Pyramid Quest (19 page)

One thing that feeds skepticism about Bauval’s theories, as he himself acknowledges, is that his date lines up a little too precisely with some interpretations of Plato’s chronology for the destruction of Atlantis, and with the time that psychic Edgar Cayce assigned to the building of the Great Pyramid by locals helped by wanderers from Atlantis. Such an association only gives critics ammunition. Still, Bauval’s ideas have met skepticism in conventional Egyptological circles less because of their psychic connections than because they indicate that the Egyptians of the pyramid age—and earlier—understood precession long before our version of history says they should have. But precession may be only the very beginning of what they understood.

Bauval’s ideas underscore two fundamental concepts about the Great Pyramid and Giza. The first idea is that the Giza monuments, and perhaps all of the Old Kingdom pyramids, form a complex whose meaning can be understood better in the whole than in the parts. The second is that later monuments were erected to memorialize or record much earlier arrangements of the constellations in the round of precession.

I didn’t fully realize how far across Egypt the astronomical complex might extend, or how far back into prehistory that memorialization might reach, until November 11, 2001. On that day physicist Thomas G. Brophy sent me a copy of an article he had written about the stone circles of Nabta Playa in southern Egypt. In his cover e-mail, Brophy wrote, rather academically, “I think you may find interest in the results of the attached pre-submission manuscript.” That proved to be an understatement. I found his work—which later grew into the book
The Origin Map—
fascinating.

Nabta Playa, about 65 miles west of Abu Simbel in southernmost Egypt’s Western Desert, is a desolate, hot, difficult place that is now practically lifeless for much of the year. The archaeological significance of the site was discovered quite by accident in 1973-1974. A group of scientists headed by Southern Methodist University anthropologist Fred Wendorf had stopped for a break while driving from the Libyan border to the Nile. As Wendorf later wrote, “we were standing there minding our own business, when we noticed potsherds and other artifacts.”
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Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Wendorf returned to excavate Nabta Playa, uncovering one of the most fascinating and fruitful archaeological finds of Stone Age Egypt.

The playa, which forms a basin that fills with water when there’s enough rain, has been inhabited by humans, at least seasonally, since about 9000 B.C. In circa 5500 B.C., a time when rainfall was regular and ample, the area was permanently settled by pastoralists with a social system more complex than any previously seen in Egypt. These people erected large stones in alignments to build a calendar circle that marked the summer solstice of about 4500 B.C. Charcoal in hearths around the circle has been dated to circa 4800 B.C., another indication that the area was used extensively in the fifth millennium B.C. as a ritual center. That is at least 1,000 years before Stonehenge, a much better known monument with a calendar circle marking the solstice.

Brophy proposes that the stone circle at Nabta Playa is more than a calendar marking the first day of summer, however. As he sees it, three of the stones inside the Nabta Playa circle represent the belt of Orion—in the same way that the three major Giza pyramids symbolize the very same stars. The Nabta Playa stones demonstrate how these three stars would have appeared as they crossed the meridian on summer solstice nights between 6400 B.C. and 4900 B.C. Significantly, in 4940 B.C., the inclination of Orion’s Belt on the meridian was at its smallest angle. Even more significantly, that same year also marked the only time in the entire precessional cycle when Orion Belt’s lies on the meridian close to sunrise on the summer solstice.

The residents of Nabta erected three other stones inside the circle. These monoliths, Brophy argues, diagram the configuration of Orion’s head and shoulders as they appeared in circa 16,500 B.C. That, too, is a significant date. In the skies close to that time in distant prehistory, the inclination of Orion’s Belt on the meridian was at its greatest angle. Overlay the shapes of Orion at the summer solstice in both 4940 B.C. and 16,500 B.C., and you’ll see how the stones making up the circle and standing within it outline the constellation at both points. Whoever built this circle understood the precession of Orion in its entire 25,900-year cycle—thousands of years before Hipparchus is reputed to have discovered it.

Although Nabta Playa lies 400 miles from Giza, the cultural links between the two sites are very strong, indicating that the culture that erected the Nabta Playa monoliths contributed directly to Predynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt. For example, cattle played important religious roles in both cultures, and both cultures laid great importance on the constellation Orion, which the ancient Egyptians called Sahu and associated with Osiris. It is likely that when the Egyptian climate turned extremely arid in the late fourth millennium B.C., the people of Nabta Playa migrated toward the Nile and became one of the groups that contributed to the cultural mélange from which ancient Egypt arose.

In his way, Brophy supports Bauval’s hypothesis that Giza memorializes the sky of a distant era, but he adds an intriguing complication to this basic idea. When Brophy matched the layout of the pyramids to the changing image of Orion’s Belt as it crosses the celestial meridian, he found that the ground map matched the sky in 11,772 B.C., not 10,500 B.C. As for the shape of Orion’s Belt when it rose from the horizon on the spring equinox, that configuration matched the pyramids’ in 9420 B.C.

Other important astronomical alignments mark both dates as well. If an observer in 9420 B.C. were standing at the center of the site where the Great Pyramid now sits, he or she would see Orion’s Belt rise over the rump of the Sphinx. Then, at the time of the sun’s rising, the shape of Orion’s Belt sighted over the Menkaure Temple would match the ground orientation of the three main Giza pyramids. Finally, Orion’s Belt would set alongside the three smaller, or satellite, pyramids alongside the Menkaure Pyramid.

Now move the date back to 11,772 B.C., and what does an observer in the same position as the Great Pyramid see? Again Orion’s Belt comes up over the horizon atop the Sphinx’s rump. If he or she looks due south—along the same line as the celestial meridian—as the Belt passes the meridian, the arrangement of the stars exactly matches the ground orientation of the three main Giza Pyramids. Finally, once again the Belt drops below the horizon over the Menkaure Pyramid’s three satellite pyramids.

Where Bauval says Giza points to one date in the ancient sky, Brophy argues that Giza sets bookmarks or brackets around the 2,352 years between 11,772 and 9420 B.C. This period has two important points of significance. For one, it marks a single precessional age. That is, since the horizon is a circle of 360°, and since the zodiac contains 12 constellations, each constellation accounts for an average of 30° of precession, which is a little less than the amount marked by the turning of the heavens during between 11,772 and 9420 B.C. The second point makes this particular time even more significant. It marks the highest position, or northern culmination, of the Galactic Center in 10,909 B.C., the date of the shift in precessional age from Virgo to Leo.

The Galactic Center is just what its name implies: the center of our galaxy, the point around which the millions and millions of stars that make up the Milky Way spin in their long orbits. It is a mysterious place, full of dust and gas clouds, and possibly the home of a black hole. And, equally important from the perspective of the study of ancient civilization, the Galactic Center cannot be seen with the naked eye, at least not in our time. Still, despite its apparent invisibility, the Galactic Center has other connections to Giza.

First, dial the precession clock back to 13,101 B.C., assume that the Galactic Center can be seen, and place one observer on the site of the Menkaure Pyramid and another on the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid observer would see the Galactic Center rise over the Khufu Valley Temple, while the Menkaure observer watched the same phenomenon over the Sphinx. And the shape of Orion’s Belt as it rose over the horizon would match the ground plan of the three satellite pyramids next to the Great Pyramid.

The builders of the Great Pyramid were still keeping track of the Galactic Center millennia later, by means of the shafts emanating from the King’s and Queen’s chambers. In circa 2370 B.C., the southern King’s Chamber shaft aligned with the Galactic Center, while the northern King’s Chamber shaft pointed to Thuban (Alpha Draconis, the visible star closest to the north celestial pole at that time) and the southern Queen’s Chamber’s shaft aimed directly at Sirius. The northern shaft in the Queen’s Chamber, which has been measured less precisely than the others, appears to have been sighted at the ritually significant star Kochab (Beta Ursae Minoris) at the same time. If Brophy is correct about the alignments—and, as far as I can tell, he is—it can hardly be a random event that four shafts are aimed at important stars or celestial points on the same date. Somebody—somebody very sophisticated—knew what he or she was doing.

What does all this analysis of Giza add up to? It tells us that not only did the builders of the Giza monuments mark the northern culmination of the Galactic Center and the southern culmination of Orion’s Belt; they also understood the length of a precessional age and calibrated precession’s cycle from the northern culmination of the Galactic Center. In the same way that both hands of the clock turning to 12 mark the beginning of a new day, the Galactic Center’s northern culmination started the cycle of the zodiac all over again. When Virgo gave way to Leo as the Galactic Center reached its northernmost point in 10,909 B.C., precession had started again on its long cycle through the cosmic millennia.

Constellations have remarkable staying power. Although the names we give to the constellations come down to us from the classical Greeks, arranging the stars in patterns that carry significance is a very old piece of human culture. This point was first brought home to me in the mid-1990s by Frank Edge, a high school and community college teacher of mathematics and cosmology. Edge studied the magnificent frieze in the Hall of Bulls inside the Lascaux cave, a fascinating archaeological site in France’s Dordogne Valley dating to circa 15,000 B.C. Where other scholars saw a hunting scene of bulls, stags, buffalo, and ponies, Edge recognized the star cluster we know as the Pleiades and the constellation we call Taurus. Taurus means “bull” in Latin, and the constellation is appropriately depicted as an immense bull.

“So striking is the resemblance of this ice age bull to the traditional picture of Taurus,” Edge writes, “that if the Lascaux bull had been discovered in a medieval manuscript rather than on a cave ceiling, the image would have been immediately recognized as Taurus.”
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Other portions of the Hall of Bulls captured other constellations. The figure known as the Unicorn, for example, came from combining stars we now place in Scorpio, Libra, and Sagittarius. Put all the paintings within Lascaux together, and you have an accurate picture of the summer night sky in approximately 15,000 B.C. The cave dwellers, Edge suggests, used this star chart to follow the path of the moon and determine the summer solstice.

Recent research indicates that modern constellations reach even farther back into prehistory. Michael Rappenglueck, a former University of Munich researcher known for his work on star charts in ancient caves, argues that a tiny tablet of inscribed mammoth ivory dating to between 30,000 and 36,000 B.C. charts the constellation Orion. The ivory, discovered in German’s Ach Valley in 1979 and attributed to the little-known Aurignacian people, who supplanted the Neanderthals, shows a man with what could be a sword hanging between his legs. The man’s shape is curious: The right leg is longer than the left, and the waist is unnaturally slim. Connect the stars of Orion as if they were dots, and you’ll see that the left leg is shorter than the right, the sword hangs between the legs, and the waist is surprisingly slim. In the same way that Lascaux depicts Taurus as a bull, the Ach Valley ivory shows Orion as a hunter, the very image we still have, over 30,000 years ago.

Like Edge’s and Rappenglueck’s research, Brophy’s work deepens our understanding of the antiquity of astronomical knowledge, from the names and shapes of the constellations to the precise movements of heavenly bodies. And he implies that people of the old times knew a great deal more than we give them credit for.

It is clear from Brophy’s research, as well as that of Bauval and the groundbreaking work of Jane Sellers, author of
The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt: A Study of the Threshold of Myth and the Frame of Time
(first published in 1992 and later revised), that the ancient Egyptians understood precession, recognized what it meant, and measured the shift from one precessional age to the other. They knew the paths the stars followed in their transits and the way those paths shifted year by year—so precisely that they could plot lines of sight through layer upon layer of masonry to stars with ritual significance. They understood how to determine true north from observations of circumpolar stars, and how to transfer the north-south meridian from sky to earth. And they could locate the Galactic Center, which is no easy undertaking.

Does this mean that the ancient Egyptians possessed telescopes or extraterrestrial assistance? It does not. Robert Temple and Thothnu Tastmona (pseudonym of Paul T. Platt) have both suggested that the ancients may have used telescopes, but few scholars have been persuaded by their arguments. Brophy indicates that people who watched the heavens carefully over long periods of time might be able to locate the Galactic Center—and its opposite, the Galactic Anticenter, the point in the plane of the galaxy that lies directly opposite the Galactic Center and is found close to the bright star Alnath in Taurus. In modern times, the Galactic Center was first found by William Herschel (1738-1822), who counted stars in the Milky Way (our galaxy) and grouped them by magnitude (degree of brightness) to find where they were most dense, thereby locating the direction to the center of the galaxy. The ancient Egyptians may have done something of the same, perhaps as a result of their extensive star mapping.