PART FIVE

ANCIENT HIGH TECH
 

26 - A Conversation with Peter Tompkins

Secrets of Forgotten Worlds

 J. Douglas Kenyon

For the many who date their personal discovery of the wisdom of the ancients and the power of unseen forces with the late 1960s and early '70s. two books enjoyed nearly unequaled influence.

The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of the Great Pyramid were both runaway best sellers. which. if nothing else. put the orthodox establishment to considerable trouble defending itself.

While today notions such as the preference of plants for good music and the miraculous measurements of the Great Pyramid may have become somewhat passe. twenty-five years ago they caused quite a stir and in the process earned not a little notoriety for the author Peter Tompkins. For one who had dared to challenge so flagrantly the titans of the scientific establishment. Tompkins achieved not only celebrity but also. for a time. an unprecedented measure of credibility.

Both books remain in print but Tompkins. though scrupulous in his research. came to be dismissed by the conventional as something of a crank.

Two of his other books. Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids and Secrets of the Soil, have done little to change his undeserved reputation; nevertheless. he remains busy and unrepentant. He is a seminal. fascinating figure. and Atlantis Rising was lucky enough to interview him in order to discuss his views on a number of interests that he shares with the magazine.

Originally from Georgia. Tompkins grew up in Europe. but returned to the United States to study at Harvard. College. though. was interrupted by World War II. Initially employed by the New York Herald-Tribune, Tompkins began the war as a correspondent.

Soon he was broadcasting for Mutual and NBC. By the end of the war he was working with Edward R. Murrow and CBS. In 1941. his reporting career was interrupted by a stint in the TOI (a precursor of the OSS. which ultimately became the CIA).

Five months were spent behind enemy lines.

"At the Anzio landing." he recalls. "General Donovan and General Park sent me into Rome ahead of the landing. and had they not failed to arrive. we would have had a big victory. But as it was. we got stuck. Then I had to send out radio messages four or five times a day about what the Germans were doing - where they were going to attack and in what strength. and so on."

During the mission. Tompkins recruited numerous agents who were sent north to link up with the partisans and help clear the way for the planned Allied advance. Eventually he went to Berlin.

When. at the close of the war. Truman abolished the OSS. Tompkins found he had no desire to join the newly organized CIA and went his own way.

The years following the war were spent in Italy learning moviemaking and scriptwriting and developing a healthy distaste for censorship:

"I realized the only way I could say what I wanted to say was by writing books. They don't get censored."

Even then, he was finding his views made him anathema to many.

"I got thrown out of more dinner parties," he chuckles, "for talking about metaphysical - or what were considered crazy - notions at the time, so I learned to be quiet."

Being quiet in print, though, has not been his wont. Nor has censorship of a sort been entirely escaped.

Tompkins believes his most recent book, Secrets of the Soils, which he describes as,

"a cry to save the planet from the chemical killers," was virtually "squashed by the publisher," afraid of scaring the public.

A follow-up on the Secret Life of Plants, the book spelled out alternatives to the use of chemical fertilizers that Tompkins says,

"are absolutely useless and only lead to killing the soil and the microorganisms, poisoning the plants and, ultimately, animals and humans."

Tompkins believes such fertilizers to be primary contributors to the spread of cancer.

The writer has found his plans thwarted not just by publishers.

One idea to use a promising technology he had chanced upon to virtually X-ray the Great Pyramid was apparently blocked by Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Antiquities Authority.

"It would have cost about fifty grand to X-ray the whole pyramid and find out what the hell really is in there," he says. "It seemed to me that it would make an interesting television program, but no one was interested. It was very strange."

On the recent highly publicized work of the Belgian astronomer Robert Bauval purporting to show an alignment between the pyramids and the constellation Orion, Tompkins shrugs:

"It's a hypothesis, but it's not provable. I'm only interested in those things about the Great Pyramid that are solid, that are indisputable."

Tompkins wants more than "endless theories," of which he claims to have a roomful.

But, he concedes,

"if you think of the Dogon and the Sirius connection, it's obvious that, on this planet, people knew a great deal more about astronomy, and may have been linked in one way or another with the stars. But I'm only interested when someone comes along with fairly hard proof."

Proof of advanced ancient astronomical knowledge, Tompkins believes, is abundant in much of the ancient architecture.

"It's obvious that all the great temples in Egypt were astronomically oriented and geodetically placed," he says.

He is especially interested in Tel el-Amarna, which he sees as the subject of a possible future book.

The astronomical knowledge incorporated into the city built by Akhenaton Tompkins considers "mind blowing," as he puts it. Unfortunately for his plans, though, Livio Catullo Stecchini, the Italian scholar and authority on ancient measurement upon whom Tompkins relied for much of his work in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, is dead.

Interestingly, Tompkins never permitted Secrets of the Great Pyramid to be published in Italy because the publisher wanted to omit Stecchini's appendix.

The injustice still angers Tompkins:

"Here's an unrecognized Italian genius. but the Italians said if you print it. you can't have the book."

Tompkins's subsequent book. on the Mexican pyramids. further reinforced his view that the ancients were possessed of advanced astronomical knowledge.

Though not convinced that the similarities between Egypt and Mexico prove the existence of a mother culture like Atlantis. as some have suggested. he does believe,

"it's obvious that people went back and forth across the Atlantic."

And he believes the Mexico builders used the same system of measurements as the Egyptians.

"I should write another whole book on the subject of what was known on both sides of the Atlantic." he says.

During his Mexico experience, Tompkins succeeded - at great expense and difficulty - in filming the effect of the rising and setting sun at the equinox on the temple at Chichen Itza.

"It's absolutely staggering." he says. "but you can see that snake come alive. just on that one day. It goes up and down the steps. We filmed it and it's just beautiful. How did they orient that pyramid so that would happen only on the equinox?"

Answering that question led Tompkins to New Zealand and Geoffrey Hodgeson. who gained fame in the 1920s by clairvoyantly pinpointing the precise position of the planets at a given time.

Convinced by Hodgeson's demonstration, Tompkins concluded that he knew the secret by which the ancients were able to achieve their precise astronomical achievements without access to modern instruments.

"They didn't need the instruments." he says. "because the instruments were built into them. Clairvoyantly they could tell exactly where the planets were and understand their motion."

Such understanding. while available to the ancients. has been largely forgotten by alienated high-tech Western society.

"We've closed ourselves in." he says. "We've pulled down the shades on our second sight."

Fascinated by clairvoyance and the potential it represents, Tompkins has tried to deploy it as a resource for his more scientific investigation.

When his own search for concrete proof of the existence of Atlantis took him to the Bahamas. he used every tool at his disposal. When one site appeared to be littered with ancient marble columns and pediments. it was a psychic who told him that the spot was nothing more than the final resting place of a nineteenth-century ship bound for New Orleans with a marble mausoleum on board.

On the more scientific side. clandestine core sampling of the celebrated Bimini Road convinced him the pavement was not man-made but only beach rock.

It took a University of Miami geologist to give him what he wanted. Dr. Cesare Emiliani showed Tompkins the result of his own core sampling over the years in the Gulf of Mexico. Here was conclusive proof of a great inundation of water in about 9000 B.C.E.

Tompkins remembers:

"Emiliani said. 'They say that Atlantis has been found in the Azores and found off the coast of Spain and off the East Coast of the United States. All of these places.' he said. 'could have been part of the Atlantean empire that was submerged at exactly the date when Plato said it was.'"

Several years earlier Tompkins had written the foreword for the English translation of Otto Muck's book The Secret of Atlantis.

Muck's hypothesis that Atlantis had been sunk by an asteroid Tompkins thought very plausible. and he still thinks so. though it remains to be proved. In Emiliani's work. though. Tompkins believes he has found the only geological proof on the subject.

Of course. proved or not. Atlantis. like many other controversial notions. is not likely to be readily accepted by the intellectual establishment. The reasons for this seem clear to Tompkins:

"They would have to rewrite all their archeological schoolbooks if some of this is proved. If John West's theory about the Sphinx is correct (that it's over ten thousand years old). it's going to change a lot of stuff."

By way of analogy he describes a man he knows in Canada who has developed a cure for cancer. and points out what a threat such a discovery is to the billion-dollar-a-year cancer industry.

A lifetime of searching the hidden byways has made Tompkins philosophical about his own inevitable physical transition. While acknowledging that he is "getting on," he says.

"I'm infinitely more peaceful about the prospect of death. Like time. it's sort of an illusion. I mean. you lose the body. but what's that? You've had many before and you'll probably have more after. Maybe you'll do better without them."

At any rate. his productivity has yet to suffer.

His next book promises to prove the existence of elemental creatures. The project was inspired by the recent scientific validation of the work of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in mapping subatomic structure. Before the turn of the century. the two leaders of the Theosophical Society had decided to use their yogic powers to analyze the elements.

Leadbeater saw and Besant drew. When their work was published. no one paid any attention. After all. not only was it "impossible" to do what they were doing. but their results also contradicted conventional science.

Then. in the 1970s. an English physicist discovered their work and realized that they were accurately describing quarks and other features of the atom that had only recently been discovered. With such powerful vindication established.

Tompkins now goes into the detailed work that the two produced on elemental spirits. as well as the work of the renowned clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner.

"If you put it all together." he says. "and realize these people could actually many years ahead of the discovery of atoms and isotopes accurately describe and draw them. and then look at their description of the nature spirits. their function on the planet. their connection with human beings. and why it is that we should reconnect with them. you have to listen. I mean. it's black and white. You can't escape it."

27 - Ancient Agriculture, in Search of the Missing Links

Is the Inescapable Evidence of a Lost Fountainhead

of Civilization to Be Found Growing in Our Fields?

Will Hart

One of the most curious aspects of history's mysteries is that there is anything mysterious to puzzle over.

Why should our history be full of anomalies and enigmas? We have become conditioned to accept these incongruities. but if we turn the situation around. it really does not seem to make sense. We know the histories of America. Europe. Rome. and Greece with some precision back three thousand years. just as we know our own personal histories. We would consider it very odd and unacceptable if we did not.

However. when we go farther back into prehistory than Babylonia to Sumeria and ancient Egypt. things get very fuzzy.

There can be few possible explanations:

1) our ideas and beliefs about the way history happened conflict with the truth

2) we have collective amnesia for unknown reasons and/or some combination of both

Imagine that you woke up one morning with complete amnesia. no idea of how you got on this planet and no memories of your own past.

 We are in an analogous situation regarding the history of civilization. and it is just as disturbing. Or let's say that you are living in an old Victorian-style mansion full of odd. ancient artifacts. That is pretty much our situation as we wander around ancient ruins and through the galleries of museums wondering who made all this stuff. and how. and why.

One hundred and fifty years ago. much of the history in the Old Testament was considered pure fiction. including the existence of Sumeria (the biblical Shinar). Akkad. and Assyria. But those forgotten pieces of our past were discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Nineveh and Ur were found. Their artifacts have completely changed our view of history.

Until fairly recently. we did not know the roots of our own civilization. We had no idea who might have invented the wheel. agriculture. writing. cities. or any of the rest of it. Additionally. for some curious. inexplicable reason. not that many people cared to know. and even historians were willing to let the ruins of human history lie buried under the desert sands. That attitude seems as strange as the mysteries themselves.

Would you simply accept the situation if you had amnesia. or would you do everything in your power to reconstruct your past and your identity?

It seems that there is something we are hiding from ourselves. Some will say it was a mind-wrenching visit by ancient astronauts; others will argue there was an ancient human civilization destroyed by cataclysm. In either event. we have apparently buried and forgotten those episodes because the memory is too painful.

Personally, I have not reached a final conclusion regarding those ideas; however. I am sure the orthodox theories presented by conventional archeologists. historians. and anthropologists do not hold up under intense scrutiny.

It is curious that we have developed the capability to send space probes to Mars and to crack the human genome, and even to clone ourselves, but we are still fumbling around trying to understand the mysteries of the pyramid cultures, of prehistory, and of how we made the quantum leap from the Stone Age to civilization in the first place! It does not add up.

Why should we, as a species, not have maintained the threads directly and concretely linking us to our past?

I have this gut feeling that investigative reporters and homicide detectives get when they've been digging into an unsolved case for a long time. We are missing some pieces and/or we are not looking at the situation correctly, and we are probably overlooking the meaning of obvious clues because we have been conditioned to think about the facts in a certain way.

Additionally, we have not asked all of the right questions. It never hurts to go back to basics and review everything you think you know and what the real "facts" are.

We have always had the choice of trying to make sense of the world or not. Life has given us an incredible amount of leeway and freedom when it comes to knowledge acquisition. Our ancestors mastered the basic rules of the game of survival during the incredibly long time span of the Stone Age. They did not need to know that Earth revolved around the Sun or the nature of atomic structure to succeed.

But after the last ice age, something strange occurred, and the human race went through a sudden transformation that sent our race into unknown territory.

We are still reaping the consequences of those explosive events.

Let us go back and set the stage of early human evolution as science depicts it unfolding. Our ancestors found themselves in a world full of natural wonders, facing the challenges that nature set before them, all having to do with basic survival.

To begin with, they had no tools and no choice other than to meet the challenges head-on, just as other animals did. We have to keep the realities of this background in perspective. We know exactly how Stone Age people lived because many tribes around the world were still living in this manner during the past five hundred years, and they have been studied intensively and extensively.

We know that humanity was fairly homogeneous throughout the Stone Age. Even 10,000 years ago, people lived pretty much the same way, whether they were in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas.

They lived very close to nature, hunting wildlife and gathering wild plants, using stone tools and stone, wood, and bone weapons. They had learned the art of making and controlling fire and they had very accurate and detailed knowledge about the habits of animals, the lay of the land, nature's cycles, and how to distinguish between edible and poisonous plants.

This knowledge and their way of life had been painstakingly acquired over millions of years of experience. Stone Age humans have been wrongly portrayed and misunderstood. They were not stupid brutes, and there would be no modern mind and no modern civilization without the long evolution they went through to establish the basis for all that would eventually happen.

They were keenly aware, entirely in communion with nature, and unquestionably stronger and more muscularly robust than we are today.

In reality, the natural world we inherited from Stone Age man was entirely intact. Everything was as pristine and virginal as it had been during the millions of years of human evolution. Nature bestowed her bounty upon those early humans and they learned to live within that natural framework.

Viewed from a statistical perspective, the human status quo is the hunter-gatherer culture that we lived in for 99.99 percent of our existence as a species. at least according to modern science.

It is very easy to understand how our remote ancestors lived; life changed very little and very slowly. Early man adapted and stuck with what worked. It was a simple but demanding way of life that was passed on from generation to generation by example and oral tradition.

There really does not seem to be much mystery about it. But that all starts to change radically after the last ice age. Suddenly. a few tribes began to embrace a different way of life. Giving up their nomadic existence. they settled down and started raising certain crops and domesticating several animal species. The first steps toward civilization are often described but never really examined at a deep level.

What compelled them to change abruptly? It is more problematic to explain than we have been led to believe.
 

The first issue is very basic and straightforward.

Stone Age people did not eat grains. and grains are the basis of agriculture and the diet of civilization. Their diet consisted of lean wild meats and fresh wild greens and fruits.

To begin with. we will be looking at the evolutionary discordance from a general standpoint by examining the mismatch between characteristics of foods eaten since the "agricultural revolution" that began 10.000 years ago and our genus's prior two-million-year history as hunter-gatherers. The present-day edible grass seeds simply would have been unavailable to most of mankind until after their domestication because of their limited geographic distribution.

Consequently. the human genome is most ideally adapted to those foods that were available to pre-agricultural man.

This presents us with an enigma that is every bit as difficult to penetrate as the building of the Great Pyramid. How and why did our ancestors make this leap? As they had little to no experience with wild grains. how did they know what to do to process them. or even that they were indeed edible?

Beyond that. by the time of the abrupt appearance of the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. grains had already been hybridized. which demands a high degree of knowledge about and experience with plants. as well as time. If you have any experience with wild plants or fruits. or any experience of farming. then you know that wild breeds are very different from hybridized cultivars.

It is well established that hunter-gatherers had no experience with plant breeding or animal domestication, and it should have taken much longer to go from zero to an advanced state than historians insist it did.
 

We must ask, Where did their knowledge originate? How did Stone Age man suddenly acquire the skills to domesticate plants and animals and do it with a high degree of effectiveness?

We find purebred dog species like salukis and greyhounds in Egyptian and Sumerian art: How were they bred so quickly from wolves?

The following issues make the conventional explanations difficult to support: 1) mankind's very slow process of evolution in the Stone Age; 2) the sudden creation and implementation of new tools, new foodstuffs, and new social forms that lacked precedence. If early humans had eaten wild grains and experimented with hybridization for some lengthy time period and evolved in obvious developmental stages, then we could comprehend it.

But how can we accept the scenario of the Stone Age to the Great Pyramid of Giza?

Plant breeding is an exacting science and we know it was being done in Sumeria, in Egypt, and by the ancient Israelites. If you doubt that statement, consider that we are growing the same primary grain crops that were developed by the ancients. That is a strange fact and it begs close scrutiny.

There are hundreds of other possible wild plants that could be domesticated. Why have we not developed new grains from the other wild species of the past three thousand years? How could they pick the best crops with the extremely meager knowledge that they would have possessed had they just emerged from the Stone Age?

They not only figured out all these complex issues, but they also quickly discovered the principles of making secondary products out of cereals. The Sumerians were making bread and beer five thousand years ago and yet their very close ancestors - at least according to anthropologists - knew nothing of these things and lived by picking plants and killing wild beasts. It is almost as if they were given a set of instructions by someone who had already developed these things.

But it could not have been from their ancestors, because they were hunters and plant collectors.

It is very difficult to reconstruct these rapid-fire transitions, especially when they were accompanied by radical changes in every other feature of human life. How and why did humans who had known nothing but a nomadic existence and an egalitarian social structure so quickly and so radically change? What compelled them to build cities and create highly stratified civilizations when they knew nothing about such organizations?

During the Epipaleolithic Era, circa 8000-5500 B.C.E., the tribes in the Nile Valley were living in semi-subterranean oval houses roofed with mud and sticks. They made simple pottery and used stone axes and flint arrowheads. They were still seminomadic and moved seasonally from one camp to another. The vast majority of tribes around the globe were living in a similar state.

How do we get from there to quarrying, dressing, and manipulating one- to sixty-ton stones into the world's most massive structure, and in such a short time?

This quick transition is all but impossible to explain rationally. All inventions and cultural developments require time and a sequence of easily identified developmental stages. Where are the precursors? It is very easy to trace this path of development during the Stone Age from very primitive tools to chipped ax heads and flint arrowheads. That is what we should find as civilization develops.

But where are the smaller-scale pyramids - much smaller? Where are the crude stone carvings that precede the sophisticated stelae? The slow evolution of forms, from simple to complex, is all that human beings knew, not mud and thatch-roof huts and then large-scale architecture employing megalithic blocks of stone and complex artwork demanding master craftsmanship.

But the developmental phases are simply not there. Sumerian cuneiform tablets describe fairly complex systems of irrigation and farming, bakeries, and the making of beer. The Bible tells us that the ancient Jews raised grapes and made wine, and both leavened and unleavened bread. We take these things for granted but the assumptions underlying them are never questioned. Where did they learn to hybridize bread wheat and turn it into flour and bake the flour into bread in such a short time span?

Ditto for viticulture. These are not simple or obvious products.

We assume that their ancestors developed farming skills over a prolonged period of time, which is a logical expectation. But that is not the case. The very first and very primitive agricultural experiments that have been documented by archeologists occurred in Jarmo and Jericho.

These were small, humble villages that raised a few simple crops, but they still hunted game and gathered plants, so they were not strictly agricultural communities.

The problem is that there is no intermediate step between them and Sumeria and Egypt, just as there are no small-scale ziggurats, pyramids, or any progression showing that Stone Age artisans could suddenly carve intricate statuary and stelae.

The orthodox theories are starting to rely more on the "official" pronouncements of authorities rather than on well-argued and well-documented facts. We have reached a crisis in the fields of anthropology, history, and archeology because the conventional theses are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies.

The explanations are thin and threadbare and becoming more ponderous and unable to support their own weight. The pieces do not lock together and fit into a smooth, coherent whole.

We have mentioned previously in this book a quote by the eminent paleo-anthropologist Louis

Leakey. Some years ago, while giving a lecture at a university, Leakey was asked by a student about the evolutionary "missing link."

He replied,

"There is not one missing link, there are hundreds of links missing."

This is even more true for cultural than biological evolution. Until we find those links, we are like amnesiacs struggling to make sense out of our modern lives and our collective history.
 

28 - Atlantean Technology: How Advanced?

What Does the Evidence Really Show?

Frank Joseph

Edgar Cayce said that the inhabitants of Atlantis operated aircraft and submarines. and were in possession of a fabulous technology superior to that achieved in the twentieth century.

The question of so advanced a technology in ancient times is the most difficult argument for many investigators to accept. especially Cayce's descriptions of achievements beyond anything known today.

He said the Atlanteans were adept at,

"photographing from a distance" and "reading inscriptions through walls - even at distances."

The Atlantean,

"electrical knife was in such a shape. with the use of the metals. as to be used as the means for bloodless surgery. as would be termed today - by the very staying forces used which formed coagulating forces in bodies where larger arteries or veins were to be entered or cut." he said.

Refugees from Atlantis supposedly brought to Egypt,

"electron music where color. vibration. and activities make for toning same with the emotions of individuals or peoples that may make for their temperaments being changed.

 

And same may be applied by the entity in those associations with what may be called the temperaments of individuals. where they are possessed - as it were - by the influences from without. and those that are ill from diseases that have become of a nature or vibratory influence within the body as to set themselves as a vibration in the body."

Cayce told of,

"a death ray that brought from the bowels of the Earth itself - when turned into the sources of supply - those destructions to portions of the land."

This "death ray" may be today's laser because.

Cayce said in 1933. it,

"will be found in the next twenty-five years."

He spoke of,

"electrical appliances. when these were used by those peoples to make for beautiful buildings without but temples of sin within."

The Atlanteans were skilled in,

"the application of the electrical forces and influences especially in the association and the activities of same upon metals; not only as to their location but as to the manner of the activity of same as related to the refining of some and the discovery of others. and the use of the various forms or transportation of same - or transformation of same to and through those influences in the experience."

At the time Cayce said that the Atlanteans used electrical current for the working of metals. there was no evidence that the ancients knew anything about electricity. let alone how it might be applied to metallurgy.

Then in 1938. Dr. Wilhelm Koenig. a German archeologist. was inventorying artifacts at the Iraq State Museum in Baghdad when he noticed what seemed to be the impossible resemblance of a collection of two-thousand-year-old clay jars to a series of dry cell storage batteries. His curiosity had been aroused by the peculiar internal details of the jars. each of which enclosed a copper cylinder capped at the bottom by a disk (also of copper) and sealed with asphalt.

A few years later. Dr. Koenig's suspicion was put to the test. Willard Gray. a technician at the General Electric High Voltage Laboratory in Pittsfield. Massachusetts. finished an exact reproduction of the Baghdad jars. He found that an iron rod inserted into the copper tube and filled with citric acid generated 1.5 to 2.75 volts of electricity. enough to electroplate an object with gold.

Gray's experiment demonstrated that practical electricity could have been applied to metalworking by ancient craftsmen after all.

Doubtless. the "Baghdad battery." as it has since become known. was not the first of its kind - it was a device that represented an unknown technology preceding it by perhaps thousands of years. and might have included far more spectacular feats of electrical engineering long since lost.

According to Cayce. the Atlanteans did not confine their application of electricity to metallurgy.

They had,

"the use of the sound waves. where the manners in which lights were used as a means of communication." he said.

"Elevators and the connecting tubes that were used by compressed air and steam" operated in Atlantean buildings.

Atlantean technology soared into aeronautics.

Airships of elephant hides were,

"made into the containers for the gases that were used as both lifting and for the impelling of the crafts about the various portions of the continent. and even abroad... They could not only pass through that called air. or that heavier. but through that of water."

Manned flight is practically emblematic of our times. and we find such references to ancient aeronautics incredible.

Yet serious researchers believe Peruvian balloonists may have surveyed the famous Nazca Lines two thousand or more years ago from aerial perspectives. Despite reluctance to take Cayce at his word. equivocal yet tantalizing evidence does exist to at least suggest that manned flight may indeed have occurred in the ancient world.

The earliest substantiated journeys aloft took place in the fifth century B.C.E.. even before Plato was born. when the Greek scientist Archytas of Tarentum invented a leather kite large enough to carry a young boy. It was actually used by Greek armies in the earliest known example of aerial reconnaissance.

More amazing was the discovery made in the Upper Nile Valley near the close of the nineteenth century.

The story is best told by the famous author and explorer David Hatcher Childress: "In 1898. a model was found in an Egyptian tomb near Sakkara. It was labeled a 'bird' and cataloged Object 6347 at the Egyptian Museum. in Cairo.

Then. in 1969. Dr. Khalil Massiha was startled to see that the 'bird' not only had straight wings. but also an upright tail-fin. To Dr. Massiha. the object appeared to be that of a model airplane.

It is made of wood. weighs 39.12 grams and remains in good condition.

"The wingspan is 18 cm. the aircraft's nose is 3.2 cm long. and the overall length is 18 cm. The extremities of the aircraft and the wing-tips are aerodynamically shaped. Apart from a symbolic eye and two short lines under the wings. it has no decorations nor has it any landing legs. Experts have tested the model and found it airworthy."

In all. fourteen similar flying models have been recovered from ancient digs in Egypt.

Interestingly. the Saqqara example came from an archeological zone identified with the earliest dynastic periods. at the very beginning of pharaonic civilization. which suggests that the aircraft was not a later development but belonged instead to the first years of civilization in the Nile Valley.

The Egyptians' anomalous artifacts may indeed have been flying "models" of the real thing operated by their Atlantean forefathers.

The Cairo Museum's wooden model of a working glider implies the ancient Egyptians at least understood the fundamental principles of heavier-than-air. man-made flight. Perhaps such knowledge was the only legacy left from a former time. when those principles were applied more seriously.

The quote from Childress is excerpted from his book Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis (coauthored with Ivan Sanderson). the most complete examination of the subject. In it. he was able to assemble surprising evidence from the earliest Hindu traditions of aircraft supposedly flown in ancient times.

Then known as Vimanas, they appear in the famous Ramayana and Mahabharata and the less-well-known but earliest of the Indian epics. the Drona Parva.

Aircraft were discussed in surprisingly technical detail throughout several manuscripts of ancient India. The Vymaanika-Shaastra, Manusa, and Samarangana Sutradhara, all classic sources, additionally describe "aerial cars" that were allegedly operating from deeply prehistoric times.

Each of these epics deals with a former age. hinting at the last. bellicose. cataclysmic years of Atlantis. Childress's collection of impressive source materials dating back to the dawn of Hindu literature heavily underscores Cayce's description of flying devices in Atlantis. It is important to understand. however. that these vimanas had virtually nothing in common with modern aviation. because their motive power was utterly unlike combustion or jet engines. They also had little to do with aeronautics as we have come to understand it.

Apparently. the Atlanteans operated two types of flying vehicles: gas-filled dirigible-like craft and heavier-than-air vimanas directed from a central power source on the ground. While the latter represented an aeronautical technology beyond any known aircraft, the balloons Cayce describes featured a detail that suggests their authenticity.

He said their skin was made of elephant hides. They probably would have been too heavy to serve as envelopes for the containment of any lighter-thanair gas. But lighter, expandable, and non-leaking elephant bladders might have worked. In any case, Cayce says that the Atlanteans used the animals, which were native to their kingdom, for a variety of purposes.

The Critias also mentions that elephants abounded on the island of Atlantis.

Skeptics long faulted Plato for including this out-of-place pachyderm until the 1960s, when oceanographers dredging the sea bottom of the Atlantic Ocean some two hundred miles west of the Portuguese coast unexpectedly hauled up hundreds of elephant bones at several different locations.

The scientists concluded that the animals had anciently wandered across a now submerged land bridge extending from the Atlantic shores of North Africa into formerly dry land long since sunk beneath the sea. Their discovery gave special credence not only to Plato, but to Cayce as well.

No less surprising are the submarines known to the early-fifth-century-B.C.E. Greek historian Herodotus and the first-century-C.E. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder.

Even Aristotle wrote about submarines. His most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, was said to have been on board a glass-covered undersea vessel during an extended shake-down cruise beneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea, around 320 B.C.E.

While these submersibles may have gone back twenty-three centuries or so, Atlantis had already vanished about one thousand years earlier. Even so, if such inventions took place in Classical times, they might just as well have operated during the Bronze Age, which was not much different technologically.

Ancient aeronautics paled in comparison to even greater technological achievements, as Atlantean scientists succeeded,

"in the breaking up of the atomic forces to produce impelling force to those means and modes of transportation, or of travel, or of lifting large weights or of changing the faces or forces of nature itself," said Edgar Cayce.

The same life-reading explains that explosives were invented by the Atlanteans. Seven years earlier, he mentioned what he called "the Atlantean period, when those first of the explosives were made."

Ignatius Donnelly, the father of modern Atlantology, wrote even earlier that explosives were developed in Atlantis.

Cayce explained that the Atlanteans were able to create such an advanced society because their civilization developed over a more or less continuous history until the final catastrophe. Their cultural evolution had been graced with many centuries of growth in which to develop and perfect the scientific arts. The basis of this ancient technology was an understanding and application of crystal power.

Through it, the motive forces of nature were somehow directed to serve human needs. Transportation on, above, and under the sea became possible, and long-distance communication bound together the world of Atlantis.

We find such a high level of material progress set in prehistoric times incomprehensible and beyond belief. Yet many better-known civilizations achieved technological breakthroughs that were forgotten when their societies fell, only to be rediscovered sometimes thousands of years later.

In Middle America, for example, Mayan accomplishments in celestial mechanics were not matched until the last century. Incan agricultural techniques, abandoned with the Spanish Conquest, yielded three times more produce than farming methods employed in Peru today.

At the same time Plato was writing about Atlantis, his fellow Greeks were sailing the Alexandris.

More than four hundred feet long, she was a colossal ship, the likes of which would not be seen again for another two thousand years. A pregnancy test in use among eighteenth-dynasty Egyptians was not discovered until the 1920s. As for Egypt, our modern world's top engineers lack the knowhow capable of reproducing the Great Pyramid in all its details. Certainly, far more was lost with the fall of ancient civilization than has yet been found.

Moreover, our times do not have a monopoly on human beings of great genius and inventiveness. That they were able to create complex technologies in other times and societies long since forgotten should not overtax our credulity. And if one of those lost epochs belonged to a place known as Atlantis, we have it on the authority of Western civilization's most influential philosopher and the foremost psychic our country has yet produced.

However they may disagree in their interpretations of the lost civilization, both metaphysical and worldwide mythological sources are almost unanimous in describing a central role for the sophisticated technology of Atlantis in its ultimate destruction.

Cayce said that the Atlanteans grew intoxicated with the material wonders made possible through quartz crystal technology. The riches and luxuries it generated inspired them with an insatiable desire for abundance.

They turned the beams of their power crystals into the very bowels of the planet, excavating for even greater mineral wealth. Prodigious amounts of high-grade copper, which fueled the bronze weapons industries of the pre-Classical world, and gold enough to sheet the walls of their city poured forth from Earth's violated cornucopia.

The copper-mining operations of prehistoric Michigan still bear the scars of Atlantean technology. For example, some unknown device enabled the ancient miners of the Upper Peninsula to sink pits vertically through sixty feet of solid rock. Another piece of lost instrumentation directed them to all the richest veins of copper hidden under the hillsides of Isle Royale and the Kewanee Peninsula.

These and similar achievements of the late fourth millennium B.C.E., which allowed the prehistoric miners to remove a minimum of half a billion pounds of raw copper, are no speculation; they have been known to archeologists for more than a century.

Perhaps in overreaching themselves through their mining operations, the Atlanteans excavated too deeply into the already seismically unstable Mid-Atlantic Ridge on which their capital perched. They were blind to the geologic consequences of their ecological selfishness, and regarded our living planet as an inexhaustible fount of mineral wealth.

Parallels with our times are uncomfortably close.

The Atlanteans reveled in an orgy of self-indulgent materialism. But at some indefinable point, long-suffering Nature rebelled. The threshold of her forbearance had been crossed, and she chastised her sinful children with a terrible punishment. Her fires of hell opened to engulf opulent Atlantis in a volcanic event so cataclysmic that it destroyed the entire island. The crumbling, incinerated city with its screaming inhabitants was dragged to the bottom of the sea and into myth.

The "great, terrible crystal" - the source of the Atlanteans' unexampled prosperity - had become the instrument of their doom.
 

29 - Archeology and the Law of Gravity

Orthodox Theory of Ancient Capability Tends to Cave In under Its Own Weight

Will Hart

The massive earthmover makes the average street pickup look like a Tonka truck.

Rated to about 350 tons, it is restricted to mining operations, as the federal highway load limit is forty tons and the truck weighs more than that without a load. I was watching it being put through its paces in the local open-pit copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. A bone-jarring flash suddenly struck me that snapped into place things that I had long been trying to get a perspective on.

The earthmover is the heaviest truck that we have in modern civilization and it can haul the heaviest loads we find littering the landscapes in Egypt, Bolivia, and Peru. At one point in my life, as I was learning the ropes of the literary world, I worked on a cement construction crew in a logging town, where I came to know about handling heavy loads and what a front-end loader could lift and a double flatbed logging truck could haul.

During the course of my thirty years of investigations into the mysteries of ancient civilizations, I have often been puzzled by the way people react to cyclopean blocks of stone being moved long distances or hoisted up into the air. These reactions were either a blank look or a shrug that said "Okay, what's the big deal?"

This response frustrated me and made me feel as if I was not communicating adequately the scope and difficulty of the problem. But I have since realized that the reason most people do not grasp the magnitude of the problem - and what the "real" enigmas of our planet are - has to do with simple, direct experience.

One hundred and fifty years ago most people lived on farms in rural areas and were commonly faced with having to haul loads of hay, logs, or whatever. They knew what it took to bale a ton of hay and lift a three-hundred-pound log or chunk of rock.

But today machines handle all of these heavy-lifting and moving jobs and we have lost our perspective. I recently had a conversation with a friend about these issues wherein I was trying to explain why the Egyptians could not have built the Great Pyramid with primitive tools and techniques.

He was skeptical. until he recalled an event that quickly shifted his attitude.

I was telling him that I would be willing to concede that the builders could handle the millions of 2.5-ton blocks if he would deal with the problem of the seventy-ton megaliths over the King's Chamber. The light went on in his head. He suddenly became animated as he told me how he and a group of friends were faced with moving a heavy pool table.

They positioned themselves about it. shoulder to shoulder. and gave the old heave-ho.

It came as a great surprise when the pool table remained rooted to the floor; they had not been able to lift it even one inch. My point sank in. You cannot use manpower to lift a seventy-ton block of granite up and out of a quarry and onto a sledge. The task increases exponentially when we consider how one-hundred-ton blocks were hoisted up and positioned more than twenty feet off the ground in the Sphinx Temple.

This is an engineering and physics problem that cannot be overcome by numbers. which is how Egyptologists try to solve it. Granite is very dense. and a twenty-foot-long block can weigh seventy tons.

How many men can physically fit around it to attempt a lift? Maybe fifty. which is not even enough manpower to hoist ten tons.
 

This is an intractable problem.

As long as Egyptologists insist that men lifted up the cyclopean blocks of stone with nothing but brute force and ropes, this problem will need to be overcome. The rest of the construction formula of the Egyptologists is moot until this primary obstacle is dealt with. If they cannot or will not prove that it was accomplished as they claim, then it is time to go beyond challenging the rest of their baseless theories.

We need to discard the whole orthodox house of cards and walk away from the so-called debate.

Returning to the 350-ton cyclopean monsters, our highest-rated commercial cranes are near their limit with this load. If anyone thinks that men, ropes, and sledges lifted and hauled loads that our heaviest equipment can barely handle, I will argue that this belief is a sign of technological illiteracy. Recently I was watching a documentary about a bridge that collapsed while a train was traveling over it. I went through a mental process similar to the copper mine example.

Locomotives, diesel or steam, weigh about two hundred tons. They are rugged, hardworking, heavy-duty pieces of machinery. There are many cyclopean blocks in Egypt and Peru that weigh as much as a locomotive. A monstrous crane was brought in to fish the locomotive out of the river. Imagine placing a locomotive on bare earth or sand. What would happen? It would immediately sink into the ground.

There is a good reason that train tracks are built on a gravel bed that has railroad ties laid down crosswise beneath the steel tracks.

Could several thousand men pull a locomotive across the sand? That is extremely doubtful. Some kind of hard-packed road would have to be constructed to take the weight and lessen the tremendous drag. As we saw above, our modern highways hold up only under loads less than forty tons.

The average eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer hauls about twenty tons, so it is obvious that loads exceeding twenty tons are indeed very heavy. Those kinds of loads were hauled all over Egypt. Where is the evidence that the necessary roads were installed? They would not have disappeared, as they would have been made out of stones and brick masonry.

Assuming a few of the ancient stone-block transport roads have been uncovered, they are perfect to test the orthodox sledge-hauling theory. The problem of how the ancients moved the heaviest loads is quite enough to crush the orthodox building theories and time lines into dust. in my estimation.

Academics are not known for being mechanically inclined. nor are they the ones doing the sweat labor during excavations out in the field. It is extraordinarily easy to put pen to paper and make a one-hundred-ton block of stone move from the quarry onto a temple wall. It is impossible to meet that challenge in the real world using manpower unaided by modern equipment.

The fact is that the Egyptologist Mark Lehner discovered this years ago when he put together an expert team to try and raise a thirty-five-ton obelisk using ancient tools and techniques. It was filmed by "NOVA."

A master stonemason was brought in to quarry the granite block from the bedrock. Unfortunately. he gave up after trying every trick he knew. They called a bulldozer in. which cut it away from the bedrock and lifted it onto a waiting truck.

That was really the end of the experiment. and it proved that it was not possible to quarry and lift a block one-tenth the size of the heaviest obelisk still standing in Egypt.
 

WHAT MORE PROOF IS NEEDED?
Lehner never again tried to use the ancient tools to prove how the pyramids were constructed.

In a later experiment aimed at showing that a twenty-foot-tall scale model of the Great Pyramid could be constructed. he brought in barefoot locals with modern chisels. hammers. and a truck with a steel winch to hoist the blocks out of the quarry.

That compromised the entire test. which was silly anyway. as the blocks were less than half the size of the average ones used to build the pyramid. How could that prove that seventy-ton blocks were hoisted up 150 vertical feet to the King's Chamber? His use of the twenty-foot-tall scale model is analogous to the comparison between the plastic Tonka truck and a real earth-mover cited earlier in this article.

The whole fiasco proved only that he had become intimidated by the magnitude of the construction problems.

We encounter very similar. intractable problems when we examine the precision engineering that went into building the Great Pyramid. We have another example of just how precise and demanding this massive project was in a demonstration that took place in the late 1970s. At that point in time. Japan was the global economic miracle. and riding high.

A Japanese team funded by Nissan set out to prove they had the wherewithal to build a sixty-foot scale model of the Great Pyramid using traditional tools and methods.

The Egyptian government approved the project. Their first embarrassment came at the quarry when they discovered they could not cut the stones from the bedrock. They called in jackhammers. The next embarrassing situation came when they tried to ferry the blocks across the river on a primitive barge. They could not control it and had to call for a modern one.

Then they ran into more grief on the opposite bank when they discovered that the sledges sank into the sand and they could not budge them. They called for a bulldozer and a truck. The coup de grace was delivered when they tried to assemble the pyramid and found they could not position the stones with any accuracy. and had to request the aid of helicopters.

National pride and saving face are very important to the Japanese. and this was a shameful episode. They were utterly humiliated when they ultimately discovered that they were not able to bring the four walls together into an apex and their mini-pyramid experiment was a disaster. They left Giza sadder and

wiser. Imagine the inconceivably exact planning that went into building the Great Pyramid in order to bring the 481-foot-high walls to a point!

How long did it take the ancient Egyptians to build it? That is the wrong question. The right one is. Could the ancient Egyptians have built the Great Pyramid? The answer is: not with the tools and techniques that Egyptologists claim they used.

These issues have been raised and debated for decades. It is time to bring them to a head and move on. Alternative historians have pointed to the enigmas and orthodoxy has pooh-poohed them. Quite frankly. this gridlock is unproductive. Orthodox historians have shown a disdain for applying the rules and guidelines of scientific methodology to the matter.

Chris Dunn has addressed this issue and pointed out that Egyptologists apply a double standard when it comes to evaluating their soft "evidence" versus the hard facts as outlined above. They set the bar about one foot off the ground for themselves and about eight feet high for alternative historians.

The repeated live TV and canned video programs that have been churned out quite regularly since the mid-1990s. by Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner. have been aimed at shoring up the party line. In the Fox-TV special broadcast live from the Giza plateau in September 2002.

I watched the robot explore the shaft. While most observers have focused on analyzing the "payoff." the most important parts of the program slipped by virtually unnoticed. These were "the filler" segments that recited and added new support for the traditional version of history. It was very deftly layered into the program; in fact. it was "the programming" part of the show.

There really is no "debate" between the orthodox and the alternative history camps because the former group refuses to engage in any fair. open exchange or to provide solid proof of its theories. Every one of their basic construction tenets can be subjected to scientifically controlled tests. Alternative historians have been under the false impression that the other side could be convinced with compelling fact-based arguments and incontrovertible evidence. But that has proved to be a false assumption.

History's mysteries have long since become a political football.

In my opinion. it is time to leave behind that paradigm and time to stop playing by the other side's rigged rules. The debate is over. if it ever existed. so why go on wasting effort trying to open closed minds? That is an exercise in futility.

Some very crucial issues need our full attention:

• What intelligent culture built the pyramid complexes using cyclopean stones?

• How did they do it and where is the evidence of the technology that was used?

• Are we the beneficiaries of an alien, yet human, DNA that has to solve this riddle before it can evolve any further?

• Or are we the inheritors of a strictly Earth-based legacy handed down by a "lost" civilization?

30 - An Engineer in Egypt

Did the Ancient Egyptians Possess Toolmaking Skills Comparable to Those of the Space Age?

Christopher Dunn

Within the past three years, artifacts established as icons of ancient Egyptian study have developed a new aura.

There are suggestions of controversy, cover-ups, and conspiracy to squelch or ignore data that promises to shatter conventional academic thinking regarding prehistoric society. A powerful movement is intent on restoring to the world a heritage that has been partly destroyed and undeniably misunderstood. This movement consists of specialists in various fields who, in the face of fierce opposition from Egyptologists, are cooperating with each other to effect changes in our beliefs of prehistory.

The opposition by Egyptologists is like the last gasp of a dying man. In the face of expert analysis, they are striving to protect their cozy tenures by arguing engineering subtleties that make no sense whatsoever.

In a recent interview, an Egyptologist ridiculed theorists who present different views of the pyramids, claiming their ideas are the product of overactive imaginations stimulated by the consumption of beer. Hmmm...
 

By way of challenging such conventional theories, for decades there has been an undercurrent of speculation that the pyramid builders were highly advanced in their technology.

Attempts to build pyramids using the orthodox methods attributed to the ancient Egyptians have fallen pitifully short. The Great Pyramid is 483 feet high and houses seventy-ton pieces of granite lifted to a level of 175 feet. Theorists have struggled with stones weighing from up to two tons to a height of a few feet.

One wonders if these were attempts to prove that primitive methods are capable of building the Egyptian pyramids - or the opposite? Attempts to execute such conventional theories have not revealed the theories to be correct! Do we need to revise the theory, or will we continue to educate our young with erroneous data?

In August 1984 I published an article in Analog magazine entitled "Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt." based on Pyramids and Temple of Gizeh, by Sir William Flinders Petrie (the world's first Egyptologist). published in 1883.

Since that article's publication. I have been fortunate enough to visit Egypt twice. On each occasion I left Egypt with more respect for the industry of the ancient pyramid builders - an industry. by the way. whose technology does not exist anywhere in the world today.

In 1986. I visited the Cairo Museum and gave a copy of my article. and a business card. to its director. He thanked me kindly. then threw my offering into a drawer with sundry other stuff and turned away. Another Egyptologist led me to the "tool room" to educate me in the methods of the ancient masons by showing me a few tool cases that housed primitive copper implements.

I asked my host about the cutting of granite. as this was the focus of my article. He explained how a slot was cut in the granite. and wooden wedges - soaked with water - would then be inserted. The wood swelled. creating pressure that split the rock.

This still did not explain how copper implements were able to cut granite. but he was so enthusiastic with his dissertation.

I chose not to interrupt.
 

I was musing over a statement made by the Egyptologist Dr. I.E.S. Edwards in Ancient Egypt.

Edwards said that to cut the granite,

"axes and chisels were made of copper hardened by hammering."

This is like saying,

"To cut this aluminum saucepan, they fashioned their knives out of butter"!

My host animatedly walked me over to a nearby travel agent. encouraging me to buy plane tickets to Aswan, "where," he said,

"the evidence is clear. You must see the quarry marks there and the unfinished obelisk."

Dutifully, I bought the tickets and arrived at Aswan the next day.
 

The Aswan quarries were educational.

The obelisk weighs approximately 440 tons. However. the quarry marks I saw there did not satisfy me as being the only means by which the pyramid builders quarried their rock. Located in a channel that runs the length of the obelisk is a large hole drilled into the bedrock hillside. measuring approximately twelve inches in diameter and three feet deep.

The hole was drilled at an angle. with the top intruding into the channel space.

The ancients must have used drills to remove material from the perimeter of the obelisk. knocked out the webs between the holes. and then removed the cusps. While strolling around the Giza plateau later. I started to question the quarry marks at Aswan even more. (I also questioned why the Egyptologist had deemed it necessary that I fly to Aswan to look at them.)

I was to the south of the second pyramid when I found an abundance of quarry marks of a similar nature. The granite-casing stones. which had sheathed the second pyramid. were stripped off and lying around the base in various stages of destruction. Typical to all of the granite stones worked on were the same quarry marks that I had seen at Aswan earlier in the week.

This discovery confirmed my suspicion of the validity of Egyptologists' theories on the ancient pyramid builders' quarrying methods.

If these quarry marks distinctively identify the people who created the pyramids. why would they engage in such a tremendous amount of extremely difficult work only to destroy their work after having completed it? It seems to me that these kinds of quarry marks were from a later period of time and were created by people who were interested only in obtaining granite. without caring where they got it from.

One can see demonstrations of primitive stonecutting in Egypt if one goes to Saqqara. Being alerted to the presence of tourists. workers will start chipping away at limestone blocks.

It doesn't surprise me that they choose limestone for their demonstration. for it is a soft. sedimentary rock and can be easily worked. However. one won't find any workers plowing through granite. an extremely hard igneous rock made up of feldspar and quartz. Any attempt at creating granite. diorite. and basalt artifacts on the same scale as the ancients but using primitive methods would meet with utter and complete failure.

Those Egyptologists who know that work-hardened copper will not cut granite have dreamed up a different method. They propose that the ancients used small round diorite balls (another extremely hard igneous rock) with which they "bashed" the granite.

How could anyone who has been to Egypt and seen the wonderful intricately detailed hieroglyphs cut with amazing precision in granite and diorite statues, which tower fifteen feet above an average man, propose that this work was done by bashing the granite with a round ball? The hieroglyphs are amazingly precise, with grooves that are square and deeper than they are wide.

They follow precise contours and some have grooves that run parallel to each other, with only a .030-inch-wide wall between the grooves.

Sir William Flinders Petrie remarked that the grooves could have been cut only with a special tool that was capable of plowing cleanly through the granite without splintering the rock. Bashing with small balls never entered Petrie's mind. But, then, Petrie was a surveyor whose father was an engineer.

Failing to come up with a method that would satisfy the evidence, Petrie had to leave the subject open.

We would be hard-pressed to produce many of these artifacts today, even using our advanced methods of manufacturing. The tools displayed as instruments for the creation of these incredible artifacts are physically incapable of coming even close to reproducing many of the artifacts in question.

Along with the enormous task of quarrying, cutting, and erecting the Great Pyramid and its neighbors, thousands of tons of hard igneous rock, such as granite and diorite, were carved with extreme proficiency and accuracy. After standing in awe before these engineering marvels and then being shown a paltry collection of copper implements in the tool case at the Cairo Museum, one comes away with a sense of frustration, futility, and wonder.

Sir William Flinders Petrie recognized that these tools were insufficient. He admitted it in his book Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh and expressed amazement and stupefaction regarding the methods the ancient Egyptians used to cut hard igneous rocks, crediting them with methods that "we are only now coming to understand." So why do modern Egyptologists identify this work with a few primitive copper instruments and small round balls? It makes no sense whatsoever!

While browsing through the Cairo Museum, I found evidence of lathe turning on a large scale. A sarcophagus lid had distinctive indications. Its radius terminated with a blend radius at shoulders on both ends. The tool marks near these corner radii are the same as those I have witnessed on objects that have an intermittent cut.

Petrie also studied the sawing methods of the pyramid builders. He concluded that their saws must have been at least nine feet long. Again, there are subtle indications of modern sawing methods on the artifacts Petrie was studying. The sarcophagus in the King's Chamber inside the Great Pyramid has saw marks on the north end that are identical to saw marks I've seen on modern granite artifacts.

The artifacts representing tubular drilling, studied by Petrie, are the most clearly astounding and conclusive evidence yet presented to identify, with little doubt, the knowledge and technology in existence in prehistory.

The ancient pyramid builders used a technique for drilling holes that is commonly known as trepanning.

This technique leaves a central core and is an efficient means of hole making. For holes that didn't go all the way through the material. the craftsmen would reach a desired depth and then break the core out of the hole. It was not just the holes that Petrie was studying. but also the cores cast aside by the masons who had done some trepanning.

Regarding tool marks that left a spiral groove on a core taken out of a hole drilled into a piece of granite. he wrote.

"[T]he spiral of the cut sinks .100 inch in the circumference of six inches. or one in sixty. a rate of plowing out of the quartz and feldspar which is astonishing."

For drilling these holes. there is only one method that satisfies the evidence.

Without any thought to the time in history when these artifacts were produced. analysis of the evidence clearly points to ultrasonic machining. This is the method that I proposed in my article in 1984. and so far no one has been able to disprove it.

In 1994 I sent a copy of the article to Robert Bauval (author of The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids). who then passed it on to Graham Hancock (author of Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization ). After a series of conversations with Hancock. I was invited to Egypt to participate in a documentary with him. Bauval. and John Anthony West.

On February 22. 1995. at 9:00 A.M.. I had my first experience of being "on camera."

This time. with the expressed intent of inspecting features I had identified on my previous trip. in 1986. I took some tools with me: a flat ground piece of steel (commonly known as a parallel in tool shops. it is about six inches long and a quarter-inch thick with edges ground flat within .0002 inch); an Interapid indicator; a wire contour gauge; a device that forms around shapes; and hard-forming wax.

While there. I came across and was able to measure some artifacts produced by the ancient pyramid builders that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that highly advanced and sophisticated tools and methods had been employed by them. The first object I checked for close precision was the sarcophagus inside the second (Khafra's) pyramid on the Giza plateau.

I climbed inside the box. and with a flashlight and the parallel was astounded to find the surface on the inside of the box perfectly smooth and perfectly flat. Placing the edge of the parallel against the surface. I lit my flashlight behind it. There was no light coming through the interface. No matter where I moved the parallel. vertically. horizontally. sliding it along as one would a gauge on a precision surface plate. I couldn't detect any deviation from a perfectly flat surface.

A group of Spanish tourists found it extremely interesting too and gathered around me. as I was becoming quite animated at this point. exclaiming into my tape recorder. "Space-Age precision!"

The tour guides were becoming quite animated. too. I sensed that they probably didn't think it was appropriate for a live foreigner to be where they believed a dead Egyptian should rest. so I respectfully removed myself from the sarcophagus and continued my examination of it from the outside. There were more features of this artifact that I wanted to inspect. of course. but I didn't have the freedom to do so.

My mind was racing as I lowered my frame into the narrow confines of the entrance shaft and climbed outside. As I did so. my mind was reeling: the inside of a huge granite box finished off to a precision that we reserve for precision surface plates? How had they done this? It would be impossible to have done this by hand!

While being extremely impressed with this artifact, I was even more impressed with other artifacts found at another site in the rock tunnels at the temple of Serapeum at Saqqara, the site of the step pyramid and Zoser's tomb. In these dark dusty tunnels are housed twenty-one huge basalt boxes. They weigh an estimated sixty-five tons each and are finished off to the same precision as the sarcophagus in the second pyramid.

The final artifact I inspected was a piece of granite I quite literally stumbled across while strolling around the Giza plateau later that day. I concluded, after doing a preliminary check of this piece, that the ancient pyramid builders had to have used machinery that followed precise contours in three axes to guide the tool that created it. Beyond the incredible precision, normal flat surfaces, being simple geometry, may be explained away by simple methods.

This piece, though, drives us beyond the question normally pondered - What tools were used to cut it? - to a more far-reaching question: What guided the cutting tool?

These discoveries have more implications for understanding the technology used by the ancient pyramid builders than anything heretofore uncovered.

The interpretation of these artifacts depends on engineers and technologists. When presenting this material to a local engineers club, I was gratified by the response of my peers. They saw the significance. They agreed with the conclusions.

While my focus was on the methods used to produce them, some engineers, ignoring the Egyptologists' proposed uses for these artifacts, asked,

"What were they doing with them?"

They were utterly astounded by what they saw.

The interpretation and understanding of a civilization's level of technology cannot and should not hinge on the preservation of a written record for every technique that it had developed. The nuts and bolts of our society do not always make good copy, and a stone mural will more than likely be cut to convey an ideological message rather than the technique used to inscribe it.

Records of the technology developed by our modern civilization rest in media that are vulnerable and could conceivably cease to exist in the event of a worldwide catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or another ice age.

Consequently, after several thousand years, an interpretation of an artisan's methods may be more accurate than an interpretation of his language. The language of science and technology doesn't have the same freedom as speech. So even though the tools and machines have not survived the thousands of years since their use, we have to assume, by objective analysis of the evidence, that they obviously did exist.
 

31 - The Giza Power Plant, Technologies of Ancient Egypt

A New Book Challenges Conventional Wisdom on the Intended Purpose of the Great Pyramid

Christopher Dunn

 

In the summer of 1997, Atlantis Rising was contacted by a scientist involved in government research into nonlethal acoustical weapons.

 

He said his team had analyzed the Great Pyramid using the most advanced tools available and concluded that its builders used sophisticated geometries that we have only recently begun to understand -  "way beyond Euclidean " or any of the other familiar, ancient systems.

 

Moreover, we were told, the analysis indicated that the only way to understand the configuration of the chambers in the Great Pyramid was in acoustical terms: in other words, by the sophisticated manipulation of sound. For the weapons designer, that meant the Great Pyramid was, in all probability, a weapon - an extremely powerful one at that.

 

Unfortunately, for reasons that remain unclear, we soon found ourselves unable to contact the scientist again, and we were left with a tantalizing bit of information that we could not corroborate. However, as fate would have it, one of the most important investigations of the acoustical potential of the Great Pyramid was being conducted by an old friend of ours, Christopher Dunn.

Chris has written a book entitled The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt in which he produces an overwhelming body of evidence that accounts for many previously unexplained anomalies. In it he tells us that the Giza pyramid was a machine that captured the acoustic energies of the earth to produce awesome power. In this article, Chris excerpts and edits a brief summary of the arguments in his book.
 - EDITOR
 

The evidence carved into the granite artifacts in Egypt clearly points to manufacturing methods that involved the use of machinery such as lathes. milling machines. ultrasonic drilling machines. and highspeed saws.

They also possess attributes that cannot be produced without a system of measurement that is equal to the system of measurement we use today. Their accuracy was not produced by chance. but rather is repeated over and over again.

After I assimilated the data regarding the ancient Egyptians' manufacturing precision and their possible and in some instances probable methods of machining. I suspected that to account for the level of technology the pyramid builders seem to have achieved. they must have had an equally sophisticated energy system to support it. One of the pressing questions we raise when we discuss ancient. ultrasonic drilling of granite is. "What did they use as a source of power?"

A still more forceful inquiry regarding the use of electricity necessary to power ultrasonic drills or heavy machining equipment that may have been used to cut granite is.

"Where are their power plants?"

Obviously there are no structures from the ancient world that we can point to and identify as fission reactors or turbine halls. And why should we have to? Isn't it a bit misguided of us to form an assumption that the ancient power plants were even remotely similar to ours?

Nevertheless. there may be some fundamental similarities between ancient and modern power supplies. in that power plants in existence today are quite large and need a supply of water for cooling and steam production.

If such an advanced society existed in prehistory and if indeed it had an energy system. we could logically surmise that its power plants. in all probability. would have been the largest construction projects it would have attempted.

It also may follow that. as the largest creations of the society. those power plants would stand a good chance of surviving a catastrophe and the erosion of the elements during the centuries that followed.
 

The pyramids easily meet these requirements.

These geometric relics of the past. which have been studied. speculated about. and on which so much debate has centered. are located near a water supply. the Nile River. and. indeed. are the largest building projects that this ancient society completed. In light of all the evidence that suggests the existence of a highly advanced society utilizing electricity in prehistory.

I began to consider seriously the possibility that the pyramids were the power plants of the ancient Egyptians.

Like just about every other student of the Egyptian pyramids. my attention was focused on the Great Pyramid. primarily because this is the one that everybody else's attention had been focused on. resulting in more research data being available for study. The reports of each successive researcher's discoveries inside the Great Pyramid are quite detailed.

It is as though researchers became obsessed with reporting data. regardless of how insignificant it may have seemed. Much of their data focuses on the dimensional and geometric relationship between the Great Pyramid and Earth.

To review John Taylor's findings: A pyramid inch is .001 inch larger than a British inch. There are twenty-five pyramid inches in a cubit and there were 365.24 cubits in the square base of the Great Pyramid. There are 365.24 days in a calendar year. One pyramid inch is equal in length to 1/500 millionth of Earth's axis The Great Pyramid and of rotation.

This relationship suggests that Earth in resonance not only were the builders of the Great Pyramid knowledgeable about the dimensions of the planet, but they also based their measurement system on them.

What else is unique about the Great Pyramid? Although it is a pyramid in shape, its geometry possesses an astounding approximation of the unique properties of a circle, or sphere. The pyramid's height is in relationship to the perimeter of its base as the radius of a circle is in relationship to its circumference. A perfectly constructed pyramid with an exact angle of 51° 51'14.3" has the value pi incorporated into its shape.

Further understanding of this relationship requires the study of not just every detail of the Great Pyramid, but also those of Earth.

Earth is a dynamic, energetic body that has supported civilization's demand for fuel for centuries. To date, this demand has been predominantly for energy in the form of fossil fuels. More recently, scientific advances have allowed us to tap into the power of the atom, and further research in this area promises greater advances in the future.

There is, however, another form of abundant energy in the earth that, in its most basic form has, for the most part, been largely ignored as a potential source of usable energy. It usually gets our attention when it builds up to a point of destruction. That energy is seismic, and it is the result of the earth's plates being driven by the constant agitation of the molten rock within the earth. The tides are contained not only within the oceans of the world; the continents, too, are in constant movement, rising and falling as much as a foot as the Moon orbits Earth.

The earth's energy includes mechanical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, nuclear, and chemical action, each a source for sound. It would follow, therefore, that the energy at work in the earth would generate sound waves that would be related to the particular vibration of the energy creating it and the material through which it passes.

The audible hum of an electric motor - operating at 3,600 rpm - would fall well below the level of human hearing if it were to slow down to one revolution every twenty-four hours, as in the case of Earth.

What goes unnoticed as we go about our daily lives is our planet's inaudible fundamental pulse, or rhythm.

On the other end of the scale, any electrical stimulation within the earth of piezoelectrical materials - such as quartz - would generate sound waves above the range of human hearing.

Materials undergoing stress within the earth can emit bursts of ultrasonic radiation. Materials undergoing plastic deformation emit a signal of lower amplitude than when the deformation is such as to produce cracks. Ball lightning has been speculated to be gas ionized by electricity from quartz-bearing rock, such as granite, that is subject to stress.

Because the earth constantly generates a broad spectrum of vibration, we could utilize vibration as a source of energy if we developed suitable technology. Naturally, any device that attracted greater amounts of this energy than is normally being radiated from the earth would greatly improve the efficiency of the equipment.

Because energy will inherently follow the path of least resistance, any device offering less resistance to this energy than the surrounding medium through which it passes would have a greater amount of energy channeled through it.

Keeping all of this in mind and knowing that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical integer of the earth, it may not be so outlandish to propose that the pyramid is capable of vibrating at a harmonic frequency of the earth's fundamental frequency.

In The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt, I have amassed a plethora of facts and deductions based on sober consideration of the design of the Great Pyramid and nearly every artifact found within it. When taken together, these all support my premise that the Great Pyramid was a power plant and the King's Chamber its power center.

Facilitated by the element that fuels our Sun (hydrogen), and uniting the energy of the universe with that of the earth, the ancient Egyptians converted vibrational energy into microwave energy. For the power plant to function, the designers and operators had to induce vibration in the Great Pyramid that was in tune with the harmonic resonant vibrations of Earth.

Once the pyramid was vibrating in tune with Earth's pulse, it became a coupled oscillator and could sustain the transfer of energy from the earth with little or no feedback. The three smaller pyramids on the east side of the Great Pyramid may have been used to assist the Great Pyramid in achieving resonance, much like today we use smaller gasoline engines to start large diesel engines.

So let us now turn the key on this amazing power plant to see how it operated.
 

THE GIZA POWER PLANT
The Queen's Chamber, located in the center of the pyramid and directly below the King's Chamber, contains peculiarities entirely different from those observed in the King's Chamber.

The characteristics of the Queen's Chamber indicate that its specific purpose was to produce fuel, which is of paramount importance for any power plant. Although it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly what process took place inside the Queen's Chamber, it appears that a chemical reaction repeatedly took place there.

The residual substance the process left behind (the salts on the chamber wall) and what can be deduced from artifacts (grapnel hook and cedarlike wood) and structural details (Gantenbrink's "door," for example) are too prominent to be ignored. They all indicate that the energy created in the King's Chamber was the result of the efficient operation of the hydrogen-generating Queen's Chamber.

The equipment that provided the priming pulses was most likely housed in the subterranean pit. Before or at the time the "key was turned" to start the priming pulses, a supply of chemicals was pumped into the northern and southern shafts of the Queen's Chamber, filling them until contact was made between the grapnel hook and the electrodes that were sticking out of the door.

Seeping through the "lefts" in the Queen's Chamber, these chemicals combined to produce hydrogen gas, which filled the interior passageways and chambers of the pyramid. The waste from the spent chemicals flowed along the horizontal passage and down the well shaft.

Induced by priming pulses of vibration - tuned to the resonant frequency of the entire structure - the vibration of the pyramid gradually increased in amplitude and oscillated in harmony with the vibrations of the earth. Harmonically coupled with the earth, vibrational energy then flowed in abundance from the earth through the pyramid and influenced a series of tuned, Helmholtz-type resonators housed in the grand gallery, where the vibration was converted into airborne sound.

By virtue of the acoustical design of the grand gallery, the sound was focused through the passage leading to the King's Chamber. Only frequencies in harmony with the resonant frequency of the King's Chamber were allowed to pass through an acoustic filter. which was housed in the antechamber.

The King's Chamber was the heart of the Giza power plant. an impressive power center comprising thousands of tons of granite containing 55 percent silicon-quartz crystal. The chamber was designed to minimize any damping of vibration. and its dimensions created a resonant cavity that was in harmony with the incoming acoustical energy.

As the granite vibrated in sympathy with the sound. it stressed the quartz in the rock and stimulated electrons to flow by what is known as the piezoelectric effect.

The energy that filled the King's Chamber at that point became a combination of acoustical energy and electromagnetic energy. Both forms of energy covered a broad spectrum of harmonic frequencies. from the fundamental infrasonic frequencies of the earth to the ultrasonic and higher electromagnetic microwave frequencies.

The hydrogen freely absorbed this energy. for the designers of the Giza power plant had made sure that the frequencies at which the King's Chamber resonated were harmonics of the frequency at which hydrogen resonates. As a result. the hydrogen atom. which consists of one proton and one electron. efficiently absorbed this energy. and its electron was "pumped" to a higher energy state.

The northern shaft served as a conduit. or a waveguide. and its original metal lining - which passed with extreme precision through the pyramid from the outside - served to channel a microwave signal into the King's Chamber. The microwave signal that flowed through this waveguide may have been the same signal that we know today is created by the atomic hydrogen that fills the universe and that is constantly bombarding Earth.

This microwave signal probably was reflected off the outside face of the pyramid. then focused down the northern shaft.

Traveling through the King's Chamber and passing through a crystal box amplifier located in its path. the input signal increased in power as it interacted with the highly energized hydrogen atoms inside the resonating box amplifier and chamber.

This interaction forced the electrons back to their natural "ground state." In turn. hydrogen atoms released a packet of energy of the same type and frequency as the input signal. This "stimulated emission" was entrained with the input signal and followed the same path.

The process built exponentially - occurring trillions of times over. What entered the chamber as a low energy signal became a collimated (parallel) beam of immense power as it was collected in a microwave receiver housed in the south wall of the King's Chamber and was then directed through the metal-lined southern shaft to the outside of the pyramid.

This tightly collimated beam was the reason for all the science. technology. craftsmanship. and untold hours of work that went into designing. testing. and building the Giza power plant.

The ancient Egyptians had a need for this energy: It was most likely used for the same reasons we would use it today - to power machines and appliances. We know from examining Egyptian stone artifacts that ancient crafts-people must have created them using machinery and tools that needed electricity to run. However. the means by which they distributed the energy produced by the Giza power plant may have been a process very different from today's.

I would like to join the architect James Hagan and other engineers and technologists in extending my utmost respect to the builders of the Great Pyramid. Though some academics may not recognize it, the precision and knowledge that went into its creation are - by modern standards - undeniable and a marvel to behold.

The evidence presented in The Giza Power Plant, for the most part, was recorded many years ago by men of integrity who worked in the fields of archeology and Egyptology.

That much of this evidence was misunderstood only reveals the pressing need for an interdisciplinary approach to fields that have, until recently, been closed to non-academics and others outside the fold of formal archeology and Egyptology.

Much of our ignorance of ancient cultures can be placed at the feet of closed-minded theorists who ignore evidence that does not fit their theories or fall within the province of their expertise. Sometimes it takes a machinist to recognize machined parts or machines!

As a result, much of the evidence that supports a purpose for the Great Pyramid as anything other than a tomb has been ignored, discounted without serious consideration, or simply explained away as purely coincidental.

The technology that was used inside the Great Pyramid may be quite simple to understand but difficult to execute, even for our technologically "advanced" civilization. However, if anyone is inspired to pursue the theory presented here, his or her vision may be enhanced by the knowledge that recreating this power source would be ecologically pleasing to those who have concern about the welfare of the environment and the future of the human race.

Blending science and music, the ancient Egyptians had tuned their power plant to a natural harmonic of the earth's vibration (predominantly a function of the tidal energy induced by the gravitational effect that the Moon has on Earth). Resonating to the life force of Mother Earth, the Great Pyramid of Giza quickened and focused her pulse, and transduced it into clean, plentiful energy.

We know very little about the pyramid builders and the period of time wherein they erected these giant monuments, yet it seems obvious that the entire civilization underwent a drastic change, one so great that its technology was destroyed, with no hope of its being rebuilt. Hence a cloud of mystery has denied us a clear view of the nature of these people and their technological knowledge.

Considering the theory presented in The Giza Power Plant, I am compelled to envision a fantastic society that developed a power system thousands of years ago that we can barely imagine today.

This society takes shape as we ask the logical questions:

"How was the energy transmitted? How was it used?"

These questions cannot be fully answered by examining the artifacts left behind.

However, these artifacts can stimulate our imaginations further; then we are left to speculate on the causes for the demise of the great and intelligent civilization that built the Giza power plant.
 

32 - Return to the Giza Power Plant

Technologist Chris Dunn Finds New Fuel for His Thesis

Christopher Dunn

The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt was published in August 1998, and an article summarizing its theory appeared the same year in Atlantis Rising.

Since then I have been overwhelmed by the response to the theory. The reviews have been nothing short of incredible! I have received letters and e-mails from all over the world supporting the argument that high levels of technology existed in prehistory and that the Great Pyramid represents the pinnacle of that technology.

Though the power plant theory may explain every characteristic and noted phenomenon found within the Great Pyramid, without actually replicating its function (which is way beyond my own personal resources), the theory could be ignored or dismissed as being too fantastic by those who feel more secure with conventional views of prehistory. Not so with the hard evidence of machining!

There is a section in the book that is increasingly being seen as the "smoking gun" that proves, beyond a doubt, that the pyramid builders used advanced technology. It is not a simple matter to dismiss the physical constraints imposed on those who would attempt to replicate accurately the granite artifacts found in abundance all over this ancient land.

Those who try to dismiss it do so from inexperience and do not understand the subtleties of the work, or they cling desperately to the belief that Western civilization is the first civilization to develop science and to translate that science into products that require advanced methods of manufacturing.

My article, Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt (later expanded to become my book The Giza Power Plant), has been under public scrutiny for around fifteen years. With the level of support that it has received from those who, today, would be charged with performing the same kind of work performed by the ancient Egyptians, along with additional proof, it is rising from the rank of theory to fact.

Since its original publication, in 1984, this tentative, controversial thorn in the side of Egyptologists has been reinforced time and time again by my own on-site inspections and by others who have had the opportunity to see these incredible artifacts for themselves. The weight of evidence and the educated opinions of those who understand are creating a consensus that is overturning our understanding of prehistory.

The most awesome implication may be that civilizations are mortal!

Civilizations such as ours can rise to great heights only to be dashed by natural or engineered effects. In a blink of an eye, we can lose it all! Whether as one or as multiple blinks of an eye, our distant ancestors in prehistoric Egypt received a mortal blow to the industry capable of creating the artifacts we see there today.

Whether that blow came from extraterrestrial forces, a comet, geophysical disturbances, or even a nuclear war is open to speculation. The fact remains that their industries did exist and somehow became extinct!

The purpose here is not to belabor the obvious or to restate what others have stated more eloquently (I know I'm "preaching to the choir" for the most part), but rather to provide an update on what has happened since the book was published. On a recent trip to Egypt, as a participant in the conference Egypt in the New Millennium. I was able to perform additional on-site inspection of some of the artifacts I described in my articles and book.

I was also blessed to discover startling evidence that supports and confirms a unique and important aspect of the Giza power plant theory. This was evidence that made chills run down my spine. for it came about in a rather unexpected manner. This evidence was inside the Great Pyramid in the grand gallery. and I am still amazed by what I found. I will elaborate on this later.

It is with great appreciation for the organizers. attendees. and speakers at this conference that this article is written. Their spirit. diversity. and camaraderie buoyed my spirit and gave me strength.

But more than that. through their support and patronage (which was sometimes accompanied with frustrating and arduous conditions. with our blessed guide Hakim almost being thrown in jail). further evidence to support the power plant theory has now been captured on video and becomes part of the historical record.

A large part of my presentation at Gouda Fayed's conference center in Nazlet El Samman was to be an on-site inspection and demonstration of the precision of several artifacts. Gouda's place overlooked the Sphinx. with the Giza plateau and the pyramid complex forming an awe-inspiring backdrop.

Though I can say with great confidence that I have proved that the ancient pyramid builders used advanced methods for machining granite. the full scope of the work has not yet been determined or documented. For my trip to Egypt in 1995.

I had taken some instruments with me to inspect the flatness of artifacts that. just by simple observation. appeared extremely precise.
 

Mere looking. however. is not a sufficient means to determine the true characteristics of the artifacts.

I needed some kind of known reference with which I could compare the precision. I also needed something simple and transportable. The precision-ground straightedge I used in 1995 allowed me to determine a higher order of precision in many different artifacts than what has been described in any previous literature.

This year. in my backpack. I carried a precision-ground twelve-inch-long parallel. or straightedge. precise to within .0001 inch. I also had a precision toolmaker's solid square. I knew exactly the artifacts I wanted to use it on - the inside corners of the granite boxes at the temple of the Serapeum at Saqqara and inside the pyramids.

Also in my tool kit was a set of precision Starrett radius gauges for inspecting the machined radius that makes the transition from one surface or contour of an artifact to another.

These instruments are critical to our understanding of the basic attributes of the artifacts.
 

Unfortunately. I was unable to access the rock tunnel at the temple of the Serapeum. where more than twenty huge black granite and basalt boxes weighing over seventy tons reside.

We pleaded with the officials at the site. and I even discussed it with a local businessman who claimed to have considerable power and influence in such matters. Nevertheless. I was told that the Serapeum was closed because it was a danger to the public.

"What kind of danger?" I asked, and was told in reply that dripping water threatened to collapse the roof.

I chose not to ask the obvious question about where the water came from in such an arid country. There was enough other work to do.

Following my morning presentation on the advanced machining methods of the ancient Egyptians. the entire conference group and the film crew proceeded to the Giza plateau and into the bedrock chamber of the second largest pyramid on the plateau: Khafre's pyramid. In this chamber in 1995 I had discovered the perfect flatness on the inside surfaces of the black granite box (commonly and mistakenly. in my opinion. known as the sarcophagus).

At that time I had uttered the words "Space-age precision!" to a group of Spanish tourists who were looking on as I beamed my flashlight behind the precise edge of a steel parallel and revealed the stunning precision of the surface.

Although I confidently wrote articles citing this as additional proof of the level of technology practiced by the pyramid builders. in the back of my mind was the nagging need to go back to Egypt with additional instruments and do more tests. Each time I go to Egypt I approach these relics with eager anticipation and some trepidation. Will I find them the same? Will the next range of instruments confirm or deny what was gleaned on the previous visit?

The cool confines of the passageway leading to the bedrock chamber of Khafre's pyramid were a welcome relief from the burning Egyptian sun. It felt familiar and right to be there. I was excited to share the discovery I had made four years earlier with the wonderful people who attended the conference. as well as being able to document the event on video. But still there was that twinge of doubt.

Had I made a mistake in the past? Would the new instruments reveal anything significant?

Climbing into the black granite box set into the floor of the chamber. I placed my twelve-inch straightedge on the inside surface. The "edge" used this time had been prepared differently from the one I had used in 1995, as it had a chamfer on both corners. For those interested, I slid this edge along the smooth interior of the granite box with my flashlight shining behind it and demonstrated its exact precision.

But I was anxious to perform other tests. The squareness of the corners was of critical importance to me. Modern machine axes are aligned orthogonally, or exactly perpendicular, to each other to ensure accuracy. This state ensures that the corners cut into an object on the machine are square and true.

The requirements for producing this condition go beyond coincidental simplicity. I wasn't expecting the corners of the sarcophagus to be perfectly square, for perfection is extremely difficult to achieve.

I was flabbergasted as I slid my precision square along the top of the parallel (I used the top of the parallel to raise the square above the corner radius), and it fit perfectly on the adjacent surface.
 

"Bloody hell!" I exclaimed as the significance of this find came over me. I pointed it out to others in the group. (Alan Alford would spend the next few days mimicking me with a good-natured "Bloody hell!")

The film crew was busy capturing my exploration on video as I went to each corner and found the same condition. On three corners, the square sat flush against both surfaces. One corner had a gap that was detected by the light test, though it was probably only about .001 inch.

So not only did we have an artifact with perfectly flat surfaces, but the inside corners were also perfectly square. What else was significant about this so-called sarcophagus? The corners themselves! After conducting the test with the parallel and the square, I pulled out my radius gauges to check the corner radius. As I checked the corner, I chuckled to myself with memories of a documentary I had seen earlier that year.

Those of you who saw the Fox special in September 2002 will remember the moment in it when the world's foremost Egyptologist and the director of the Giza plateau, Zahi Hawass, picked up a dolerite ball in the bedrock chamber under one of the satellite pyramids next to Khephren's pyramid.

He was describing. to the Fox anchor Suzie Koppel. the Egyptologists' theory of the methods the ancient Egyptians used to create granite artifacts. This method involved bashing the granite with a round ball until the desired shape was achieved.

I'm not disputing that this is a viable means of creating a box and. indeed. there is evidence at Memphis near Saqqara that some boxes were created in this manner.

These boxes had large corner radii. which were extremely rough and tapered toward the bottom - exactly what one would expect to produce using a stone ball. However. as Hawass was wielding his eight-inch-diameter ball in front of the cameras. my attention was focused on the shiny. black. so-called sarcophagus behind him. which sat in mute contradiction to his proposition.

The inside of this box had the same appearance as the box inside Khafre's pyramid. The surfaces appeared smooth and precise but. more important. the inside corners were equally as sharp as what I had witnessed in Khafre's pyramid. Just looking at it. one could see that to create such an artifact with an eight-inch-diameter ball would be impossible!

Likewise. creating the corner radius of the box inside Khafre's pyramid using such primitive methods would be impossible. Checking this corner radius with my radius gauges. I started with a half-inch radius gauge and kept working my way down in size until the correct one had inadvertently been selected. The inside corner radius of the box inside Khafre's pyramid checked 3/32 inch.

The radius at the bottom. where the floor of the box met the wall. checked 7/16 inch. It should go without saying that one cannot fit an eight-inch ball into a corner with a 3/32 radius. or even a one-inch radius.
 

THE GIZA POWER PLANT: THE PROOF
I don't think I have ever been as surprised as I was while filming inside the grand gallery.

Filming inside the grand gallery had been especially rewarding. as I had had my doubts as to whether I would even get to go into the Great Pyramid. It had been closed to visitors. ostensibly for restoration. and we had spent almost a week of uncertainty over access. But after numerous calls and visits to officials. we finally got the go-ahead.

While most of the group meditated in the King's Chamber. the video crew and I went out into the grand gallery to do some filming. I was going to describe. on camera. my theory about the function of the grand gallery.

This involved pointing out the slots in the gallery side ramps. the corbeled walls. and the ratchet-style ceiling. Equipped with a microphone. I stood just below the great step. the camera at the top. While the soundman adjusted his gear. I scanned the wall with my flashlight. It was then I noticed that the first corbeled ledge had some scorch marks underneath it. and that some of the stone was broken away.

Then. as the camera lights came on. things became really interesting.

In all the literature I had read. the grand gallery was described as being constructed of limestone. But here I was looking at granite! I noted a transition point farther down the gallery where the rock changed from limestone to granite. I scanned the ceiling and saw. instead of the rough. crumbling limestone one sees when first entering the gallery. what appeared to be. from twenty-eight feet below. smooth. highly polished granite.

This was of great significance to me. It made sense that the material closer to the power center would be constructed of a material that was more resistant to heat!

I then paid closer attention to the scorch marks on the walls. There was heavy heat damage underneath each of the corbeled layers. for a distance of about twelve inches. and it seemed as though the damage was concentrated in the center of the burn marks.

Then. visually. I took a straight line through the center of each scorch mark and projected it down toward the gallery ramp. That was when chills ran down my spine and the hair stood out on my neck. The line extended in alignment with the slot in the ramp!

In The Giza Power Plant, I had theorized that harmonic resonators were housed in these slots and were oriented vertically toward the ceiling. I had also theorized that there was a hydrogen explosion inside the King's Chamber that had shut down the power plant's operation. This explosion explained many other unusual effects that have been noted inside the Great Pyramid in the past. and I had surmised that the explosion had also destroyed the resonators inside the grand gallery in a terrible fire.

Only with the powerful lights of the video camera did the evidence become clear. and illuminated before me. as at no other time before - the charred evidence to support my theory. This was evidence that I had not even been looking for!

Even as I conclude this article. I continue to receive confirmation that I'm on the right track. Others are stepping forward with their own research along the same lines. A more complete update on all of this. though. will have to wait for another time.

Perhaps when the Egyptian government discloses what it finds behind Gantenbrink's door? I am most anxious to know what is discovered behind this so-called door. If my own prediction is correct. then yet another aspect of the power plant theory will be confirmed.

It has been an interesting year.
 

33 - Petrie on Trial
 

Have Arguments for Advanced Ancient Machining Made by the Great Nineteenth-Century Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie Been Disproved? Christopher Dunn Takes On the Debunkers
Christopher Dunn

If there is one area of research into ancient civilizations that proves the technological prowess of a superior prehistoric society, the study of the technical requirements necessary to produce many granite artifacts found in Egypt is it.

My own research into how many of these artifacts were produced started in 1977, and my article Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt was first published in Analog magazine in 1984. It was later expanded to fill two chapters in my book The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt.

As this body of work became more popular and well known, it was only a matter of time before the orthodox camp attempted to diminish the significance of the artifacts and thereby discredit my work.

Albeit ineffectual, this they have done in both subtle and obvious ways:

1. Documentaries have been produced that attempt to reinforce Egyptologists' views that bashing granite with hard stone balls produced fabulous granite artifacts.
    

2. A stonemason named Denys Stocks was taken to Egypt to demonstrate how the use of copper and sand, along with a tremendous amount of manual effort, can produce holes and slots in granite. This he succeeded in doing, much to the satisfaction of orthodox believers.
    

3. Two authors who claimed to be onetime supporters of alternate ideas such as mine switched camps and wrote a book entitled Giza: The Truth. Though unschooled in the mechanical arts, Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald were determined to take an antagonistic approach to the ideas I have presented and to support the orthodox view.

In each of the above cases, the limited perspective and incomplete analysis of all the evidence, though probably passing muster with their own peer reviews, do not pass muster with my own peers, who consist of technologists involved in such work today.

In fact, the consensus among the latter group is that the former are dead wrong. However, none of us is perfect, and everyone has his Achilles' heel.

In retrospect, I will admit to having probably taken my analysis too far when I proposed that ultrasonic machining produced the artifact known as Core #7. My theory of ultrasonic machining was based on Sir William Flinders Petrie's book Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. In this book, Petrie described an artifact with marks of a drilling process that left a spiral groove in granite indicating that the drill sank into the granite at .100 inch per revolution of the drill.

My conviction was shaken when I read, in Giza: The Truth, that two researchers, John Reid and Harry Brownlee, had effectively dismissed my theories of how the ancient Egyptians had drilled granite.

After a physical examination of this artifact, they testified that the grooves were not spiral grooves but individual rings, and were common to cores found in any modern quarry in England.

A photograph of this core in Giza: The Truth was positioned in a way that seemed to support their contention; however, I was unable to disprove them because I had not even been in the same room as the core, let alone physically examined it.
 

Until I had the opportunity to perform a detailed inspection of the piece. which requires more than mere visual scrutiny.

I was forced to defer to the observations of Reid and Brownlee. Nevertheless. even in so doing. if they were basing their observations on the photograph in Giza: The Truth, I had questions about those observations.

What we have is a photograph that shows the frustrum of a cone (Core #7) with grooves cut into it. After reading this report. I immediately posted. to my Web site. a statement to the effect that I suspended any assertions I have made about ultrasonic machining of these holes and cores and I also asserted that I was prepared to examine the core for myself.

On November 10. 1999. I flew out of Indianapolis heading for England. My Webmaster. Nick Annies. had arranged. with the Petrie Museum. for the inspection of the core while the museum was closed for academic research. Nick and I took the train to King's Cross on Monday. November 15. 1999.

A short walk to the University College. London. found us. at 10:30 A.M.. standing on the bottom step of the Petrie Museum. looking up at a gregarious doorman who advised us to have a cup of tea while we waited for the museum to open and then pointed us in the direction of a cafeteria. Not only a cuppa did we find there. but a wonderful English breakfast as well!

Then it came time to inspect the infamous Core #7. Although I had talked and written about this core for more than fifteen years. this was not the reverent visit to a holy relic that one might expect. I was not especially breathless with excitement to take the artifact into my latex-gloved hands. Nor was I impressed with its size or character.

To tell the truth. I was profoundly unmoved and disappointed. With the old Peggy Lee song "Is That All There Is?" bouncing around in my head. I peered at this insignificant-looking piece of rock that had fueled such a heated debate on the Internet and in living rooms and pubs across the globe.

I was thinking to myself as I looked at the rough grooves on its surface, "How do I make sense of this?" And, "What was Petrie thinking about?" I looked up at Nick Annies standing over me. He had a look on his face that reminded me of my mother, within whose face I sought comfort when, at the age of eight, I was lying on the operating table having a wart burned out of my palm by a long, hot needle.

Not a word passed between us as I formulated my ultimate confession to the world. I had made a huge mistake in trusting Petrie's writings! The core appeared to be exactly as Reid and Brownlee had described it!

The grooves did not appear to have any remote resemblance to what Petrie had described. With the truth resting where a wart once grew, I was frozen in time.

With resignation I proceeded to check the width between the grooves using a 50X handheld microscope with .001 gradated reticle to .100 inch. At this point, I was certain that Petrie had been totally wrong in his evaluation of the piece.

The distance between the grooves, which are scoured into the core along the entire length, was .040-.080 inch. I was devastated that Petrie had even gotten the distance between the grooves wrong!

Any further measurements, I thought, would just be perfunctory. I couldn't support any theory of advanced machining if Petrie's dimensions of .100 inch feed-rate could not be verified! Nevertheless, I continued with my examination.
 

The crystalline structure of the core under microscope was beyond my ability to evaluate.

I could not determine, as surely as Petrie had, that the groove ran deeper through the quartz than through the feldspar. I did notice that there were some regions, very few, where the biotite (black mica) appeared to be ripped from the feldspar in a way that is similar to other artifacts found in Egypt.

However, the groove passed through other areas quite cleanly without any such ripping effect, though again I support Brownlee's assertions that a cutting force against the material could rip the crystals from the feldspar substrate.

I then measured the depth of the groove. To accomplish this I used an indicator depth gauge with a fine point to enable it to reach into a narrow space. The gauge operated so as to allow a zero setting when the gauge was set on a flat surface without any deviations. When the gauge passed over a depression (or groove) in a surface, the spring-loaded indicator point pushed into the groove, causing the needle to move on the gauge dial, indicating the precise depth.

The depths of the grooves were .002 and .005 inch. (Actually, because there were clearly discontinuities in the groove at some locations around the core, the actual measurement would be between .000 and .005 inch.)

Then came the great question. Was the groove a helix or a horizontal ring around the core? I had deferred to Reid and Brownlee's assertions that they were horizontal and I was, at this juncture, painfully assured that it was the correct thing to do. It was Petrie's description of the helical groove that made Core #7 stand apart from modern cores. It was one of the principal characteristics upon which I had based my theory of ultrasonic machining.

But what I held in my hand seemed to support Reid and Brownlee's objections to this theory, for they said that the core had an appearance similar to any other core one may produce in a quarry.

White cotton thread was the perfect tool to use when inspecting for a helical groove. Why not use a thread to check a thread! I carefully placed one end of the thread in a groove while Nick secured it with a piece of Scotch tape. While I peered through my 10X Optivisor, I rotated the core in my left hand, making sure the thread stayed in the groove with my right.

The groove varied in depth as it circled the core, and at some points there was just a faint scratch that I would probably not have detected with my naked eye. As the other end of the thread came into view, I could see that what Petrie had described about this core was not quite correct.

Petrie had described a single helical groove that had a pitch of .100 inch. What I was looking at was not a single helical groove, but two helical grooves.

The thread wound around the core following the groove until it lay approximately .110 inch above the start of the thread. Amazingly, though, there was another groove that nestled neatly in between!

I repeated the test at six or seven different locations on the core, with the same results. The grooves were cut clockwise, looking down the small end to the large - which would be from top to bottom. In uniformity, the grooves were as deep at the top of the core as they were at the bottom. They were also as uniform in pitch at the top and bottom, with sections of the groove clearly seen right to the point where the core granite was broken out of the hole.

These are not horizontal striations or rings as trumpeted in Giza: The Truth, but rather helical grooves that spiraled down the core like a double-start thread.

To replicate this core, therefore, the drilling method should produce the following:

• A clockwise double helical groove from top to bottom with a .110 to .120-inch pitch.

• A groove between .000 and .005 inch deep.

• A taper from top to bottom. Some ripping of the quartz is acceptable.

I was quite impressed with the deepness of the groove, so after returning home I walked out to the tool room and talked to toolmaker Don Reynolds, who was working on a surface grinder. I asked him if he had a sharp diamond wheel dresser. (These are used to dress carborundum and other types of grinding wheels.)

He did in fact have one; it had been barely used. and had a nice sharp point. (These industrial diamonds are set into a steel shank. which is then fixtured so as to sit on a magnetic chuck.) I asked him how deep a groove he thought he could scratch into a piece of granite with the diamond.

He said.

"Let's find out!"

We walked over to a granite surface plate while I jokingly admonished him not to try it on the work surface. He pressed the diamond point into the side of the plate. Bearing down with all the weight he could throw behind it. he scoured the side of the plate with a scratch about four inches long.

We both felt the scratch.

"How deep would you say that is?" I asked.
"Oh. between .003 and .005 inch." he said.
"Let's check it out then!" I said.

Don fixtured an indicator gauge in a surface gauge and zeroed the fine needle point on the surface. As he passed it over the groove. the point dropped into the groove and the dial read only .001 inch!

The reason I bring this up is that it has been suggested that if the core did have a spiral groove. it would have been created by the lateral pressure of a spinning drill as it was being rapidly withdrawn from the hole.

Bringing all my thirty-eight years of experience to bear. for the following reasons I cannot imagine that this is remotely possible:

1. This idea relies on centrifugal force to cut the groove. as the drill is being withdrawn and passing over a widening gap. and to achieve greater centrifugal force. the drill would need to spin faster.

2. There wouldn't be sufficient lateral force to cut a groove in granite to a depth of .001 inch. let alone .005 inch. It is as simple as that.

3.  With a spinning drill shank that has the freedom to roam inside an oversized bearing. the drill will seek the path of least resistance. which is away from the granite.

4. Petrie's observations were valid when he claimed that this was not a viable means of creating the groove. because of a buildup of dust between the tube and the granite.

Why such a commotion regarding a small. insignificant core?

Because it was seen as the weakest area of my work. and therefore easily disputed. It also served to obscure and divert attention from other. more significant artifacts that I have described.

Thus, I would challenge the orthodox camp to forget about Petrie's Core #7 for now and provide explanations for all of the other artifacts I describe in my book. I would challenge them to demonstrate. with the tools they have educated us with for centuries. how the ancient Egyptians created such awesome precision and geometry in hard granite, diorite, basalt, and schist.

They can't.

For these, my friends, are the products of a highly advanced civilization.

34 - How Did the Pyramid Builders Spell Relief?

Do We Really Know Why the Ancients Used Such Giant Stones in the Pyramid's So-Called Relieving Chambers?
Christopher Dunn
 

While conducting explorations in the Great Pyramid in 1836. the British military man Colonel William Richard Howard-Vyse was in a crouched space above the King's Chamber examining a mysterious layer of granite beams that were similar to the granite beams that formed the ceiling of the King's Chamber beneath him.

The crouched space is named Davison's Chamber. after Nathaniel Davison. who had discovered it in 1765.

Howard-Vyse. who reportedly had received £10.000 from his family for this exploration and. more important. to liberate themselves from his presence. was intent on making a significant discovery and thus far was not having any luck. The granite layer over his head posed a tantalizing clue that something might be lying behind it. Noticing a crack between the beams of the ceiling.

Howard-Vyse mulled over the possibility of yet another chamber existing above. Being able to push a three-foot-long reed into the crack. without obstruction. seemed an indication that there must be some other space beyond.

Howard-Vyse and his helpers made an attempt to cut through the granite to find out if there was another chamber above. Discovering in short order that their hammers and hardened steel chisels were no match for the red granite. they resorted to gunpowder. A local worker. his senses dulled by a supply of alcohol and hashish. set the charges and blasted away the rock until another chamber was revealed.

Similar to Davison's Chamber. a ceiling of monolithic granite beams spanned the newly discovered chamber. indicating to Howard-Vyse the possible existence of yet another chamber above. After blasting upward for three and a half months and to a height of forty feet. they discovered three more chambers. making a total of five.

The topmost chamber had a gabled ceiling made of giant limestone blocks. To construct these five chambers. the ancient Egyptians had found it necessary to use forty-three pieces of granite weighing up to seventy tons each. The red-granite beams were cut square and parallel on three sides. but were left seemingly untouched on the top surface. which was rough and uneven.

Some of them even had holes gouged into their topsides.
 

In this article we will look at the evidence and attempt to explore reasons for this phenomenal expenditure of resources from both the conventional perspective and the alternative perspective.

Considering the enormous effort that must have gone into delivering to the Giza plateau these enormous monoliths. we will ask.

"Within the framework of the established hypothesis on the Great Pyramid. was all of this work really necessary?"

By today's standards. quarrying and hauling five hundred miles for just one of the forty-three granite beams that are placed above the King's Chamber would not be a simple task.

Yet the ancient Egyptians accomplished this task not just once. but many times. The seveny-ton weight. however. is not the limit of what the ancient Egyptians were capable of. Large obelisks of up to four hundred tons were also quarried. hauled. and erected. Howard-Vyse surmised that the reason for the five superimposed chambers was to relieve the flat ceiling of the King's Chamber from the weight of thousands of tons of masonry above.

Although most researchers after Howard-Vyse have generally accepted this speculation. there are others. including the world's first Egyptologist. Sir William Flinders Petrie. who have not. Important considerations cast doubt on this theory and prove it to be incorrect.

What needs to be considered is that there is a more efficient and less complicated technique in chamber construction elsewhere inside the Great Pyramid.

The Queen's Chamber negates the argument that the King's Chamber's overlying "chambers of construction" were designed to allow a flat ceiling. The load of masonry bearing down on the Queen's Chamber is greater than that above the King's Chamber. due to the fact that this chamber is situated below the King's Chamber.

If a flat ceiling had been needed for the Queen's Chamber. it would have been quite safe to span this room with the kind of beams that are above the King's Chamber. The construction of the Queen's Chamber employed cantilevered limestone blocks that transferred the weight of the masonry above to the outside of the walls.

A ceiling similar to the one in the King's Chamber could have been added to this design and. as with the beams above the King's Chamber. the beams would be holding up nothing more than their own weight.

When the builders of the Great Pyramid constructed the King's Chamber. they were obviously aware of a simpler method of creating a flat ceiling. The design of the King's Chamber complex. therefore. must have been prompted by other considerations. What were these considerations? Why are there five superimposed layers of monolithic seventy-ton granite beams?

Imagine the sheer will and energy that went in to raising one of the granite blocks 175 feet in the air!

There must have been a far greater purpose for investing so much time and energy.
 

I made the above argument in my book, The Giza Power Plant.

Since its publication, the contrary opinion that I had articulated had evidently become a point of discussion on a message board because I received an e-mail from Egyptology student Mikey Brass, within which was a link to a translation of a German magazine article.

The question was posed to Frank Dornenburg, a participant in the discussion: Why so many layers?

He writes:

I have been debating elsewhere, the Kings Chamber, and the question of why five 'Relieving' Chambers were needed to be used to spread the massive weight above the King's Chamber. My answer to this was I simply did not know.

 

A good answer to this question can be found in Gottinger Miszellen 173:

"The old method of corbelling channeled the weight force directly to the walls of a chamber.

 

The new, and here for the first time used, gable-roof redirects the force down AND sideways. If the Egyptians had put the gable roof in the King's Chamber directly on the ceiling like in the Queen's Chamber, the sideways force would have damaged the great gallery. So they had to put the gable above the upper layer of the gallery's construction.

 

The easiest way to do this was to stack small chambers. And if you look at a cross section you will see that now the sideways force of the roof goes well over the roof of the gallery."

Superficially, what is proposed in the above hypothesis may seem plausible.

It is, however, a construct founded on flawed assumptions and an incomplete analysis of the entire King's Chamber complex. Before accepting it as factual, we need to consider the following.

The hypothesis assumes that dynamic lateral forces would follow the direction of the angled blocks and that these lateral forces would accumulate as more stone was piled on top of the gabled blocks. According to the hypothesis, the consequence of each block added above the King's Chamber causes additional lateral thrust to push against the southern end of the grand gallery.

The drawing on page 253 represents a mechanical setup with which many manufacturing technologists are intimately familiar. It is a steel plate resting in a V-block. If we allow that the above hypothesis is correct. the plate would push on surface A. causing lateral movement.

At rest. the plate will put more pressure on the opposite surface due to the center of gravity of the piece. Except for gravity. there are no dynamic forces at work. There is only dead weight. which is distributed according to each member's center of gravity. When an object is placed on an inclined plane. it has the potential to move down that plane by gravitational forces acting upon it.

This movement continues until an obstruction is encountered. at which time the kinetic energy that causes lateral motion ceases.

The gabled ceiling blocks above the King's Chamber are situated on an inclined plane cut into the core blocks. Assuming that. like the Queen's Chamber. the center of gravity of these blocks lies outside the chamber walls. the blocks may be described as cantilevered. whereas there is no archthrust at the apex where two opposing blocks meet.

The entire weight of the block is borne by the blocks that form the inclined plane. with some weight being carried by the block that holds the lower end.

Without knowing for sure what design features were employed. I can envision a design that would be sound and not damage the grand gallery. The rough measurement between the ends of the gabled blocks and the grand gallery south wall is about nine feet. Considering the width of the gallery (between forty-two and eighty-two inches). it is reasonable to assume that the blocks that form the gallery south wall extend outside the inside surface - but to what distance? I don't know.

However. considering that the King's Chamber's northern shaft bends around the grand gallery. it gives rise to the speculation that the blocks that form the gallery walls are deeper than four feet. (This is a significant point to make. and probably in itself worthy of a discussion. The northern shaft could have more easily been a straight shot to the sky. without the extra bends. It would have clearly missed the inside wall of the grand gallery by about four feet.)

With the grand gallery southern-wall blocks butted against the gallery east- and west-wall blocks. any lateral forces that might affect it from the King's Chamber's gabled ceiling blocks would give less cause for concern than. say. the forces acting on the roof of the horizontal passage from the pressure of the Queen's Chamber's gabled ceiling blocks - or the pressure of the blocks bearing down on the roof of the grand gallery.

Moreover. building on top of gabled ceiling blocks does not necessarily mean that they must bear a tremendous accumulation of weight. As described in the drawing above. the distribution of load does not necessarily have to bear down on the gable.

Perhaps the most significant argument against what has been proposed in Gottinger Miszellen, and the simplest to understand. can be made by pointing to a plan view of the Great Pyramid. As we can see. the King's Chamber is thirty-four feet in length. The grand gallery is forty-two to eighty-two inches wide  - barely the width of one gabled ceiling block.

Therefore. when looking at a side view of the chambers. the hypothesis may appear plausible. but it falls apart under scrutiny. for even if we allow that there would be undue pressure on the south wall of the grand gallery. it would not necessitate five chambers being built across the entire thirty-fourfoot length of the King's Chamber.

Also, why five layers of beams? Why not a large open space with the gabled ceiling above?

In cutting these giant monoliths, the builders evidently found it necessary to craft the beams destined for the uppermost chamber with the same respect as those intended for the ceiling directly above the King's Chamber. Each beam was cut flat and square on three sides, with the topside seemingly untouched. This is significant, considering that those directly above the King's Chamber would be the only ones visible to those entering the pyramid.

Moreover, it is remarkable that the builders would exert the same amount of effort in finishing the thirty-four beams, which would not be seen once the pyramid was built, as they did the nine beams forming the ceiling of the King's Chamber, which would be seen. Even if these beams were imperative to the strength of the complex, deviations in accuracy would surely be allowed, making the cutting of the blocks less time-consuming - unless, of course, they were either using these upper beams for a specific purpose, and/or were using standardized machinery methods that produced these beams with little variation in their shape.

Why five layers of these beams? To include so many monolithic blocks of granite when constructing the King's Chamber is obviously redundant.

To get an idea of the enormity of such a task today, my company, Danville Metal Stamping, recently acquired a hydroform press. The main body of the press weighs one hundred tons and had to be shipped more than one hundred miles to our plant. Because of weight distribution considerations, the Department of Transportation dictated that it be hauled on a special tractor-trailer with the weight distributed among nineteen axles.

The length of this trailer approached two hundred feet and it required two additional drivers, positioned at key points along its length, to pivot it around corners.

The reason for describing this scenario is to point out that even using today's efficient, high-tech methods, there would have to be a damn good reason to move even one heavy load. The forty-three giant beams above the King's Chamber were not included in the structure to relieve the King's Chamber from excessive pressure from above, but rather to fulfill a more advanced purpose.

Without a conventional explanation that makes sense, we must look for other answers to the mystery of these granite beams. When these granite beams are analyzed with a more utilitarian perspective, one can discern a simple yet refined technology operating at the heart of the Great Pyramid that makes more sense.

The ancient Egyptians, or Khemitians, were brilliant in applying natural laws and using natural materials to enable this ancient power plant to function.

The granite beams above the King's Chamber were an essential and integral part of making this pyramid machine hum.
 

35 - Precision

Did the Ancients Have It? And If They Did, Should It Matter to Us?

Christopher Dunn

The word precision comes from precise, which Webster's defines as "sharply or exactly limited or defined as to meaning; exact; definite, not loose, vague, or equivocal; exact in conduct; strict; formal; nice; punctilious."

Preciseness is "exactness; rigid nicety; excessive regard to forms or rules; rigid formality." Precision is "the state of being precise as to meaning; preciseness; exactness; accuracy."

To many people, the application of precision in their lives is related to their words and actions. We have precise speech, precise timekeeping, and the precision of a military drill. We may have the good fortune to be invited to a dinner party by a "precision" and find the tableware in exact order, with nary a spoon or a goblet out of position.

The application of precision, as noted above, is part and parcel of being civilized. It is the discipline and order that is necessary for civilization to function successfully.

Beginning in the late 1800s, a different application of precision was gaining increased importance and seen to be necessary to ensure the successful outcome of human endeavors. The machines that were invented and used as laborsaving devices depended on precision components to function properly. In the 1800s, the cotton industry and steam power spawned the Industrial Revolution in the north of England.

The demand for more-efficient spinning mills and looms gave rise to a greater emphasis on producing components that functioned precisely.

To make products that were consistent, variables in the manufacturing process had to be reduced or eliminated. To accomplish this, dimensional variables that were inherent in the manufacture of critical components needed to be reduced to acceptable levels. However, because of the inaccuracies of the machine tools of the day, skilled fitters were needed to scrape, chisel, and file components to close dimensions in order for them to fit properly.

Wars have accelerated the evolution of standardized measurements and the elimination of variables in the manufacturing process. Put yourself in the place of a soldier during the Civil War. His rifle was precision-crafted, but when replacing a component in the field, he had to hand-file the pieces to fit. Obviously, this was time-consuming, and in war, timing could make you a winner or a loser. Standards were necessarily instituted and suppliers had to meet these standards or lose business.

Anyone who has brought home a bicycle or piece of "ready-to-assemble" furniture can appreciate the precision that is required for these objects to go together easily. Have you ever found yourself trying to a bolt in a predrilled hole that is off by an eighth of an inch? This is an example of the need for precision, and how the effort to produce precision products is actually an expensive, difficult endeavor.

In manufacturing today, components are made throughout the world and come together in an assembly plant. The exacting standards and precision of the product shipped from thousands of miles away ensure that when they go to the assembly line, the components fit together without additional work.

Most people will never actually create objects to a high precision. It is understandable. therefore. that most people overlook this important aspect of a civilization's infrastructure. To laypeople. precision is an abstract concept. This is not a criticism. If you have not had precision manufacturing experience. either professionally or as a hobby. an understanding of the concept of precision is academic.

We are end users of powerful precision technologies that fuel our civilization and make our lives easier. Without manufacturing precision. cars would not run. planes would not fly. and CDs would not play. The precision we create is born out of necessity. We do not create it without good reason. because the costs of producing artifacts today go up exponentially if the demand for accuracy is greater.

An example of close accuracy and precision is the twelve-inch straightedge that I took to Egypt in 1999 and 2001. The edge was finished on a precision grinder. Its deviation from a perfect. straight line was a mere .0001 inch. For the reader who cannot relate to what that means in real terms. take a hair out of your head and split it equally along its length into twenty parts. One part is approximately equal to .0001 inch. (The average hair is .0025 inch.)

Or. to compare it to our "some-assembly-required" example above. this straightedge is 1.250 times more precise than the predrilled hole that was off by an eighth of an inch.

If we were to miraculously uncover an unidentified artifact in the Sahara Desert that had been buried for thousands of years. how would we determine its purpose? If the speculation arises that it may have had some technological purpose. the challenge would be to prove it. which would require us to reverse-engineer its design to determine its function. Reverse engineering has been a part of industrial competitiveness for years.

Engineers would buy a competitor's product and by studying its design and components would understand the science and engineering behind its function. This is why the recovery of a potential or real enemy's weapons of war is important.

If. after a cursory examination of this unidentified prehistoric artifact. we determine that it may have been a machine that functions as a tool to create artifacts. how would we know that it was a precision machine tool? In order to prove the case for our prehistoric precision machine tool. it would need to be measured for accuracy. Certain components associated with precision machine tools are manufactured to a high accuracy.

Flat surfaces necessary for the machine to function properly would be finished to within .0002 inch. This kind of accuracy separates primitive tools and those that are the result of need and development. The discovery of this precision would elevate the artifact to a higher purpose. If these components were not precise. the arguments against it being the product of an advanced society would be strengthened.

The critical evidence. therefore. is the accuracy of the surfaces being measured. Artisans do not create surfaces with such accuracy unless the artifact they are creating needs to function to exact specifications. Unless there is a need. precision isn't even a consideration.

When looking for prehistoric machines. though. we tend to look for artifacts that are made of iron or steel. not granite. primarily because we use iron and steel to construct our machines. We see things as we are. not how they are. Nevertheless. the critical proof that would be demanded to support the conclusion that a steel artifact was a precision machine is its precision and the product of the machine.

This precision can be found in Egypt - crafted into many artifacts made of stable igneous rock that would survive tens of thousands of years and still retain their precision.

We may not have the iron and steel used to create the artifact. but we have the products in abundance. Many of these artifacts. I believe. may have been misidentified and assigned to a time that doesn't support the hypothesis. that the tools used to create them may have eroded over a much longer period of time than established dates would allow.

There is support for such a speculation if we look at artifacts purely from an engineering perspective. It has been said that to understand the ancient Egyptian culture. you have to think like an Egyptian.

To understand its technological accomplishments. however. you have to think like an engineer.
 

THE SERAPEUM
The granite box inside Khafre's pyramid has the same characteristics as the boxes inside the Serapeum.

Yet the boxes in the Serapeum were ascribed to the eighteenth dynasty. more than eleven hundred years later. when stoneworking was in decline. Considering that this dating was based on pottery items that were found and not the boxes themselves. it would be reasonable to speculate that the boxes have not been dated accurately.

Their characteristics show that their creators used the same tools and were blessed with the same skill and knowledge as those who created Khafre's pyramid.

Moreover. the boxes in both locations are evidence of a much higher purpose than mere burial sarcophagi.
 

They are finished to a high degree of accuracy; their corners are perfectly square. and their inside corners are astoundingly sharp.

All of these features are extremely difficult to accomplish. and none of them is necessary for a mere burial box.

In 1995 I inspected the inside and outside surfaces of two boxes in the Serapeum with a six-inch precision straightedge that was accurate to .0002 inch. My report on what I discovered has been published in my book The Giza Power Plant and published on my Web site.

The artifacts I have measured in Egypt have the marks of careful and remarkable manufacturing methods. They are unmistakable and irrefutable in their precision, but origin or intent will always be open to speculation. The accompanying photograph was taken inside the Serapeum on August 27, 2001.

Those taken of me inside one of these huge boxes show me inspecting the squareness between a twenty-seven-ton lid and the inside surface of the granite box on which it sits. The precision square I am using was calibrated to .00005 inch (that is, 5/100,000 of an inch) using a Jones & Lamson comparitor.

The underside of the lid and the inside wall of the box are incredibly square.

Finding that the squareness was achieved not just on one side of the box but on both raises the level of difficulty in accomplishing this feat.
 

Think of this as a geometric reality.

In order for the lid to be perfectly square with the two inside walls, the inside walls would have to be perfectly parallel. Moreover, the topside of the box would need to establish a plane that is square to the sides. That makes finishing the inside exponentially more difficult.

The manufacturers of these boxes in the Serapeum not only created inside surfaces that were flat when measured vertically and horizontally, but they also made sure that the surfaces they were creating were square and parallel to each other, with one surface, the top, having sides that are five feet and ten feet apart from each other.

But without such parallelism and squareness of the top surface, the squareness noted on both sides would not exist.

As an engineer and craftsman who has worked in manufacturing for more than forty years and who has created precision artifacts in our modern world, in my opinion this accomplishment in prehistory is nothing short of amazing. Nobody does this kind of work unless there is a very high purpose for the artifact. Even the concept of this kind of precision does not occur to an artisan unless there is no other means of accomplishing what the artifact is intended to do.

The only other reason that such precision would be created in an object is that the tools that are used to create it are so precise that they are incapable of producing anything less than precision.

With either scenario, we are looking at a higher civilization in prehistory than what is currently accepted. The implications are staggering.

This is why I believe that these artifacts that I have measured in Egypt are the smoking gun that proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that a higher civilization existed in ancient Egypt than what we have been taught. The evidence is cut into the stone.

The boxes that are off the beaten tourist's path in the rock tunnels of the Serapeum would be extremely difficult to produce today. Their smooth. flat surfaces. orthogonal perfection. and incredibly small inside corner radii that I have inspected with modern precision straightedges. squares. and radius gauges leave me in awe.

Even though after contacting four precision granite manufacturers I could not find one who could replicate their perfection. I would not say that it would be impossible to make one today -  if we had a good reason to do so.

But what would that reason be? For what purpose would we quarry an eighty-ton block of granite. hollow its inside. and proceed to craft it to such a high level of accuracy? Why would we find it necessary to craft the top surface of this box so that a lid with an equally flat underside surface would sit square with the inside walls?

There may be arguments against the claims of advanced societies in prehistory. Some may argue that the lack of machinery refutes such claims. but a lack of evidence is not evidence. It is fallacious to deny or ignore what exists by arguing for what does not exist.

When we ponder the purpose for creating such precision. we inexorably move beyond the simple reasons espoused by historians and are forced to consider that there was a civilization in prehistory that was far more advanced and vastly different from what was previously thought. We do not need to look for secret chambers or halls of records to know that this civilization existed.

It is crafted into some of the hardiest materials with which they worked - igneous rock.
 

36 - The Obelisk Quarry Mystery

Do Egyptologists Really Know How These Monuments Were Created?

Christopher Dunn

In my articles and book, I have injected a distinct bias when I have viewed ancient Egyptian artifacts.

In this article I will explain where my bias came from and I will answer the following questions:

"Isn't it possible to create all these wonderful artifacts in ancient Egypt with primitive tools? Because there are volumes of work that describe how these tools were capable of such work, we don't need to resort to fantastic inventions that don't exist in the archeological record, so why do you?"

My biased opinion of the level of technology used by the ancient Egyptians comes from many years of work in manufacturing.

For six years (over 12,480 hours) I operated hand tools and machine tools of many varieties, both large and small, in the production of artifacts that were crafted to engineering specifications. At the end of this six years I had completed my apprenticeship and was presented with journeyman documents, to benefit from as I saw fit.

The opportunities that followed spanned more than three decades. During this time, I must admit that my bias was further reinforced by exposure to the environment in which I had chosen to make a living. The effect this environment has had on my brain, I fear, is irreversible.

By the time I had been rescued and promoted to the sterile confines of a senior manager's office, more than 62,400 hours of environmental exposure in engineering and manufacturing had left deeply embedded scars in my critical thinking skills regarding how things are made.

These scars describe a path of struggle: the struggle to convert ideas into physical reality. The struggle is to sketch an idea onto paper and then proceed to pour, cut, shape, and mold that idea, with precision, into a functioning device. The struggle is to employ every intellectual and physical tool available, within those disciplines of science, engineering, manufacturing, and metrology that embrace function, form, and precision.

However, these scars also describe a path of disappointment when ideas do not work and a path of elation when, having learned from mistakes, there is success. Associated with both, the higher forces of humility etch a little deeper.

Perhaps I was too hasty in exclaiming space-age precision after discovering an accuracy of .0002 inch on the inside of a large, prehistoric, granite box. Perhaps the lathe marks were not really lathe marks. Perhaps I am overconfident when I look at tool marks on an artifact and can identify the tool that made them.

I have considered that a part of my bias could be related to a time in my career when I had to think like an American, rather than an Englishman.

But, then, I don't remember any drastic changes there, except the revelation that engineers are forced to think in similar ways regardless of what country they are in. That's the price of living in a physical world with natural laws.

Of course, the other environmental effect of living in a culture different from the one in which you spent your formative years is the stripping away of preconceived chauvinistic views of your natal culture as it relates to other cultures. This leads to a greater tolerance and acceptance of the views of others.

The reason I am telling you this is to give you some idea of the mistake I made in presenting my work. Much of what I have taken for granted when looking at artifacts in Egypt needed to be more fully explained. I realized that I had been putting the cart before the horse. In studying ancient Egyptian artifacts. I looked at the final product and wrote about the geometry and the precision.

For the most part. I neglected to discuss all of the methods that are required and by which these artifacts were created. To me it seemed obvious that they were the products of technologies of which there is no surviving evidence.

What I have been faced with. though. are arguments that cling to the notion that the use of primitive tools. such as stone hammers and pounders. copper chisels. and abrasive materials such as sand. is sufficient to explain the existence of all the stoneware created in ancient Egypt. It is argued that these tools. in the hands of a large. skillful workforce with plenty of time at its disposal. are capable of creating all of these artifacts.

It is argued that the ancient Egyptians did not consider time in the same way we do. To the ancient Egyptians (a civilization that covered several millennia). a decade was but a drop in the ocean of time. a century a mere goblet. So when an Egyptologist is asked to explain how a particularly difficult-to-create object is made. the main ingredient is time. and lots of it.

For a culture that spanned so many centuries. the ancient Egyptians were building for eternity. By their architecture and building materials. they were quite obviously concerned about the continuity of their Ka. or spirit. and the continuity of their civilization. It all sounds very logical and complete. and I found myself nodding my head in agreement. I cannot deny that handwork can produce many beautiful and precise objects in extremely difficult-to-work materials.

Yet even as I found myself agreeing. I still had a nagging concern that something was not quite right. There had to be a more cogent argument to which orthodox Egyptologists would listen. It has become quite obvious that ringing my bell next to artifacts that are incredibly precise was falling on deaf ears.

Following the publication of my previous article. entitled "Precision," I engaged in some discussions on Internet message boards. This is not the first time I have participated in such discussions. Since I discovered these aerobic exercises for the fingers. as far back as 1995. my enthusiasm for such discourse has been tempered by the reality that in most cases Internet debates are time-wasting and futile. I have been advised to avoid them like the plague - mostly by those who are closest to me. my family (particularly my wife).

Nevertheless. out of this masochistic exercise came some insight as to how I can redress my mistakes.

What I noticed is that I found myself discussing my work with people who did not agree with my conclusions. Because they did not agree with my conclusions. they quickly adopted the findings of scholars who have published their own studies and who articulated conclusions that are more consistent with what is believed about the history of the ancient Egyptians.

The foremost authority on ancient Egyptian stoneworking today is Denys Stocks. of Manchester University.

Stocks's work effectively trumps any prior commentary on the subject and is invaluable in analyzing the techniques of the ancient stonemasons. Stocks's opinions on the subject carry more weight because they are based on experimental data gathered in Egypt using materials that are a part of the archeological record.

The opinions of Sir William Flinders Petrie in his book Pyramids and Temple of Gizeh (which was published in 1893) and Lucas and Harris in their Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries are preempted by Stocks's field studies and considerable effort. The most recent work by Stocks was the Aswan project funded by "NOVA" during the creation of its "Obelisk" documentaries.

For this reason. I will focus on the working of granite. for in the course of his credible and scientific research at Aswan. Stocks produced some hard data on material removal rates that enables us to perform a reasonably accurate time study. The analysis is quite simple and is used by estimating engineers in manufacturing to provide estimated costs for producing modern-day artifacts.

What follows are calculations based on Stocks's research on the amount of time necessary to quarry one granite obelisk. The time will not include the time necessary for pulling its 440-ton mass out of the quarry. Nor do the calculations address the finishing of the block to its smooth. flat surface. or the numerous deeply etched. incredible glyphs.

Last. they do not take into account the time it would take to transport and erect the obelisk in front of Pylon V at Karnak.
 

We will start at the Aswan granite quarries. where we will select a suitable area for our stone.

Based on the finished dimensions. the raw piece of stone will be tall. The method used by the ancient Egyptians to separate a large. important stone from the bedrock was to cut a channel all the way around the piece and then undercut it. leaving pillars supporting its weight.

This hypothesis seems most reasonable and sensible. When looking at the unfinished obelisk at Aswan. we see that a trench was cut all around the obelisk. and if work had continued. an undercut would have been necessary to separate the granite from the bedrock.

The channel has scoop-shaped quarry marks. which led the Egyptologist Dieter Arnold to claim that each worker,

"sent to the granite" was assigned an area of "75 centimeters (10 palms) wide and divided into working sections 60 centimeters long. the minimum space for a squatting or kneeling worker."

This would be a somewhat cramped area barely two feet by two and a half feet wide for a worker swinging a heavy stone ball. and considering that there would have needed to be a line of workers. each one equally aggressive in wielding his stone ball. the risk of injury does not go unnoticed.

Nevertheless. for the sake of argument. I will use these figures in my calculations.

Mark Lehner. in the "Obelisk" documentary. concurred that this method was probably the one used by the ancient Egyptians. and he even performed some experimental work himself.

Based on the material removal rate information. therefore. a quick analysis of the time necessary to quarry an obelisk can be made. though we might believe that. with a sufficient amount of labor. the time it takes to accomplish a given project could be reduced. This is not necessarily true. Within any project are constraints or bottlenecks.

So while we may command a workforce of one thousand. a bottleneck will effectively reduce the number engaged in a given project significantly. The constraint in the obelisk-quarrying project is the number of workers able to work on a two-foot by two-and-a-half-foot patch of granite.
 

Obviously. this is only one at a time.

The time it would take to quarry the block. therefore. is based on the cubic mass of material to be removed. divided by the material removal rate. The mass of material is the width. multiplied by the length. multiplied by the depth. (The results follow the metric dimensions presented by Stocks. which are given in cubic centimeters [cu.cm]. Meters. feet. and inches are also given.)

The depth of the channel is open to question. Looking at the photographs. there is a considerable amount of bedrock removed. down to the top of the block.

It could be argued that other blocks might have been quarried away from its top for other purposes and. therefore. this distance could not be considered part of the project. I will estimate. therefore. that the depth of the channel had to have sunk into the bedrock nine feet for the obelisk and another two feet for the undercut.

The depth has to include quarrying deep enough that a worker may quarry a channel underneath the block that is wide enough for him to crawl under to chisel away the rock.

In the following table. it is assumed that a worker is pounding the granite using a dolerite ball. Stocks estimates that the material removal rate for a dolerite ball is thirty cubic cm per hour.

While there was no mention of the removal of waste or the replacement of pounders as they became ineffective. it is assumed that the material removal rate continues unabated. according to Stocks's experimental data.
 

Now let us analyze the length of time it would take to create an undercut.

For the calculation on the undercut, we will use Stocks's removal rate using a hammer and flint chisel. I have switched to this rate on the basis of a reasonable assumption that efficiencies will go down as the worker has to lie on his side without the aid of gravity to impact the surface. Stocks's material removal rate for a hammer and flint chisel was 5 cu. cm. per hour.

Although it challenges the imagination to believe that anyone other than a diminutive person/worker can effectively chisel a two-foot by two-and-a-half-foot tunnel underneath the granite, for the sake of argument I will base my calculations on such an assumption.

I will also base my calculations on the assumption that there are workers on both sides of the granite chiseling toward each other, thus halving the distance necessary to create the full undercut.

Using constraint analysis, the minimum amount of time just to quarry the stone is fifty years! It is physically impossible to assign more workers to accomplish the task in less time.

Workers may come and go to replace tired and sick workers, but at any given time, only one worker can labor away at that patch of granite. The 30-cu. cm. per hour removal rate does not continue unabated until we have a perfectly flat surface with sharp and square corners, either.

We are still left with the task of finishing the product, which, in my estimation, would conservatively take another decade using the tools that Egyptologists allow the ancient Egyptians to have in their tool kit.

On the base of Hatshepshut's pair of obelisks are inscriptions that tell us that the pair were quarried and raised into position in a seven-month period. To merely quarry the raw block in such a time would mean that the cutting rate would need to be increased at least thirty-seven times. Tools capable of such efficiency are not a part of the archeological record.

Along with all previous considerations and claims of geometry and precision, and now using the Egyptologists' own data, this confirms that the assertions of the Egyptologists are incorrect and that the ancient Egyptians were much more advanced than what we have allowed in the past.
 

37 - Behind the Pyramid's Secret Doors

What Does Astonishing New Evidence Reveal about the Great Pyramid's True Purpose?

Christopher Dunn

On Monday, September 16, 2002, at 8:00 P.M. Eastern Standard time, Fox television in the United States broadcast live from the Giza plateau in Egypt an exploration of the southern shaft in the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid.

Since 1993, when German robotics engineer Rudolph Gantenbrink made his initial exploration of this 8-eight-inch-square, 220-foot long shaft, millions of Egypt-watchers around the world have been waiting for the day when additional explorations would take place and another tantalizing barrier to greater knowledge might be removed.

The two-hour Fox/National Geographic extravaganza provided a torturous prelude to the moment when iRobot's masonry drill bit finally broke through into the space beyond and the endoscopic camera was inserted into the hole to take a peek at what lay beyond Gantenbrink's door.

The buildup to the production explored several ideas on what lies behind this so-called door.

Before the show aired, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chairman of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Antiquities (SCA), expressed a belief that a book about Khufu would be discovered:

"What this door might hide is very important to know, that Khufu wrote a sacred book and maybe this book is hidden behind this door, or maybe a papyrus roll telling us about building the pyramids."

Hawass's comments were taken further by the Egyptian State Information Service:

"Hawass stated that such doors were constructed for religious purposes due to the books found there, such as the gateways, the cavities, and the road which guided the dead to the hereafter and warned them against the dangers they might face."

The German Egyptologist Ranier Stadelman, who directed the work of Rudolph Gantenbrink in 1993, expressed a belief that the so-called door was a false door for the king's soul to pass through on its way to Osiris, represented by the star Sirius.

He believed that the copper fittings were handles that the king would use to lift the door.
 

Robert Bauval, author with Adrian Gilbert of The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids, predicted that a statue would be discovered and that the end of the shaft served as a serdab (a narrow chamber commemorating the dead) from which the ancient Egyptians viewed the stars.

John Anthony West, the author of Serpent in the Sky, thought there would be nothing but core masonry behind this door.

A caller to the Art Bell show during an interview I had with George Noory on September 15 identified herself as an Egyptologist and claimed to know what was behind the door. Dismissing my hypothesis on what would be behind the door, she claimed that they would find a space thirty feet long that contained sacred sand.

My own hypothesis, which we will discuss in a moment, has changed little since the publication of my book, The Giza Power Plant, in 1998. I resurrected it on my Web site and discussed it in interviews both prior to and after September 16.

The confidence in Chairman Hawass became noticeably muted as the program drew to a close. He cautioned the viewers that there might be nothing behind the door at all. His prophetic comments became a sickening reality to all of us as the endoscopic camera with its fish-eye lens pushed through the hole and a distorted image came into view. There appeared to be nothing there but a rough-looking block a short distance away.

With inimitable style and gusto, Dr. Hawass could hardly contain his excitement at the dismal image sent back by the camera.

"It's another door!" he said with glowing enthusiasm.

 

"With a crack!"

(The old Peggy Lee song played with melancholy in my head... "Is That All There Is?")

Hawass's pre-broadcast predictions were downgraded a week later to,

"Everything now needs a careful look. We will ask the National Geographic Society to cooperate to reveal more mysteries. After this broadcast, can we expect them to reveal anything but mysteries? After all, it's the mysteries that keep the viewers coming back for more."

On September 23, 2002, news came out of Egypt that the Pyramid Rover team had successfully explored the northern shaft in the Great Pyramid.

This shaft, opposite the southern shaft, posed problems forGantenbrink in 1993. Upuaut II was unable to navigate around earlier explorers' rods that were jammed in the passage as they attempted to push the rods around a bend in the shaft.
 

The iRobot team had a cunning but simple solution to the problem that Gantenbrink was faced with.

They turned the robot 90 degrees and sent it up the shaft gripping the walls, instead of the ceiling and floor. In this manner, it was able to ride over the top of the obstacles. Of the northern shaft, Hawass had an opinion that was beyond all reasonable demands of any craftsman living in any era.

Subject to the scrutiny and attention of the world press, the information coming from the chief of the SCA became increasingly unusual.

It is an unfortunate position to be in to be considered an expert and explorer in residence for the National Geographic Society and not have any well-thought-out answers for a hungry press:

"...the passage had bends and turns in an apparent attempt by builders to avoid the main chamber."

This could indicate the unexplained passageways were built after the pyramids were completed and were not part of the original design.

Hawass speculated that the passages could be connected to an attempt by Cheops to promote himself as Egypt's sun god. Belief at the time said kings became the god in death. Hawass believes the shafts, which have been chiseled out of the pyramid's stone structure, are passages the king will face before he travels to the afterlife.

Then, one week after going before the cameras in his Indiana Jones hat and predicting the discovery of a royal diary of Khufu, Dr. Hawass was again before the press:

"This find in the northern shaft, coupled with last week's discovery... in the southern shaft, represents the first major, new information about the Great Pyramid in more than a century," said Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

 

"This is not Raiders of the Lost Ark,'" Hawass said, scoffing at the idea that hidden treasure would be found.

Hawass proceeded to predict unabashedly that behind the stone block at the end of the northern shaft would be another door. (Cue Peggy Lee.)

Actually, I believe Hawass is correct. Behind the block at the end of the northern shaft they will discover another space similar to the one at the end of the southern shaft. This time, I believe, they will find a shaft that is on the right side of the cavity, perhaps in the floor, but more than likely in the right wall.

Compared to Dr. Hawass as quoted above. I have used more of the Great Pyramid's entire inner design to arrive at my prediction. I have discussed this subject with knowledgeable and staunch believers of the tomb theory. and they insist that it doesn't matter what is found behind the door; it will still support the tomb theory.

One conversant commented that even a vertical shaft that goes down into the bedrock would be incorporated into the tomb theory because if the Pharaoh wanted a vertical shaft. he could have one. His reason was that Egyptology is not a hard science and does not need to conform to the same standard.

In The Giza Power Plant theory. every architectural element in the Great Pyramid is integrally linked. Some features can be analyzed separately. but. for the most part. the Queen's Chamber. the King's Chamber. and the grand gallery are the principal features that work together in unison. and they cannot be separated from each other when considering a piece of evidence.

The features found in the King's Chamber led me to propose the use of diluted hydrochloric acid in the southern shaft and hydrated zinc in the northern shaft of the Queen's Chamber. The features in the grand gallery led me to understand the function of the King's Chamber. The features in the Queen's Chamber indicate that a chemical reaction was taking place there. The hypothesis rises or falls on the evidence found in these areas.

For the theory to hold. evidence that is discovered in the future has to support it. Some evidence. such as what will be found behind Gantenbrink's door. can be predicted by what is found in the chamber. the southern shaft. and the northern shaft. The power plant will either be vindicated. severely challenged. or even dismissed. based on what is revealed.

Before the Pyramid Rover exploration. I went on record as being fully prepared to admit that I was wrong if a search of the southern shaft did not reveal another shaft. or shafts. that will be redirected and eventually lead to a point underneath the pyramid. I also predicted that. on the back side of the door. the copper fittings would have connections or would continue away from the door to a point underneath the Great Pyramid.

Unfortunately. as of now. there have not been any clear images of the back side of the so-called door. so this part of the prediction has not been verified.

However. the illustration in my book predicted one of the attributes of the door and the evidence vindicated this prediction. In my illustration. the thickness of the block is given. by scale. as three inches thick. My measure was arbitrary and based on nothing more than the proposed function of the block.

The ultrasonic thickness tester on the Pyramid Rover measured the actual thickness and found it to be three inches thick (see schematic below).
 

Like everybody else in the United States, I was watching the video on Fox television.

In the top left corner was LIVE and the bottom left carried the Fox symbol with Channel 27. There was really nothing for me to become excited about until a man in Germany uploaded to the Maat message board a high-resolution image that he had taken of the National Geographic program broadcast on Sky Television in Europe.

This image seemed to indicate that there was more to be seen in the area that was occluded by the Fox logo.

I copied the image into a graphics program and auto-adjusted the levels, which lightened the dark areas. I stared at the screen - for what seemed to be eternity - at what was revealed.

I know that if you stare at something long enough, you might be able to see a face or some other shape, but the rectangular shape in the left corner of the new block became immediately apparent.

I then adjusted the levels, curves, and colors to bring more definition to the image and created construction lines (1 and 2) using the bottom corners as guides in order to create a vanishing point. It was my intention to see if the geometry of the rectangular shape on the left side was indeed a true rectangle and parallel with the wall.

Striking a line from the vanishing point (3) and bringing it along the side of the rectangular shape, I became confident that I may have indeed discovered the vertical shaft that I had predicted would be there. Interestingly, the line in the floor (4) is also parallel to the walls, which indicates either that the floor is made of two blocks or that a groove is cut in the floor.

In this enhanced image, the signs of staining on the floor lead from the vertical shaft end, which is also square with the walls. It appears that the second door is also notched in this area.

Because the chemical flowing into the Queen's Chamber did not need to be a great torrent or even of the volume that a normal faucet would produce, replenishing the shaft with fluid would not require a large orifice. The notched corner as seen in the bottom right corner of the block would be all that was needed to maintain the fluid level.

Moreover, if we look at the size of the vertical shaft behind the door by scale, it is only about one and a half inches wide and four inches long.

The exploration of the northern shaft and what was discovered at the end was predictable and, without any shadow of a doubt, vindicates the purpose for these shafts as outlined in The Giza Power Plant. The image of another door with copper fittings and the subtle difference between these fittings and those at the end of the northern shaft support the hypothesis regarding the chemicals used. The electrodes are affected by different chemicals a different way.

In the southern shaft, the action of the dilute hydrochloric acid eroded the copper over time. Because the upper part of the copper was covered with chemical for a shorter period of time than the lower part, as the fluid was always falling, the lower part of the copper was eroded more than the upper part. This resulted in a taper of the copper and the ultimate failure of the left electrode.

In the northern shaft we see a different effect. Because this shaft contained a hydrated metal, such as hydrated zinc, what we see is an electroplating of the left electrode. This is normal and predictable; considering that electricity flows from cathode (+) to anode (-), there would be a deposit of zinc on the anode.

What we see in the photograph taken by the Pyramid Rover is a white substance on the left electrode only. There is no erosion on these electrodes, and the thickness of the metal is considerably less than on those in the southern shaft. The stained limestone is on the left and on top of the electrode. Studies on what causes this effect are still being made.
 

Though Egyptology is not considered to be a hard science, scientific standards should be employed when trying to explain this edifice.

Arguments should follow the rules of evidence and conform to scientific principles. While Egyptologists may say the tomb theory is unassailable, my view has been that if the tomb theory cannot follow logical scientific arguments, and be subject to radical revision when new data emerges, then it fails.

These are the standards applied to alternate theorists, such as Hancock, Bauval, and myself, so we should expect no less from those who teach and support the accepted view. Moreover, the theory should be predictable.

What was discovered behind Gantenbrink's door, though not yet brought into full view, was not predicted by Egyptologists and does nothing to support the theory that this edifice was originally a tomb.

Scientific and social progress demands that we all be skeptics and question the accepted mores and theories that have been handed to us. Alternative views need to be discussed. Indeed, they should be welcomed by anyone who is serious about learning what flaws may exist with his or her own ideas.

Egyptology should not be immune to these scientific precepts, though its orthodox protectors' awkward attempt to force contradictory data to fit an unsupportable hypothesis gives little hope for change.

38 - The Case for Advanced Technology in the Great Pyramid

What Does the Evidence Really Show about the Advancement of Its Builders? Marshall Payn
One of the tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang offacts.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
 

The Khufu (Cheops) pyramid defies how we depict ancient technology.

Over two million limestone blocks rise to the height of a forty-story building. Each baseline exceeds two and a half football fields. Standing on top. an archer cannot clear the base with an arrow. All this comes from what was supposedly an agrarian society. forty-five hundred years ago.

And that's not all. The precision and craftsmanship surpass our modern understanding. Occupying an area of thirteen acres. the entire bedrock base has been carved to less than an inch out of level. It is oriented within a tiny fraction of a degree from the cardinal points.

Outer casing stones and inner granite blocks fit with such precision that a razor blade cannot be inserted between them. Blocks weighing as much as seventy tons (about what a railroad locomotive weighs) have been lifted to the height of a ten-story building and mated to the next block with wondrous precision.

How did they do these things? We don't know. Just a few generations before Khufu there were no pyramids. Where did the technology come from? We have no answers.

Any method of construction suggested. to date. for this pyramid does not satisfy the accepted standards of technology. But the reality is that the pyramid is real. and regardless of how they built it. they built it. Egyptians built pyramids for another thousand years. but today most of those are unrecognizable rubble.

Only the older ones are intact. which argues against the assumption of accrued knowledge. By whatever technological means these older ones were built. the Egyptians themselves somehow lost that technology.

More intriguing is why they were built in the first place. In spite of the fact that no body or funerary object - dating to the same time that the fourth-dynasty pyramids were built - has ever been found in any of them orthodox Egyptology vehemently asserts that all pyramids are tombs and only tombs. built to house the bodies of pharaohs.

Later pyramids had funerary connotations, but no bodies.
 

Egyptology's explanation of grave robbers does not address the absence of any evidence of robbers and fails to explain how purported robbers could bypass the barriers constructed to prohibit intrusion.

Perhaps funerary considerations introduced after the fourth dynasty were connected to the marked degeneration in construction quality. So let's test the "tombs-only" conviction with just one of the pyramid's unique design features.

The descending passage is roughly 350 feet long, of which about 150 feet is through masonry and another 200 feet is through bedrock. A century ago Sir Flinders Petrie, known as the granddaddy of Near East archeology, measured the descending passage. To show his adeptness for precision, he measured the pyramid's perimeter by triangulation, as the base was covered with rubble.

He calculated it to be 3,022.93 feet. Twenty-five years later the Egyptian government hired a professional surveyor after the rubble had been cleared away, and by traditional surveying techniques found it to be 3,023.14 feet. Petrie was off by 2.5 inches in 3,000 feet - off by 0.007%.

The straightness of the passage and the flatness of its ceiling and sides intrigued his penchant for precision. Because the floor had been so damaged, he didn't consider it.

The passage is about four feet high by three and a half feet wide and descends at an angle of 26 degrees. It is oriented due north, and today is aligned to Polaris.

Petrie determined that,

"[t]he average error of straightness in the built part of the passage is only 1/50 inch, an amazingly minute amount in a length of 150 feet. Including the whole passage, the error is under 1/8 inch on the sides, and 3/i0 inch on the roof, in the whole length of 350 feet."

How on earth did they construct this straightness, this optical precision on the scale of a football field? They didn't have lasers. Walk through the steps of possible construction methods. How could such precision have been derived?

Answer: We don't know.

They used some sort of technology and/or tools we simply don't know about. But what we do know, using our own technology, is that they could not have done this by accident.

And obviously, no matter how they did do it, it required a huge effort. Thus, one thing now is absolutely clear: They didn't go through such extreme effort for precision in the passage to carry a body through one time. By any kind of rationale, this should put the tomb-only notion to rest.

This information has been available for a century. It is suggested that the tomb-only theory has persisted because the curriculum for Egyptology has not included fundamental sciences and mathematics, and therefore does not provide the foundation to evaluate such elementary technical matters.

So what, then, could be the pyramid's purpose? There may be several, but a good bet for at least one use for the descending passage is as an observatory. Astronomy is the oldest discipline of science and the ancients are known to have been astute astronomers. Great deeds by the ancients were motivated by their respective religions, and their religions were derived from astronomy. To them, studying the heavens was not merely a scientific effort; their immortality depended on it.

Along with the measurable movements of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars, many scholars recognize that the ancients knew about the precession of the equinoxes.

Like a top that circles slowly while spinning rapidly around its central axis, Earth makes the slow circle of precession at about one degree every seventy-two years, or a complete circle once every 26,000 years, while spinning around its axis once every twenty-four hours. Usually attributed to Hipparchus, 150 B.C.E., the knowledge of this moving of the vault of the heavens is demonstrated by ancients far older than Hipparchus, and their religions reflected this knowledge.

Sighting from the bottom of the descending passage, the upper opening subtends an angle of just over half a degree. It would take a span of thirty-six years for an observer to follow any star close to the true pole (i.e., today's Polaris) as it enters the opening from the left and continues to the right until it disappears.

Thus, seventy-two years would equal one degree of precession and 360 times that would yield a precession cycle of just under 26,000 years.

It is well known that Egypt's ancients had the ability to deal with such mathematics. So considering religion and astronomy, the precision in design of the descending chamber as an observatory seems more credible than the idea that it had been designed to carry a body through it once, and attributing such precision to happenstance.

Another purpose for the Khufu pyramid (it is the largest and thereby might well epitomize the ancients' technology) could be to serve as a monument to preserve knowledge - something of a time capsule.

A large number of scholars outside of Egyptology believe it preserves dimensions of our planet, whereby the base perimeter is equal to one half of a degree of equatorial longitude. Does it?
 

Perimeter 3,023.14 ft. = ½ minute

6,046.28 ft. = 1 minute

362,776.8 ft. = 1 degree

so 68.7077 miles = 1 degree
360 degrees = 24,734.78 miles
 

If you stand on the equator and walk due north for 3,023.14 feet, the theory is that you've walked one half of one minute of longitude.

The earth's longitude would then equal 24,735 miles. Satellite measurement is 24,860 miles, or a difference of 125 miles. This is accuracy of 99.5 percent. Egyptology calls this coincidence. and that is certainly possible. But if the theory has merit. then the only other dimension of a sphere. its radius. would have. as its counterpart. the pyramid's height.

If such proves out. the theory would indeed have merit. But does it?

The height of the Khufu pyramid was 480.7 feet. Various measurements differ minutely. but not enough to affect the theory. Using the formula above. 480.7 feet x 2 x 60 x 360 = 3.933 miles. This computes to a polar radius of the earth of 3.933 miles. which. compared to the satellite's measure of 3.960 miles. yields a difference of 27 miles or an accuracy of 99.3 percent. Ninety-nine point five percent... 99.3%.

The mathematics of engineering does not allow such accuracy to be dismissed as coincidence.

How could the ancient Egyptians have derived these measurements? Again. look to astronomy (The Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Peter Tompkins). There are many other features of the pyramid for which we have no explanations. so this knowledge is but one example of what they knew and what we've only known for a few hundred years. But there stands the pyramid.

Then comes the question of the pyramid as a scale of the earth's dimensions: Why such a big scale? Why not a pyramid half the size - a dramatic reduction of work to attain and preserve the same information?

A hint comes from an unexpected discipline - mythology. The highly esteemed scholar Joseph Campbell. writing about myths of disparate cultures (Icelandic. Babylonian. Sumerian. Egyptian. and others. including biblical scripture) in his book The Masks of God - Occidental Mythology, found the number 43.200 or its direct multiple or derivative. In fact. he traced this number back to Neolithic times.

This engendered in him what he called "ecstatic panic" in that the supposed independent reoccurrence of this number. he reasoned. represented some relationship to cosmic rhythm. perhaps even a universal constant.

Remember the Khufu pyramid's scale: 2 x 60 x 360 = 43.200! Professor Campbell's ecstatic panic might have been too much for him had he known this. Could this number in some way have been used by the builders to determine the pyramid's dimensions?

Bottom line:

1. The notion that the pyramids were only tombs is disproved. That they were tombs at all has never been proved. even though the younger ones. not the older ones. had funerary characteristics.

2. The ancients demonstrated technology far exceeding what's been credited to them. far exceeding a simple mausoleum. reaching out with accuracy and methodology unexplained today.

Where did this technology come from? We don't know.

But they had it and then they lost it.

And rising above the Giza plateau is the most massive monument to that loss. the great Khufu pyramid. the oldest and only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

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