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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 />

mathematicians and astronomers, had borne out his inspired hunch. His<br />

evidence (reviewed fully in Chapter Forty-nine) showed that the three<br />

pyramids were an unbelievably precise terrestrial map of the three stars<br />

of Orion’s belt, accurately reflecting the angles between each of them and<br />

even (by means of their respective sizes) providing some indication of<br />

their individual magnitudes. 6 Moreover, this map extended outwards to<br />

the north and south to encompass several other structures on the Giza<br />

plateau—once again with faultless precision. 7 However, the real surprise<br />

revealed by Bauval’s astronomical calculations was this: despite the fact<br />

that some aspects of the Great Pyramid did relate astronomically to the<br />

Pyramid Age, the Giza monuments as a whole were so arranged as to<br />

provide a picture of the skies (which alter their appearance down the ages<br />

as a result of precession of the equinoxes) not as they had looked in the<br />

Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, but as they had looked—and only as they<br />

had looked—around the year 10,450 BC. 8<br />

I had come to Egypt to go over the Giza site with Robert Bauval and to<br />

question him about his star-correlation theory. In addition I wanted to<br />

canvass his views on what sort of human society, if any, could have had<br />

the technological know-how, such a very long while ago, to measure<br />

accurately the altitudes of the stars and to devise a plan as mathematical<br />

and ambitious as that of the Giza necropolis.<br />

I had also come to meet another researcher who had challenged the<br />

orthodox chronology of Ancient Egypt with a well-founded claim to have<br />

found hard evidence of a high civilization in the Nile Valley in 10,000 BC<br />

or earlier. Like Bauval’s astronomical data, the evidence had always been<br />

available but had failed to attract the attention of established<br />

Egyptologists. The man responsible for bringing it before the public now<br />

was the American scholar, John Anthony West, who argued that the<br />

specialists had missed it—not because they had failed to find it, but<br />

because they had found it and had failed to interpret it properly. 9<br />

West’s evidence focused on certain key structures, notably the Great<br />

Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza and, much farther south, the<br />

mysterious Osireion at Abydos. He argued that these desert monuments<br />

showed many scientifically unmistakable signs of having been weathered<br />

by water, an erosive agent they could only have been exposed to in<br />

sufficient quantities during the damp ‘pluvial’ period that accompanied<br />

the end of the last Ice Age around the eleventh millennium BC. 10 The<br />

implication of this peculiar and extremely distinctive pattern of<br />

‘precipitation induced’ weathering, was that the Osireion, the Sphinx, and<br />

6<br />

The Orion Mystery.<br />

7<br />

Ibid.<br />

8<br />

Ibid.<br />

9<br />

Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-242.<br />

10 Ibid., 186-7.<br />

343

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