Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

It suddenly hit me how dauntingly and disturbingly old it was, and how completely my life at this moment depended on the skills of the ancient builders. The hefty blocks that spanned the distant ceiling were examples of those skills – every one of them laid at a slightly steeper gradient than that of the Gallery. As the great archaeologist and surveyor Flinders Petrie had observed, this had been done in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately upheld by the side walls which it lies across.27 And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?