The great conspiracy of Egypt’s mythical library, the Hall of Records
If you’re into conspiracies — both wacky and true — you’re in for a treat, Each week, we’re going to pick a different conspiracy, legend, or urban myth — something unsubstantiated or unproven, but still believed by a significant number of people — and we’re going to dive in. We’ll tell you what it is, who believes it and why, and of course, we’ll explain any evidence against it actually being true.
Let’s get right into it.
The Hall of Records
For something that sounds so dull and pedestrian, like a place you’d go wait in line for a copy of your birth of certificate, the Hall of Records — if it exists — would be an absolutely revolutionary find. While the Library of Alexandria contained almost the entirety of ancient Greek knowledge, including works of fiction, criticism, drama, mathematics, physics, and more, before being accidentally burned to the ground, the Hall of Records is said to have served much the same purpose for ancient Egyptian knowledge.
If the Hall of Records existed, if someone were to stumble across it, it would be one of the most significant finds in all of human history, as it would not only replicate many of the lost Library of Alexandria works, but also shed light on Egyptian history and thought as well. For diehard believers in the Hall of Records, that means details on where the Egyptian people came from, or perhaps, where they really came from, which of course leads us to two of the most resilient conspiracy theory tropes: aliens and Atlantis.
For those who buy into the idea of ancient aliens — otherworldly beings who visited Earth to assist and be worshipped by ancient peoples — the Hall of Records could hold just the confirmation they’re looking for. The same goes for the lost continent of Atlantis and folks who think that perhaps its inhabitants ended up hanging by the Nile.
While most respected archaeologists and academics write the Hall of Records off as pseudo-archaeological nonsense, believers typically write that off with a, “Well, of course they would say that!” Throwing fuel on the speculative fire is the fact that the Egyptian government has purportedly blocked investigations around what is said to be the site of the Hall of Records: The Great Sphinx of Giza.
That’s right, the coolest part about the Hall of Records is that it’s said to be hidden beneath that most iconic, giant Egyptian statue. Any sphinx carries with it the aura of mysticism and magic, but that aura becomes magnified with a statue this size, one that also contains small, mysterious holes in its body. Archaeologists have suggested that they were involved in the creation of the statue, but again: “They would say that!”
Like most conspiracy theories, there’s a metric ton of speculation around the Hall of Records, and even more wackadoodle theories surrounding it. One of my personal favorites, which gets bonus points for its specificity, is that the Hall of Records was sealed up by a pre-Egyptian society way back in 10,500 BC, because that’s the last time that the Leo constellation lined up with the area between the Sphinx’s paws. Why would that be the case, and how would people know such a thing? Search me.
Outside of conspiracy theories, myths and out-and-out speculation, there’s not really any evidence to support the idea of a massive, hidden Hall of Records. There aren’t even any extant literary sources that mention it, and you can find ancient texts talking about all kinds of crazy things, from sea monsters to the aforementioned Atlantis and more. But: there does exist one more piece of important evidence that Hall of Records believers tend to point to.
Robert M Schoch is a professor at Boston University — he’s not just some internet crackpot — and he is best known for putting forth a rather fascinating theory. Due to research on how they have weathered and aged, he contends that many ancient structures are actually the products of much older civilizations than originally thought, ones that even shared some type of contact with one another. And among those structures? The pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica and, of course, the Giant Sphinx of Giza.
As part of the research into his claims, Schoch and others used ground-penetrating radar around the sphinx, and claim to have found a number of open spaces there. While this is far from evidence that the Hall of Records actually exists, it does indicate that the Hall of Records doesn’t necessarily not exist, which is more than enough to keep the conspiracy enthusiasts postulating.
So, what do you think? Does the Hall of Records exist? Is it buried beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza? Or does it all just sound a little bit too much like a Nicholas Cage movie designed for an international audience? Tell us your thoughts down in the comments!
"The Giza-plateau and old Cairo are crisscrossed with subterranean passageways, shafts, natural caverns, lakes and chambers that contain surprising artifacts, but Egyptian authorities are not ready to reveal these to the public"
About the Author:
Tony Bushby , an Australian, became a highly successful businessman and entrepreneur very early in his life. He established a magazine publishing business and spent 20 years researching, writing and publishing his own magazines, primarily for the Australian and New Zealand markets.
With strong spiritual beliefs and an interest in metaphysical subjects, Tony has developed long relationships with many associations and societies throughout the world. He has been given access to rare biblical manuscripts in the archives of numerous private libraries and museums.
His book, The Bible Fraud, involved him in 12 years of full-time painstaking research at great personal expense. His extensive travels have taken him to Egypt, the Middle East, England, Wales, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
To comprehend fully the secret information in the Bible, it is important to understand the extent of the subterranean tunnel system and associated chamber facilities existing below the surface of the Pyramid Plateau, for it was there that major elements of Mystery School teachings developed.
What happened under the sands thousands of years ago is not reflected in today's history books, and discoveries made in the last eight decades or so verify that point.
The Fayum Oasis district, just a few kilometers outside the boundary of the Memphis Nome, presents a site of unusual interest. It was in that lush, fertile valley that Pharaohs calling themselves the "masters of the royal hunts" fished and hunted with the boomerang (1), Lake Moeris once bordered the Fayum Oasis and on its shores was the famous Labyrinth, described by Herodotus as "an endless wonder to me".
The Labyrinth contained 1500 rooms and an equal number of underground chambers that the Greek historian was not permitted to inspect, according to Labyrinth priests, "the passages were baffling and intricate", designed to provide safety for the numerous scrolls they said were hidden in subterranean apartments.
That massive complex particularly impressed Herodotus and he spoke in awe of the structure:
There I saw twelve palaces regularly disposed, which had communication with each other, interspersed with terraces and arranged around twelve halls. It is hard to believe they are the work of man.
The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends, there is a pyramid, two hundred and forty feet in height, with great carved figures of animals on it and an underground passage by which it can be entered.
I was told very credibly that underground chambers and passages connected this pyramid with the pyramids at Memphis.
Underground passages connecting pyramids
The pyramids at Memphis were the pyramids at Giza, for Giza was originally called Memphis (see reference, "Giza formerly Memphis" on Nordan's map from Travels in Egypt and Nubia, 1757, on page 152 of previous chapter).
Many ancient writers supported Herodotus' record of underground passages connecting major pyramids, and their evidence casts doubt on the reliability of traditionally presented Egyptian history. Crantor (300 BC) stated that there were certain underground pillars in Egypt that contained a written stone record of pre-history , and they lined access ways connecting the pyramids.
In his celebrated study, On the Mysteries , particularly those of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and the Assyrians, Iamblichus , a fourth-century Syrian representative of the Alexandrian School of mystical and philosophical studies, recorded this information about an entranceway through the body of the Sphinx into the Great Pyramid (2):
This entrance, obstructed in our day by sands and rubbish, may still be traced between the forelegs of the crouched colossus, It was formerly closed by a bronze gate whose secret spring could be operated only by the Magi. It was guarded by public respect, and a sort of religious fear maintained its inviolability better than armed protection would have done.
In the belly of the Sphinx were cut out galleries leading to the subterranean part of the Great Pyramid. These galleries were so art-fully crisscrossed along their course to the Pyramid that, in setting forth into the passage without a guide throughout this network, one ceasingly and inevitably returned to the starting point.
It was recorded in ancient Sumerian cylinder seals that the secret abode of the Anunnaki was,
"an underground place... entered through a tunnel, its entrance hidden by sand and by what they call Huwana ... his teeth as the teeth of a dragon, his face the face of a lion".
That remarkable old text, unfortunately fragmented, added that,
"He [Huwana] is unable to move forward, nor is he able to move back", but they crept up on him from behind and the way to "the secret abode of the Anunnaki" was no longer blocked.
The Sumerian record provided a probable description of the lion-headed Sphinx at Giza, and if that great creature was built to guard or obliterate ancient stairways and lower passages leading to subterranean areas below and around it, then its symbolism was most appropriate.
Local 19th-century Arab lore maintained that existing under the Sphinx are secret chambers holding treasures or magical objects.
That belief was bolstered by the writings of the first-century Roman historian Pliny , who wrote that deep below the Sphinx is concealed the,
"tomb of a ruler named Harmakhis that contains great treasure", and, strangely enough, the Sphinx itself was once called "The Great Sphinx Harmakhis who mounted guard since the time of the Followers of Horus".
The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus made additional disclosures about the existence of subterranean vaults that appeared to lead to the interior of the Great pyramid (3):
Inscriptions which the ancients asserted were engraved on the walls of certain underground galleries and passages were constructed deep in the dark interior to preserve ancient wisdom from being lost in the flood.
A manuscript compiled by an Arab writer named Altelemsani is preserved in the British Museum, and it records the existence of a long, square, underground passage between the Great Pyramid and the River Nile with a "strange thing" blocking the Nile entrance.
He related the following episode:
In the days of Ahmed Ben Touloun, a party entered the Great pyramid through the tunnel and found in a side-chamber a goblet of glass of rare color and texture. As they were leaving, they missed one of the party and, upon returning to seek him, he came out to them naked and laughing said,
"Do not follow or seek for me", and then rushed back into the pyramid.
His friends perceived that he was enchanted.
Upon learning about strange happenings under the Pyramid, Ahmed Ben Touloun expressed a desire to see the goblet of glass. During the examination, it was filled with water and weighed, then emptied and re-weighed. The historian wrote that it was "found to be of the same weight when empty as when full of water".
If the chronicle is accurate, that lack of additional weight provided indirect evidence of the existence of an extraordinary science at Giza.
According to Masoudi in the 10th century, mechanical statues with amazing capabilities guarded subterranean galleries under the Great Pyramid. Written one thousand years ago, his description is comparable to the computerized robots shown today in space movies. Masoudi said that the automatons were programmed for intolerance, for they destroyed all "except those who by their conduct were worthy of admission".
Masoudi contended that,
"written accounts of Wisdom and acquirements in the different arts and sciences were hidden deep, that they might remain as records for the benefit of those who could afterwards comprehend them ".
That is phenomenal information, as it is possible that, since the times of Masoudi, "worthy" persons have seen the mysterious underground chambers.
Masoudi confessed,
"I have seen things that one does not describe for fear of making people doubt one's intelligence... but still I have seen them".
In the same century, another writer, Muterdi , gave an account of a bizarre incident in a narrow passage under Giza, where a group of people were horrified to see one of their party crushed to death by a stone door that, by itself, suddenly slid out from the face of the passageway and closed the corridor in front of them.
Old records confirmed
Herodotus said Egyptian priests recited to him their long-held tradition of "the formation of underground apartments" by the original developers of Memphis. The most ancient inscriptions therefore suggested that there existed some sort of extensive chamber system below the surface of the areas surrounding the Sphinx and pyramids. Those old records were confirmed when the presence of a large cavity was discovered in a seismic survey conducted at the site in 1993.
That detection was publicly acknowledged in a documentary called The Mystery of the Sphinx , screened to an audience of 30 million people on NBC TV later that year.
The existence of chambers under the Sphinx is well known.
Egyptian authorities confirmed another discovery in 1994; its unearthing was announced in a newspaper report that was carried under the headline, "Mystery Tunnel in Sphinx":
Workers repairing the ailing Sphinx have discovered an ancient passage leading deep into the body of the mysterious monument. The Giza Antiquities chief, Mr Zahi Hawass, said there was no dispute the tunnel was very old.
However, what is puzzling is: who built the passage? Why? And where does it lead...?
Mr Hawass said he had no plans to remove the stones blocking the entrance. The secret tunnel burrows into the northern side of the Sphinx, about halfway between the Sphinx's outstretched paws and its tail.(4)
The popular supposition that the Sphinx is the true portal of the Great Pyramid has survived with surprising tenacity. That belief was substantiated by 100-year-old plans prepared by Masonic and Rosicrucian initiates, showing the Sphinx was the ornament surmounting a hall that communicated with all Pyramids by radiating underground passages.
Those plans were compiled from information originally discovered by the supposed founder of the Order of the Rosicrucians , Christian Rosenkreuz, who allegedly penetrated a "secret chamber beneath the ground" and there found a library of books full of secret knowledge.
The schematic drawings were produced from information possessed by mystery school archivists before sand-clearing commenced in 1925, and revealed hidden doors to long - forgotten reception halls, small temples and other enclosures. (Those plans are included in "The Master Plan" section at the end of the book.)
The knowledge of the mystery schools was strengthened by a series of remarkable discoveries in 1935 that provided proof of additional passageways and chambers interlacing the area below the Pyramids.
The Giza complex showed major elements of being a purposely built, uniting structure with the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid and the Temple of the Solar-men directly related to each other, above and below the ground.
Chambers detected by ground penetrating radar
Chambers and passageways detected by sophisticated seismograph and ground penetrating radar ( GPR ) equipment in the last few years established the accuracy of the plans. Egypt is also successfully using sophisticated satellites to identify sites buried beneath the surface at Giza and other locations. The novel tracking system was launched at the beginning of 1998 and the location of 27 unexcavated sites in five areas was precisely determined.
Nine of those sites are on Luxor's east bank and the others are in Giza, Abu Rawash, Saqqara and Dashur.
The printouts of the Giza area show an almost incomprehensible mass of net-like tunnels and chambers crisscrossing the area, intersecting and entwining each other like latticework extending out across the entire plateau.
With the space surveillance project, Egyptologists are able to determine the location of a major site, its probable entrance and the size of chambers before starting excavations.
Particular attention is being focused on three secret locations:
an area in the desert a few hundred meters west/southwest of the original location of the Black Pyramid, around which is currently being built a massive system of concrete walls seven meters high covering eight square kilometers
the ancient highway that linked the Luxor temple with Karnak
the "Way of Horus" across northern Sinai
Headlines News
Among the mystics or members of Egyptian mystery schools, tradition explained that the Great Pyramid was great in many ways. Despite the fact that it was not entered until the year 820, the secret schools of pre-Christian Egypt insisted that the interior layout was well known to them.
They constantly claimed that it was not a tomb nor a burial chamber of any kind, except that it did have one chamber for symbolic burial as part of an initiation ritual. According to mystical traditions, the interior was entered gradually and in various stages via underground passageways . Different chambers were said to have existed at the end of each phase of progress, with the highest and ultimate initiatory stage represented by the now-called King's Chamber .
Little by little, the traditions of the mystery schools were verified by archaeological discoveries, for it was ascertained in 1935 that there was a subterranean connection between the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid and that a tunnel connected the Sphinx to the ancient temple located on its southern side (today called the Temple of the Sphinx ).
As Emile Baraize 's massive 11-year sand and seashell clearing project neared completion in 1935, remarkable stories started to emerge about discoveries made during the clearing project.
A magazine article, written and published in 1935 by Hamilton M. Wright , dealt with an extraordinary discovery under the sands of Giza that is today denied. The article was accompanied by original photographs provided by Dr Selim Hassan , the leader of the scientific investigative team from the University of Cairo who made the discovery.
It said:
We have discovered a subway used by the ancient Egyptians of 5000 years ago. It passes beneath the causeway leading between the second Pyramid and the Sphinx. It provides a means of passing under the causeway from the Cheops Pyramid to the Pyramid of Chephren [Khephren] . From this subway, we have unearthed a series of shafts leading down more than 125 feet, with roomy courts and side chambers.
Around the same time, the international news media released further details of the find.
The underground connector complex was originally built between the Great pyramid and the Temple of the Solarmen, for the Pyramid of Khephren was a later and superficial structure. The subway and its apartments were excavated out of solid, living bedrock-a truly extraordinary feat, considering it was built thousands of years ago.
There is more to the story of under-ground chambers at Giza, for media reports described the unearthing of a subterranean passageway between the Temple of the Solar-men on the plateau and the Temple of the Sphinx in the valley. That passageway had been unearthed a few years before the release and publication of that particular newspaper article.
The discoveries led Dr Selim Hassan and others to believe and publicly state that, while the age of the Sphinx was always enigmatic in the past, it may have been part of the great architectural plan that was deliberately arranged and carried out in association with the erection of the Great Pyramid.
Archaeologists made another major discovery at that time. Around halfway between the Sphinx and Khephren's Pyramid were discovered four enormous vertical shafts, each around eight feet square, leading straight down through solid limestone.
It is called "Campbell's Tomb" on the Masonic and Rosicrucian plans, and,
"that shaft complex", said Dr Selim Hassan, "ended in a spacious room, in the centre of which was another shaft that descended to a roomy court flanked with seven side chambers ".
Some of the chambers contained huge, sealed sarcophagi of basalt and granite, 18 feet high.
The discovery went further and found that in one of the seven rooms there was yet a third vertical shaft, dropping down deeply to a much lower chamber. At the time of its discovery , it was flooded with water that partly covered a solitary white sarcophagus. That chamber was named the "Tomb of Osiris" and was shown being "opened for the first time" on a fabricated television documentary in March 1999.
While originally exploring in this area in 1935, Dr Selim Hassan said:
We are hoping to find some monuments of importance after clearing out this water. The total depth of these series of shafts is more than 40 metres or more than 125 feet... In the course of clearing the southern part of the subway, there was found a very fine head of a statue which is very expressive in every detail of the face .
According to a separate newspaper report of the time, the statue was an excellent sculpted bust of Queen Nefertiti, described as "a beautiful example of that rare type of art inaugurated in the Amenhotep regime". The whereabouts of that statue today are unknown.
The report also described other chambers and rooms beneath the sands, all interconnected by secret and ornate passageways. Dr Selim Hassan revealed that not only are there inner and outer courts, but they also found a room they named the "Chapel of Offering" that had been cut into a huge, rock outcrop between Campbell's Tomb and the Great Pyramid. In the centre of the chapel are three ornate vertical pillars standing in a triangular shaped layout.
Those pillars are highly significant points in this study, for their existence is recorded in the Bible. The conclusion drawn is that Ezra, the initiated Torah writer (c. 397 BC), knew the subterranean layout of passages and chambers at Giza before he wrote the Torah.
That underground design was probably the origin of the triangular shaped layout around the central altar in a Masonic lodge. In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus, in the first century, wrote that Enoch of Old Testament fame constructed an underground temple consisting of nine chambers. In a deep vault inside one chamber with three vertical columns, he placed a triangular-shaped tablet of gold bearing upon it the absolute name of the Deity (God).
The description of Enoch's chambers was similar to the description of the Chapel of Offering under the sand just east of the Great Pyramid. An anteroom much like a burial chamber, but "undoubtedly a room of initiation and reception "(5) was found higher up the plateau closer to the Great Pyramid and at the upper end of a sloping passage, cut deep into rock on the northwest side of the Chamber of Offering (between the Chamber of Offering and the Great Pyramid). In the centre of the chamber is a 12-foot long sarcophagus of white Turah limestone and a collection of fine alabaster vessels.
The walls are beautifully sculpted with scenes, inscriptions and emblems of particularly the lotus flower. The descriptions of alabaster vessels and the emblematic lotus flower have remarkable parallels with what was found in the temple-workshop on the summit of Mt Sinai/Horeb by Sir William Petrie in 1904.
Additional underground rooms, chambers, temples and hallways were discovered, some with vertical circular stone support columns, and others with wall carvings of delicate figures of goddesses clothed in beautiful apparel. Dr Selim Hassan's report described other magnificently carved figures and many beautifully colored friezes. Photographs were taken and one author and researcher who saw them, Rosicrucian H. Spencer Lewis recorded that he was "deeply impressed" with the images.
It is not known where the rare specimens of art and relics are today, but some were rumored to have been smuggled out of Egypt by private collectors.
The foregoing particulars are but a few contained in Dr Selim Hassan's extensive report that was published in 1944 by the Government Press, Cairo, under the title Excavations at Giza (10 volumes). However, that is just a mere fragment of the whole truth of what is under the area of the Pyramids.
In the last year of sand clearing, workers uncovered the most amazing discovery that stunned the world and attracted international media coverage.
"The City" deep in huge natural cavern
Archaeologists in charge of the discovery were "bewildered" at what they had unearthed, and stated that the city was the most beautifully planned they had ever seen. It is replete with temples, pastel-painted peasant dwellings, workshops, stables and other buildings including a palace. Complete with hydraulic underground waterways, it has a perfect drainage system along with other modern amenities.
The intriguing question that arises out of the discovery is: where is that city today?
Its secret location was recently revealed to a select group of people who were given permission to explore and film the city. It exists in a huge natural cavern system below the Giza Plateau that extends out in an easterly direction under Cairo. Its main entry is from inside the Sphinx, with stairs cut into rock that lead down to the cavern below the bedrock of the River Nile.
The expedition carried down generators and inflatable rafts and travelled along an underground river that led to a lake one kilometer wide. On the shores of the lake nestles the city, and permanent lighting is provided by large crystalline balls set into the cavern walls and ceiling. A second entry to the city is found in stairs leading up to the basement of the Coptic Church in old Cairo (Babylon). Drawing from narratives of people "living in the Earth" given in the books of Genesis, Jasher and Enoch, it is possible that the city was originally called Gigal .
Film footage of the expedition was shot and a documentary called Chamber of the Deep was made and subsequently shown to private audiences. It was originally intended to release the footage to the general public, but for some reason it was withheld.
A multi-faceted spherical crystalline object the size of a baseball was brought up from the city, and its supernatural nature was demonstrated at a recent conference in Australia. Deep within the solid object are various hieroglyphs that slowly turn over like pages of a book when mentally requested to do so by whoever holds the object.
That remarkable item revealed an unknown form of technology and was recently sent to NASA in the USA for analysis.
Historical documents recorded that, during the 20th century, staggering discoveries not spoken of today were made at Giza and Mt Sinai, and Egyptian rumors of the discovery of another underground city within a 28-mile radius of the Great Pyramid abound. In 1964, more than 30 enormous, multilevelled subsurface cities were discovered in the old Turkish kingdom of Cappadocia.
One city alone contained huge caverns, rooms and hallways that archaeologists estimated supported as many as 2,000 households, providing living facilities for 8,000 to 10,000 people. Their very existence constitutes evidence that many such subterranean worlds lie waiting to be found below the surface of the Earth.
Excavations at Giza have revealed underground subways, temples, sarcophagi and one interconnected subterranean city, and validation that underground passageways connected the Sphinx to the Pyramids is another step towards proving that the whole complex is carefully and specifically thought out.
Official Denials
Because of Dr Selim Hassan's excavations and modern space surveillance techniques, the records and traditions of the ancient Egyptian mystery schools that claim to preserve secret knowledge of the Giza Plateau all rose to the highest degree of acceptability.
However, one of the most puzzling aspects of the discovery of underground facilities at Giza is the repeated denial of their existence by Egyptian authorities and academic institutions. So persistent are their refutations that the claims of mystery schools were doubted by the public and suspected of being fabricated in order to mystify visitors to Egypt. The scholastic attitude is typified by a Harvard University public statement in 1972:
No one should pay any attention to the preposterous claims in regard to the interior of the Great Pyramid or the presumed passageways and unexcavated temples and halls beneath the sand in the Pyramid district made by those who are as located with the so-called, secret cults or mystery societies of Egypt and the Orient.
These things exist only in the minds of those who seek to attract the seekers for mystery, and the more we deny the existence of these things, the more the public is led to suspect that we are deliberately trying to hide that which constitutes one of the great secrets of Egypt. It is better for us to ignore all of these claims than merely deny them.
All of our excavations in the territory of the Pyramid have failed to reveal any underground passageways or halls, temples, grottos , or anything of the kind except the one temple adjoining the Sphinx.
It was well enough for scholarly opinion to make such a statement on the subject, but in preceding years, official claims were made stating that there was no temple adjoining the Sphinx. The assertion that every inch of the territory around the Sphinx and pyramids had been explored deeply and thoroughly was disproved when the temple adjoining the Sphinx was discovered in the sand and eventually opened to the public.
On matters outside official policy, there appears to be a hidden level of censorship in operation, one designed to protect both Eastern and Western religions.
Ever-Burning Lamps
In spite of amazing discoveries, the stark truth is that the early history of Egypt remains largely unknown and therefore unmapped territory. It is not possible, then, to say precisely how miles of underground passageways and chambers beneath the Giza Plateau were lit, but one thing is for sure: unless the ancients could see in the dark, the vast subterranean areas were somehow illuminated.
The same question is addressed of the interior of the Great Pyramid, and Egyptologists have agreed that flaming torches were not used, for ceilings had not been blackened with residual smoke.
From what is currently known about subsurface passageways under the Pyramid Plateau, it is possible to determine that there are at least three miles of passageways 10 to 12 storeys below ground level. Both the Book of the Dead and the Pyramid Texts make striking references to "The Light-makers", and that extraordinary description may have referred to a body of people responsible for lighting the subterranean areas of their complexes.
Iamblichus recorded a fascinating account that was found on a very ancient Egyptian papyrus held in a mosque in Cairo. It was part of a 100 BC story by an unknown author about a group of people who gained entry to underground chambers around Giza for exploratory purposes.
They described their experience:
We came to a chamber. When we entered, it became automatically illuminated by light from a tube being the height of one man's hand [approx. 6 inches or 15.24 cm] and thin, standing vertically in the corner. As we approached the tube, it shone brighter... the slaves were scared and ran away in the direction from which we had come!
When I touched it, it went out. We made every effort to get the tube to glow again, but it would no longer provide light. In some chambers the light tubes worked and in others they did not. We broke open one of the tubes and it bled beads of silver-colored liquid that ran fastly around the floor until they disappeared between the cracks (mercury?).
As time went on, the light tubes gradually began to fail and the priests removed them and stored them in an underground vault they specially built southeast of the plateau.
It was their belief that the light tubes were created by their beloved Imhotep, who would some day return to make them work once again.
It was common practice among early Egyptians to seal lighted lamps in the sepulchres of their dead as offerings to their god or for the deceased to find their way to the "other side". Among the tombs near Memphis (and in the Brahmin temples of India), lights were found operating in sealed chambers and vessels, but sudden exposure to air extinguished them or caused their fuel to evaporate.(6)
Greeks and Romans later followed the custom, and the tradition became generally established-not only that of actual burning lamps, but miniature reproductions made in terracotta were buried with the dead. Some lamps were enclosed in circular vessels for protection, and instances are recorded where the original oil was found perfectly preserved in them after more than 2,000 years.
There is ample proof from eyewitnesses that lamps were burning when the sepulchres were sealed, and it was declared by later bystanders that they were still burning when the vaults were opened hundreds of years later.
The possibility of preparing a fuel that would renew itself as rapidly as it was consumed was a source of considerable controversy among mediaeval authors, and numerous documents exist outlining their arguments. After due consideration of evidence at hand, it seemed well within the range of possibility that ancient Egyptian priest-chemists manufactured lamps that burned if not indefinitely then at least for considerable periods of time.
Numerous authorities have written on the subject of ever-burning lamps, with W. Wynn Westcott estimating that the number of writers who have given the subject consideration as more than 150 and H. P. Blavatsky as 173. While conclusions reached by different authors are at a variance, a majority admitted the existence of the phenomenal lamps.
Only a few maintained that the lamps would burn forever, but many were willing to concede that they might remain alight for several centuries without replenishment of fuel.
It was generally believed that the wicks of those perpetual lamps were made of braided or woven asbestos, called by early alchemists "salamander's wool". The fuel appeared to have been one of the products of alchemical research, possibly produced in the temple on Mt Sinai.
Several formulae for making fuel for the lamps were preserved, and in H. P. Blavatsky's profound work, Isis Unveiled , the author reprinted two complicated formulae from earlier authors of a fuel that,
"when made and lighted, will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please".
Some believe the fabled perpetual lamps of temples to be cunning mechanical contrivances, and some quite humorous explanations have been extended.
In Egypt, rich underground deposits of asphalt and petroleum exist, and some would have it that priests connected asbestos wicks by a secret duct to an oil deposit, which in turn connected to one or more lamps. Others thought that the belief that lamps burned indefinitely in tombs was the result of the fact that in some cases fumes resembling smoke poured forth from the entrances of newly opened vaults.
Parties going in later, and discovering lamps scattered about the floor , assumed that they were the source of the fumes. There were some well-documented stories concerning the discovery of ever-burning lamps not only in Egypt but also in other parts of the world.
De Montfaucon de Villars gave this fascinating account of the opening of the vault of Rosicrucian Christian Rosenkreuz.
When the Brethren entered the tomb of their illustrious founder 120 years after his death, they found a perpetual-lamp brightly shining in a suspended manner from the ceiling.
"There was a statue in armor [a robot] which destroyed the source of light when the chamber was opened." 7
That is strangely similar to the accounts of Arab historians who claimed that automatons guarded galleries under the Great Pyramid.
A 17th-century account recorded another story about a robot. In central England, a curious tomb was found containing an automaton that moved when an intruder stepped upon certain stones in the floor of the vault. At that time, the Rosicrucian controversy was at its height, so it was decided that the tomb was that of a Rosicrucian initiate. A countryman discovered the tomb, entered and found the interior brilliantly lit by a lamp hanging from the ceiling.
As he walked toward the light, his weight depressed the floor stones and, at once, a seated figure in heavy armor began to move. Mechanically it rose to its feet and struck the lamp with an iron baton, destroying it and thus effectively preventing the discovery of the secret substance that maintained the flame.
How long the lamp had burned was unknown, but the report said that it had been for a considerable number of years.
" ...One sequence of pictures showed a group of thoughtful men planning what they termed a "Time Capsule" (what we called "The Cave of the Ancients"), wherein they could store for later generations working models of their machines and a complete, pictorial record of their culture and lack of it. Immense machines excavated the living rock. Hordes of men installed the models and the machines. We saw the cold light spheres hoisted in place, inert radio-active substances giving off light for millions of years. Inert in that it could not harm humans, active in that the light would continue almost until the end of Time itself.
We found that we could understand the language, then the explanation was shown, that we were obtaining the "speech" telepathically. Chambers such as this, or "Time Capsules", were concealed beneath the sands of Egypt, beneath a pyramid in South America, and at a certain spot in Siberia. Each place was marked by the symbol of the times; the Sphinx. We saw the great statues of the Sphinx, which did not originate in Egypt, and we received an explanation of its form. Man and animals talked and worked together in those far-off days.
The cat was the most perfect animal for power and intelligence. Man himself is an animal, so the Ancients made a figure of a large cat body to indicate power and endurance, and upon the body they put the breasts and head of a woman. The head was to indicate human intelligence and reason, while the breasts indicated that Man and Animal could draw spiritual and mental nourishment each from the other. That Symbol was then as common as is Statues of Buddha, or the Star of David, or the Crucifix at the present day.
We saw oceans with great floating cities, which moved...."
The world hears of the discovery of a "secret" Egyptian city (1935)
Endnotes
Professor Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, 1901, p. 517
Histoire de la Magie; based in part upon the authority of lamblichus, from On the Mysteries, particularly those of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and the Assyrians
Ammiani Marcellini Rerum Gestaruum Libri, Leipzig, 1875
The Sydney Morning Herald, II October 1994
Dr Selim Hassan
Fame and Confession of Rosie-Cross, trans. Thomas Vaughan, 1625
Montfaucon de Villars, The Diverting History of the Count of de Gabalis, 1714
Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - The lost labyrinth, full of hieroglyphs sculpted for eternity in its endless stone walls is believed to contain all knowledge of ancient Egypt.
What secrets does this legendary giant underground complex contain?
Could this be the most important discovery in human history?
The Labyrinth of Egypt has been described by a number of ancient writers such as Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, and Pliny. The labyrinth's age and ancient origins are unclear, but at the time of Herodotus' visit it was more than 1,300 years old.
This legendary complex, named the "Labyrinth" by the ancient Greeks was legendary complex is believed to be an enormous collective tomb of the twelve kings who built it and a resting place for sacred crocodiles. Located at Hawara, about 90 km south of modern Cairo the complex contains secret chambers, passages shrines and tombs.
Herodotus wrote of the Labyrinth in the fifth century B.C. (History, 2.148-49): 'It has twelve covered courts - six in a row facing north, six south - the gates of the one range exactly fronting the gates of the other.
Inside, the building is of two storeys and contains three thousand rooms, of which half are underground, and the other half directly above them.
I was taken through the rooms in the upper storey, so what I shall say of them is from my own observation, but the underground ones I can speak of only from report, because the Egyptians in charge refused to let me see them, as they contain the tombs of the kings who built the labyrinth, and also the tombs of the sacred crocodiles.
The upper rooms, on the contrary, I did actually see, and it is hard to believe that they are the work of men; the baffling and intricate passages from room to room and from court to court were an endless wonder to me, as we passed from a courtyard into rooms, from rooms into galleries, from galleries into more rooms and thence into yet more courtyards.
The roof of every chamber, courtyard, and gallery is, like the walls, of stone.
Copperplate engraving, “Description de l’Egypte” Paris 1809
The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade'.
For a long time, the true location of the Labyrinth remained unknown.
Since Herodotus visited the legendary labyrinth of Egypt 2500 years ago, the building disappeared in the mist of time.
In 1888, Professor Flinders Petrie located the actual site of the Egyptian Labyrinth. Sufficient of the original foundations remained to enable the size and orientation of the building to be roughly determined. The Labyrinth was about 304 meters [997 feet] long and 244 meters [800 feet] wide. On other words, it was large enough to hold the great temples of Karnak and Luxor!
In his writings, Herodotus described nearby pyramid to be at the corner of the labyrinth. This was the Hawara pyramid. Could this offer a clue to the location of the Labyrinth?
When the Mataha Expedition scanned parts of the base area at Hawara in 2008 they found strong suggestion of complex chambers and walls several metres thick beneath the surface to considerable depth.
The findings of the research team confirmed that there were archeological features to the south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhat III. The scannings showed vertical walls of an average thickness of several meters, which were connected to form quite a number of closed rooms.
Reconstruction of the Egyptian labyrinth by Athanasius Kircher. Copperplate engraving (50X 41 cm) “Turris Babel Sive Archontologia”, Amsterdam 1679.
The scanned surfaces were at the Labyrinth area south of the pyramid. One area was 150m by 100m on the right side of the Bahr Wahbi and on the left side 80m by 100m.
Therefore, the team had proven the Labyrinth existed given the huge dimensions, but the total size and shape could not yet be concluded. The underground water and the presence of the canal had an effect on the consistency of the survey.
The researchers first encountered walls and structures 1.5m by 2.5m underground. There was nothing left other than walls and houses of mud bricks. This layer was believed to date back to Roman and Ptolemaic periods. Then, the Labyrinth region was used as a burial ground. It was during the Byzantium period that it had begun being used for housing. Under this layer, there rests the gigantic stone block Petrie had ascertained. The scientists scanned beneath the block and what they found further proved their theories.
There were rooms underneath. What Petrie had called the basin was in fact the ceiling!
The Mataha Expedition had made one of history's greatest discoveries without even excavating. There lay underground the legendary Labyrinth of Egypt.
Unfortunately, this amazing discovery was never heard of because the Egyptian government opposed the outside world should learn about the findings.
The Mataha Expedition results were published in the fall 2008 scientific journal of the NRIAG and the results were exchanged on the public lecture at Ghent University. Shortly thereafter, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (Egypt) asked for a stop to communicating the results owing to the Egyptian National Security sanctions. The researchers waited patiently for Dr. Hawass to make the findings public.
It never happened. So, the team set up a website and posted their findings.
The Mataha Expedition's discovery is extraordinary but no further attempts have been made to investigate the Labyrint. It is vital that the Labyrinth will once again be brought to daylight and presented to humanity.
For how many years will the Labyrinth and all its secrets be forgotten this time?
About the author: Ellen Lloyd – is the owner of AncientPages.com and an author who has spent decades researching ancient mysteries, myths, legends and sacred texts, but she is also very interested in astronomy, astrobiology and science in general.
Folks , this video talks about 3 ancient Sphinxes (all of whom could be related to the same prehistoric civilisation) - in Egypt , Niger and Pakistan . According to Graham Hancock , the Sphinxes were likely built more than at least 12,500 years ago :-
List members , on this 20th day of January in the year 2020 , I was remembering a couple of strange incidents from the past when I came across two very unusual individuals :-
The first incident was about 16 years ago , when I was on a business visit to Orlando , in Florida , US . During one of the evening get togethers of my group , someone had called for a "magician" who would entertain us with telekinesis . The "magician" who came happened to be a man of Iranian origin . He had piercing eyes , as though having the ability to read the minds of others . He showed his rare abilities to many of the guests . I too tried out one of his "tricks" , thinking it would just be a "trick" , nothing more.
However , to my extreme surprise , this person was able to BEND a metallic coin , which I had been asked to keep inside a clenched fist behind my back . I still remember , the feel of the bent metal - the coin (which I had taken from my own wallet) was about 2 mm thick . Till today , I have absolutely no rational explanation how that happened ?
The second instance is from about 3 years ago - I was at a conference (related to my work) in Mumbai , at which several foreigners were in attendance . One of them was an Egyptian . This person had a strange appearance and aura - his head and face were clean shaven and his head had an oddly pointed shape . The kohl lining his eyes was strangely extending till some distance behind the eyes...now since I have seen lots of paintings/images of Egyptian Pharaohs , I noticed that this man's eyes were painted exactly like that of the Pharaohs used to be...not just that , his oddly elongated skull was again similar to that of the Pharaohs . At that moment , I couldn't help wondering - is this individual a direct descendent of the Egyptian Pharaohs , a carrier of that exact same bloodline ??
Anyhow , coming back to the topic of the Sphinx , for many years , I have been mystified by this monument and today I thought of expressing my thoughts about this greatest ENIGMA , in a poetic manner . I am myself surprised why I am getting poetic thoughts about an ancient stone monument , when most people feel poetic only out of love or longing !
Maybe , it's just a sign that I am getting older :)) What I have written below , is my personal tribute to the Sphinx . It is written from the perspective of the Sphinx , as it views our world . Here goes , within " " :-
"I stand alone....
In splendid and majestic isolation , at the very edge of time ,
the sands of time swirling around me...as I contemplate immortality and meditate on the meaning of my own existence . The silent sentinel , till eternity...
The past , present and future have always existed in unison before me...
Many a civilisation have I witnessed being born , then turning to dust under my very gaze , with the unrelenting , ceaseless flow of perennial time...the sun , the moon and the stars restlessly chasing each other across the sky , in a never ending cycle that makes me weary...as I ask the maker of this world , does destiny have a redemption in store for me , ever ??
Now , as I stare into the infinite distance beyond the horizon , I see the embers of a new dawn , set to mark it's arrival on this world's stage . What will it bring with itself , I wonder ? Sometimes I ponder , who it was that built me , was it the hand of man or the Divine ?? Which was that era in which "they" gave me shape and form ? Why ? For what inscrutable purpose , was I created ?? What secrets do I hide ? What do I symbolise ? Is it the timeless wisdom of the ancients , or is it some nameless fear that I evoke in the hearts of men , for their vulnerability to the vagaries of time ? Questions , questions , questions , which never get answered , but who am I to ask ??
"They" call me the Sphinx , but is this my gift , or is it my curse ? Is there anyone capable of resolving this profound enigma ?? At the very edge of time , in splendid and majestic isolation , I stand alone..."
Startling new evidence from Giza appears to prove that the Sphinx was built over 10,000 years ago,
thus rewriting the history of human civilization.
The mystery deepens with evidence of a secret hypogeum beneath the Sphinx...
The Language Of Stone
The Great Sphinx of Giza is probably the world's best known relic from the distant past.
It is shrouded in mystery. Indeed to many it is mystery itself.
The Sphinx is not built with quarried blocks like the pyramids and temples it guards, but carved out of the living bedrock. Its makers gave it a man's head (some say it's a woman) and the body of a lion. It is 66 feet high and an impressive 240 feet long. It has the most extraordinary expression, like a hundred Mona Lisas all rolled into one.
And it eyes gaze forever at the distant horizon due east, at the equinox point...at something not of this world but beyond it, in the sky. Something, perhaps, that is reflected or 'frozen' in the essence and age of the Sphinx.
Nothing can prepare a first-time visitor for the awe-inspiring and humbling experience of meeting the Great Sphinx face to face. No matter who you are, no matter what your disposition and temperament are, the Great Sphinx of Giza will not leave you unmoved.
John Anthony West is a man who knows this phenomenon well.
He has stood in the shadow of this great statue many a time since he started visiting Egypt some thirty years ago. To him the Sphinx had always appeared as a monument apart, and much, much older than anything else he had seen either at Giza or elsewhere.
West's strong 'gut feeling' had rarely let him down. One day, while reading a book on Egypt by the French author and mathematician Schwaller de Lubicz ( Sacred Science , Paris 1961) an answer to his intuitive hunch came shooting straight at him. Schwaller made a passing remark on what appeared to be water erosions on the body of the Sphinx .
Turning to a close up photograph of the Sphinx , West suddenly realized that the weathering patterns on the Sphinx were not horizontal as seen on other monuments at Giza , but vertical. Now horizontal weathering is the result of prolonged exposure to strong winds and sandstorms. There sure had been plenty of those in this arid region of the Sahara. Could water have caused the vertical weathering on the Sphinx?
Water from where?
Something, clearly, was worth investigating here. West knew, of course, that most Egyptologists believed that the Sphinx was built in 2500 BC in the time of the pharaoh Chephren (or Khafre ), who is identified with the Second Pyramid at Giza.
He also knew that this belief was now so entrenched that it would take an intellectual bulldozer to tug it out. Yet his study had shown him that this believe was more a dogma than any-thing else. He asked himself if a proof-positive identification between Khafre and the Sphinx would stand in an 'open court' under public scrutiny?
The answer was no. The reason was, quite simply, this. There was no inscriptions - not a single one - either carved on a wall or a stela or written on the throngs of papyri that identified Khafre (or anyone else, for that matter) with the construction of the Sphinx and its nearby temples. As for the proximity of Khafre 's pyramid to the Sphinx (in fact it is 1700 feet away) this did not prove that both monuments were built as one complex nor, more relevantly, at the same epoch.
By such standards future generations of archaeologists may one day allocate ownership of the Sphinx to the builder of the Sound & Light theatre because of its proximity to the Sphinx complex or - as someone else has put it - attribute St. Paul's Cathedral to General Gordon of Khartoum just because his statue was found in it. In short, Khafre may well be the quintessential 'Kilroy was here' of antiquity. So could the Sphinx be much older than the reign of Khafre , as West had long suspected it was? Could this hypothesis explain, for example, the strange vertical weathering on the statue?
In 1991 John West rounded a crack team of scientists who were not hampered by an ingrained Egyptological consensus, and took them to Giza . Along came Dr. Robert Schoch, a prominent geologist and professor from Boston University to examined the unique weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure. His conclusions, which came after several months of analysis, was to convulse the world of archaeology.
The vertical weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure, Schoch argued, were not caused by wind effect, as had previously been thought, but by water - water from torrential rains and pouring down in sheets over these ancient structures. But how could this be? Was Schoch saying that such heavy rains only fell on the Sphinx area but nowhere else at Giza?
That was impossible, retorted the Egyptologists. Not impossible, said Schoch, if it is conceded that the Sphinx was built at an epoch when such rains were common in this region but that the other monuments at Giza , however, were built long after these rains had stopped occurring. Again impossible, replied the ruffled Egyptologists; such heavy rains stopped occurring thousands of years before the time of Khafre . Schoch politely shrugged his shoulders. This, he answered, was not his problem.
The usual was to happened. John West was branded a charlatan and a sensation-seeker, and Schoch was politely shunned for not minding his own business and for stepping on the Egyptological turf. John West, however, was relentless. True, he did not have the lofty credentials of his learned opponents, but this did not deter him in the least. Scientific logic was on his side, not credentials. He was now determined more than ever to see that the Egyptologists either prove him wrong with equal or better scientific arguments or concede that he, and not they, was right about the age of the Sphinx . Anything less would be short change.
To be fair, the implications of West's theory are, of course, far-reaching. History books will have to be re-written and scientists will have to reconsider the origins of civilization as a whole. Well, so be it. Progress worked like that. In any case, it had been done many times before. It could be done again. Yet going about to prove that the Sphinx was much older than Khafre was one thing.
The question was, how much older exactly?
How could science determine the true age of a stone monument?
Astronomy Joins The Sphinx Debate
In 1989 I published a paper in the Oxford Journal, Discussions In Egyptology (vol. 13), in which I demonstrated that the three Great Pyramids and their relative position to the Nile created on the ground a sort of 3-D 'hologram' of the three stars of Orion's belt and their relative position to the Milky Way .
To support this contention, I brought into evidence the inclined shaft in the Great Pyramid which were aimed at the south meridian towards these group of stars as well as written evidence from the Pyramid Texts that identified the afterlife destiny of the pyramid-kings with Orion .
Later in my book The Orion Mystery I also demonstrated that the best fit for the Giza Pyramids/Nile pattern with the Orion's belt/Milky Way pattern occurred when the sky was pushed back in time (i.e. precessed ) to the epoch of 10,500 BC. There were good reasons for doing so.
The ancient Egyptians, for example, constantly refer to a remote golden age they called Zep Tepi , 'The First Time' of Osiris , which they believed had long predated the Pyramid Age . Osiris was Orion , and the Great Pyramid had a shaft directed to Orion at the meridian.
To me, this ' silent ' astro-architectural language seemed to be spelling out 'here is Osiris in the sky when these pyramids were built, yet know, too, that his origins are rooted in the First Time .' But The 'First Time' of what? How could the stars of Orion have a 'First Time'?
Well they can. And they do.
Provided, of course, that you can read through the allegorical 'language' of the ancients via the symbolic architecture and the related Pyramid Texts . Allegory, to put it in another way, is the 'Q-Basics' of the master astronomers who designed the Giza complex . When the stars of Orion are observed at the meridian in the precise manner that the ancient Egyptian astronomers did over many centuries, they could not help noting that these stars crossed the south meridian at different altitudes at different epoch.
This is, of course, due to the phenomenon of Precession (see The Orion Mystery , appendices 1 and 2). In short, the stars of Orion can be said to have a starting point or 'beginning' at the nadir of their precessional cycle.
Simple calculations show that this occurred in 10,500 BC. Could the ancient astronomers of the Pyramid Age have used their very clever 'silent language' combined with Precession to freeze the 'First Time' of Osiris - somewhat like the gifted architects of gothic cathedral froze in its allegorical stonework the 'time of Christ'?
In the summer of 1993 Graham Hancock and I got together to investigate this issue further. Graham was quick to realized the important implications this approach could have on the Sphinx problem. He had a hunch that the curious harking back to the epoch of 10,500 BC by the pyramid builders of Giza was an invitation by them to consider the actual age of the Sphinx .
If this hypothesis was correct, then the Sphinx must be an 'original' time-marker of that remote epoch using an obvious celestial tag valid for 10,500 BC. But which tag? What could the Sphinx be representing that was in the sky? Could this have something to do with the due east direction of its gaze towards the horizon?
In his ground-breaking book Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock pointed out that the 'First Time' date of 10,500 BC also denoted the beginning or 'First Time' of the Age of Leo . This was when the ' lion ' constellation would have risen heliacally (at dawn before the sun) on the day of the spring (vernal) equinox. This event brought the celestial lion to rest due east, thus in perfect alignment with the Sphinx .
The Sphinx , in other words, was made to look at his own image in the horizon - and consequently at his own 'time'. Hancock pointed out that 10,500 BC was no random date. It very precisely denoted another beginning, that of Orion-Osiris defined on the ground with the pattern and alignments of the nearby Pyramids . Here, then, were not just the Pyramids but also the Sphinx luring us to the same date of 10,500 BC.
But,
Were we dealing with a 'coincidence' -albeit an astonishing one- or was all this part of a deliberate long term scheme set by the ancients?
Could it be possible that some blueprint was put into motion in 10,500 BC with the making of the Sphinx then to be completed much later by the builders of the Pyramids?
Was there evidence of a continuous presence here at Giza through the ages of some master 'astronomers' who could have been responsible to see this scheme through?
If so, who were they? Where had they come from? Why here at Giza?
Graham and I have spent the last two years researching this fascinating issue.
We believe that what we have uncovered will change the perceptions of what Giza was (and still is) forever. The full results of our investigation, as you might have guessed, are laid out in our new book, Keeper of Genesis , available now at a discount through AA&ES.
Suffice at this stage to say that author Colin Wilson , who gave the book an early review, thinks it's 'a much more satisfying tour de force' than Fingerprints of the Gods or The Orion Mystery. Meanwhile let us take a look at an intriguing archaeological discovery near the Sphinx that has very recently made the news.
A Lucky Turn Of The Spade
In October 1995 the Egyptian Antiquities Organization finally decided to refurbish the old parking lot east of the Sphinx.
While clearing the area in front of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, a 'lucky turn of the spade' from one of the laborers unearthed part of an ancient complex of underground galleries and pathways.
Hearing of this providential discovery, Graham Hancock and I planned a short trip to Egypt to see for ourselves what was going on. John Anthony West also was on his way there, and so we decided to meet directly at Giza.
When we arrived there we found the place swarming with activity.
Several gangs of laborers and masons were digging and clearing the area in front of the Sphinx and its temples. By a stroke of good fortune the Egyptian authorities had not yet cordoned this area, so we asked one of the inspectors in charge if we could take a closer look. It was a little difficult to tell what exactly was happening here.
No one seemed to be sure. It looked as if part of the area had already been excavated some years ago but then, for reasons unknown, it was covered up again.
This was evident by the botches of modern mortar and iron bars that were left embedded in the ceiling of the ancient pathways, probably in an attempt to underpin or reinforce the relics. An inspector standing by seemed to think that these modern-day additions were made either when Egyptologist Selim Hassan was clearing the area for the Egyptian Antiquity Organization in the 1930s or, perhaps, later in the 1950s when the Sons Et Lumieres open-air theatre was constructed nearby.
But why the vestiges were covered up again, and why and how they came to be forgotten remains a mystery.
These vestiges consisted of a major artery cut into the natural bedrock (some 10 feet wide and 200 feet long from north to south) which runs in front of the Valley Temple and the Sphinx.
This artery is itself intersected by two paved pathways coming from the Valley Temple and going due east -much like two small roads bridge over a straight motorway. These pathways very oddly dip at their eastern end and then vanished into the ground. We also noticed a very curious manhole set in the main artery at the point where it intersects the southern pathway. It's lid, which is made from a single piece of limestone, is broken at one corner and through it we could see water flowing (mixed with the sewage from the nearby village) and heading towards the Sphinx and the Valley Temple.
The whole complex was obviously very ancient and almost certainly contemporary with the Sphinx. But what could its function be? And what was the purpose of the underground waterway?
According to a prominent Ancient Egyptian myth, the legendary gates of the Afterworld were guarded by two gigantic lions or sphinxes called Aker. In New Kingdom tomb drawings the aker-sphinx of the eastern gate sits proud with its hind parts in a hollow. Underneath it can be seen an curious underground stream or duct.
Behind the lion towers a huge mound or pyramid and under it is found a large, oval chamber which appears to be hermetically sealed.
In this mysterious chamber it said to be some lofty secret, no doubt from the 'gods' who ruled the land of Egypt during the remote epoch of Zep Tepi -'The First Time'. This strange chamber was called the 'House of Sokar' in Rostau.
The resemblance with the Sphinx complex at Giza is uncanny. Giza in ancient time was also called Rostau, and Sokar (a hawk-headed deity) was identified to Osiris.
Odd coincidences? Perhaps.
Or will astronomy make 'a lucky turn of the spade' that will convert this supposedly cosmic myth into an historical reality?
The Great Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza, by David Roberts, 17 July 1839.
During the years I’ve been investigating the Kolbrin ̶ a mysterious set of books with no provenance ̶ one thing in particular has puzzled me. Surely, somewhere in those six Egyptian books, there ought to be a mention of the Great Sphinx ̶ after all, the Kolbrin is allegedly ancient, and the Great Sphinx is said to be older than time itself.
The Egyptian books contain no Greek-sounding names such as ‘Sphinx’, so they were probably written or copied before the advent of Ptolemaic rule. Finding references is a needle-in-a-haystack job which involves winkling out descriptions that sound like the Great sphinx and then trying them for size.
CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
But first, what do we know about the Sphinx? The monument faces east over the Giza plateau on the west bank of the Nile, taking the form of a ‘couchant’ limestone animal with paws outstretched in front. It is said to have a lion’s body and a human head. It is the oldest monumental sculpture in Egypt and it is huge ̶ 238 feet (73 metres) long from paw to tail and 66 feet (20 m) high from base to top of head ̶ its mouth alone is six-and-a-half feet wide.1
The Egyptologist Selim Hassan (1887–1961) who excavated the Sphinx during the 1930s believed that the Sphinx could be dated back
‘…to the first appearance of that god [Atun] whose name appears in the Pyramid Texts, along with those of Kheperi and Ra… On this basis, we can consider the Sphinx as one of the oldest of the Egyptian Gods, but unfortunately, we are building our hypothesis upon New Kingdom texts, which were written at a time when the Egyptians had forgotten the original traditions.’2
The Sphinx is now generally thought to have been built during the reign of the Pharaoh Khafre (2520-94 BC), with head and face carved into Khafre’s likeness.3 Centuries later, the pharaoh Thutmose IV (late-13th century BC) dreamed of the Sphinx, which prompted him to restore the monument and set an inscribed stone between the Sphinx’s front paws, now known as the ‘Dream Stela’.4
In 1993 the late lecturer and guide John Anthony West and the geologist Robert Schoch presented a TV documentary challenging the conventional c.2500 BC dating of the carving of the Sphinx; they contended that weathering on its body and the surrounding enclosure walls could only have been caused by prolonged rainfall between 10,000-5000 BC (West)5 or 5000-7000 BC (Schoch).6 Their documentary also suggested that the monument had been carved by an ancient advanced culture. Just how long the Sphinx has been in existence is now hotly disputed.
Legend has it that once, the Sphinx could speak. The Ancient Greeks said that it devoured all travellers who could not answer its riddle: ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?’ The hero Oedipus gave the answer ‘Man,’ and the Sphinx, enraged at receiving the right answer, leapt down from the precipice where it sat and was dashed to pieces.7
The Sphinx’s names
What we know about the Sphinx’s names is summed up by Andrew Collins in Earthquest News: Andrew Collins Newsletter Vol. 12 No. 1 (May 2009), based in part on Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval’s 1996 book Keeper of Genesis. Hancock and Bauval have much to say about the Sphinx’s names, and note that its traditional 12th-century Arabic name was Abul-Hol (‘Father of Terror’), used by the writers Abdel-Latif and (later) El-Makrizi.8
Collins and Hancock and Bauval refer back to Selim Hassan, saying that foreigners known as ‘Canaanites’ (of Syro-Canaanite origin from the ancient city of Harran, now in modern Turkey) lived in Lower Egypt in the early second millennium BC and worshipped the Sphinx under the name Hwl . Collins has found New Kingdom inscriptions where the Sphinx is addressed as ‘Hauron’ (Horon/Chauron/Hwron) ̶ a Syro-Canaanite underworld deity. Hassan speculated that ‘Hauron’ was the origin of the Sphinx’s Arab name Abou-l Hwl , ‘Father of Terror’, interpreting hwl as a corruption of Hwron from the Semitic root hor = the bottom of a well, or hole, with abou a corruption of ancient Egyptian bw= place, therefore bw-hwron= the place of the god Hauron. Canaanite inscriptions mention Hauron being sent into the ‘chamber of darkness’, a form of underworld, to prevent demons entering the world.9
Collins says that among the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, Hauron was identified with a deity called Nimru, meaning ‘panther’. In Akkado-Sumerian texts, Nimru was identified with a sky-figure in the form of a panther-griffin (half feline/half eagle) called UD.KA.DUH.A, made up of stars from the constellations Cygnus and Cepheus.10
The Ancient Egyptians called the Sphinx Hu and Hor-em-akhet ‘Horus of the Horizon’, a name originally linking the Sphinx to the rising sun.11 On the Dream Stela, Thutmose IV refers to the ‘Pyramids of Hor-em-akhet’, from which Selim Hassan deduced that the pharaoh considered the Sphinx to be older than the Pyramids.12 Another Egyptian name for the Sphinx was Seshep-ankh Atum (‘the living image of Atum’); the name ‘Sphinx’ used today is a Greek corruption of Sheshep-ankh .13
So the Sphinx’s names over the period of Egyptian civilisation have meant father, terror, the horizon, Horus, Atum, a protective underworld deity and a star-clustered hybrid beast. This assortment suggests many different ages and beliefs.
William Vaughn Tupper, Tupper Scrapbooks Collection, Boston Public Library
The Sphinx in the Kolbrin – 1
Two small pieces of text in the Kolbrin may refer to the Sphinx.
The first appears in the Book of Manuscripts and comes from a chapter written by a scribe called Emod, and refers back to a distant past when refugees arrived in Egypt. It reads:
‘It was the men of Zaidor who built the Great Guardian which ever watches, looking towards the awakening place of God. The day He comes not its voice will be heard.’
A picture emerges of something that forever sits in silence, watching and waiting for a sinister-sounding event to happen. The Great Guardian faces towards ‘the awakening place of God’ ̶ eastward to where the sun rises; this is echoed in the Sphinx’s traditional name Horemakhet/Harmakhet/Harmachis meaning ‘Horus in the horizon ‘ .
Why would the Sphinx be called ‘the Great Guardian’? In Egyptian mythology the ‘Great Guardian’ is the jackal-headed god Anubis who, like a watch-dog, guarded the entrance to the underworld, protected burial places and oversaw the weighing of the hearts of the dead.14 In early Egyptian times Anubis was associated with several cult centres including a northern Egyptian city called Zawty, meaning ‘Guardian’ (modern-day Asyut).15 Later it became known as Lycopolis ̶ ‘Wolf City’.16
Original drawing by Howard Carter at his house in Luxor. Photo by YW
Anubis attending the mummy of the deceased – Public Domain
But what, you may ask, has the jackal god Anubis to do with the Sphinx? After all, everyone knows the Sphinx is a lion.
Or is it?
The investigative author Robert Temple believes that the Sphinx was originally carved in the form of the jackal Anubis. In The Sphinx Mystery he devotes an entire chapter to his controversial theory, saying:
‘The first time I went to Egypt and saw the Sphinx with my own eyes, I was deeply shocked… I had always been told that the Sphinx had the body of a lion with the head of a man, and I accepted that account as being true… This was one of those disillusioning moments in life, like realizing there is no Santa Claus, when all your hopes and dreams are stripped away from you… The Sphinx was something, but it certainly wasn’t a lion.’
Temple puts forward an interesting case for the Sphinx originally having been carved as an Egyptian jackal ̶ or, to be precise, what has been genetically identified as an African Golden Wolf. To show how the Sphinx could have been reworked with the disproportionately tiny head it now has, reproduced below is a drawing used in Temple’s book of the famous statue of Anubis found in Tutankhamun’s tomb with a scale drawing of the Sphinx’s much smaller, remodelled head set inside it.
Drawings by David Sutton. Image courtesy of Robert Temple
Temple points out that one of the Sphinx’s many reconstructions involved filling in the once narrow, dog-like body of the Sphinx to make it more massive and leonine. He also notes that the monument’s thin, smooth lion tail is made entirely of bricks with no carved stone core at all, leading him to think that the tail may not be an original feature but was added at a later period as part of a ‘lionizing’ process. If there had been an original tail, he writes, ‘what we have now is largely or wholly a replacement or “tail transplant”‘.
Whether the Sphinx was originally carved as a jackal or as a lion, ‘Great Guardian’ is an appropriate epithet for a creature guarding Giza’s sacred heights. Hassan says:
‘There seems little doubt that by the time of the New Kingdom, the Sphinx was regarded as a God of the dead, and guardian of the dead, an attribution which its situation at the entrance to the Necropolis rendered very suitable.’17
Collins points out that, as the temples themselves admit, the role of guardian to the duat-underworld was held by a lion ( ru ) and by a jackal. If, as inscriptions and folklore suggest, the Sphinx was later represented as a lion, then this cultural accretion only serves to accentuate its extreme age.
Those who built the Sphinx
Back to that first Kolbrin snippet:
‘It was the men of Zaidor who built the Great Guardian which ever watches, looking towards the awakening place of God. The day He comes not its voice will be heard.’
The ‘men of Zaidor’ are mentioned several times in the Kolbrin’s Book of Manuscripts.18 Described as ‘the Wise Ones from the East’, they are the second group of refugees to arrive in Egypt after a cataclysm had wiped out the people of Egypt and perhaps their own civilisation too.19 Many names in the Kolbrin have become skewed through centuries of translating and copying (for example, the pharaoh Akhnaten appears as ‘Nabihaton’, the vital essence hike appears as ‘hokew’), but usually the internal consonants of the word remain unchanged, so ‘Zaidor’ could well be a skewed version of the name ‘Poseida’. If it is, then the men of Zaidor came from a place the 20th-century ‘Sleeping Prophet’ psychic Edgar Cayce described as the largest island of the Atlantis archipelago.20 Mention psychic readings, and at once you find yourself on shaky ground, but Cayce is of interest here because one of his Atlantis readings mentions not only ‘Poseida’ but also another place-name ̶ ‘Amaki’; this sounds like the name ‘Ramakui’ which crops up several times in the Kolbrin. Ramakui/Amaki ̶ Zaidor/Poseida.21
The Kolbrin has more to tell about the men of Zaidor:
‘This was the land from whence man came, the Great One came from Ramakui and wisdom came from Zaidor. The people who came with Nadhi were wise in the ways of the seasons and in the wisdom of the stars. They read the Book of Heaven with understanding.
‘They covered their dead with potter’s clay and hardened it, for it was not their custom to place their dead in boxes.22
‘We dwell in a land of three peoples, but those who came from Ramakui and Zaidor were fewer in numbers. It was the men of Zaidor who built the Great Guardian which ever watches, looking towards the awakening place of God. The day He comes not its voice will be heard.’
When the final sentence is unpacked, something extraordinary emerges:
‘… the awakening place of God.’
This must refer to Ra, the Egyptian father-creator god who in his role as sun-god sailed across the heavens during the day in his ‘Barque of Millions of Years’, spent the night in the underworld and was reborn at dawn the next day.
‘The day he comes not…’
A day when the sun did not rise would surely spell disaster for the Earth.
‘… its voice will be heard’.
The Sphinx had a voice which would be heard when ‘he comes not’ ̶ that is, when the sun did not rise. What form could this ‘voice’ have taken? It sounds like an alarm of some kind. Was the Sphinx built with a sensor in its eastward-facing gaze so that if the sun did not rise in the east as usual, or if the sky blackened out the sun, or if the rising sun were to be outshone by a brighter light, the alarm would be triggered?
Why they built the Sphinx
Why would the sun not rise in the east? What would cause the Earth’s orbit to shift so that the sun rose from another direction?
Elsewhere, the Kolbrin tells of ‘the Destroyer’, a terrible cosmic event said to wreak havoc on the Earth at long, regular intervals, and says that the planets changed their position at the time the Destroyer appeared: ‘When ages pass, certain laws operate upon the stars in the Heavens. Their ways change, there is movement and restlessness, they are no longer constant…’23 The Kolbrin’s Annexed Scroll 1 says: ‘My land is old, a hundred and twenty generations have passed through it since Osireh brought light to men. Four times the stars have moved to new positions and twice the sun has changed the direction of his journey.’24 The sun rising in another direction is also mentioned by the 5th-century BC writer Herodotus and the 1st-century Latin author Pomponio Mela, who writes:
‘The Egyptian people pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals… one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in the part of the sky where it rises today.’
The Kolbrin also says that the Destroyer appeared at first light (‘Then, with the dawning, men saw an awesome sight. There, riding on a great black rolling cloud came the Destroyer’25… at ‘the rosy dawning of a newborn day… at the night end of the skyroof appeared the dread figure’26 ̶ more on the Destroyer later.)
Could an alarm inside the Sphinx have given rise to a tradition that it ‘spoke’? Was the Sphinx an early warning system? This is what the Kolbrin is saying.
If the Sphinx starts to sound like something out of Star Wars , bear in mind that the men of Zaidor under their leader Nadhi ‘ were wise in the ways of the seasons and in the wisdom of the stars. They read the Book of Heaven with understanding. ‘ From the legacy they left behind them in Egypt, it is clear that these men of Zaidor were a highly advanced people.
Yet another puzzle presents itself: why would the men of Zaidor build an early warning system in the form of a huge beast? The Kolbrin says they arrived in a country populated by human beings whose culture and knowledge had been totally destroyed by global cataclysm. All the adults had been killed by a plague which for some reason many of their children survived. These survivors, with nobody to teach them, wore animal skins, lived in holes in the ground, competed for food with hordes of rats, were hunted down by ‘the Braineaters’, and wandered the plains like wild creatures.27 When the men of Ramakui and Zaidor tried to civilise them, they were quick to learn, but they could not understand abstract concepts ̶ so the men tried to explain cosmic/religious matters using simple stories or what we would now call ‘myths’. Could this be why an advanced technological system was installed inside a giant protective animal guardian?
The Sphinx in the Kolbrin – 2
The second snippet of text, in the Book of Scrolls, is copied from an even older scroll. Its scribe Herakat asks God ‘to help me in my transcription of these ancient writings, that they may be a true record … They have been transcribed exactly as they are and no thought or belief of mine has gone into them.’ If Herakat considered the writings ancient several thousand years ago when he transcribed them, the mind struggles to take in the age of these writings. The scroll tells how the People of the Light came to Egypt ‘from Ramakui of the Seven Cities, Land of Copper’ , led by ‘the Old Bald-Headed One’.28
The strange snippet of text which could refer to the Sphinx appears at the end of this paragraph:
‘There are writings which speak truly, but they are no longer with us. The Arisen Ones know the secrets of the lesser gods who are no more than these. The Great Scales weigh the soul by its appearance in the Netherworld, and thus its place is appointed. Its virtues form its food, but no man eats the filth that is his. He who devours souls is but the dark cave of horror which opens to receive dark souls into affinitive darkness. The Rakima watches in silence; patiently it sits, waiting for the day of the Destroyer. It will come in a hundred generations, as is written in the Great Vault.’
The text then moves into a prophecy of global catastrophe.
Enigmatic, indeed! The two sentences at the end sound almost as if they have been tacked on to the preceding text: ‘ The Rakima watches in silence; patiently it sits, waiting for the day of the Destroyer. It will come in a hundred generations, as is written in the Great Vault.’
Like the ‘Great Guardian’ snippet, this portrays something that forever sits in silence, watching and waiting ̶ here, it waits for the day of the Destroyer, while in the ‘Great Guardian’ text it awaits a day when he comes not. In this text, the ‘something’ is linked to the weighing of souls and the underworld ̶ which suggests Anubis.
The meaning of Rakima
What does the name ‘ Rakima’ mean when split into its component parts?
Ra
In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the father of the gods, sun-god and protector of mankind was Ra. So the term ‘sun-god’ is fairly self-explanatory ̶ or is it?
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), author of several controversial books reinterpreting ancient events, thought otherwise. In his unpublished work, In the Beginning, he points out that in ancient times the word ‘sun’ was sometimes used to refer to a different planet altogether ̶ a planet which exploded many thousands of years ago in a nova-like burst of brilliant light and earned from Chaldean astronomers the name Alap-Shamas (‘Star of the Sun’). According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, the Chaldeans called this planet Helios , while Babylonian astrologers knew it as Shamash or Nimib (‘Nimib in various places is said to shine like the Sun’) and Ut-Gal-Lu (the ‘great sun of storms’); in India the planet was once called by the Sun’s name Arki , and in Ancient Greece it was Phaenon (‘the Shining One’).29 The Zoroastrian Parsee Bundahish speaks of the star Tishtar saying that ‘for thirty days and nights he was distinguished in brilliance, and in each form he produced rain ten days and nights… Every single drop of that rain became as big as a bowl, and the water stood the height of a man over the whole of this earth.’30 (The Kolbrin roughly echoes this measurement: ‘when the tumult quietened and the waters became still, they stood no more than three cubits [54 inches] above the Earth.’ )31 The Mexican codices say that the first world age, which ended when the Earth was destroyed by a universal deluge called Atonatiuh, ‘the sun of water’ was presided over by a body in the heavens called Ce-acatl.32 This planet, known as Cronos to the Ancient Greeks, was called Saturn by the Romans and has been Saturn ever since.
In other words, the Ra in Ra-Kima could refer either to the father-protector sun-god Ra or to the planet Saturn.
Kima
Many names in the Kolbrin have become skewed over centuries of translation, but not Kima. In the Old Testament it appears in Job 38: ‘Can you bind the cluster of the Kima, or loosen the cords of Kesil?’; and in Amos 5:8 (original Hebrew Names Version): ‘Seek him who made the Kima and Kesil, and turns the shadow of death into the morning, and makes the day dark with night; who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the eretz,33 the Lord is his name’. The 3rd-century Jewish astronomer Rabbi bar Nachmani wrote: ‘When the Holy One… wanted to bring a flood upon the world, He took two stars from Khima, and brought a flood…’;34 and the 11th-century scholar Rashi Isaac Ben Solomon wrote that a comet called Khima caused the Flood.35
Whatever Kima was, it was a force to be reckoned with. The Ancient Egyptians certainly thought so, for, as the philologist E.A. Wallis-Budge notes, they used the word khemi meaning ‘destroyer’ and ‘to destroy or attack’.36
Velikovsky was convinced that the planet Saturn caused the Great Flood. In the Beginning uses a host of Ancient Greek, Roman and Sanskrit texts to support his theory identifying Kima with what ancient texts called ‘moist Saturn’, Kesil with ‘hot Mars’, and suggests that a super-nova explosion by Saturn precipitated the Flood. Apart from Saturn, there are other contenders for the role of planetary villain. In St Jerome’s 4th-century Vulgate and in the King James Bible, Kima is translated as the star-clusters Pleiades or Hyades, or as the star Arcturus. Velikovsky, however, rejects these interpretations, pointing out that in rabbinical literature the term Mazal Khima is used. Mazal means ‘planet’. And Saturn, he maintains, is the only planet that can be identified with Khima .
Whether or not Velikovsky was correct in identifying Kima with Saturn, the Kolbrin makes clear that the Great Flood which followed this planetary event was one of almost total destruction. It was preceded by days of brilliant super-nova light. Two heavenly bodies fell from the sky. One of them
‘ belched forth fire and hot stones and a vile smoke. It covered the whole sky above and the meeting place of Earth and Heaven could no longer be seen.’37‘The stars in the Heavens were loosened from their places, so they dashed about in confusion. There was a revolt on high, a new ruler appeared there and swept across the sky in majesty.’38
This cosmic chaos turned day into night and triggered earthquakes, whirlwinds, thunder, lightning and volcanic activity accompanied by a terrific noise in the heavens above, followed by great heat and bitter cold. Then the Earth was bombarded with water from two different directions ̶ from above the Earth’s atmosphere in extra-terrestrial torrents ̶
‘The floodgates of Heaven were opened’,39‘The pillars of Heaven were broken and fell down to Earth. The skyvault was rent and broken’40̶ and from below in gigantic bursts ̶ ‘the foundations of Earth were broken apart. The surrounding waters poured over the land and broke upon the mountains.’41
Changes in the world’s ancient calendars suggest that this heavenly chaos caused a change in Earth’s orbit. At some point in ancient times the Hindu Aryans, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Mexicans, the Incas and the Chinese all amended their calendars from 360 to 365½ days. The writer Richard Mooney suggests in Colony Earth that:
‘An alteration in Earth’s distance from the Sun and its orbital position would account for the difference in the length of the year. If Earth had been jolted out of its previously held orbital position, the moon also would have been affected. The change would have affected the Earth/Moon system. Since the Moon is a smaller body than Earth, and the distances between them much smaller than between the Earth and the Sun, the differences would have been even more noticeable in the case of the Earth/Moon system than in the case of the Earth/Sun system.’
Was this the kind of shift that the Sphinx’s early warning system might have picked up on its sensor?
The Kolbrin states that the Earth has been completely destroyed twice in human memory, once by fire and once partially by water. The destruction by water was, it says, ‘the lesser destruction’.42 So when Kima ̶ an eruption of heavenly bodies from either Saturn or a star cluster ̶ fell to Earth, it brought about the second worst disaster in our planet’s history and spelt unimaginable terror for mankind.
What is interesting here is how close Ra-kima = ‘Father-[of]-Kima’ is to the Sphinx’s later Arab name Abul-Hol = ‘ Father of Terror’. Could Rakima be an extremely ancient name for the Sphinx? If it was, then, as human memory of the terrible event dimmed over thousands of years, ‘Rakima’ might have become simply ‘Father of Terror’.
The Destroyer
I have already written about one of the Destroyer’s appearances in my article ‘The Kolbrin’s Exodus Story – Ancient Egyptian Version’, 9th February 2016. The name ‘Destroyer’ may be a vague blanket term for destruction, but it rates a three-and-a-half-page entry in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible .43 In the Old Testament, the Destroyer is said to be not the angel of death, but a force which massacres entire populations with premature and violent deaths. It is a force distinct from God/Yahweh and is described most dramatically in Exodus 12: 23:
‘Yahweh will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, Yahweh will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer ( hammašhît ) to enter your houses to strike you down.’
In Chronicles 21, the Destroyer is said to be of gigantic proportions and visible to humans.
Throughout the books of the Kolbrin, the Destroyer is said to be a regular visitor to Earth, so destructive as to be beyond mankind’s understanding. Several chapters graphically describe its appearance and behaviour.44 The Destroyer can be identified with the Ancient Greek god Typhon and many other dragon-like god-monsters found in world mythology.
Zeus in combat with Typhon. Detail lifted from a ceramic Chalkidian hydria, c. 540-530 BC. CC0
Over and over again, texts in the Kolbrin’s Egyptian and Celtic books prophecies the Destroyer’s return, giving it many different names: the Sky-monster, the Scorcher of Heaven, the Day of Visitation, the Revenging Dragon, the Days of Disaster, the Great Trial, the Days of Doom, the Doomshape, the Frightener, the Doomdragon ; and their precise descriptions of world conditions when the Destroyer returns could well refer to our own time.45
‘It will come in a hundred generations…’ The Kolbrin says that at one time mankind divided the year into ‘a Summer half and a Winter half, with a great year circle of fifty-two years, a hundred and four of which was the circle of The Destroyer.’46 This kind of knowledge implies that someone somewhere had been observing the Earth long enough to record the Destroyer’s huge orbit.
Were Kima and the Destroyer one and the same? In the Kolbrin’s Book of Gleanings, a Sumerian-based account of the Great Flood describes ‘the Destroyer, newly released from the confines of the sky vaults’47 raging about the Heavens accompanied by a second destructive force, which sounds much like the double entity Kima ; on other occasions the Destroyer is referred to as a single force.
The Sphinx’s head remodelled
If the Sphinx’s ‘voice’ was an early warning system, did the mechanism become redundant as centuries passed? Did the Egyptians forget how to operate it? Did the head itself (tall pointed ears and long nose, if it was a jackal) suffer damage from earthquakes and interference by man ̶ or did the mechanism simply wear out? Was that why the head was remodelled?
The Great Sphinx of Giza. Credit: Hedwig Storch. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Robert Temple has much to say in The Sphinx Mystery about the re-carving of the Sphinx’s head. He bases his analysis on an 1897 article by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt:
‘During the century and a half of chaos, floods, drought and famine of the terrible time known as the First Intermediate Period when the government collapsed and mobs ran amok smashing everything in their rage, the head of Anubis must have been drastically mutilated… When order returned under the Middle Kingdom and the Twelfth Dynasty was established… the third king of that dynasty took an interest in the mutilated statue of Anubis. That king was Pharaoh Amenemhet II. Because the head of Anubis was ruined beyond repair, he had a new and smaller head carved out of the neck. That head was a human head, and its face was his own.’
If you look at the upward-turned face of the Giza Sphinx set beside the upward-turned face of the Amenemhet II Tanis sphinx in the Louvre Museum in Paris (apparently this pharaoh adored sphinxes) the resemblance in ears, face shape, eyes and mouth is remarkable.
Above : The Great Sphinx of Giza. Below : the Amenemhet II Tanis sphinx in the Louvre, Paris
The Great Vault and the Hall of Records
The ‘Great Guardian’ snippet finishes, ‘…as is written in the Great Vault’. Could this be another name for the Hall of Records ̶ a legendary chamber said by ancient writers to house early Egyptian records inscribed with the history of the lost civilisation of Atlantis?48 The Hall of Records has become every Egyptologist’s Holy Grail. It is intriguing that the Dream Stela shows the Sphinx set on a square pedestal with a central doorway and recessed decoration (see drawing below). Robert M. Schoch and Dr Thomas L. Dobecki have used ground-penetrating radar to show that there are indeed cavities beneath the Sphinx, but to date, the Hall has not been found.49
Thutmose IV and the Sphinx, by Karl Richard Lepsius (Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien).
The Kolbrin, now just a patchwork of books and bits of books, was once a vast collection of scrolls and ring-bound volumes of the Old Religion known as ‘the Sacred Records’. Originally it comprised one hundred and thirty-two scrolls and five ring-bound volumes which made up The Greater Book of the Egyptians and The Lesser Book of The Egyptians.50 A chapter in the Book of the Sons of Fire records how four complete sets of the Greater Book and the Lesser Book were put in ‘Great Arks’ inside four masonry casings which were removed to ‘the four quarters of the Earth’ and watched over by ‘Guardians’.51 Later, when civil war split apart the Egyptian religious institutions and the Old Religion was threatened with annihilation, a complete set of Sacred Records was removed from the Eastern Quarter and smuggled out of Egypt.52
Could Giza be one of those ‘quarters’? If so, then a complete copy of the Kolbrin’s Egyptian Books in their original language might even now be lying deep underground among other records, guarded over by that mysterious Great Guardian, Rakima, which we know as the Great Sphinx.
References
1 Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods, SevenWonders of Ancient Africa (Twenty-First Century Books, 2008), p. 10.
22 The Kolbrin has far more to say about Ramakui than about Zaidor. Ramakui, it tells us, was ‘age-old’ and ‘great’. It was the place from where the first group of refugees came to Egypt. ‘From Ramakui of the seven cities, Land of Copper, came the People of the Light and they brought with them, out of their transparent temples, the light that shines, when darkness falls, without being lit. Led by the Old Bald-Headed One, he whose name is not spoken, they came out of the West at the sunsetting. They came from the place where now the sun goes down; in the days when the Western wilderness was green and sand had not replaced the waters; when the outlands nourished cattle and sheep fed where now there is nought but rock and stone… the great land of Ramakui first felt his [Man’s] step. Out by the encircling waters, over at the rim it lay.
‘There were mighty men in those days… Their dwelling places were set in the swamplands from whence no mountains rose, in the land of many waters slow-flowing to the sea. In the shallow lakelands, among the mud, out beyond the Great Plain of Reeds. At the place of many flowers bedecking plant and tree. Where trees grew beards and had branches like ropes, which bound them together, for the ground would not support them. There were butterflies like birds and spiders as large as the outstretched arms of a man. The birds of the air and fishes of the waters had hues which dazzled the eyes, they lured men to destruction. Even insects fed on the flesh of men. There were elephants in great numbers, with mighty curved tusks.
‘The pillars of the Netherworld were unstable. In a great night of destruction the land fell into an abyss and was lost forever. When the Earth became light, next day, man saw man driven to madness. All was gone. Men clothed themselves with the skins of beasts and were eaten by wild beasts, things with clashing teeth used them for food. A great horde of rats devoured everything, so that man died of hunger. The Braineaters hunted men down and slew them. Children wandered the plainland like the wild beasts, for men and women became stricken with a sickness that passed over the children. An issue covered their bodies which swelled up and burst, while flame consumed their bellies. Every man who had an issue of seed within him and every woman who had a flow of blood died. The children grew up without instruction, and having no knowledge turned to strange ways and beliefs. They became divided according to their tongues.
‘This was the land from whence man came, the Great One came from Ramakui and wisdom came from Zaidor…
‘Those who came with the Great One were cunning craftsmen in stone, they were carvers of wood and ivory. The High God was worshipped with strange light in places of great silences. They paid homage to the huge sleeping beast in the depths of the sea, believing it to bear the Earth on its back; they believed its stirrings plunged lands to destruction. Some said it burrowed beneath them.
‘In Ramakui there was a great city with roads and waterways, and the fields were bounded with walls of stone and channels. In the centre of the land was the great flat-topped Mountain of God. The city had walls of stone and was decorated with stones of red and black, white shells and feathers. There were heavy green stones in the land and stones patterned in green, black and brown. There were stones of saka, which men cut for ornaments, stones which became molten for cunning work. They built walls of black glass and bound them with glass by fire. They used strange fire from the Netherworld which was but slightly separated from them, and foul air from the breath of the damned rose in their midst. They made eye reflectors of glass stone, which cured the ills of men. They purified men with a strange metal and purged them of evil spirits in flowing fire.’
Cf The Ancient Giants who ruled America: the missing skeletons and the great Smithsonian cover-up, Alan J. Dewhurst, 2013.
The Syracuse Daily Standard, July 23, 1897 reported not only the finding of an old copper spear with an incredibly fine 10-inch point, but also a nine-foot skeleton embalmed in some kind of dried cement. The journalist added, ‘Archaeologists believe that at some prehistoric time the country surrounding Mora was densely inhabited by a race of people who were much further advanced in civilization than the Indians.’ A clipping from the El Paso Herald, April 19, 1915, H.E. Davis of the El Paso Herald reported that an eight-foot skeleton found near Silver City had been found encased in baked mud, ‘indicating that encasing the corpse in mud and baking it was the mode of embalming.’
32 Eduard Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen Vol.II, p. 798. Also see Cottie Arthur Burland, Irene Nicholson and Harold Osborne, Mythology of the Americas (Better World Book., 1968), pp. 180-181.
35 Velikovsky’s source is in Hebrew, so he supplies the following information: ‘“Rashi” is an abbreviation for Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon; he lived in the south of France in the eleventh century. His commentary to the Bible and to some parts of the Talmud is still regarded as the most authoritative in the field of rabbinical knowledge, which has great authorities in every one of the twenty centuries since the beginning of rabbinical learning. Till today Rashi’s commentary is supplied to many Hebrew editions of the Scriptures and Talmud, with supracommentary on Rashi by later authorities added as well.’
36 Ernest Alfred Wallis-Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary Vol.1 (John Murray, 1920), p. 547b.
43 Karel van der Toorn, Pieter W. van der Horst, Prof. Dr. Bob Becking ed, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Brill, 1998). The Destroyer entry mentions that the Hebrew word mašhît, meaning a supernatural creature commissioned by God to exterminate large groups of people, appears in two contexts in the Bible: Exodus 12:23 (the killing of Egyptian first-borns) and 2 Samuel 24:16 // 1 Chronicles 21:15.
45 Kolbrin, Manuscripts 3 prophesies the next appearance of the Destroyer. Other descriptions and prophesies concerning the Destroyer can be found In the Egyptian Books – Creation 3:5, 4:5-15, 7:5; Gleanings 3:5, 4:1-29, 6:30; Scrolls 19:3, 33:9, 11-13; Sons of Fire 6:20, 10:22, 13:10-12; Manuscripts 1:20, 34, 3, 4, 5. 6, 12:11, 26:9-34, 27:7, 33:2, 5, 34:4; Morals and Precepts 2:42; in the Celtic Books ̶ Origins 3:9-25; Silver Bough 7:18.
46 Kolbrin, Creation 7:5. It is possible that the ‘great year circle’ might not be made up of years as we calculate them in modern times.
23 thoughts on “The Kolbrin: On Who Built The Great Sphinx, And Why”
James Myers says:
Fantastic article, thank you for sharing your hard work. I am fascinated by the Kolbrin. Often it is quickly dismissed because as you stated, it has no provenance. But the re are certain passages that seem to beg one’s attention and leave me feeling that there truly is something to the stories, something grander than conventional history writ large.
I have a thought I’d like your feedback on, fairly specific in scope.
You touched on hokew. Here is my thought: if hokew was some form of life essence, and was something that could be stored, and later drawn like water as stated in the Kolbrin, do you think this could possibly be an explanation for dolmens? I have been looking for a satisfying answer the question of dolmens for years, what if they were used to store hokew?
Won’t ramble any further. Would love to know your thoughts on that idea.
Thanks again for the great article.
Thanks for this, James. It never occurred to me that dolmens were used to extract hike/hokew from the earth, but it’s an interesting idea. First we need to ask:what WAS hike/hokew? The Kolbrin has some intriguing information about the substanced in its early books, but until science or other ancient writings emerge telling us more, we shall never know. When I look at dolmens and underground structures in Cornwall, I see them as shelters giving some form of protection from aerial bombardment by fire/pitch/rocks or whatever fell from the heavens in the earliest cataclysms (for according to the Kolbrin there were many) but that’s just speculation. Some of the dolmens are a bit small to have been shelters, so your guess is as good as mine. I reckon that the huge underground cities in Anatolia were constructed to protect humans from bombardment and/or the huge ravening beasts which, according to the Kolbrin (and Edgar Cayce), threatened human existence in earliest times until a major cataclysm wiped most of them out.
I completely agree about the protection/structure theory, living in caves, underground structures, etc.
One passage is particularly fitting, that after the cataclysm subsided, something like this would be needed for civilization to be able to take hold and flourish: ” It is hokew which bestows fertility, causing flocks to multiply and crops to increase.”
Perhaps thats what the smaller dolmens were for- to store hokew, to be accessed and used to bring fertility back to a chard, barren landscape.
Given that experiments show greater yield from plants in some dolmen or other sacred stone sites, perhaps “hokew” is a name for whatever “bio field effect” is concentrated there, however that works. We don’t know how, but that there is something implicitly going on with those areas, for life force effect enhancement, has been supported by several studies.
Delamer Duverus had written that the Sphinx was carved from the center structure of the Tower of Babel. The pyramids are also a part of it, but two thirds of the pyramids were destroyed so it couldn’t be used as a weapon. It could enrich the Earth also, make a land of Milk and Honey. The base of the structure was a six-pointed star coming to a point at the top and and it was covered in auracalcum (sp?) which is a mixture of gold and two other metals brought together with a catalyst. The center structure was also partly destroyed with a phasar blast, as had Sodom and Gomorrah, as had the Tunguska blast in 1908, but for another reason altogether.
Thanks. I’ve never heard of Delamer Duverus, but I’ve looked him up and see that he wrote a book called THE GOLDEN REED, so I’ll try and have a look at it.
The Sphinx could well be metaphorically “carved from Babel’s tower” if there are records there, or it was, itself, a speaking record (as in, a symbol of the star locations, as Bauval thought), because Babel is also a symbol of the split in understanding and knowledge just after the time of the deluge. The Sphinx does not have to be a link to the actual stones or metals in a specific tower of Babel. It could be, but it seems far more likely to be a metaphorical connection and temporal (time) connection with the Babel story, if anything.
Thank you for a great read. I have become more and more interested in “alternative” views on human kinds
historical path. While not a subscriber to any “ancient alien” theories I am more and more convinced that early human “cultural” history is grossly misrepresented.
The spectacular find at Gobekli Tepe alone has convinced me just how incomplete the picture is.
I am familiar with Graham Hancock and Dr Schoch as well as others you reference.
Couple of quick points: I find a comet or asteroid bombardment far more satisfactory than the thesis of Villakovsky. (Worlds in Collision).
Also found difficulty with your description of the Sphinx as a “sensor” unless considered in some type of astronomical position sense.
Nevertheless incredibly fascinating and well researched. Thank you for your hard work and helping me to better understand the connectivity of ancient Egypt and the Sphinx to early human history.
Thanks, Jeff. The men of Zaidor/Poseida clearly were great astronomers (‘The people who came with Nadhi were wise in the ways of the seasons and in the wisdom of the stars. They read the Book of Heaven with understanding’). If I have interpreted correctly what the Kolbrin says about the Great Sphinx, then it may well have contained astronomical instruments too. These men were surely cleverer than us!
Once again Yvonne Whiteman has hit the ball out of the park. Her current and prior article associations between the Kolbrin and real history are gems that solidify the Kolbrin in the face of the numerous arm chair critics who hope to dent the credibility of the Kolbrin with paper arrows.
Remember these points. 1) Velikovsky was the master detailing the ancient associations of names and events but he was struggling in an era of scientific confusion and misdirection. 2) There were MULTIPLE ancient disasters of varying types and degrees of earthwide damage which spanned much of “pre-history”. The Kolbrin bridges that gap to the past. 3) Simple bombardment (direct earth collisions) by asteroids and comets does not explain the myriad of effects described by the ancients from around the globe. And last but not least, 4) Comets are not dirty snowballs but a plasma discharge of the solar capacitor (ala the McCanney Plasma Discharge Comet Model) and moreover, the rare extremely large comets can wreak havoc on a planetary solar system scale. The severe damage due to large comets is wrought by “Action at a Distance” (without direct collisions) which includes gravitational and electromagnetic effects, severe pollution events including flooding by water and chemicals from the enormous comet tail encounters, meteorite bombardment, and more. The ancients chronicle these exactly.
These topics have become so obfuscated by outdated standard science, internet imposters who cloud these issues with pseudoscience, even one person who claims he wrote the Kolbrin if you can imagine that, and hosts of nay sayers whose party line history is threatened by the Kolbrin.
Yvonne Whiteman’s wonderfully insightful dissertation gems stand on their own merit and continue to shine brightly in the darkness of modern ignorance.
An excellent piece of research Yvonne. Do you think the Sphinx is more than 10,000 years old.? The mention of comets reminded me that The Destroyer visited here ( UK ) in more recent times. In 562 AD disaster struck Britain & Ireland which could have been the tail of a comet. Bishop Gregory of Tours described the island as burning from end to end for a week. Britain was uninhabitable for almost a decade and those that remained turned yellow and died. Possibly 8 million persons were displaced or died accounting for the low population levels in medieval times and the leveling of the Roman buildings : unlike the continent. Arthurian chronicles describe this as The Wasteland. This brought to an end The British Pendragonate rule and the Arthurian period. It allowed for the incursion of The Anglo Saxons and the coming of The English.
If you haven’t read it, may I recommend the dendrochronologist Mike Baillie’s book Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic encounters with comets, which starts with the Exodus cataclysm and ends with the comet’s tail-brush you mention. Baillie spreads his net as far as ancient Chinese sources. As he points out, tree-rings and ice-core samples never lie.
Since writing this article, I have learnt that the Pyramid Texts gave the name ‘Jackal Lake’ to the moat created around the Great Sphinx by the annual flooding of the Nile at the time of the Old Kingdom; other names for this moat include ‘the Canal of Anubis’. This lends weight to the theory that originally it might have been built in the form of an Anubis jackal. See The Sphinx Mystery: the Forgotten Origins of the Sanctuary of Anubis, Robert Temple with Olivia Temple (Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2009), page 250 picture caption.
I note your accepted reasoning for the change in year from 360 to 365.25 days in the year as by a change in orbital distance from the sun….this could also be realised by an acceleration of the spin upon our earth axis as made by for example an impact [physical or electromagnetic] that may have scourged out the pacific region of earth. [one theory of our moons creation]. This is reflected in the Egyptian through Hermes informing Isis to add 1 1/4 days to each quarter solar cycle of the year [the quadrants of astrology or the cross of matter/time]. Importantly an acceleration of spin would also bulge the oceans at the equator so submerging any civilisations remains present there before. [flood myth histories] This would also lessen the depths of oceans toward the poles exposing more land there.
Continental drift of plates has all land as one piece originally, however this is seen to have earth in a very unbalanced state with ocean on one side and land on the other….which defies spinning sphere geometrics
Just some to think upon….
Hi Yvonne – I’d like to propose an alternate “planetary villain” for Kima, one that no longer exists…
Our asteroid belt was discovered by a group of scientists following the Titius-Bode law (regarding the relationships between orbiting bodies in a system). It postulated that a body should be in the position between Mars and Jupiter – we didn’t find a body, instead we found the asteroid belt.
Astronomers at the time (William Herschel among them) believed it was the remnants of a former planet. 3 main reasons caused the theory to fall out of favor, all of which have become increasingly disputable with the passage of time: (1) The amount of energy required to destroy a planet was staggering (but imaginable today), (2) the mass of the asteroid belt is only 4% of the mass of our moon (but computer simulations now estimate the original mass may have been close to Earth’s), (3) significant chemical differences between the asteroids do not lend to the idea of them being from a single planet (also arguable, but too long for here).
Back to your thoughts on Kima…
Were the asteroid belt to have been a planet that was destroyed – (a) depending on the impact/explosion the planet would have absolutely become a bright spot in the sky given the destruction and its proximity, (b) were Earth to pass through the debris field it would have undoubtedly been struck, (c) were the planet to consist of water, or ice, those molecules would have rained down on Earth.
It is likely that large chunks of the planet may have fallen into erratic orbits around our sun (greatest gravitational pull by far), and so could have possibly “returned” to strike Earth even years after the initial destruction. Add that to ongoing collisions between remnants which could also cause a wayward strike of Earth.
This kind of impact could also change earth’s axis, make the “heavens spin” from the viewpoint of the surface and, difficult to imagine, but possible – change’s earth’s rotational velocity, or even direction.
Your historical references, make this not an impossible idea, such as “bind the cluster of Kima”, as in…put a destroyed planet back together again?
Thank you for your work. It has been fun to read and participate.
A wandering star would theoretically have enough mass to send very large objects out of the Oort cloud and into our solar system, potentially at speeds (or volumes) enough to destroy a planet. We would need to do more math — estimated mass/velocity of star, estimated mass/velocity of disturbed objects, we have computer simulations of original mass of asteroid belt — we may even be able to look at the positions of the bodies at the theoretical date(s) and see if the numbers start to line up.
I’ll pursue this a little further out of my own interest, but let me know if you’re interested? – Best, Katie
Some researchers believe that the Giza pyramids, particularly the Great Pyramid, were located in an exact geographical position as part of an ancient geodetic design linked to other ancient sacred sites, the GP is orientated exact north marking a meridian. This design would be much older than the approx 2500BCE dated usually attributed to the GP and there must have been some original landmark used by the designer(s) when the plan was set out.This might have been at least 5000years BCE or maybe earlier.
The original landmark at the site could have been the rock from which the Great Sphinx was shaped, a sacred rock outcrop fashioned to indicated due east and the rising sun on the equinox, a time of equality, balance and harmony in the future. This future time could be when the geometic design of the GP was understood, as it now seems to have been, and also when the reason for the exact location of the structure within the plan of other sites spanning thousands of miles was also fully understood. The bearings between these sites would be Great Circles around the Earth with their centres being the centre of the Earth which is one of the signs of Ra.The return of Horus is linked to the Great Sphinx.
From the work of David Furlong and others there are strong geometric links to the British Isles and Wiltshire.
Stories from AE suggest that Osiris and Isis were involved in the setting up of sacred sites outside AE
Just something to maybe think about when considering the Great Sphinx…
Thanks for the article, very thought provoking. Could the Sphinx actually be monitoring the sun’s position rather than whether it will rise or not? Perhaps rather than changed earth axis what is described is earth crust displacement, which could cause the effects described. Einstein supposedly thought this would be possible with proper force applied which could have been supplied by the other events described. Would also correlate with known pole changes.
Hi Yvonne and thanks for an interesting article. Do you think that this event & the Younger Dryas event could be one and the same? https://cosmictusk.com/
It’s a shame that so much of our true history has been altered or completely suppressed because it doesn’t conform to the “norm”
Folks , now here is some research I have done on my own about the "Great Sphinx" in Baluchistan , Pakistan .
It so happens , that a very ancient Hindu Temple , called the "Hinglaj Mata Temple" (built inside a natural mountain cave) , which was prominently mentioned even in the Hindu epic "Ramayana" , is just 49 km from the Baluchistan Sphinx . This Hinglaj temple is still in use by the miniscule Hindu population of Baluchistan , but it's almost impossible for Indians to visit this place after the partition of the Indian subcontinent .
The point I am getting at is this - there is probably a connection between the two - as per tradition , every important Goddess temple (called Shakti Peeth in Hinduism) has a corresponding Shiva (Bhairava) temple nearby.
Hinglaj Mata is supposed to be THE oldest of the 52 Shakti Peeths in the Indian Subcontinent . The Baluchistan Sphinx (& the dilapidated Shiva temple like structure adjacent to it) too , is extremely ancient . So these two sites were likely correlated in the ancient past . Moreover , both are situated very close to the Arabian sea coast of Pakistan.
Legend has it that this particular Shakti Peeth and it's corresponding Shiva temple were connected through underground tunnels...this has never been verified , since no archaeological study has been done in these remote areas .
***It is said that when a weary Alexander and his Greek army were returning from India in 321 B.C. , half of his forces (including Alexander himself) took the land route (the other half lead by Admiral Nearchus , returned by sea) , along the Arabian sea coast and probably passed by these ancient structures...I will separately try to find evidence for this hypothesis about the Baluchistan Sphinx , from the observations made in the old Greek chronicles...
I also found a video that has a rare top view of the Balochistan Sphinx , taken by helicopter. The whole barren and sparsely populated landscape of Baluchistan looks almost Martian and stunningly surreal....this particular site is prone to Tsunamis from the Arabian sea , it even has extremely strange MUD volcanoes - that could explain all the sediment that's got deposited on this ancient structure , as well as the IMMENSE weathering & erosion it has gone through . Of course , this arid zone was lush green in the ancient past (as also mentioned in Hindu scriptures) , which is why these structures got built there in the first place...same was the case for the Egyptian Sphinx , which was once in a green zone .
While the maker of this video thinks it's not a manmade structure , he probably does not know the whole story :)) . Moreover , the Pakistanis have absolutely no intention of highlighting the pre-Islamic heritage of this land that they cut away from undivided India , in 1947...though I personally feel that time itself stands still when you gaze at such enigmatic monuments from the hoary past...
List members , hope you got to see that mesmerising video of the Baluchistan sphinx in my earlier post...if not , you should see it in the full screen mode , to view all the details of the surrounding landscape .
Also , for anyone with even a passing interest in history or adventure , the enclosed account of a wounded Alexander & his Greek army's desperate march through the desolate Baluchistan desert is epic (no less than a thriller novel)...not only because this is a lesser known facet from the last days of Alexander , but also because it provides such an authentic account of the forbidding terrain of Baluchistan that proved fatal for many of the remaining Greek soldiers...on their way from India to Persia . in later times , the legend of "Sindabad the Sailor" was born from this same region :-
Alexander seized with desire to visit the Indian Ocean
The journey back towards Greece proved to be the most arduous part of the journey---more costly than any battle. Instead of returning home the way they came---over the Hindu Kush. Alexander decided to travel south by river with 1,800 ships through what is now Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, a journey that ended up taking months. First they had to fight their way down the Indus River and resistance was met with slaughter on a genocidal scale. In one attack spearheaded by Alexander himself, the great conqueror took an arrow is his lung and had to be carried away in a stretcher, but soon after mounted his horse to show his men he wasn't finished yet.
Alexander's army of 87,000 infantry, 18,000 cavalry, 52,000 followers arrived at the Arabian Sea, in a part of the world they were unfamiliar with. Because there were to many men to be carried in boats on the Arabian Sea, Alexander's divided his army, with a small contingent being carried boats and larger contingent journeying overland. A plan was concocted for the army to march overland across the brutal deserts of what is now southern Pakistan and Iran and be supplied by a fleet sailing on Arabian Sea that would meet up with army at various points along the way. That year the monsoon blew the opposite direction and the ships got stuck in Pakistan and were unable to bring supplies to the tens of thousands traveling overland.
Alexander Plans Trip Back to Persia and Receives News From Home
Plutarch wrote: ““Here his admiral, Nearchus, came to him, and delighted him so with the narrative of his voyage, that he resolved himself to sail out of the mouth of Euphrates with a great fleet, with which he designed to go round by Arabia and Africa, and so by Hercules's Pillars into the Mediterranean; in order for which, he directed all sorts of vessels to be built at Thapsacus, and made great provision everywhere of seamen and pilots. But the tidings of the difficulties he had gone through in his Indian expedition, the danger of his person among the Mallians, the reported loss of a considerable part of his forces, and a general doubt as to his own safety, had begun to give occasion for revolt among many of the conquered nations, and for acts of great injustice, avarice, and insolence on the part of the satraps and commanders in the provinces, so that there seemed to be an universal fluctuation and disposition to change. Even at home, Olympias and Cleopatra had raised a faction against Antipater, and divided his government between them, Olympias seizing upon Epirus, and Cleopatra upon Macedonia. [Source: Plutarch (A.D. 45-127), “Life of Alexander”, A.D. 75 translated by John Dryden, 1906, MIT, Online Library of Liberty, oll.libertyfund.org ]
“When Alexander was told of it, he said his mother had made the best choice, for the Macedonians would never endure to be ruled by a woman. Upon this he despatched Nearchus again to his fleet, to carry the war into the maritime provinces, and as he marched that way himself, he punished those commanders who had behaved ill, particularly Oxyartes," one of the sons of Abuletes, whom he killed with his own hand, thrusting him through the body with his spear. And when Abuletes, instead of the necessary provisions which he ought to have furnished, brought him three thousand talents in coined money, he ordered it to be thrown to his horses, and when they would not touch it, “What good," he said, “will this provision do us?” and sent him away to prison."
Arrian wrote: “Again he took half of the shield-bearing guards and Agrianians, the guard of cavalry and the horse-bowmen, and marched forward to the confines of the Gadrosians and Oritians, where he was informed that the passage was narrow, and the Oritians were drawn up with the Gadrosians and were encamping in front of the pass, with the purpose of barring Alexander's passage. They had indeed marshalled themselves there; but when it was reported that he was already approaching, most of them fled from the pass, deserting their guard. The chiefs of the Oritians, however, came to him, offering to surrender both themselves and their nation. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
“He instructed these to collect the multitude of their people together and send them to their own abodes, since they were not about to suffer any harm. Over these people he placed Apollophanes as viceroy, and with him he left Leonnatus the confidential body-guard in Ora, at the head of all the Agrianians, some of the bowmen and cavalry, and the rest of the Grecian mercenary infantry and cavalry. He instructed him to wait until the fleet had sailed round the land, to colonize the city, and to regulate the affairs of the Oritians so that they might pay the greater respect to the viceroy.
Alexander's Arduous Journey Across the Baluchistan Desert
Alexander led the largest contingent on a march 1,750 kilometers across the Baluchistan desert, a wasteland more forbidding than the Sahara, and southern Iran. They traveled almost exclusively at night because it was simply too hot during the day. Even at night it travel was difficult as temperatures rarely dropped below 35 degrees C (95 degrees F). Because the supply ships never showed the marchers were forced to subsist on the limited food they brought with them.
The temperatures were blistering and what little water there was largely undrinkable. The trip was so arduous pack animals were butchered and eaten, booty was left behind and more than once the royal stores were broken into. Even then many men died of starvation, thirst and heat.
Alexander suffered along with everyone else. Once he was offered a helmet full of water but he poured it into the sand as a sign that he was willing to share the misery of his troops. Even when there water that could spell trouble too. A large number of his retinue drowned when a flash flood caught them in a canyon.
Alexander's journey across the deserts of Baluchistan has been compared to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The journey took 60 days. About 15,000 of Alexander's men, or nearly half the fighting force that accompanied him, perished---more than all the men killed in battle. By contrast, the fleets reached the Iranian coast, delayed but almost intact.
March through the Desert of Gadrosia
Arrian wrote: “Thence Alexander marched through the land of the Gadrosians, by a difficult route, which was also destitute of all the necessaries of life; and in many places there was no water for the army. Moreover they were compelled to march most of the way by night, and a great distance from the sea. However he was very desirous of coming to the part of the country along the sea, both to see what harbours were there, and to make what preparations he could on his march for the fleet, either by employing his men in digging wells, or by making arrangements somewhere for a market and anchorage. But the part of the country of the Gadrosians near the sea was entirely desert. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
“He therefore sent Thoas, son of Mandrodorus, with a few horsemen down to the sea, to reconnoitre and see if there happened to be any haven anywhere near, or whether there was water or any other of the necessaries of life not far from the sea. This man returned and reported that he found some fishermen upon the shore living in stifling huts, which were made by putting together mussel-shells, and the back-bones of fishes were used to form the roofs. He also said that these fishermen used little water, obtaining it with difficulty by scraping away the gravel, and that what they got was not at all fresh.
“When Alexander reached a certain place in Gadrosia, where corn was more abundant, he seized it and placed it upon the beasts of burden; and marking it with his own seal, he ordered it to be conveyed down to the sea. But while he was marching to the halting stage nearest to the sea, the soldiers paying little regard to the seal, the guards made use of the corn themselves, and gave a share of it to those who were especially pinched with hunger. To such a degree were they overcome by their misery that after mature deliberation they resolved to take account of the visible and already impending destruction rather than the danger of incurring the king's wrath, which was not before their eyes and still remote. When Alexander ascertained the necessity which constrained them so to act, he pardoned those who had done the deed. He himself hastened forward to collect from the land all he could for victualling the army which was sailing round with the fleet; and sent Cretheus the Callatian to convey the supplies to the coast. He also ordered the natives to grind as much corn as they could and convey it down from the interior of the country, together with dates and sheep for sale to the soldiers. Moreover he sent Telephus, one of the confidential Companions, down to another place on the coast with a small quantity of ground corn."
Alexander's route through the Baluchistan desert between the Indus River and Babylon
March through Gadrosia
Arrian wrote: “He then advanced towards the capital of the Gadrosians, which was named Pura; and he arrived there in sixty days after starting from Ora. Most of the historians of Alexander's reign assert that all the hardships which his army suffered in Asia were not worthy of comparison with the labours undergone here. Nearchus alone asserts that Alexander pursued this route, not from ignorance of the difficulty of the journey, but because he heard that no one had ever hitherto passed that way with an army and emerged in safety from the desert, except Semiramis, when she fled from India. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
“The natives said that even she emerged with only twenty men of her army; and that Cyrus, son of Cambyses, escaped with only seven of his men. For they say that Cyrus also marched into this region for the purpose of invading India; but that he did not effect his retreat before losing the greater part of his army, from the desert and the other difficulties of this route. When Alexander received this information he was seized with a desire of excelling Cyrus and Semiramis. Nearchus says that he turned his march this way, both for this reason and at the same time for the purpose of conveying provisions near the fleet. The scorching heat and lack of water destroyed a great part of the army, and especially the beasts of burden; most of which perished from thirst and some of them even from the depth and heat of the sand, because it had been thoroughly scorched by the sun.
“For they met with lofty ridges of deep sand, not closely pressed and hardened, but such as received those who stepped upon it just as if they were stepping into mud, or rather into untrodden snow. At the same time too the horses and mules suffered still more, both in going up and coming down the hills, from the unevenness of the road as well as from its instability. The length of the marches between the stages also exceedingly distressed the army; for the lack of water often compelled them to make the marches of unusual length. When they travelled by night on a journey which it was necessary to complete, and at daybreak came to water, they suffered no hardship at all; but if, while still on the march, on account of the length of the way, they were caught by the heat, then they did indeed suffer hardships from the blazing sun, being at the same time oppressed by unassuageable thirst."
Sufferings of Alexander's Army
Arrian wrote: “The soldiers killed many of the beasts of burden of their own accord; for when provisions were lacking, they came together, and slaughtered most of the horses and mules. They ate the flesh of these, and said that they had died of thirst or had perished from the heat. There was no one who divulged the real truth of their conduct, both on account of the men's distress and because all alike were implicated in the same offence. What was being done had not escaped Alexander's notice; but he saw that the best cure for the present state of affairs would be to pretend to be ignorant of it, rather than to permit it as a thing known to himself. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
Baluchistan desert in present-day Iran
“The consequence was, that it was no longer easy to convey the soldiers who were suffering from disease, or those who were left behind on the roads on account of the heat, partly from the want of beasts of burden and partly because the men themselves were knocking the waggons to pieces, not being able to draw them on account of the depth of the sand. They did this also because in the first stages they were compelled on this account to go, not by the shortest routes, but by those which were easiest for the carriages. Thus some were left behind along the roads on account of sickness, others from fatigue or the effects of the heat, or from not being able to bear up against the drought; and there was no one either to show them the way or to remain and tend them in their sickness. For the expedition was being made with great urgency; and the care of individual persons was necessarily neglected in the zeal displayed for the safety of the army as a whole.
“As they generally made the marches by night, some of the men were overcome by sleep on the road; afterwards rousing up again, those who still had strength followed upon the tracks of the army; but only a few out of many overtook the main body in safety. Most of them perished in the sand, like men shipwrecked on the sea. Another calamity also befell the army, which greatly distressed men, horses, and beasts of burden; for the country of the Gadrosians is supplied with rain by the periodical winds, just as that of the Indians is; not the plains of Gadrosia, but only the mountains where the clouds are carried by the wind and are dissolved into rain without passing beyond the summits of the mountains. On one occasion, when the army bivouacked, for the sake of its water, near a small brook which was a winter torrent, about the second watch of the night the brook which flowed there was suddenly swelled by the rains in the mountains which had fallen unperceived by the soldiers.
The torrent advanced with so great a flood as to destroy most of the wives and children of the men who followed the army, and to sweep away all the royal baggage as well as all the beasts of burden still remaining. The soldiers, after great exertions, were hardly able to save themselves together with their weapons, many of which they lost beyond recovery. When, after enduring the burning heat and thirst, they lighted upon abundance of water, many of them perished from drinking to excess, not being able to check their appetite for it. For this reason Alexander generally pitched his camp, not near the water itself, but at a distance of about twenty stades from it, to prevent the men and beasts from pressing in crowds into the river and thus perishing, and at the same time to prevent those who had no control over themselves from fouling the water for the rest of the army by stepping into the springs or streams."
Alexander's Magnanimous Conduct
Arrian wrote: “Here I have resolved not to pass over in silence the most noble deed perhaps ever performed by Alexander, which occurred either in this land or, according to the assertion of some other authors, still earlier, among the Parapamisadians. The army was continuing its march through the sand, though the heat of the sun was already scorching, because it was necessary to reach water before halting. They were far on the journey, and Alexander himself, though oppressed with thirst, was nevertheless with great pain and difficulty leading the army on foot, so that his soldiers, as is usual in such a case, might more patiently bear their hardships by the equalization of the distress. At this time some of the light-armed soldiers, starting away from the army in quest of water, found some collected in a shallow cleft, a small and mean spring. Collecting this water with difficulty, they came with all speed to Alexander, as if they were bringing him some great boon. As soon as they approached the king, they poured the water into a helmet and carried it to him. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
Alexander refuses to take water
“He took it, and commending the men who brought it, immediately poured it upon the ground in the sight of all. As a result of this action, the entire army was re-invigorated to so great a degree that any one would have imagined that the water poured away by Alexander had furnished a draught to every man. This deed beyond all others I commend as evidence of Alexander's power of endurance and self-control, as well as of his skill in managing an army. The following adventure also occurred to the army in that country. At last the guides declared that they no longer remembered the way, because the tracks of it had been rendered invisible by the wind blowing the sand over them.
“Moreover, in the deep sand which had been everywhere reduced to one level, there was nothing by which they could conjecture the right way, not even the usual trees growing along it, nor any solid hillock rising up; and they had not practised themselves in making journeys by the stars at night or by the sun in the daytime, as sailors do by the constellations of the Bears—the Phoenicians by the Little Bear, and other men by the Greater Bear. Then at length Alexander perceived that it was necessary for him to lead the way by declining to the left; and taking a few horsemen with him he advanced in front of the army. But when the horses even of these were exhausted by the heat, he left most of these men behind, and rode away with only five men and found the sea. Having scraped away the shingle on the sea-beach, he found water fresh and pure, and then went and fetched the whole army. For seven days they marched along the sea-coast, supplying themselves with water from the shore. Thence he led his expedition into the interior, for now the guides knew the way."
March through Carmania and Punishment of Viceroys
Arrian wrote: “When he arrived at the capital of Gadrosia, he there gave his army a rest. He deposed Apollophanes from the viceroyalty, because he discovered that he had paid no heed to his instructions. Thoas was appointed viceroy over the people of this district; but as he fell ill and died, Sibyrtius succeeded to the office. The same man had also lately been appointed by Alexander viceroy of Carmania; but now the rule over the Arachotians and Gadrosians was given to him, and Tlepolemus, son of Pythophanes, received Carmania. The king was already advancing into Carmania, when news was brought to him that Philip, the viceroy of the country of the Indians, had been plotted against by the mercenaries and treacherously killed; but that Philip's Macedonian body-guards had caught some of the murderers in the very act and others afterwards, and had put them to death. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
“When be had ascertained this, he sent a letter into India to Eudemus and Taxiles, ordering them to administer the affairs of the land which had previously been subordinated to Philip until he could send a viceroy for it. When he arrived in Carmania, Craterus effected a junction with him, bringing with him the rest of the army and the elephants. He also brought Ordanes, whom he had arrested for revolting and trying to effect a revolution. Thither also came Stasanor, the viceroy of the Areians and Zarangians, accompanied by Pharismanes, son of Phrataphernes, the viceroy of the Parthians and Hyrcanians. There came also the generals who had been left with Parmenio over the army in Media, Cleander, Sitalces, and Heracon, bringing with them the greater part of their army. Both the natives and the soldiers themselves brought many accusations against Cleander and Sitalces, as for example, that the temples had been pillaged by them, old tombs rifled, and other acts of injustice, recklessness, and tyranny perpetrated against their subjects. As these charges were proved, he put them to death, in order to inspire others who might be left as viceroys, governors, or prefects of provinces with the fear of suffering equal penalties with them if they swerved from the path of duty.
“This was one of the chief means by which Alexander kept in subordination the nations which he had conquered in war or which had voluntarily submitted to him, though they were so many in number and so far distant from each other; because under his regal sway it was not allowed that those who were ruled should be unjustly treated by those who ruled. At that time Heracon was acquitted of the charge, but soon after, being convicted by the men of Susa of having pillaged the temple in that city, he also suffered punishment. Stasanor and Phrataphernes came to Alexander bringing a multitude of beasts of burden and many camels, when they learnt that he was marching by the route to Gadrosia, conjecturing that his army would suffer the very hardships which it did suffer. Therefore these men arrived just at the very time they were required, as also did their camels and beasts of burden. For Alexander distributed all these animals to the officers man by man, to all the various squadrons and centuries of the cavalry, and to the various companies of the infantry, as their number allowed him."
Alexander in Carmania
Arrian wrote: “Certain authors have said (though to me the statement seems incredible) that Alexander led his forces through Carmania lying extended with his Companions upon two covered waggons joined together, the flute being played to him; and that the soldiers followed him wearing garlands and sporting. Food was provided for them, as well as all kinds of dainties which had been brought together along the roads by the Carmanians. They say that he did this in imitation of the Bacchic revelry of Dionysus, because a story was told about that deity, that after subduing the Indians he traversed the greater part of Asia in this manner and received the appellation of Thriambus. [Source: Arrian the Nicomedian (A.D. 92-175), “Anabasis of Alexander”, translated, by E. J. Chinnock, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884, gutenberg.org]
“For the same reason the processions in honour of victories after war were called thriambi. This has been recorded neither by Ptolemy, son of Lagus, nor by Aristobulus, son of Aristobulus, nor by any other writer whose testimony on such points any one would feel to be worthy of credit. It is sufficient therefore for me to record it as unworthy of belief. But as to what I am now going to describe I follow the account of Aristobulus. In Carmania Alexander offered sacrifices to the gods as thank-offerings for his victory over the Indians, and because his army had been brought in safety out of Gadrosia. He also celebrated a musical and gymnastic contest. He then appointed Peucestas one of his confidential body-guards, having already resolved to make him viceroy of Persis. He wished him, before being appointed to the viceroyalty, to experience this honour and evidence of confidence, as a reward for his exploit among the Mallians. Up to this time the number of his confidential body-guards had been seven:—Leonnatus, son of Anteas, Hephaestion, son of Amyntor, Lysimachus, son of Agathocles, Aristonoüs, son of Pisaeus, these four being Pellaeans; Perdiccas, son of Orontes, from Orestis, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, and Peithon, son of Crateas, the Heordaeans. Peucestas, who had held the shield over Alexander, was now added to them as an eighth.
“At this time Nearchus, having sailed round the coast of Ora and Gadrosia and that of the Ichthyophagi, put into port in the inhabited part of the coastland of Carmania, and going up thence into the interior with a few men he reported to Alexander the particulars of the voyage which he had made along the coasts of the external sea. Nearchus was then sent down to the sea again to sail round as far as the country of Susiana, and the outlets of the river Tigres. How he sailed from the river Indus to the Persian Sea and the mouth of the Tigres, I shall describe in a separate book, following the account of Nearchus himself. For he also wrote a history of Alexander in Greek. Perhaps I shall be able to compose this narrative in the future, if inclination and the divine influence urge me to it. Alexander now ordered Hephaestion to march into Persis from Carmania along the seashore with the larger division of the army and the beasts of burden, taking with him also the elephants; because, as he was making the expedition in the season of winter, the part of Persis near the sea was warm and possessed abundant supplies of provisions."
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Canadian Museum of History historymuseum.ca ; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT, Online Library of Liberty, oll.libertyfund.org ; Gutenberg.orggutenberg.org Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" [∞] and "The Creators" [μ]" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum.Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, World Religions edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); History of Warfare by John Keegan (Vintage Books); History of Art by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton's Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Turns Out Venus Is Covered With Giant Crystal Volcanoes!
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Egypt is a land of treasure. For thousands of years, during a time when history was not even recorded, great cultures walked across the Egyptian land. Mighty civilizations developed, creating piece by piece a history that we would eventually come to cherish.
The land of Pharaohs, mummies, pyramids and golden sand offers something that no other place offers: a trip to the past through its many majestic monuments, some of which remained buried beneath the surface for thousands of years.
If you ask any traveler today what has impacted him the most while visiting Egypt, you’d probably get more than one answer.
Some people would argue that the Egyptian pyramids are beyond a reason of a doubt the most impressive feature of Egypt’s ancient history. Others would say that the very core of their history is more than enough to leave a lifelong impact.
Egypt has a lot to offer. From sunken cities, massive temples built with nearly impossible stones, the pyramids, great Kings and rulers throughout its history, to their impeccable knowledge in various fields of science.
Although the ancient Egyptian civilization achieved so much during their long history, their biggest and most impressive achievement are perhaps the pyramids.
To date, experts argue that there are around 120 pyramids scattered across Egypt. The most impressive pyramids are certainly those at Giza, thought to have been constructed during Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty.
As revealed by archeologists, and following their strict timeline, Egypt’s truly gigantic pyramids were built over the course of no more than three generations, starting with the Third Dynasty King Sneferu, followed by his son Khufu, and Sneferu’s grandson Khafre.
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If the mainstream view on Egypt’s history is correct than Sneferu was Egypt’s most prolific pyramid builders. He is thought to have erected a total of three massive pyramids: One at Dahshur, and two at Meidum.
Sneferu’s pyramids alone contain more than 3.5 million cu. meters of stone. This means that all other Egyptian pyramids combined (except the queens’ pyramids and satellite pyramids) contain only 41 percent of the total mass of the pyramids of Sneferu, his son Khufu and grandson Khafre.
Although Menkaure–the King who is thought to have built the third-largest pyramid at Giza–still used multi-ton blocks of stone in his pyramid, the total volume of his pyramid is far less than the total volume of Egypt’s first pyramid, the Step pyramid at Saqqara.
A pyramid and a vast underground world
Although many people believe that the Great Pyramid is Egypt’s oldest pyramid, the first such structure built in Egypt was completed around 4,700 years ago, during Egypt’s Third Dynasty.
The structure was supposedly commissioned by Djoser early in his reign. To build it, the king is said to have turned to his royal vizier and architect Imhotep. The young man had revolutionary ideas in architecture that were apparently recognized by Djoser.
He ordered the monument to be built at the royal necropolis of Saqqara, not far from Giza, where the most impressive pyramids of Egypt would be built within 200 years of Djoser.
The Step Pyramid was revolutionary.
Never before had Egypt seen a structure of similar design, built entirely out of stone. Mainstream scholars see Djoser’s Step Pyramid as the earliest colossal stone building in Egypt, and the oldest large-scale cut stone construction in history.
To build a structure like that of Imhotep, a never-before-seen workforce was gathered. It was no small project, and for a young architect, it was a major undertaking.
In fact, experts say that the social implications of such a massive, carefully sculpted structure are staggering, pointing towards the fact that the royal government of the time had complete control of not only natural resources but both material and human ads well.
The entire pyramid complex is believed to have been completed in around 19 years, which suggests that Djoser probably ruled long enough to see his masterplan complete.
The pyramid began perhaps not as one from the beginning. Experts believe the structure Imhotep designed first resembled a kind of square mastaba. This is the most important tell-tale sign that the monument was not meant to be a mastaba. Egyptologists say that there are no known square mastabas anywhere in Egypt.
This probably suggests Imhotep mas have “played around” with the design of the monument. Although he probably knew he would not create a mastaba, it is unknown whether he envisioned building a pyramid, or whether or not this was just a random result of him experimenting with the structure. After all, the Step pyramid is regarded as a proto-pyramid.
It has been suggested that the Step Pyramid was constructed in six distinctive stages. Beginning as a square mastaba, the structure was gradually enlarged by Imhotep first evenly on all four sides, and later just on its eastern point. Each step is thought to have been experimental.
The “morphed” mastaba was most likely constructed in two stages, first to form a four-stepped structure (P1) and then to form a six-stepped structure (P2), which a clear rectangular base aligned on an east to west axis.
Most of the construction material for the pyramid was quarried near the construction site, and the builders did not have to worry about transporting extremely large stones across vast distances, like the builders of the Great Pyramid.
Although the pyramid was the most impressive feature at the complex, many other important and equally majestic buildings decorated it. The structures at the center were surrounded by a massive wall built using light Tura limestone 10.5 m (34 ft) high. This wall is interrupted by 14 doors but had only one entrance.
The entire complex was truly massive; experts estimate it covers 15 ha (37 acres), which means it is nearly 3 times as large as the Old Kingdom town of Heirakonpolis.
Underground Chambers beneath the Step Pyramid. Image Credit: Pinterest.
However, the most impressive feature of the entire pyramid complex are not the above-ground elements but rather that which remains hidden beneath the surface.
If the pyramid complex was so large that it resembled in size a town of the Old Kingdom, then the underground world built beneath the Step pyramid directly was a major metropolis.
Egyptologists believe that this vast underground world beneath the pyramid was meant to represent the funerary apartment that mimicked the palace and would serve as the living place of the royal ka.
However, while Djoser’s Step Pyramid is thought to have given birth to the pyramids of Egypt, and many of its elements endured in future examples of pyramids in Egypt, never again did any king construct a vast subterranean world the size of that located beneath the Step Pyramid.
In fact, never was it even attempted in future generations, and not even the largest pyramids in Egypt, the Red Pyramid, the Great Pyramid, nor Khafre’s pyramid featured such an impressive and complex underground system.
The storage rooms beneath the Step Pyramid were home to more than 40,000 stone vessels which were curiously found to predate Pharaoh Djoser by several generations.
The ancient Egyptian moon god, Hermes Trismegistos reported on a library of knowledge in his mystical works. Legend has it that there is a maze below the paws of the Sphinx that leads to the mystery-shrouded Hall of Records, where all essential knowledge of alchemy, astronomy, mathematics, magic and medicine is stored. The library of knowledge - researchers continue to search for it today. Is it myth or reality?
The burial chambers in the Pyramid of Teti in Saqqara bear testimony to the fact that the pharaohs were given knowledge to take with them. Encrypted hieroglyphic messages tell of the kings ascension to heaven and his rule in the next world. Magical spells about ores that will breathe new life into the pharaoh are enshrined here. Have the researchers been captivated by the myth of secret knowledge due to the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Teti? Or is this a sign that giving burial gifts of knowledge was a common practice in Egyptian burial rights, and that a library of knowledge must exist? One thing is certain, people have searched for a place that hides the answers to all questions throughout the ages.
In the modern era, the search began in the wake of the prophecies of American faith-healer Edgar Cayce. While in a trance, he spoke of a hall of records, where all knowledge from bygone cultures was hidden. He believed he was the reincarnation of a high priest who used to live on the island Atlantis. According to him, there is a passageway that parts from the right front paw of the Sphinx leading to the chamber. People have been trying to prove the truth of this spiritual epiphany to this very day.
The exact floor plan of the Hall of Records even prompted several expeditions. More than 30 years ago, American researchers accosted the Sphinx with a gigantic drill. They drilled into the paw, putting a seven-meter-deep hole in the stone. These experiments, approved by the highest authority, remain very controversial to this day. They almost ruined the monument. They did not find the tunnel of which had been foretold. Seismic readings indicated that there were chambers underneath the Sphinx. These, however, proved to be naturally formed cavities. The Egyptian authority responsible for ancient monuments has forbidden any further detonation or drilling. For those who continue to champion the truth of Cayce's theory, this is a conspiracy on the part of the archaeological establishment. Myth or reality, the Sphinx remains a stony puzzle.
List members , there is actually a way to indirectly prove how Egyptians had reached the American continent about 5,000 years ago :-
5,000 Years Ago, Ancient Egyptians Sailed to America and This Could Be The Evidence
Coca and tobacco found in ancient Egyptian mummies: Is this the ultimate evidence of transoceanic voyages 5,000 years ago?
What if the ancient Egyptian civilization was much more advanced than we’ve ever imagined? After all, they are the rightful owners of some of the most impressive ancient structures on the surface of the planet.
Is it hard to believe they could have constructed powerful vessels that would have allowed them to travel to other continents?
According to DNA analysis performed on ancient Egyptian mummies, this may not be just ‘another crazy conspiracy.’
Dr. Svetla Balabanova was left in total disbelief when she saw the results of her own analyzes.
The prestigious German medical examiner had been commissioned to analyze several mummies looking for traces of drug use in the rulers of ancient Egypt.
What she found was considered to be a history changer.
After analyzing several ancient Egyptian mummies, the researchers discovered the presence of high levels of cocaine, nicotine, and tetrahydrocannabinol in bodies that were preserved for thousands of years.
With scientific rigor, Dr. Balabanova repeated the tests several times and sent samples to other laboratories for independent testing.
All successive analyzes confirmed the initial results.
Ancient Egyptian mummies had high levels of cocaine, nicotine, and tetrahydrocannabinol. But where did the ancient Egyptians obtain the products from?
Despite finding evidence, the scientific community remained skeptical, accusing the researchers who had made the discovery of incompetence.
They began by stating that the mummies were false until they were proven to be authentic.
Then they went on to argue that they were contaminated until it was shown that it is impossible to contaminate the inner stem of a hair.
They then claimed that the experiments were not reproducible until an independent group of experts found traces of cocaine and nicotine in other Egyptian mummies in a British museum.
Finally, they ended up defending the indefensible: that tobacco and coca did not come from South America but rather were very rare varieties of African origin.
But no evidence of coca or tobacco cultivation was ever found in Africa, Europe or Asia before the time of Christopher Columbus.
What the mummies tell us is an intolerable story for history as we have learned in school.
Coca and tobacco are undoubtedly originating in South America.
The Egyptians apparently had the ability to build the Pyramid but did not have sufficient naval skills to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
How can we explain these controversial results?
Is it possible that the Ancient Egyptians traveled somehow to the American continent thousands of years ago?
Or could this be evidence enough that a highly advanced civilization existed on Earth thousands of years ago? A civilization that had knowledge and technologies that neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks nor the Romans had at that time?
Whatever it may have been, many authors agree that this is irrefutable proof that the ancient Egyptians had contact with products that originated halfway around the globe; on the American Continent.ž
But what if we are wrong? For all of those who are interested in seeing another side to this story, I recommend you read an article which was first published in the New Dawn Magazine issue 156, May/June 2016. It basically opposes everything stated in this one.
Speaking of the Sphinx, Rameses is a contraction of Rama Isis in Sanskrit, which means "Rama Lord". That line of Kings took this name, Rameses II, Ramses III, et cetera.
This suggests that Egypt was originally Vedic, although it seems that something happened later on.
P.N. Oaks suggests that the name Egypt is a contraction of Ajapati, who was one of the celestials in the Vedic pantheon.
And he shows glyph of a brahmin architect who supposedly was an architect who helped to design the pyramids. He says the man is a Dravidian. Oaks found the image in the book Egyptian Myth and Legand, P - 368; attached.
@deandddd , this image of a Brahmin priest , found in Egypt is especially intriguing and has already raised many an eyebrow in academic circles...the name of Ram , so cryptically embedded in "Rameses" is also not properly explained by Egyptologists .
However , let's come to a larger point here - if someone is honestly , truly , seriously interested in the truth about ancient civilisations , they must first do the following :-
Shed ALL their biases , whether ethnic , cultural , linguistic , religion etc. before even trying to dig deeper into such possibilities
In their mind's eye , erase ALL national borders as seen on today's world maps...humans have always been a migratory species and their migrations just did NOT recognise any such artificial borders through most of the history of mankind (these manmade lines have come in just the last 0.1% of human history) . Indeed , humans have survived on this planet till now , by making timely migrations , whenever environmental factors forced them to . The story of the Exodus from the Bible is just one of MANY such examples , from different regions of the globe . It would just take a natural or manmade disaster to prove to people , how impermanent these RIGID national boundaries actually are....such arrogance around manmade "lines in the sand" , could be rendered meaningless and futile under certain types of circumstances , which we may get to see within our own lifetimes...
Forget ALL the "MODERN definitions of nationhood" as they exist in today's times
Only by adopting such an open minded , clear hearted approach , can one really unravel what happened in the distant past. I am not claiming that it's easy to shed our deeply ingrained attitudes , neither am I trying to pretend that I am free of biases either , but I have accepted that the closer one can get to such an "open" minded approach , the more successful they are going to be in this kind of research .
Sorry , if this looks like I am preaching , so let me end my sermon right now :))
Folks , the concept of chimeras such as the Sphinx (half lion , half man) , the Centaur (half man , half bull) , the gorgon (half human , half snake) and many others like them , were likely all sourced from the same global , prehistoric civilisation .
The concept of such chimeras is so widespread across cultures that it must have been a universal culture at some point of time in the distant past .
It also shows that the definition of what is a human was not as rigid as it is today - there was a sort of species continuum that this pre-historic civilisation believed in , due to which they saw man as not very distinct from other creatures . In a sense , they probably had a greater respect for nature and other creatures in the world .
This may have also been because at least some such chimeras actually did exist , maybe not on the surface , but in the cavern worlds below...
There is one INCREDIBLE similarity between the Giza Sphinx and the Baluchistan Sphinx - both are aligned exactly in the East-West direction . Both are likely situated above extensive underground tunnel systems and subterranean structures .
Of course , the alignment with the rising sun , is a well known fact about the Giza Sphinx , but to those who consider the Baluchistan Sphinx to be merely a geological feature , how can they explain the fact it is aligned exactly in an East-West direction (am not certain whether it faces due East or due West) ??...Natural structures usually don't have such precise alignment to the Cardinal directions :))
**Another thing which I find personally quite satisfying about this research about Baluchistan Sphinx is how it contains a hidden key to resolving the geographical confusion created by the most popular version of Ramayan epic (original Ramayan was recompiled by Tulsidas 400 years ago) .
The Baluchistan Sphinx and the Hinglaj Mata temple hold vital clues to the true geography of Ramayan - you see , by shifting all the locations 1,000 km towards the North-West , but still within the Indian subcontinent , all of Ramayan epic's apparently confusing geography suddenly starts making sense ! For those who are a bit more familiar with geography of this region - just shift the location of Ramayan from the Gangetic plain to the Indus plain and it's geography will all fall into place .
***Well , that would also lead to some recently manmade "lines in the sand" (Sorry , borders !) being crossed (Oops !) , but THE TRUTH is the Truth and bears NO obligation to anybody :))
I've realised that over thousands of years , places get renamed after the original ones...therefore most of the towns in today's India that are named after towns mentioned in the Ramayan are most probably re-named ones , they are not the original locations , which in almost all cases , were 1,000 km towards the North-West . In more recent times, New York and New Hampshire have been named after York and Hampshire in England , for example . New South Wales in Australia is named after Wales in England as another modern example...this tendency is not new in human civilisation , it's been practiced for thousands of years !
However , no mainstream historian is likely to accept the above interpretation - they will continue to insist what they have already illogically "concluded" is final and irrevocable ! To them , maintaining the status quo and the ambiguity about the geography of Ramayan epic is more suitable , than to try uncovering the truth .
The Makran coast of Baluchistan , where the Sphinx is located , is naturally rich in limestone and marble (it's called Makrana marble) . The world famous Taj Mahal of India (in the town of Agra , near New Delhi) was built with marble quarried from the same region in which the Baluchistan Sphinx is located . Incidentally , within a few days time from now , Donald Trump too will be visiting the Taj Mahal...
Folks , this is an incredible find - the "lost wax casting method" , a metal casting technique which even NASA uses till today , is AT LEAST 6,000 years old (!!) , if not even older :))
The Mehrgarh site in Baluchistan (not very far from the Baluchistan Sphinx) , was THE first place in the world where this important technique was being used . I myself am increasingly getting convinced that this region really was the true cradle of human civilisation !
**Interestingly , the earliest traces of Hinduism have also been found at Mehrgarh , NOT from within the "truncated" borders of present day India , as one might expect...
The 6,000-year-old artifact –discovered at the Neolithic village of Mehrangarh, Pakistan– was created with a technique still used by NASA. As researchers explain: “It is also today the highest precision metal forming technique—under the name ‘investment casting’—in aerospace, aeronautics, and biomedicine, for high-performance alloys from steel to titanium.”
Researchers have recently come across a 6,000-year-old ornament excavated at the Neolithic village of Mehrangarh, Pakistan. According to a new imaging technique that allowed researchers to find out more about it, the artifact was created with an ancient technologythat NASA still uses today reports Mail Online .
The technology called lost-wax casting is a metal casting technique still used today in order to create a duplicate metal object. A modern version of the method called ‘investment casting’ was utilized by researchers at NASA when they built components for the International Space Station, the Curiosity rover exploring the red planet, and other spacecraft like the Messenger probe.
(a) Map indicating the major Indo-Iranian archaeological sites dated from the seventh to the second millennia BC. Scale bar, 200 km. (b) View of the MR2 archaeological site at Mehrgarh (sector X, Early Chalcolithic, end of period III, 4,500–3,600 BC). (c) View of the front side of the wheel-shaped amulet. Scale bar, 5 mm. (d) Dark-field image of the equatorial section of the amulet.
The 6,000-year-old ornament was studied using a revolutionary new technique called ‘photoluminescence imaging’ by scientists from Ipanema – a European research facility that specializes in the study of archaeological materials.
The new technique allowed experts to determine the exact process by which the artifact was made in the past.
“We discovered a hidden structure that is a signature of the original object, how it was made,” stated lead author Mathieu Thoury, a physicist at Ipanema, the European center for the study of ancient materials, as quoted by the Washington Post.
“You have a signature of what was happening 6,000 years ago,” Thoury added.
‘Photoluminescence imaging’ is a process where light is being projected onto the artifact while researchers measure the amount of light that bounces back.
Scientists explain that different material consequently reflects different amounts of light, which in turn allowed experts to pinpoint the exact materials used in the production of the ornament some 6,000 years ago.
After studying the artefact in detail, experts concluded that the amulet was in fact created as a single piece which led experts to conclude that whoever created the ornament used a process called lost-wax casting.
Lost-Wax Casting involves in the production of a ‘replica’ item using wax, and then creating a mold around the object. When it’s heated up, the liquefied wax is removed, and molten metal is poured in. Once the mold cools down it is broken apart which leaves only the newly formed metal inside it.
Experts discovered that the ancient craftsman created the amulet by pouring –extremely pure— copper melt into a mold that was previously created using lost-wax casting. The study was published in the journal Nature.
**Am sure , by now some of you would be wondering - if Baluchistan really has such an old Hindu civilisation from it's pre-Islamic era , then why haven't we heard more about it ???
Well , besides the reluctance of Pakistani authorities to highlight the ancient Hindu heritage of their land , is the thriving multi-million dollar black market for ancient artefacts (notice the statues of Hindu Gods) smuggled into Rome , Italy . You see , the Pakistani officials gain nothing if such antiquities grace some museum , but stand to gain a fortune instead , by illegally trading them with wealthy international "collectors" of such artefacts .
QUETTA: Italian police has recovered from Rome antiques stolen from Balochistan's Mehrgarh area, said a statement issued by the provincial government.
Mehrgarh, which is located in Bolan district, has a history of civilisation that goes back to thousands of years.
The Balochistan government said late on Tuesday that the Italian police had on Monday recovered the antiques from Rome, which were stolen from Mehrgarh.
The government did not give details about any arrests in relation to the theft or the value of the antiques. The recovered antiques are said to be thousands of years old and are considered highly valuable in the international market, the statement said.
Chief Minister Balochistan Dr Abdul Malik Baloch expressed pleasure over the recovery of the antiques and directed Secretary Archives to contact the Pakistani embassy in Rome for an immediate return of the antiques.
Prominent local historian Noor Khan Mohammad Hassani told Dawn that there was no mechanism in place to guard antiques in Balochistan.
"People have stolen artifacts and material that represents our history, our identity," Hassani said, adding that certain people were stealing antiquities from Balochistan to sell them in the international market.
Mehrgarh is regarded as among the oldest civilisations across the globe, with historians saying it could be at least eight thousand years old.
@Soretna , thanks for sharing this updated video....I watched it again , then read your other post about Reptilians in ancient Egypt and - Bingo !!
**I got a sudden brainwave that the Egyptian God Osiris , who Dr. Zahi Hawass himself candidly admitted (in this updated video you sent) , may have been buried in an underwater Sarcophagus beneath the Giza Sphinx , was always depicted by the ancient Egyptians , as having GREEN coloured skin !!!!
In terms of "forbidden knowledge" about such matters , Dr. Zahi Hawass is of course the prime suspect - he clearly belongs to the "Establishment" , that wants to cover up all of this...but there is another researcher , a freelancer , who probably knows as much as the "Gatekeeper" , Dr. Zahi Hawass himself !
***That other researcher's name is John Anthony West . Sometime in the 1990s , he somehow managed to sneak into the tunnels beneath the Giza Sphinx and figured out all that lies hidden beneath the Sphinx....!
(An interesting similarity between the Giza Sphinx and the Baluchistan Sphinx , is that both were carved from limestone bedrock)
Net , Net , was Osiris of ancient Egypt , a powerful Reptilian entity that they worshipped ?? What do you think ?
Nothing can prepare a first-time visitor for the awe-inspiring and humbling experience of meeting the Great Sphinx face to face. No matter who you are, no matter what your disposition and temperament are, the Great Sphinx of Giza will not leave you unmoved.
Astronomy Joins The Sphinx Debate
A Lucky Turn Of The Spade
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