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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 />

unadorned style of architecture as the better-known Valley Temple. Here,<br />

at any rate, were the same enormous blocks, weighing 200 tons or more<br />

each. 13 And here too was the same intangible atmosphere of vast<br />

antiquity and awakening intelligence, as though some epiphany might be<br />

at hand. Even in its present, much despoiled state, this anonymous<br />

structure, which Egyptologists had called a Mortuary Temple, was still a<br />

place of power that seemed to draw its energy from an epoch far in the<br />

past.<br />

I looked up at the huge mass of the Second Pyramid’s eastern face just<br />

behind us in the pearl-grey dawn light. Again, as John West had pointed<br />

out, there was much to suggest that it might have been built in two<br />

different stages. The lower courses, up to a height of perhaps thirty feet,<br />

consisted largely of cyclopean limestone megaliths like those in the<br />

temples. Above this height, however, the remainder of the pyramid’s<br />

gigantic core had been formed out of much smaller blocks weighing<br />

around two to three tons each (like the majority of the blocks in the Great<br />

Pyramid).<br />

Had there been a time when a twelve-acre, thirty-foot-high megalithic<br />

platform had stood here on the ‘hill of Giza’, west of the Sphinx,<br />

surrounded only by nameless square and rectangular structures such as<br />

the Valley and Mortuary Temples? In other words, was it possible that the<br />

Second Pyramid’s lower courses might have been built first, before the<br />

other pyramids—perhaps long before, in a much earlier age?<br />

The cult<br />

That question was still on my mind when Robert Bauval arrived. After<br />

exchanging a few chilly pleasantries about the weather—a cold desert<br />

wind was blowing across the plateau—I asked him, ‘How do you account<br />

for the 8000-year gap in your correlations?’<br />

‘Gap?’<br />

‘Yes; shafts that seem to have been aligned in 2450 BC and a site-plan<br />

that maps star positions in 10,450 BC.’<br />

‘Actually, I see two explanations that both make some kind of sense,’<br />

said Bauval, ‘and I think the answer has to be one or the other of these ...<br />

Either the pyramids were designed as a sort of “star-clock” to mark two<br />

particular epochs, 2450 and 10,450 BC, in which case we actually can’t<br />

say when they were built. Or they were built up over ...’<br />

‘Hang on with that first point,’ I interrupted. ‘How do you mean “starclock”?<br />

How do you mean we can’t say when they were built?’<br />

‘Well, let’s assume for a moment that the pyramid builders knew<br />

13 The Mortuary Temple was excavated by von Sieglin in 1910 and was found to consist<br />

of blocks of varying sizes weighing ‘between 100 and 300 tons’. Blue Guide: Egypt, p.<br />

431.<br />

431

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