Egypt's Lost Legacy & the Genesis of Civilisation
In this two part article, Andrew Collins explains how Egypt's Sphinx-building culture achieved a level of sophistication and technological understanding almost beyond human comprehension.
The Great Pyramid is humanity's greatest architectural achievement. Two
and a half million blocks, ranging in size from two to seventy tonnes
a piece, were used in the construction of this silent sentinel of
the past, the largest and perhaps the most enigmatic of the three
matching structures on the Giza plateau. It covers an area of 13 acres
and weighs an incredible six million tons, and up until the construction
of the Eiffel Tower, it was the tallest structure in the world. There
is more stone in the Great Pyramid than in all the churches, chapels
and cathedrals built in England.
Yet this wonder of the past is more than just an architectural curiosity, for it embodies
a level of sophistication far superior to anything the world has produced at any time
since this age.
Over the past 200 years many hundreds of books have been written about the
mysteries of the Great Pyramid, most of them more fantasy than fact. Yet shining through
all of them is a hardcore of evidence which shows that the pyramid builders were privy to
universal knowledge far beyond that accredited to the ancient Egyptians who lived around
4500 years ago, the time-frame in which the pyramids are said to have been
built.
Let me provide a few examples. The Great Pyramid is considered to have been built as an
exact geodesic representation of the earth's northern hemisphere. Precision geometry
incorporating harmonics, proportions and sound acoustics was incorporated into its
exterior and interior design. Its four sides are aligned to the cardinal points with such
precision that modern-day surveyors would have trouble replicating this laser-like
accuracy, while in relation to the earth the Great Pyramid is situated in the dead centre
of its largest land-mass.
To the Sound of a Trumpet
More extraordinary still is the knowledge that the pyramid builders could well have
possessed a form of sonic technology that included the ability to raise stone blocks into
the air and pierce through granite at a feed-rate unmatched even today. It has long been
known that many of the temples and monuments of Pharaonic Egypt incorporate an intimate
knowledge of sound acoustics, while one specific legend preserved by an Arab writer of the
tenth-century AD named al-Masudi records how the builders of the pyramids were able to
move stone blocks a distance of "one bow-shot" through an avenue of metal
poles,
simply by hitting them with a rod. Furthermore, there exist age-old legends from places
such as Bolivia, Mexico and Greece which tell of the first cities being built by mythical
figures who could make stones raise into the air by using sound alone. At the site of the
ancient city of Tiahuanaco high up on the Bolivian Altiplano, for
instance, local Indian
legends speak of the city's first inhabitants as able to move stones from the local quarry
to their places of destination to "the sound of a trumpet".
So what reality is there behind such wild claims? Are they all to be dismissed as the
naive delusions of primitive peoples?
Precision Impossible
During an indepth study of the temples and monuments of Giza in the 1880s, respected
Egyptologist W.M. Flinders Petrie uncovered clear evidence of a precision stone-ware
technology that surpassed anything else achieved in the ancient world. It included the use
of nine-feet long, jewel tipped saws to cut and fashion objects such as the sarcophagus
inside the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid. He also found that the pyramid builders
used highly specialised drilling techniques to bore perfect holes in hard
granite,
lathe-finish beautiful bowls in tough diorite and fashion exquisite stone vases with
openings no larger than a little finger. American technologist Christopher Dunn has
recently completed an indepth study of the ancient Egyptians' incredible stone-ware
industry and has convincingly demonstrated that they used ultrasound-induced vibration to
enhance their drilling capabilities.
Such a conclusion might seem beyond comprehension, but this present author has
uncovered hard evidence to demonstrate that Tibetan monastic communities as late as the
present century were in possession of a sonic technology that included the creation of
weightlessness in stone blocks and the destruction of physical matter using ultrasound
vibration. Furthermore, it has now come to light that a nineteenth-century maverick
scientist named John Ernst Worrell Keely quite independently found a way of raising heavy
objects into the air and disintegrating lumps of granite using sympathetic vibratory
apparatus.
How did the pyramid builders of 4500 years ago gain such an extraordinary insight into
a science and technology little understood even today? What became of this lost
technology, and why has much of it only been rediscovered in our present age? In order to
suitably answer these questions, we must embark on a journey that will reveal a virtually
alien world, inhabited by a forgotten culture composed of a priestly elite who lived in
Egypt's fertile Nile valley during a distant epoch long before the accepted genesis of
civilisation. It will reveal the existence at Giza of buildings and monuments seemingly
left by this Elder race, as well as the firm presence beneath the Great Sphinx of an
underworld complex known today as the Hall of Records.
To attempt to understand this mystery more fully we must return to the Giza plateau and
examine its strange megalithic temples, for these suggest a construction date long before
the pyramid age.
Temples of the Gods
Egyptologists assert that the Valley Temple, which sits on the edge of the
plateau, was
built at the time of the Pharaoh Khafre, around 2550 BC. Certainly, it is linked via a
stone causeway to another ancient temple on the eastern side of the Second Pyramid which
is also accredited to Khafre. Further evidence of this conclusion, they
say, is the Valley
Temple's similarity in design to other temples on the Giza plateau, as well as its
proximity to the Great Sphinx and the fact that statues of Khafre were found abandoned in
a well located beneath its floor.
This would appear to be incorrect, for recent geological surveys of the Great Sphinx
have revealed that the weathering effects visible on its body, and on the nearby enclosure
wall, were caused not by wind, as the Egyptologists believe, but by water precipitation -
in other words, rain. Lots of it, over a very, very long period of time. Such a
supposition creates insurmountable problems for the academics as it is known that the last
time Egypt produced enough rain to have created such raging torrents of water was during
the 3000-year stretch between 8000 and 5000 BC.
More damning still to the orthodox views of the Egyptologists is the knowledge that
recent astronomical research in respect to the orientation and placement of the monuments
on the Giza plateau, clearly point towards a foundation date sometime between 11,000 and
9000 BC - several thousand years before the age of the Pharaohs.
How can this be possible? Scholars argue that in the time-frame under question, the
eleventh and tenth millennia BC, the Nile valley was inhabited only by "bands of
people who lived in small huts or shelters and sustained themselves by hunting and
gathering". They also state that these early Nilotic (ie. those living by the Nile)
communities "erected no large stone structures of any kind" and had not
"taken even the first steps towards the domestication of plants and animals".
This is simply not true. There is much evidence of prehistoric man along the Nile
during this very age, and it clearly shows that between 12,500 and 9500 BC certain
communities not only possessed an advanced tool-making industry, but also domesticated
animals and developed the earliest agriculture anywhere in the world. Moreover, just 300
miles away from Giza in what is today Jericho, its inhabitants of 8000 BC were
constructing enormous fortification walls, gouging out vast trenches in the hard bedrock
and erecting a gigantic stone tower in defence against an unknown enemy. Engineering
projects on this scale would have required a high level of social structure and
co-ordinated operations.
No one can say that humanity in this distant age did not have the ability to carve the
image of a 240-feet long recumbent lion, and yet accepting this hypothesis brings with it
an even greater problem. Since the core limestone blocks - many up to 100 tonne a piece -
used in the construction of the Valley Temple, the Sphinx Temple, as well as at least one
other similar structure on the Giza plateau, were extracted from the Sphinx
enclosure, we
must concede that these too date to this same distant epoch. If this is the
case, then the
Pharaohs of the pyramid age merely restored these enormous temple
structures, which begs
the question of who exactly did build them?
Epoch of the Elder Gods
The ancient Egyptians saw their culture and religion as having been inherited directly
from a divine race that existed thousands of years before the coming of the
Pharaohs. For example, the fragmented Royal Papyrus of Turin, dating to the Nineteenth
Dynasty, c. 1300 BC, contains a list of ten netjeru - a word simply meaning
'divinities' or gods -
who reigned prior to the first kings of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians also viewed the Giza
necropolis as the 'Splendid Place of the First Time', quite literally the abode of the
gods who had ruled their land during this misty epoch. More significantly, the
hieroglyphic 'building' texts found on the walls at the Temple of Horus at
Edfu, in
southern Egypt, tell us much about the activities of the Elder gods, the divine
inhabitants, who inhabited the Nile Valley during the epoch of the First
Time.
Island of the Gods
Looking at the plateau
today, with its desert back-drop and its striking sentinel-like pyramids, that cannot help but exude a stark sense of
permanence, it is hard to imagine
Giza any different. Yet the Edfu account, which was compiled from a series of now lost
books attributed to the moon-god Thoth, enables us to construct a quite remarkable picture
of how the Giza plateau might have looked over 11,000 years ago.
If we were to find ourselves a time-machine and travel back to this distant epoch the
chances are that we would enter a hot, humid environment alive with lush green vegetation
or the type you might find today in equatorial Africa. If the texts are to be believed,
Giza apparently possessed a shallow lake, fed directly from the Nile itself. Such a
supposition is not mere fantasy, for it is known that in past ages the river flowed much
closer to the edge of the plateau, while evidence of a sacred lake and dock dated to Old
Kingdom times have been found beyond the plateau's western limits. To the Elder gods this
would have signified the primeval sea of chaos out of which the first land emerged at the
beginning of time.
On the edge of this sacred lake were, it seems, tall djed-pillars, carved
perhaps in dark stone, while standing close to the banks was an enclosure wall beyond
which was a gleaming white temple known as the Mansion of Wetjeset-Neter, the 'place of
reeds'. In the shallow waters was a small island, symbolising the Point of First Creation,
crowned with a simple stone structure that proclaimed its immense sanctity. This island is
referred to in the Edfu documents as the Island of the Egg or the Island of Trampling,
while the stone structure is recalled in the name Place of the Well.
Locally we might have found indigenous peoples of the late palaeolithic age tending
cultivated lands, herding domesticated wild animals, making beautiful flint tools and
using wooden spears to harpoon fish in the nearby river Nile. Yet behind the tall,
imposing walls of the sacred enclosure the texts speak of an altogether different kind of
person - commanding figures referred to variously as the Shebtiu, the Sages, the Elders
and the Falcons. These mythical individuals take the guise of birds, implying perhaps that
they were priest-shamans who adorned themselves in bird feathers. They are also said to
have had radiant faces that must have made them quite striking in appearance. This strange
menagerie of divine beings, who were said to number sixty, are spoken of as netjeru,
or divinities.
This then is the curious picture emerging from the writings of the Egyptians
themselves. Yet who exactly were these shamanic individuals who are said to have built the
first monuments and temples? Were they the ones responsible for the carving of not just
the Great Sphinx, but also the earliest megalithic monuments found to this day at places
such as Giza and Abydos? If this is the case, then what happened to this forgotten
culture, and what else might they have left as a legacy to the world?
The Hall of Records
As we enter the next
millennium, many great discoveries are being made on the Giza plateau. None can be more extraordinary than the detection beneath the Sphinx's
wedge-shaped enclosure of a series of nine concealed chambers of unnatural
origin. These
were first noticed during seismic soundings of the hard bedrock by two research
programmes, one led by seismologist Thomas Dobecki in 1991 and the other co-ordinated in
1996 by the University of Florida in association with millionaire Joseph
Schor, a
life-long member of the Edgar Cayce Foundation (see below).
Myths and legends that date back to Pharaonic times speak of a subterranean world
existing beneath the Giza plateau. Modern-day psychics, occult societies and new-age
mystics all firmly believe that an underground complex made up of concealed corridors and
unknown chambers will eventually be found at Giza. They refer to this underworld complex
as the 'Hall of Records', the 'Crystal Chambers' or the 'Chambers of Initiation', and
suggest that it contains arcane wisdom and knowledge hidden from the world by Egypt's
Elder culture prior to the Great Flood. During the 1930s one American psychic named Edgar
Cayce stated that the Hall of Records would be found and opened in secret during 1998.
Working on this indication, a British consortium of surveyors and geophysicists, backed by
Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is going to conduct a wide-scale search for the
entrance to the Hall of Records in July this year.
What might they expect to find? What really does await discovery beneath the Giza
bed-rock?
Ever since Roman times rumours have existed concerning the existence beneath the Giza
plateau of a series of under-ground chambers and tunnels. For example, the Roman historian
Ammianus Marcellinus (fl. AD 360-390) spoke of "subterranean fissures and winding
passages called syringes" present beneath the Giza pyramid field. These were
constructed, he said, by "those acquainted with the ancient rites, since they had
foreknowledge that a deluge was coming, and feared that the memory of the ceremonies might
be destroyed".
What exactly were these "ancient rites" that needed to be preserved from
being lost in "a deluge"? Have the geophysicists working on the recent Giza
projects really registered the echoes of Elder gods whose collective memory still lies
slumbering beneath its limestone bedrock?
Underworld of the Soul
The Edfu Building Texts speak at length about the presence of this subterranean domain
beneath the island of creation once located on the edge of the Giza
plateau. Referred to
as the Underworld of the Soul, this structure was used by the divine individuals known as
the Shebtiu to conduct strange ceremonies, described as acts of creation, using hand-held
power objects. They are said to have gained their radiance from another much greater
object described variously as the embryo, the seed, the egg, the lotus or even the benben,
or phallus stone. This was seen to be the creative source of the island, embodying both
the male and female regenerative powers. It is not stated exactly what this object might
have been, although the indications are that, similar to the hand-held power objects used
by the Shebtiu, it could have been a conical-shaped stone resembling the so-called lingams
placed in underground shrines inside some Hindu temples. These too are seen to embody the
dualistic regenerative powers of first creation.
Could this be what awaits discovery in Giza's underworld domain - powerful lingam
stones that were once used in bizarre rites by the precursors of dynastic Egypt? Is this
what will be found inside the Chambers of Creation, the so-called Hall of Records, if it
is indeed discovered over the coming year?
That the ancient Egyptians believed that a physical object of immense creative power
lie beneath the sands of Giza does not seem in doubt. Among the body of magical literature
known as the Coffin Texts it speaks of something described as "the sealed thing,
which is in darkness, with fire about it." It is said to contain "the efflux of
Osiris", the god of the underworld, and was "put in Rostau", the name given
by the ancient Egyptians to the Giza pyramid field. The text in question goes on to state
that this "sealed thing" has been "hidden since it fell from him (Osiris),
and it is what came down from him onto the desert of sand".
The burial place of the body of Osiris is integrally linked with the Egyptian concept
of the Underworld of the Soul as well as Giza itself. Indeed, the Valley Temple of Khafre
is actually referred to in ancient inscriptions as the "House of Osiris". It
seems certain that the "sealed thing" of the Coffin Texts is therefore another
allusion to the nucleus of the sacred island - the so-called seed, embryo, lotus, egg or
phallus found at the heart of Giza-Rostau's Chambers of Creation. Illustrations that
accompany Egyptian texts that detail what will be found inside the hidden chambers show at
its heart a strange fiery-orange bell-shaped object over which is the hieroglyph for
"night" or "darkness", implying that this powerful object remains in
darkness awaiting discovery.
So much for the contents of this lost world, but where might it have been
situated, and
can it be found today?
The Sphinx and the River
During the epoch of the First Time the Shebtiu initiates would perhaps have emerged from
the Chambers of Creation, the so-called Hall of Records, to stand upon the sacred
island,
surrounded by the primeval waters of Nun. Yet with the desiccation of the eastern Sahara
and the rise of Pharaonic Egypt around 3100 BC, the setting has changed quite
dramatically. No longer are we able to look out over the shallow lake, created by the
waters of the nearby river Nile, and see beyond it to the first temples of the
gods. Gone
too is the sacred island, with its structured enclosure and subterranean entrance to
Giza's underworld com-plex. Instead, we find ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of the
Giza pyramid field. Yet where exactly?
It is my conclusion that the sacred lake must have lain to the east or north-east of
the Great Sphinx and Valley Temple, on the eastern edge of the plateau. In no way can it
have been located on the plateau itself, for it rises up too steeply beyond the third
pyramid of Menkeure on its western side. Only on its eastern side can we find a low-lying
area sufficient in size to have created either a temporary, or more permanent, lake or
reservoir. This observation is supported by the recent discovery of a stone quay on the
eastern side of the Valley Temple, which may itself be the last remains of the first
temple constructed by the Elder gods on the edge of the sacred lake.
If I am correct in these assumptions, then it could well mean that the entrance to the
Hall of Records now lies beneath the streets of the Nazlet el-Samman village, placed
beyond the eastern edge of the plateau.
In many ways I hope I am wrong in this assessment of the evidence available to us at
the present time. Despite this, these findings appear to concur precisely with the
inspired readings of American psychic Edgar Cayce. In 1933 he revealed the whereabouts of
the subterranean complex with the following words:
In position, this lies - as the sun rises from the waters - as
the line of the shadows [or light] falls between the paws of the
Sphinx; that was set later as the sentinel or guard and which may
not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx's right
paw until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active
in this sphere of man's experience. Then [it lies] between the Sphinx
and the river.
Between
the Sphinx and the river - in other words to the east of the Sphinx
and Valley Temple. If he was right in this respect, then let us also
hope that he was correct in his belief that connecting chambers led
from the underground complex to a position coincident to the right
paw of the Sphinx monument. If this is so, we still stand a reasonable
chance of locating a second entry point using modern-day sounding
equipment. Whether or not the nine chambers discovered in 1996 beneath
the Sphinx enclosure by the team put together by the University of
Florida are actually connected with Giza's underworld complex remains
to be seen. It may well be that, although of man-made construction,
and therefore of profound interest to our knowledge of Egyptian history,
they lie too near the surface to be connected with the Chambers of
Creation. On the other hand they might well contain the ultimate proof
of the former existence in Egypt of a high culture of almost alien
mentality whose knowledge of ancient technology and natural sciences
will change the entire way we perceive human evolution.
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