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From Fergana in Uzbekistan
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From Tassili in the Sahara.
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An American astronaut Perhaps the earliest space travellers also wore suits like this.
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With such enormous estimates a couple of million men more or less does not matter. But one thing is clear—they all had to be fed. There were not only a host of construction workers, stone-masons, engineers and sailors, there were not only hundreds of thousands of slaves, but also a well-equipped army, a large and pampered priesthood, countless merchants, farmers and officials, and last but not least the Pharaonic household living on the fat of the land. Could they all, all have lived on the scanty yields of agriculture in the Nile delta?
I shall be told that the stone blocks used for building the temple were moved on rollers. In other words, wooden rollers! But the Egyptians would scarcely have felled and turned into rollers the few trees, mainly palms, that then (as now) grew in Egypt, because the dates from the palms were urgently needed for food and the trunks and fronds were the only tilings giving shade to the dried up ground. But they must have been wooden rollers, otherwise there would not be even the feeblest technical explanation of the building of the pyramids. Did the Egyptians import wood? In order to import wood there must have been a sizeable fleet, and even after it had been landed in Alexandria the wood would have had to be transported up the Nile to Cairo. Since the Egyptians did not have horses and carts at the time of the building of the Great Pyramid, there was no other possibility. The horse and cart was not introduced until the seventeenth dynasty, about 1600 B.C. My kingdom for a convincing explanation of the transport of the stone blocks! Of course the scholars say that wooden rollers were needed ....
There are many problems connected with the technology of the pyramid builders and no genuine solutions.
How did the Egyptians carve tombs out of the rock? What resources did they have in order to lay out a maze of galleries and rooms? The walls are smooth and mostly decorated with paintings in relief. The shafts slope down into the rocky soil; they have steps built in the best tradition of craftsmanship that lead to the burial chambers far below Hordes of tourists stand gaping in amazement at them, but none of them gets an explanation of the mysterious technique used in their excavation. Yet it is firmly established that the Egyptians were masters of the art of tunnelling from the earliest times, for the old rock-cut tombs are worked in exactly the same way as the more recent ones There is no difference between the tomb of Tety from the sixth dynasty and the tomb of Rameses I from the New Kingdom, although there is a minimum of 1,000 years between the building of the two tombs. Obviously the Egyptians had not learnt anything new to add to their old technique. In fact the more recent edifices tend increasingly to be poor copies of their ancient models.
The tourist who bumps his way to the Pyramid of Cheops to the west of Cairo on a camel called Wellington or Napoleon, depending on his nationality, gets the strange sensation in the pit of his stomach that relics of the mysterious past always produce. The guide tells him that ,1 Pharaoh had a burial place built here. And with that bit of rehashed erudition he rides homewards, after taking some impressive photographs. The Pyramid of Cheops, in particular, has inspired hundreds of crazy and untenable theories. In the 600-page-long book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid by Charles Piazzi Smith, published in 1864, we can read about many hair-raising links between the pyramid and our globe
Yet even after a highly critical examination, it still contains some facts that should stimulate us to reflection.
It is well-known that the ancient Egyptians practised a solar religion. Their sun god, Ra, travelled through the heavens in a bark. Pyramid texts of the Old Kingdom even describe heavenly journeys by the king, obviously made with the help of the gods and their boats. So the gods and kings of the Egyptians were also involved with flying ....
Is it really a coincidence that the height of the Pyramid of Cheops multiplied by 1,000 million corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun? That is to say, 93 million miles. Is it a coincidence that a meridian running through the pyramid divides continents and oceans into two exactly equal halves? Is it coincidence that the area of the base of the pyramid divided by twice its height gives the celebrated figure (Pi) = 3.14159, discovered by Ludolf? Is it coincidence that calculations of the weight of the earth were found and is it also coincidence that the rocky ground on which the structure stands is carefully and accurately levelled?
There is not a single clue to explain why the builder of the Pyramid of Cheops, the Pharaoh Khufu, chose that particular rocky terrain in the desert as the site for his edifice. It is conceivable that there was a natural cleft in the rock which he made use of for the colossal building, while another explanation, though only a feeble one, may be that he wanted to watch the progress of the work from his summer palace. Both reasons are against all common sense. In the first case it would certainly have been more practical to locate the building site nearer the eastern quarries in order to shorten transport distances, and in the second it is hard to imagine that the Pharaoh wanted to be disturbed year after year by the din that filled building sites day and night even in those days.
Since there is so much to be said against the textbook explanations of the choice of site, one might reasonably ask whether the 'gods' did not have their say here, too, even if it was by way of the priesthood. But if that explanation is accepted, there is one more important proof of my theory of the Utopian past of mankind. For the pyramid not only divides continents and oceans into two equal halves, but also lies at the centre of gravity of the continents. If the facts noted here are not coincidences—and it seems extremely difficult to believe that they are—then the building site was chosen by beings who knew all about the spherical shape of the earth and the distribution of continents and seas. In this connexion let us not forget Piri Reis's maps' It cannot all be coincidence or be explained away as fairy-stones.
With what power, with what 'machines', with what technical resources was the rocky terrain levelled at all? How did the master-builders drive the tunnels downwards? And how did they illuminate them? Neither here nor in the rock-cut tombs in the Valley of Kings were torches or anything similar used. There are no blackened ceilings or walls or even the slightest evidence that traces of blackening have been removed. How and with what were the stone blocks cut out of the quarries? With sharp edges and smooth sides? How were they transported and joined together to the thousandth of an inch? Once again there is a wealth of explanations for anyone to choose from: inclined planes, and tracks along which the stones were pushed, scaffolding and ramps. And naturally the labour of