The Stargate Conspiracy (8 page)

In 1994 he and Adrian Gilbert produced
The Orion Mystery.
Its main feature was Bauval’s theory that the three pyramids of Giza were designed and built to represent the three stars of the Belt of Orion. The fact that the three structures mimic the position of the stars of Orion’s Belt, once pointed out by Bauval and Gilbert, is indeed evident - but is that really what the builders intended? Those authors dedicate most of
The Orion Mystery
to establishing the case that it was.

The match between the pyramids and stars is not perfect, though. If the stars are superimposed on the ground plan of the pyramids, it can be seen immediately that the correlation is only approximate. If the two brightest stars are positioned over the Great Pyramid and Khafra’s Pyramid, then the third star fails to align with the smallest, Menkaura’s Pyramid. (In fact, the only time that all three pyramids line up perfectly with the stars is in graphics used in Hancock/Bauval television programmes.) Whether you accept the Orion/Giza correlation depends on the level of accuracy you expect from the pyramid builders.

When Bauval tries to make other pyramids fit his theory, he has even less success. For example, in
The Orion Mystery
he brings in the pyramids at Abu Roash, to the south of Giza, and Zawiyet-el-Aryan, to the north (neither, incidentally, were ever completed). He maintains that they correspond with other stars in Orion.
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However, they do not match up very persuasively. This is not, admittedly, a major problem. We cannot be certain that the architects of this grand design intended to map out the whole of Orion on the ground, or even that they recognised the constellation in the way we do today; it may have been just the three stars of the Belt that they mirrored at Giza.

Apparent confirmation of Bauval’s theory of the Giza/Orion’s Belt correlation comes from the alignments of the four small shafts running from the two main chambers - the so-called King’s and Queen’s Chambers - within the Great Pyramid, two from each, one to the north and one to the south in each case. These shafts run straight into the walls, before angling upwards through the main body of the pyramid. They are very small, only a little more than 8 inches (20 cm) square. Those in the King’s Chamber (the upper one) run diagonally up through the massive blocks of stone, right through the walls to the outside, which has given rise to their official designation as air shafts. Those running from the Queen’s Chamber are rather stranger, since they neither exit into the open air on the outside, nor open into the chamber itself. They were discovered behind the walls of the chamber in 1872.

It has been recognised since the early 1960s that these shafts may have been designed to point towards certain stars significant to the ancient Egyptians.
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The shaft going north from the King’s Chamber, for example, appears to have been ‘targeted’ on the star Thuban, in the constellation of Draconis, the northern pole star in the Pyramid Age. It has also been suggested that the southern shaft that runs from the King’s Chamber was targeted on the stars of Orion’s Belt. If so, this would add support to the idea that the pyramids were built to represent them. Bauval calculated that, around 2475 BCE, the southern King’s Chamber shaft would have aligned with the lowest and brightest star of Orion’s Belt, Al Nitak.
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In recent years huge controversy has centred on discoveries - and rumours of discoveries - on the Giza plateau, and especially within the Great Pyramid. Certainly the excitement generated in 1993 with the discovery of a tiny door in the Great Pyramid shows no signs of abating. The Internet rumour machine is still very busy spinning tales, which may or may not be founded in fact. In March 1993 a German engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink, sent a robot fitted with a video camera from the Queen’s Chamber into both shafts. Then, now famously, the robot — called Upuaut 2 (after the ancient Egyptian god who was ‘Opener of the Way’) — encountered what appeared to be a very small door blocking the shaft, complete with handles and an intriguing gap beneath. A door of any size implies that something lies behind it. What could it be? Imaginations have been fevered ever since, but the general consensus is that some kind of chamber lies behind ‘Gantenbrink’s Door’. At the time of writing — nearly six years after Gantenbrink’s discovery - we are still waiting to find out where that door leads.

Gantenbrink’s data had another use: it was seized upon by Robert Bauval, who saw it as a vindication of his theory, developed in the late 1980s, that the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber was designed to align with Sirius. From the angle of the shaft he could now calculate where it had been pointing when the pyramid was built. From these new alignments, Bauval estimated that it had been constructed around 2450 BCE.
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Ironically, this would make it about a century younger than mainstream Egyptologists think, erring in the wrong direction for the New Orthodoxy. (Recent carbon dating results tend to indicate that the Great Pyramid is even older, perhaps by as much as four centuries.
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) Bauval was so enthusiastic about Gantenbrink’s discovery that he took it upon himself to make the announcement to the world’s media in early April 1993.
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However, some of Bauval’s assumptions are open to question. For example, he presents a very circular argument that uses the stellar alignments of the shafts to prove the date of the Great Pyramid, but also relies on this date to prove that the shafts have stellar alignments. There is also an anomaly concerning the dates indicated by the two shafts: the Queen’s Chamber shaft would (according to Bauval’s calculations) have been perfectly aligned with Sirius around 2400 BCE, whereas the higher King’s Chamber shaft was perfectly aligned with Al Nitak some seventy-five years earlier. It was therefore impossible for both shafts to have been pointing to ‘their’ stars at the same time. But then perhaps we — and Robert Bauval — are expecting the ancient Egyptians to have been overprecise. After all, seventy-five years would have meant a mere fraction of a degree difference in alignment. All in all, Bauval’s ideas are certainly bold and challenging, though we have serious reservations about their wider implications.

Bauval’s theory has become one of the standard lines of the New Egyptology. Rarely is it questioned among readers or researchers in this field. However, one outspoken critic is none other than Rudolf Gantenbrink himself, who attacks Bauval for using his data to support his theory of alignments with Sirius, a theory that, in any case, Gantenbrink rejects. In August 1998 he told us:

Gantenbrink points out that the concept that the shafts were intended to align with any star depends on them being straight, but they only appear to be so when the Great Pyramid is shown in a north-south cross-section. In fact, all the shafts have bends from left to right - that is, from east to west. In the case of the two shafts running from the King’s Chamber, neither end (in the chamber and outside) is in line with the other. (The shafts from the Queen’s Chamber do not reach the exterior of the pyramid.)

Bauval’s theory requires the shafts to be as straight as rulers, directed at a specific point in the sky. If, as is the case, the shafts have kinks in them, it seems unlikely that they would have been intended to point at any particular heavenly body. As Gantenbrink told us: ‘So any star alignment ... could only work on the side view, but never in three-dimensional reality.’ Gantenbrink’s somewhat dramatic conclusion based on his review of the flaws in Bauval’s data is that ‘The star alignment is simply a HOAX!’

Bauval’s announcement to the world’s media of the discovery of the door also attracts comment from Gantenbrink. Certainly, Bauval completely sidestepped the usual protocol. The news should never have been released without the permission of the people for whom Gantenbrink was working at the time, the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Bauval gives as his reason for such unilateral action his great frustration with the dilatoriness of the Egyptian and German authorities in announcing the discovery. In his view, they were dragging their feet, and he felt that people should know — yet his first approach to the media was just fourteen days after Gantenbrink made his discovery! What was the real reason for Bauval’s haste in making the announcement to the world?

Gantenbrink has no doubts about Bauval’s motivation. He told us: ‘This was a clever PR campaign. Without my discovery, we simply would not know a guy called Robert Bauval.’ Gantenbrink goes further: he even blames Bauval’s premature and unauthorised release of his news to the press for the Egyptian authorities’ refusal to allow him to continue his work in the Great Pyramid.

We had been intrigued to discover that the idea that the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber aligned with Sirius appeared in Masonic literature dating from at least the late nineteenth century.
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At the time we were impressed. Was Bauval’s work confirmation that Freemasons have long possessed secret information about the pyramids? We put the idea that Bauval’s work would demonstrate this unexpected knowledge to Gantenbrink, who responded: ‘It would, but it doesn’t! It only indicates where Bauval got his idea from.’

The alleged alignments are only part of Bauval’s attempt to link his theory with a much more remote period of Egypt’s history. Bauval accepts that the Giza pyramids were built around 2450 BCE, more or less the time proposed by Egyptologists (who in fact say they are a century older). But he notes that the three pyramids were not a perfect match for the stars at that time: the pyramids are oriented at 45 degrees to a north-south meridian running through Giza, so for the three stars of Orion’s Belt to properly match the groundplan of Giza they should also be positioned at an angle of 45 degrees to the celestial meridian.
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This crossing of the celestial meridian occurs when the stars are exactly due south - when they are at their highest point in the sky (‘culminating’ in astronomical terminology). But Bauval noted that Orion’s Belt was not aligned at 45 degrees to the celestial meridian at the time that he believes the pyramids were built.

However, because of the precession of the equinoxes the constellations change in orientation over the course of centuries. Bauval, assuming that the builders deliberately mismatched the pyramids with the stars, decided to find out when they actually did align. He concluded that:

He therefore hypothesised that either the groundplan of the pyramids had been laid out at that time - even if they were not actually constructed for another 8000 years - or that the builders were trying to tell us something about the epoch of 10,500 BCE.

There are problems with this. Even Robin J. Cook, who worked with Bauval and provided the diagrams for
The Orion Mystery,
takes issue with his conclusions. In his
The Horizon of Khufu
(1996), Cook examined the same question and stated emphatically: ‘... this was not the case in 10,450 BC.’
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In fact, Cook found a correlation that did fit Orion’s Belt in the ‘Giza position’ in 2450 BCE.
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Cook disagrees that the Giza complex was intended to pinpoint the year 10,500 BCE, and it must be said unequivocally that his evidence is much more persuasive than Bauval’s. But even so, do we have to take Cook’s word for this? Unfortunately for Bauval’s tidy theory, this is very easy to double-check — when we did so, we discovered that Cook is right. Using the same astronomical computer simulation as Bauval - SkyGlobe 3.6 - we discovered that the stars of Orion’s Belt were emphatically not in the ‘Giza’ position at the spring equinox in 10,500 BCE (nor at any other time when it culminated in that epoch).
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In fact, it is very easy to tell when Orion’s Belt is at a 45 degree angle to the meridian, as at this moment Saiph — the ‘left leg’ star of Orion — is directly below Al Nitak, the most easterly (left) of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.
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In fact, for it to culminate in the ‘Giza position’ you have to go back to about 12,000 BCE — and even then, it does not culminate at the significant moment of dawn on the spring equinox.

Does this mean that Bauval merely slipped up in his calculations by 1,500 or so years? Anyone can make a mistake. And does this just mean that Bauval’s putative advanced civilisation laid out the pyramids in 12,000 BCE rather than 10,500 BCE? Tempting though it is to ascribe this ‘slip’ to human error, there is in fact much more at stake here. Once again — as with Hancock’s non-existent eleventh-millennium BCE ‘wet period’ - we find a high-profile New Egyptologist desperately trying to prove that 10,500 BCE was in some way highly significant, even when the facts indicate otherwise.