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Chapter 39
Place of the Beginning
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Giza, Egypt, 16 March 1993, 3:30 p.m.
It was mid afternoon by the time I left the Great Pyramid. Retracing the
route that Santha and I had followed the night before when we had
climbed the monument, I walked eastwards along the northern face,
southwards along the flank of the eastern face, clambered over mounds
of rubble and ancient tombs that clustered closely in this part of the
necropolis, and came out on to the sand-covered limestone bedrock of
the Giza plateau, which sloped down towards the south and east.
At the bottom of this long gentle slope, about half a kilometre from the
south-eastern corner of the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx crouched in his
rock-hewn pit. Sixty-six feet high and more than 240 feet long, with a
head measuring 13 feet 8 inches wide, 1 he was, by a considerable margin,
the largest single piece of sculpture in the world—and the most
renowned:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. 2
Approaching the monument from the north-west I crossed the ancient
causeway that connected the Second Pyramid with the so-called Valley
Temple of Khafre, a most unusual structure located just 50 feet south of
the Sphinx itself on the eastern edge of the Giza necropolis.
This Temple had long been believed to be far older than the time of
Khafre. Indeed throughout much of the nineteenth century the consensus
among scholars was that it had been built in remote prehistory, and had
nothing to do with the architecture of dynastic Egypt. 3 What changed all
that was the discovery, buried within the Temple precincts, of a number
of inscribed statues of Khafre. Most were pretty badly smashed, but one,
found upside down in a deep pit in an antechamber, was almost intact.
Life-sized, and exquisitely carved out of black, jewel-hard diorite, it
showed the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh seated on his throne and gazing with
serene indifference towards infinity.
At this point the razor-sharp reasoning of Egyptology was brought to
bear, and a solution of almost awe-inspiring brilliance was worked out:
statues of Khafre had been found in the Valley Temple therefore the
Valley Temple had been built by Khafre. The normally sensible Flinders
1 Measurements from The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 106.
2 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’.
3 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 48.
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