The Orion Mystery

Many books have been written about the Pyramids of Egypt but while there are theories aplenty for the mechanics of how they were built, Egyptology has yet to come up with a convincing explanation for why. The idea that they were simply tombs for megalomaniac pharaohs, built more or less at random at Giza, Dashur and elsewhere, doesn't bear careful scrutiny. It seems inconceivable that even the most powerful pharaoh would employ thousands of labourers, to build the most massive edifices on earth, for them to simply act as repositories for dead bodies.

Even if this were so, why did they align their sides exactly north, south, east and west? Why, in the case of the Giza pyramids, were they built according to what certainly looks like a prearranged building plan, with two of these pyramids built on a diagonal with the third offset? And why were the former two (the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre) so very much larger than their offset companion, the pyramid of Menkaure?

These were questions that long puzzled Robert Bauval, who though a Belgian by nationality, grew up in Egypt and therefore has a passionate interest in the pyramids. A building engineer by profession, his approach to the subject of pyramid research was radically different from that of most Egyptologists. It also meant he could better appreciate the enormous, technical achievement represented by the pyramids; not just the magnitude of the operation but the precision with which it was accomplished. He could see that, even with all the advantages of our modern technology, such an achievement would be nigh on impossible to emulate today . For the ancient Egyptians to have built such structures without the benefit of steel tools — let alone pulleys, hoists and cranes — seemed almost miraculous.

For a period of ten years Bauval puzzled over the plans of the Giza Necropolis but it was not until he was camping out one night in the desert, with the stars visible overhead in all of their glory, that he found the clue he was looking for in the sky: the pyramids of Giza are meant to represent the stars of Orion's Belt!

In the years that followed Baval continued his researches, investigating the Pyramid texts and other sources for confirmation that his insights were correct. He had several papers published on this subject and also sort the opinions of a number of senior Egyptologists. Though some were hostile others, such as the late Professor I.E.S. Edwards (Former Keeper of Eqyptian Antiquities at the British Museum) and Dr. Jaromir Malek of the Griffiths Institute in Oxford were generally supportive of his theories.

Late in 1992 he approached Adrian Gilbert with the idea that they should collaborate on writing a book that would present these ideas to a wider public. The result was The Orion Mystery.

Unusually for books of this nature that are not written by acknowledged academics, it received very favourable reviews:

'For the status quo, this is the stuff of heresy, the latest example of the "pyramidiocy" of commentators like Piazzi Smyth and John Michell. Yet the case of Bauval and his co-author Gilbert, argued with modesty, is persuasive and scholarly...'(Neil Spencer, The Observer, 6 February 1994).

'Why the Egyptians of the fourth to sixth dynasties of the Old Kingdom should have chosen to build such structures [the pyramids], why they built them of such a size and with such a high degree of precision and why they are scattered over a stretch of desert 80km long and 3km wide, has remained an enigma. So that to claim one has unravelled the mystery of these great monuments and can explain their true function may seem a little bold. Yet this is what Bauval and Gilbert do in this absorbing and fascinating work of archaeological detection...How they reach their conclusions is clearly and rivetingly told, and despite the volume of serious reasearch and mathematical diagrams used, the book is highly and compulsively readable.'  (Joanna Duckworth, The Sunday Times, 27 February, 1994).

Fourteen years later the book remains in print and is fast becoming established as the seminal work on pyramid research. Translated into some twenty languages, it is essential reading for anyone with an open mind who genuinely wants to know why the pyramids were built.