The Egypt Code (2 page)

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:

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,