Robert G. Bauval
Cairo, The Pyramids, April 2008
Publisher’s Note
It is my privilege to be allowed to write a few words at the beginning of a truly remarkable book by an equally remarkable man. While it is Robert Bauval to whom I owe thanks for allowing me these words, I must thank Graham Hancock for the route by which they arrived here.
As many of you will know, Robert and Graham have written three books together:
The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind
,
The Mars Mystery: A Tale Of The End Of Two Worlds
and
Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith
. They are a double act bar none, each a perfect foil for the other, in person as well as in their books. In 2005 Graham Hancock was true to his brave and pioneering spirit when he chose a new publisher in the United States for his groundbreaking new work,
Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind.
I can only assume that we must have fulfilled at least some of his expectations when he (and I must include here also Bill Hamilton, who superbly shepherds Graham and Robert through the vicissitudes of publishing) recommended us to Robert Bauval.
I first read
The Egypt Code
in early 2007 and was immediately intrigued by this tightly written account of Robert’s successful fifteen-year odyssey seeking to expand his famous Orion Correlation Theory into a comprehensive Star Correlation Theory. While I was able to strike up a good telephone and email conversation with Robert, in truth I really wanted to meet him in person before taking on the responsibility of becoming his American publisher.
I was presented with an opportunity to do so in October of that year at the fourth annual Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge, held at the University of San Diego in California. There I learned that Bauval is both a compelling public speaker and a truly engaging personality, of the kind that effortlessly dominates a crowded room or dining table.
It was here, too, that Robert first told me of his plans to organize an imperiously titled “Grand Gathering of Souls” at the foot of the Sphinx in Giza on the spring equinox of 2008. Lured by his vivid descriptions of hours of private time inside the Great Pyramid and an extraordinary chance to witness for myself the alignments of the various pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt that form the Grand Unified Plan laid out in this book, I proceeded to pursue Robert for the next few months, willing him to make the Gathering a reality.
Just as the winners of Oscars at the Academy Awards struggle to recite complete lists of all the people whom they must thank for making their dreams come true, there were innumerable people who worked extraordinarily hard to make Robert’s dream of the Grand Gathering a reality, but it is impossible to name them all here! Nonetheless, special mention must go to Robert’s true partner in enabling the Gathering: Khaled Abdel Bary. A businessman with successful ventures around the world, Bary (as he encouraged us to call him) not only took on the financial risk of the undertaking, but also facilitated our very privileged access to buildings that are ordinarily off limits to even the most connected of visitors and locals alike. (If you ever visit Cairo you must visit his splendid restaurant, simply named Barry’s, with an unequaled view overlooking the Giza pyramids.)
The tour would not only encompass the Memphite Necropolis but also feature a Nile cruise through Upper Egypt, from Aswan to Luxor. Bearing in mind that I would likely never again have an opportunity to see Egypt in such erudite company, I took my wife and two children to join Robert, his wife Michele and daughter Candice (who helped organize the tour), Graham Hancock and his wife Santha Faiia, and twenty or so others on this aptly named Grand Gathering of Souls.
Rather than gush over each and every detail of a packed itinerary, I humbly suggest to you that if you enjoy this book, you owe it to yourself to try to get to Egypt for the next of what is planned to be a series of similar tours on the equinox and solstice dates - and live the book with Robert and others who undoubtedly will have their own extraordinary insights and contributions. (Naturally, it is a self-selecting group of individuals who will invest the time, effort and money to be there.) The website to visit for more information is at
www.robertbauval.co.uk
.
I very much hope you will enjoy
The Egypt Code
as much as I did … and eventually find your way to Egypt to see for yourself the evidence that Robert lays out within these pages.
Gary Baddeley, publisher
Introduction
What are the pyramids for
?!!
Emma Freud BBC2 Everyman documentary
The Great Pyramid:
Gateway to the stars
December 1993
This king is Osiris, this pyramid of this king is Osiris, this construction of his is Osiris
…
Pyramid Texts 1657
Behold, he has come as Orion, Osiris has come as Orion
…
Pyramid Texts 820
Cosmic Ambience
What are Egypt’s Old Kingdom pyramids for? What possible purpose could they have had? Why do they have low tunnels, long narrow shafts leading nowhere, and corridors, galleries and chambers that are stark and empty? Why were they astronomically aligned to the stars? Why are they scattered in clusters along a 40 kilometre strip of desert? And, more intriguingly, why are some devoid of texts while others have their walls fully covered with texts that speak of the cycles of the sun and the stars? Until very recently the standard theory dished out by Egyptologists was that the pyramids were tombs, large sepulchres principally meant to house the body of dead kings. As for their elaborate internal systems of tunnels, shafts, corridors and chambers, these were intended to mainly to confuse and outsmart tomb-robbers, while their astronomical alignments were either meaningless or just a fluke. Amazingly, such views went mostly unchallenged for nearly two centuries, this in spite of the maddening detail that no bodies of kings (not a skeleton or skull or even a bone splinter) was ever found inside a pyramid or, for that matter, outside it. And more maddening still, no one had an explanation why, if they were ‘tombs’, these pyramids were not placed into a single well-defined cemetery but instead were scattered in small clusters in a vast desert plain west of the River Nile like strange volcanic islands in a sea of sand. Yet, oddly enough, the clues that suggested a much higher purpose than just ‘tombs’ were plentiful and always there for all to see and evaluate. And these clues screamed of a connection with the stars. For example:
1. The base of each pyramid was aligned to the astronomical directions using star alignments.
2. The largest of the pyramids contained ‘air-shafts’ oriented towards important star systems such as Orion, Sirius and the circumpolar constellations (viz. the pyramid of Khufu at Giza).
3. Pyramids were given ‘star’ names or names implicit of stars (‘The Pyramid of Djedefre is a sehedu star’; ‘Nebka is a star’; ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’ and so forth).
4. Pyramids had ceilings of chambers decorated with five-pointed stars (viz. the Step Pyramid and 5
th
and 6
th
dynasty pyramids at Saqqara).
5. Pyramids contained writings carved on the inside walls that spoke of a star-religion and the destiny of king in a starry world called
Duat
which contained Orion and other constellations (viz. the 5
th
and 6
th
dynasty pyramids at Saqqara).
It is therefore somewhat odd, not to say perverse, that with so many ‘stellar’ connections there has not been a single Egyptologist who was compelled enough to consider a stellar ‘function’ for the pyramids. And because this important matter was left unbridled for so long, it was not surprising that untrained researchers, dilatants, cranks and charlatans dished out theories that ranged from the derisory to the completely insane. Pyramids were built by the lost civilisation of Atlantis; they were built by a lost technology using levitation; they were power plants; they were electromagnetic receivers for inter-stellar communications; they were built by aliens; they were built by the Jews while in captivity in Egypt; the Great Pyramid was designed to contain detailed information of world history and future in every inch of its plan; it was a Bible in stone. So when I burst on the scene in 1994 with my first book,
The Orion Mystery,
showing that the pattern of the three Giza pyramids and their relative position to the Nile mirrored the pattern of the three stars of Orion’s belt and their relative position to the Milky Way, the subject was so much soiled and degraded that any new theory that mentioned the ‘stars’ or ‘astronomy’ was immediately met with a barrage of academic indifference (at best) or vociferous opposition. The reaction was even more violent because my theory had received the - albeit cautious - backing by one of the world’s most eminent and most respected Egyptologist, Sir I.E.S. Edwards, who had gallantly and boldly stuck his neck out on my behalf by appearing on a BBC documentary in support of some of my ideas. This brought him the wrath of his peers but it nonetheless twisted their arms and forced some to grudgingly review my theory. But in the years that followed, and especially after Sir Edwards’s death in 1996, I was derided and pilloried by a cabal of Egyptologists and other ‘experts’ seemingly determined to ‘debunk’ the Orion Correlation Theory, as my hypothesis was now being called (see appendix 3). All this academic onslaught was most daunting and distressing, but I held firm my ground for I knew that I had not only generated massive interest and support in the general public and the international media, but that the theory I had proposed neatly dovetailed into the context of Egypt’s Pyramid Age and provided the ‘missing link’ to an otherwise baffling mystery. Even the most entrenched sceptic could not easily dismiss the Orion-Giza Correlation as ‘coincidence’.
Fifteen long years have now passed since the publication of
The Orion Mystery
. In the meanwhile the book has been published in more than twenty languages and there has been a dozens of television documentaries fully or partially-based on the Orion Correlation Theory (viz. Britain’s BBC 2 and Channel 4; America’s ABC, NBC and FOX TV, Europe and America’s Discovery Channel and History Channel; Italy’s RAI 3; Germany’s ZDF and ARD; France’s ARTE and TF3; South Africa’s SABC and M-net TV; Holland’s AVRO TV; Australia’s Channel 7; Egypt’s NILE-TV and many other channels in the Far East and Middle East). Forthcoming are two more documentaries, one with National Geographic Television titled
Unsolved Mysteries of the Pyramids
1
(where my theory will be critically reviewed), and another made for Italy’s RAI 2 and Holland’s AVRO fully based on
The Egypt Code
.
2
Slowly but surely the Orion Correlation Theory has crept, like a thief in the night, into mainstream Egyptology and the new discipline of Archaeoastronomy. And even though it is given much lip and criticism, it is very obvious that it has touched the proverbial nerve of academia. To be fair, not all academics were prone to dismiss
The Orion Mystery
. Some very eminent Egyptologists such as Dr. Jaromir Malek of the Griffith Institute and the American Egyptologist Dr. Ed Meltzer, kept an open mind in the same fashion as the late Sir Edwards had done. More refreshingly, the theory received cautious support from the astronomical community, particularly from Professor Archie Roy of Glasgow University, Professor Mary Brück of Edinburgh University, Professor Giulo Magli of Milan Politecnico, Professor Percy Seymour of Plymouth University and Professor Chandra Wikramasingh of Cardiff University. And even though these high ranking astronomers maintained a healthy scepticism, they nonetheless found the theory intriguing and deserving of careful consideration and further research. Also in the course of the years a crack began to appear in the Egyptological academic armour when Dr. Joromir Malek (who had reviewed my theory in 1994 in the Oxford journal
Discussions in Egyptology
3
) declared himself favourable to the possibility that the apparent illogical scattering of pyramids in the Memphite necropolis (a 40 kilometre long desert strip west of the Nile near Cairo) may, after all, have had more to do with ‘religious, astronomical or similar’ considerations than with purely practical considerations such as the topography and geology of the land. Similar views began to be heard in Egyptology, especially by the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner, the Czech Egyptologist Miroslav Verner and the British Egyptologist David Jeffreys (see chapter 3). It was, however, the archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, who, in my view, would come the closest in providing an overall picture of what may have been in the minds of the ancient architects who designed and planned such mysterious structures monuments (not only in Egypt but in other parts of the ancient world) when he wrote that,
In order to understand what ancient people thought about the world around them, we must begin by witnessing phenomena through their eyes. A knowledge of each particular culture is necessary, but learning what the sky contains and how each entity moves is also indispensable … strange but true: whole cities, kingdom and empires were founded based on observations and interpretations of natural events that pass undetected under our noses and above our heads.
4