The Giza Necropolis

- an integrated site plan

If one looks carefully at the layout of the 3 main pyramids from above, the first thing one notices is that they are not set out in a straight line - in fact, a line drawn through the apex of the Great Pyramid and that of the Second Pyramid will pass some distance to the west of the Third Pyramid's apex.

Egyptologists have long been aware of this fact, but have never accorded it any significance because, according to their viewpoint, the 3 main pyramids at Giza were designed and built as tombs, and tombs only. And if this was the case, why should they have any designed relationship to each other?

In 1980 however, a discovery was made which is so fundamental and so important to modern society's understanding of the ancients, that it received the same vociferous derision from Egyptologists, as did  Copernicus' theory of a heliocentric Solar System from scientists and academics of his time. The discovery was made by Robert Bauval, a Belgian construction engineer, and quite frankly, the clues were always there for any inquiring mind to follow.

Central to the Ancient Egyptians' religion was the worship of the god Osiris who has always been linked to the celestial constellation of Orion. Whilst watching the heavens one night, Bauval noticed that the 3 main "belt" stars of the Orion constellation didn't quite form a straight line, with the third star, Mintaka, being slightly offset towards the east. Bauval made the connection with the pyramids' juxtoposition, and decided to measure the angle of this offset. His hunch paid off - the third pyramid was offset by the same angle.

This was an absolutely incredible discovery, not least because of its implications for the history of mankind. Here was the first solid evidence that the builders of the pyramids, whoever they may have been, were not only skilled architects and construction experts, but also advanced mathematicians and astronomers. And all this supposedly at the very dawn of human civilisation!

And that wasn't all. Due to a phenomenon known as "Precession of the Equinoxes", the image of the visable universe as seen from Earth alters over time. These minute changes are as regular and predictable, as they are unstopable. We have already seen the ground / sky duality immortalised in the site plan of the pyramids, which lie close to the course of the river Nile, the very lifeline of Egypt. This great river also played a huge part in Ancient Egyptian mythology, and is identified in ancient texts as "The winding waterway". Bauval postulated a ground / sky link here to the spiral arm of the Milky Way, which is clearly visible with the naked eye on a clear night, and appears to the observer as a winding "celestial river" across the heavens.

However, when Bauval attempted to correlate the ground layout with the celestial at around the time of the 4th Dynasty (when Egyptologists suppose the pyramids were built), the rotation of Orion relative to the band of the Milky Way caused by precession had failed to give a match. Using a sophisticated computer program however, he was able to "wind back" the image of the sky to find out exactly when the duality was complete. And it was complete around the year 10,450 BC.  At that time, and that time only, the ground / sky duality was perfect not only for the Giza pyramids, but also the sacred river Nile and, as we shall see in a later section, the equinoctal marker the Great Sphinx. The date of 10,450 BC also has an important  astronomical significance. This is because it was the exact time of Orion's lowest point in its precessional cycle, (the period of time it takes the constellation to rise and fall, relative to the celestial meridian, and return to where it started), a cycle which takes 25,920 years.

This part of Bauval's theory is the most hotly contended, and I myself have a few issues with it. In order not to devalue Bauval's tremendous work, it is worth stressing again that the relationship between the stars of Orion's Belt and the 3 main pyramids at Giza is now mostly although not universally accepted, and this has been a HUGE step towards our understanding of these technologically advanced peoples. However, I find the correlation of the Nile to the Milky Way slightly harder to accept for 2 main reasons -

1) The spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, as viewed in the night sky, is not a precise or well defined shape, nor is it in an exact measurable position, due to the very nature of its composition of billions of individual stars. Therefore, applying its presence to a precise computer model  is bound to introduce some positional ambiguities into the calculation which would only be magnified by the time-shift functions of this software.

2) The course of the river Nile is also not precisely fixed, especially when timescales of 12,000 years or more are considered. Before the Aswan Dam was completed in 1970, the river Nile would flood every year and this, coupled with any large river's natural erosional / depositional action, has served to alter its course many times over the last 12,000 years. So in the same way as the spiral arm of the galaxy, fitting the Nile's position into a computer model seems doomed to the same accuracy problems.

I am not dismissing this part of Bauval's theory, merely pointing out some of my concerns with it. With the ambiguities mentioned above, it seems more like the data can be manipulated to fit the theory.

So what are we to conclude from all this evidence then? Some may be quick to dismiss it all, as the Egyptological community has done repeatedly since the "Belt star correlation" discovery; others may cite this as proof that the pyramids of Giza were built in this remote epoch. I myself prefer to avoid such snap dicisions, although I will draw some conclusions based on  irrefutable evidence nearer the end of the website.