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

by Graham Hancock

The crux, therefore, was that the most remarkable monument of Ancient Egypt and the most remarkable monument of Ancient Mexico both incorporated pi relationships long before and far away from the official ‘discovery’ of this transcendental number by the Greeks.

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?

In antiquity, however, the floor had been smoothly polished limestone, which, at a gradient of 26°, must have been almost impossible to climb.

Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made of even harder jewels: ‘The character of the work would certainly seem to point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this conclusion …’10 An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must have: adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation; thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from ¼ inch to 5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick …11 Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever been found by Egyptologists.12 The visible evidence of the kinds of drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer that such instruments must have existed. He became especially interested in this and exten...

Why unimaginable? Because many of the vessels were tall vases with long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was capable of carving vases into shapes like these, because such an instrument would have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through the necks and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have scoured out the shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how could sufficient upward and outward pressure have been generated and applied within the vases to achieve these effects? The tall vases were by no means the only enigmatic vessels unearthed from the Pyramid of Zoser, and from a number of other archaic sites. There were monolithic urns with delicate ornamental handles left attached to their exteriors by the carvers. There were bowls, again with extremely narrow necks like the vases, and with widely flared, pot-bellied interiors. There were also open bowls, and almost microscopic vials, and occasional strange wheel-shaped objects cut out of metamorphic schist with inwardly curled edges planed down so fine that they were almost translucent.21 In all cases what was really perplexing was the precision with which the interiors and exteriors of these vessels had been made to correspond – curve matching curve – over absolutely smooth, polished surfaces with no tool marks visible. There was no technology known to have been available to the Ancient Egyptians capable of achievi...

I relaxed and tried not to worry about the possibility of one of the pyramid guards coming in and finding me in this embarrassing and probably illegal position. Hoping that I would remain undisturbed for a few minutes, I folded my hands across my chest and gave voice to a sustained low-pitched tone – something I had tried out several times before at other points in the King’s Chamber. On those occasions, in the centre of the floor, I had noticed that the walls and ceiling seemed to collect the sound, to gather and to amplify it and project it back at me so that I could sense the returning vibrations through my feet and scalp and skin. Now in the sarcophagus I was aware of very much the same effect, although seemingly amplified and concentrated many times over. It was like being in the sound-box of some giant, resonant musical instrument designed to emit for ever just one reverberating note. The sound was intense and quite disturbing. I imagined it rising out of the coffer and bouncing off the red granite walls and ceiling of the King’s Chamber, shooting up through the northern and southern ‘ventilation’ shafts and spreading across the Giza plateau like a sonic mushroom cloud. With this ambitious vision in my mind, and with the sound of my low-pitched note echoing in my ears and causing the sarcophagus to vibrate around me, I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few minutes later it was to behold a distressing sight: six Japanese tourists of mixed ages and sexes had congreg...

Another important and unusual feature of the Valley Temple was that its core structure was built entirely, entirely, of gigantic limestone megaliths. The majority of these measured about 18 feet long × 10 feet wide × 8 feet high and some were as large as 30 feet long × 12 feet wide × 10 feet high.11 Routinely exceeding 200 tons in weight, each was heavier than a modern diesel locomotive – and there were hundreds of blocks.12 Was this in any way mysterious? Egyptologists did not seem to think so; indeed few of them had bothered to comment, except in the most superficial manner – either on the staggering size of these blocks or the mind-bending logistics of how they might have been put in place. As we have seen, monoliths of up to 70 tons, each about as heavy as 100 family-sized cars, had been lifted to the level of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid – again without provoking much comment from the Egyptological fraternity – so the lack of curiosity about the Valley Temple was perhaps no surprise. Nevertheless, the block size was truly extraordinary, seeming to belong not just to another epoch but to another ethic altogether – one that reflected incomprehensible aesthetic and structural concerns and suggested a scale of priorities utterly different from our own. Why, for example, insist on using these cumbersome 200-ton monoliths when you could simply slice each of them up into 10 or 20 or 40 or 80 smaller and more manoeuvrable blocks? Why make things so difficult for yo...

A closer look at some of the remaining exterior facing blocks where they had become detached from the core revealed a curious fact. When they had been placed here in antiquity the backs of these blocks had been cut to fit into and around the deep coves and scallops of existing weathering patterns on the limestone core. The presence of those patterns seemed to imply that the core blocks must have stood here, exposed to the elements, for an immense span of time before they had been faced with granite.

In 1993 there was an astonishing new discovery which suggested that there was much still to learn about Ancient Egypt. The discoverer, moreover, was not some astigmatic archaeologist sieving his way through the dust of ages but an outsider to the field: Robert Bauval, a Belgian construction engineer with a flair for astronomy who observed a correlation in the sky that the experts had missed in their fixation with the ground at their feet. What Bauval saw was this: as the three belt stars of the Orion constellation crossed the meridian at Giza they lay in a not quite straight line high in the southern heavens. The lower two stars, Al Nitak and Al Nilam, formed a perfect diagonal but the third star, Mintaka, appeared to be offset to the observer’s left, that is, towards the east. The three pyramids of Giza plotted against the three belt stars of the Orion constellation. Curiously enough (as we saw in Chapter Thirty-six), this was exactly the site-plan of the three enigmatic pyramids of the Giza plateau. Bauval realized that an aerial view of the Giza necropolis would show the Great Pyramid of Khufu occupying the position of Al Nitak, and the Second Pyramid of Khafre occupying the position of Al Nilam, while the Third Pyramid of Menkaure was offset to the east of the diagonal formed by the other two – thus completing what seemed at first to be a vast diagram of the stars. Was this indeed what the Giza pyramids represented? I knew that Bauval’s later work, which had been whole...

I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC or earlier. Like Bauval’s astronomical data, the evidence had always been available but had failed to attract the attention of established Egyptologists. The man responsible for bringing it before the public now was the American scholar, John Anthony West, who argued that the specialists had missed it – not because they had failed to find it, but because they had found it and had failed to interpret it properly.9 West’s evidence focused on certain key structures, notably the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza and, much farther south, the mysterious Osireion at Abydos. He argued that these desert monuments showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in sufficient quantities during the damp ‘pluvial’ period that accompanied the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC.10 The implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of ‘precipitation induced’ weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and other associated structures were built before 10,000 BC.

The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling. Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic form.17 Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).18 In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal’.19 The knowledge of iron was thus regarded as yet another gift from the gods …

If iron is mostly available via meteorites, wouldn't it make sense that the heavens would be rich with it?

Thy sister Isis cometh unto thee rejoicing in her love for thee. Thou settest her upon thee, thy issue entereth into her, and she becometh great with child like the star Sept [Sirius, the Dog Star]. Horus–Sept cometh forth from thee in the form of Horus, dweller in Sept.38 Many interpretations of this passage are, of course, possible. What intrigued me, however, was the clear implication that Sirius was to be regarded as a dual entity in some way comparable to a woman ‘great with child’. Moreover, after the birth (or coming forth) of that child, the text makes a special point of reminding us that Horus remained a ‘dweller in Sept’, presumably suggesting that he stayed close to his mother. Sirius is an unusual star. A sparkling point of light particularly prominent in the winter months in the night skies of the northern hemisphere, it consists of a binary star system, i. e. it is in fact, as the Pyramid Texts suggest, a ‘dual entity’. The major component, Sirius-A, is what we see. Sirius-B, on the other hand – the dwarf-star which revolves around Sirius A – is absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Its existence did not become known to Western science until 1862, when US astronomer Alvin Clark spotted it through one of the largest and most advanced telescopes of the day.39 How could the scribes who wrote the Pyramid Texts possibly have obtained the information that Sirius was two stars in one?

(as well as the more mind-boggling ‘one million of millions of years’)

But this would show that they had no idea how much time had passed and were just making things up.

Such a people would, of course, have required an excellent calendar – one that would have facilitated complex and accurate calculations. It was therefore not surprising to learn that the Ancient Egyptians, like the Maya, had possessed such a calendar and that their understanding of its workings seemed to have declined, rather than improved, as the ages went by.48 It was tempting to see this as the gradual erosion of a corpus of knowledge inherited an extremely long time ago, an impression supported by the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who made no secret of their belief that their calendar was a legacy which they had received ‘from the gods’. We consider the possible identity of these gods in more detail in the following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.49 The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as ‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky.50 In the case of Sirius the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly 365.25 days – a mathematically har...

We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged observation of the sky.

Like the 140-foot ocean-going vessel found buried beside the Great Pyramid at Giza (see Chapter Thirty-three), one thing was immediately clear about the Abydos boats – they were of an advanced design capable of riding out the most powerful waves and the worst weather of the open seas. According to Cheryl Haldane, a nautical archaeologist at Texas A-and-M University, they showed ‘a high degree of technology combined with grace’.33 Exactly as was the case with the Pyramid boat, therefore (but at least 500 years earlier) the Abydos fleet seemed to indicate that a people able to draw upon the accumulated experiences of a long tradition of seafaring had been present in Egypt from the very beginning of its 3000 year history. Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as 1500 years before the burial of the Abydos fleet (to around 4500 BC) showed the same long, sleek, high-prowed vessels in action.

There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great Egyptian ‘leap forward’ suggest that it could only have resulted from an influx of new ideas from some as yet unidentified source.

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Giza – that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head, shows indisputable signs of water erosion.’2 While working on Serpent, West was struck by the possible significance of this remark and decided to follow it up: ‘I realized that if I could prove Schwaller’s offhand observation empirically, this would be ironclad evidence for the existence of a previously unidentified high civilization of distant antiquity.’

Moreover, how did the Ancient Egyptians get started on astronomy in the first place? It is not an obvious hobby for a valley-dwelling landlocked people to develop on their own initiative. Perhaps we should take more seriously the explanation they themselves offer: that their ancestors were taught the study of the stars by a god. We might also pay closer attention to the many unmistakably maritime references in the Pyramid Texts.

Landlocked people do not as rule become astronomers; seafaring people do. Is it not possible that the maritime iconography of the Ancient Egyptians, the design of their ships, and also their splendid obsession with observing the stars, could have been part of an inheritance passed on to their ancestors by an unidentified seafaring, navigating race, in remote prehistory? It is really only such an archaic race, such a forgotten maritime civilization, that could have left its fingerprints behind in the form of maps which accurately depict the world as it looked before the end of the last Ice Age. It is really only such a civilization, steering its course by the stars ‘for ten thousand years’ that could have observed and accurately timed the phenomenon of equinoctial precession with the exactitude attested in the ancient myths. And, although hypothetical, it is only such a civilization that could have measured the earth with sufficient precision to have arrived at the dimensions scaled down in the Great Pyramid.

It was the disposition of these three stars, as archaeo-astronomer Robert Bauval had recently demonstrated, that served as the celestial template for the site-plan of the three Giza pyramids. This, in itself, was a remarkable discovery, suggesting a far higher level of observational astronomy, and of surveying and setting-out skills, than scholars had attributed to the Ancient Egyptians. Even more remarkable, however – and the reason that I had arranged to meet him at Giza the next morning – was Bauval’s contention that the pattern traced out on the ground (in almost fifteen million tons of perfectly dressed stone) matched exactly the pattern in the sky during the epoch of 10,450 BC.

Moreover, the disposition of the pyramids had not been arrived at by any random or accidental process but seemed to have been deliberately chosen because it marked a precessionally significant event: the lowest point, the beginning, the First Time in Orion’s 13,000-year ‘up’ cycle.

Work on the principal sanctuary of Amon – the Temple of Karnak at Luxor in upper Egypt – was begun at around 2000 BC23 and, as those who have visited that temple will recall, its principal icons are rams, long rows of which guard its entrances. The immediate predecessor to the Age of Aries was the Age of Taurus – the Bull – which spanned the period between 4380 and 2200 BC.24 It was during this precessional epoch, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose in the constellation of Taurus, that the Bull-cult of Minoan Crete flourished.25 And during this epoch, too, the civilization of dynastic Egypt burst upon the historical scene, fully formed, apparently without antecedents. Readers must judge whether it is a coincidence that Egyptians at the very beginning of the dynastic period were already venerating the Apis and Mnevis Bulls – the former being considered a theophany of the god Osiris and the latter, the sacred animal of Helipolis, a theophany of the god Ra.26 Why should an equinoctial marker have been made in the form of a lion?

we could find a way of saying WE LIVED IN THE AGE OF PISCES, and could specify the altitude above the horizon of certain identifiable stars in our own epoch (say, the prominent belt stars of the Orion constellation), we would be able to signal our dates to future generations with greater precision. Alternatively we could do as the builders of the Giza pyramids appear to have done and lay out our monuments in a pattern on the ground reflecting exactly the pattern of the stars in the sky in our time.