The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Page B

‘temple’ (or Kalasasiya) had been built about 15,000 BC, some 9,000 years before the latest estimates of the beginning of civilisation in the Middle East.
    Hancock also drew on the work of a Belgian engineer, Robert Bauval, presented in a book called
The Orion Mystery
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Bauval had seen a photograph of the three pyramids at Giza taken from the air, and had been struck by their rather odd arrangement. The first two pyramids – the Great Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu), and the pyramid of his son Chefren – were neatly arranged so that a diagonal could be drawn from the upper left-hand corner of the Great Pyramid, straight through the opposite corner, and then on through the same two corners of the Chefren pyramid. You would expect that line to continue on through the two corners of the smallest of the three pyramids, that of Menkaura. So why was the third pyramid completely out of alignment? And why was it so small, compared to the other two? Menkaura was as powerful a pharaoh as his father and grandfather.
    The answer came to Bauval when he was in the desert one night, and saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt – Orion looks like two triangles placed point to point, and the Belt runs across its middle. The three stars were arranged exactly like the three pyramids. Moreover, the Milky Way, stretching across the sky beside them, looked very much like the Nile running north past the pyramids. Bauval knew that the Egyptians regarded their land as a reflection of heaven. Did they mean that quite literally, building the pyramids to reflect the Belt of their sacred constellation of Orion, which represented the god Osiris?
    However if the pyramids were meant as a representation of the stars of Orion’s Belt, Bauval noticed that they were not quite an exact reflection. Because of a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation moves up and down the sky over a period of about 26,000 years. As it does so, it twists slightly – imagine that the double-triangle isimpaled on the end of the minute hand of a clock, and you can see that as it moves from twelve o’clock to half past twelve, it will turn completely upside down. Actually, precession causes the constellation to move only to about ten past twelve, but it still changes its angle. Bauval calculated that the last time Orion actually ‘reflected’ the pyramids of Giza, as if reflected in a vast mirror, was about 10,500 BC.
    Bauval felt that this date must have had some deep significance for the ancient Egyptians – in fact, it was what their holy scriptures referred to as the ‘First Time’,
zep tepi,
the beginning of Egyptian history. Was the Sphinx built to commemorate that ‘First Time’ around 10,500 BC? If Bauval was correct, the Sphinx’s construction predated Schoch’s estimate of 7,000 BC.
    Bauval did not think that the pyramids were also built in 10,500 BC – he thought that certain astronomical evidence concerning the ‘air shaft’ out of the Queen’s Chamber indicated that the Great Pyramid had actually been built around 2,500 BC, just as Egyptologists believe, but he felt the whole Giza complex was almost certainly planned in 10,500 BC. In
Fingerprints of the Gods,
Graham Hancock suggests that perhaps the lower part of the Chefren pyramid had been built in 10,500 BC, since its massive blocks are quite unlike the much smaller blocks of the other two pyramids.
    Graham Hancock was immensely helpful to me when I began my own book, which was eventually published as
From Atlantis to the Sphinx.20
Graham sent me two complete versions of the typescript of
Fingerprints of the Gods,
and the next year the typescript of the sequel on which he and Robert Bauval collaborated,
Keeper of Genesis,21
with an invitation to use anything I wanted.
    Rand had also played his part in the success of
Fingerprints of the Gods.
Graham has described how, when he was finishing
Fingerprints of the Gods,
he was at a low ebb physically and mentally – physically