Greetings. Last week a television programme under the "Horizon" banner was broadcast on BBC2. This was the second of two installments dealing with the theme of Atlantis, the first, shown the previous week, being merely a scene-setter. Though the stated objective of these programmes was an exploration of the Atlantis myth, it quickly became clear that their real purpose was to destroy the reputation of Graham Hancock and with him anyone else currently writing in the same genre of "alternative archaeology".
It is not my intention here to defend Hancock from his detractors. In any case most of the ideas contained in his "Finger Prints of the Gods", which deals with Atlantis by any other name, were not his own but derived from the work of other people such as Charles Hapgood (Maps of the ancient Sea Kings), Rand and Rose Flem-Ath (When the sky fell) and of course Robert Bauval and myself (The Orion Mystery). I would even go so far as to say that I agree with them that the idea that 12,500 years ago there was a flourishing civilization on the continent of Antartica is highly unlikely given that we know that continent has been covered in ice for hundreds of thousands of years. Similarly I find his Ankhor Watt hypothesis—that the temples of that magnificent, ceremonial city were arranged in such a way that they marked out the constellation of Draco—unsubstantiated. However it was clear that what really stuck in the throats of his critics was his success as a writer and the wealth that this had brought to him. The poison of their envy coloured the second programme throughout and overshadowed any sort of rational debate about what are quite big issues to do with the origins of civilization on planet earth. This would not be my business had they not decided that in order to get at Hancock they needed to undermine the foundations of not just his work but also that of Robert Bauval and myself. For it was our book, The Orion Mystery, (jointly written and published in 1994—a year before Fingerprints of the Gods) that first presented the theory that the pyramids of Giza were laid out in such a way that they represent the Belt of Orion as it might have looked in 10,500 BC.
Now that the programme makers should question this theory and wish to dispute it is entirely reasonable. After all it is not a dogma and is open to discussion. However, the way that they conducted their argument was wholly reprehensible and quite mendacious in both intent and execution. It was clear to anyone who knows the people involved that interviews had been deliberately edited in such a way as to cast as bad a light as possible on alternative archaeology. For example Robert Schoch, who is a professor of geology with specialist knowledge concerning water erosion patterns and who supports the theory that the main body of the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved millenia before the date accepted by Egyptology (c.2500 BC) was not allowed to say this. Though he was briefly shown walking near the pyramids, we didn't hear a word from him on the subject of the Sphinx. One can only assume that having been brought to Egypt for an interview, the programme makers didn't like what he had to say in support of more ancient civilizations and decided to cut it. On the other hand they did like him being critical about another of Hancock's pet theories, that certain underwater structures off the coast of Japan are evidence of very ancient pyramids. This was the sort of underhand methods employed by the makers of the Horizon documentary, a technique that the late Alan Clark (former Minister of Defence in the Thatcher government) would have described as being "economical with the actualité) It is in reply to these one-sided arguments that the present piece is being written.
As main prosecution witness against the Orion correlation theory, the BBC brought on Ed Krupp. He is the Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and himself the author of several books on ancient astronomy. He can therefore at first sight be seen as someone with the credibility to pose a serious challenge to the Orion hypothesis. Unfortunately his critique was very narrowly focused and paid no regard at all to the wide range of other evidence supporting the central evidence of a correlation between the pyramids of Giza and Orion's belt. He made no mention, for example, of the shaft from the King's Chamber that pointed directly towards the culmination of Orion's Belt at the time the pyramids were built (this was discovered in 1966 by Victoria Trimble, now Profgessor of Astronomy at Maryland University). This is strange as he mentions all this in his own book "Echoes of the ancient skies" (first published in 1983 and reissued in 1994 after the success of The Orion Mystery). Here he writes: ‘Trimble. meanwhile, confirmed the good alignment of the northern shaft [from the King's Chamber] with the uppermost transit, or arc, of the star Thuban. She also demonstrated that the southern shaft pointed toward the part of the sky occupied by the conspicuous belt of Orion...No bright stars, other than those in Orion's belt, came within 1 1/2 degrees—three times the size of the full moon—during the era considered.’[Krupp, E., Echoes of the ancient skies pp.104-5, Oxford Univ. Press, 1994] In the programme neither he (nor anyone else for that matter) say that quite a number of the Pyramid Texts talk of the desire for the pharaoh's soul to go to Orion. Yet in his own book he writes:
‘Death meant no rest for the pharaohs of Old Kingdom Egypt. Their destiny was overhead. Prayers carved into the stone walls of chambers within Fifth and Sixth Dynasty (ca. 2494-2181 B.C.) pyramids describe the pharaoh's "ascent to the sky among the stars." where he "regulates the night" and "sends the hours on the way." In some of the Pyramid Texts, in the monuments of Saqqara (about 40 miles up the Nile from Cairo), he joins the circumpolar stars and governs them. They never rise and never set, and so they never die. By joining these eternal stars, the pharaoh becomes eternal.
The pharaoh also makes another celestial journey: to Orion. This constellation is a symbol of his soul's rebirth because Orion stood for Osiris and the great cycle of birth, life, death, and resurrection"...His soul, or ba, has become a "living star at the head of his brethren." The tomb in which he was buried [i.e. pyramid] was the point of his departure for the sky. Later Egyptian tombs are filled with astronomical imagery of the journey of the sun, the body of the sky, and the destinations of the stars: like the pyramids that contain hieroglyphic texts, they confirm that the Egyptians sensed a link between death and the sky’.[Ibid. pp.100-101] .
No mention of any of this was made in the programme. Was this omission again an example of eager editing by the production team or is Krupp himself now keen to play down what can clearly be interpreted as a motive for both building pyramids to represent Orion and for having a shaft directed towards the belt stars? In the programme, instead of supporting the Orion correlation theory as a natural progression from Trimble's (and indeed his own) work, he attacked it on the grounds that if one imagines the IVth dynasty pyramids as an earthly representation of the constellation of Orion, then it was facing the wrong way. For whereas the stellar Orion has its head to the north, this terrestrial counterpart would have its head to the south. This for him was damning evidence that the correlation was a coincidence and should not be taken seriously.
Unfortunately Hancock was unable to answer this criticism, (or if he did his answer was edited out of the transmitted programme). It was therefore implied that there was no answer to Ed Krupp's "silver bullet". This, however, is very far from being the case and had either Robert Bauval or I been consulted about this before the programme was broadcast we could have given a robust reply. For the answer to this conumdrum of Orion's reversal (and Krupp is not the first critic to raise this point) is really quite simple. The Egyptians really had no alternative to placing Orion with his head to the south if they wanted the whole stellar landscape, including the Milky Way, to correspond with the landscape of that part of Egypt. It had long been the custom of the Egyptians, even before the building of the pyramids, to bury their dead in the deserts on the western fringe of the Nile. This is because the west is the place of sunset and therefore symbolises death and departure into the beyond. Now looking into the sky, Orion stands clearly visible on the right hand side of the Milky Way. Since they thought of the Nile as being the earthly counterpart of the Milky Way, they had to equate the West bank of the river with this region to the right of the Milky Way. This meant that for the correlate of the Orion constellation to be placed on the west bank he had to have his head towards the south. They could only have placed him with his head north if they had built pyramids on the eastern bank of the Nile. This is very obvious when one thinks about it and Krupp's criticism of the Orion correlation theory really doesn't hold water.
To reinforce his argument that the correlation was accidental the programme makers also brought on a young, lady geologist to say the positioning of the pyramids was dictated by topography and not astronomy. However, again they failed to mention that in the case of the Khafre pyramid this certainly could not have been the case. The placing of this large pyramid so near to the edge of the Giza plateau resulted in major problems for its builders who had to place very large blocks to buttress it up in the south-east corner. If the positioning of the pyramid had not been important then they could have avoided this problem by moving it back some meters to the west. Her argument that the pyramids were set on the diagonal so that they could be correctly aligned north south does not hold water either. It is generally agreed that to obtain the accuracy needed to place the pyramids so precisely in line with the axis lines north-south and east-west it would have been necessary to use the stars. For this purpose it would have been better to use some star whose rising and setting were exactly in the east and west. When building the Khafre pyramid, such observations would not have been obscured by the Great Pyramids of Khufu to its north. Nor would the Khafre pyramid have obscurred stellar observations for the Menkaure pyramid.
On the subject of topography we have the testimony [in the BBC's programme The Great Pyramid: gateway to the stars, which they made with Robert Bauval and I and broadcast in 1994] of Jean Kerisel , a most esteemed French geological engineer and the man responsible for building the Cairo metro system, that this was not an issue in the siting of the pyramids. As chairman of the Franco-Egyptian society and an acknowledge expert on the practicalities of pyramid building, he was of the opinion that their positioning was indeed intended to represent Orion's Belt.
On the subject of whether or not the pyramids were laid out to represent the heavens as they appeared in c.10,500 BC, I would have to admit that the evidence is not as strong. In the Orion Mystery we presented a view that this may have been the case but we did not over play this. There is, however, very clear textual evidence that the ancient Egyptians themselves believed their civilization to be of very extreme antiquity. For their own reasons, today's Egyptologists prefer to ignore this. What they don't say is that whilst they use the king-lists of Manetho, these actually begin thousands of years before King Mena (or Narmer) conquered the Delta region and founded the so-called "First Dynasty" of pharaohs. Whether or not these earlier kings were connected with Atlantis (as a reading of Plato would seem to imply) is a matter of some conjecture. I would accept that much of Hancock's work concerning this earlier civilization (assuming it ever existed) is unscientific. However it would seem to me to be more reasonable to be open about the possibility of Atlantis than to attack the theory out of hand. For who knows what could turn up in the sands of Egypt? We may yet, if we are lucky, discover a cash of records older than anything yet known that tell us of a time in c. 10,500 BC when the earth shook and an island city went under the waves. If so the history of the world will have to be re-written.
Copyright © 1999 Adrian G Gilbert