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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

We walked on, reaching the south-eastern corner at a little after 4:15<br />

a.m.<br />

Very few modern buildings, even the houses we live in, have corners<br />

that consist of perfect ninety degree right angles; it is common for them<br />

to be a degree or more out of true. It doesn’t make any difference<br />

structurally and nobody notices such minute errors. In the case of the<br />

Great Pyramid, however, I knew that the ancient master-builders had<br />

found a way to narrow the margin of error to almost nothing. Thus, while<br />

falling short of the perfect ninety degrees, the south-eastern corner<br />

achieved an impressive 89° 56’ 27”. The north-eastern corner measured<br />

90° 3’ 2”; the southwestern 90° 0’ 33”, and the north-western was just two<br />

seconds of a degree out of true at 89° 59’ 58”. 4<br />

This was, of course, extraordinary. And like almost everything else<br />

about the Great Pyramid it was also extremely difficult to explain. Such<br />

accurate building techniques—as accurate as the best we have today—<br />

could have evolved only after thousands of years of development and<br />

experimentation. Yet there was no evidence that any process of this kind<br />

had ever taken place in Egypt. The Great Pyramid and its neighbours at<br />

Giza had emerged out of a black hole in architectural history so deep and<br />

so wide that neither its bottom nor its far side had ever been identified.<br />

Ships in the desert<br />

Guided by the increasingly perspiring Ali, who had not yet explained why<br />

it was necessary for us to circumnavigate the Pyramid before climbing it,<br />

we now began to make our way in a westerly direction along the<br />

monument’s southern side. Here there were two further boat-shaped pits,<br />

one of which, although still sealed, had been investigated with fibre-optic<br />

cameras and was known to contain a high-prowed sea-going vessel more<br />

than 100 feet long. The other pit had been excavated in the 1950s. Its<br />

contents—an even larger seagoing vessel, a full 141 feet in length 5 —had<br />

been placed in the so-called Boat Museum, an ugly modern structure that<br />

gangled on stilts beneath the south face of the Pyramid.<br />

Made of cedarwood, the beautiful ship in the museum was still in<br />

perfect condition 4500 years after it had been built. With a displacement<br />

of around 40 tons, its design was particularly thought-provoking,<br />

incorporating, in the words of one expert, ‘all the sea-going ship’s<br />

characteristic properties, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher<br />

than in a Viking ship, to ride out the breakers and high seas, not to<br />

contend with the little ripples of the Nile.’ 6<br />

4 Ibid., p. 87.<br />

5 See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times, University of Texas Press,<br />

1994, p. 17; The Ra Expeditions, p. 15.<br />

6 The Ra Expeditions, p. 17.<br />

272

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