The Message Of The Sphinx Part 5

Shortly after this episode, in 1979, as we shall see in further detail below, Mark Lehner got involved with the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE for short)-which is the officially registered American Egyptological mission in Egypt.[166] At about the same time, Zahi Hawa.s.s, today the Director-General of the Giza Pyramids, was supervising excavations 165 feet to the east of the Sphinx Temple and hit bedrock at a depth of only six feet. A few months later, however-in 1980-Egyptian irrigation specialists checking for groundwater drilled in the same area, less than 100 feet away from the Hawa.s.s dig, and were able to go down more than 50 feet without impediment before their drill-bit suddenly collided with something hard and ma.s.sive. After freeing the drill, much to their surprise, they found that they had brought to the surface a large lump of Aswan granite.[167]

No granite occurs naturally anywhere in the Nile Delta area where Giza is located, and Aswan-the source of all the granite used by the ancients at Giza-is located 500 miles to the south. The discovery of what appears to be a substantial granite obstacle-or perhaps several obstacles-50 feet below ground level in the vicinity of the Sphinx is therefore intriguing to say the least.

Adding to the intrigue were further discoveries that the SRI made around the Sphinx in 1982 as a result of yet another project financed by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.[168] Mark Lehner, who was once again present throughout, described what the SRI did as follows: They brought a very powerful acoustical sounder, which is a long pencil-shaped thing. They put it down a drill hole. This is called Immersion Downhole Acoustics. You have to be in water. So they put it down into the water table and it sent out sound waves in all directions. Then they put down a listener, like a stethoscope, and you get a signal on an oscilloscope if sound waves are coming through; if they're not, you don't. You discover fissures this way-on one side of the fissure there's no signal and on the other side there is.

They put the sounder underneath the paw [of the Sphinx] and always got a good, clear signal-there's no underground cavity blocking it. And they put it along the paw between the elbow and that box on the side, around the outside of the box and into the corner, and there was always a good signal.

But, at my prompting, they put it on the bedrock floor inside the box-and it was dead three places where they put it down, as though there is some kind of opening or empty s.p.a.ce underneath that was blocking the signal. That was the very last day of the SRI project, and they never checked that out.[169]

Since 1982, we were surprised to learn, almost no further research has been officially authorized to investigate the numerous tantalizing hints of deeply buried structures and chambers in the vicinity of the Sphinx. The single exception was Thomas Dobecki's seismic work in the early 1990s. As reported in Part I, this resulted in the discovery of what appears to be a large, rectangular chamber beneath the forepaws of the Sphinx. Dobecki's investigations were part of the wider geological survey of the Sphinx led by Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University-a survey, as the reader will recall, that was brought abruptly to a halt in 1993 by Dr. Zahi Hawa.s.s of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization.

The mapping surveys

The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) has several times received ECF-ARE financing for its programme of investigations at Giza.[170] In 1979, for example, a proposal was made to the ARCE for a full-scale mapping survey involving the Great Sphinx and its enclosure in which use would be made of modern photogrammetric techniques to record every detail, crack, fissure, contour and outline of the monument. When the survey went ahead, Mark Lehner was appointed as its Field Director. Funders were the Edgar Cayce Foundation, the Chase National Bank of Egypt and the Franzhein Synergy group.[171]

Mark Lehner completed the mapping survey in 1983 and by 1984 his reputation was sealed as America's leading expert on the Sphinx. He was then appointed Director of the newly established and much more extensive and ambitious Giza Mapping Project, again under the auspices of the ARCE, and with some funding-again-coming from the Edgar Cayce Foundation and ARE. The major financial contributors were the Yale Endowment for Egyptology, General Dynamics, the multimillionaire David Koch, and a Los Angeles real-estate tyc.o.o.n named Bruce Ludwig.[172] More recently the Giza Mapping Project has been superseded by the Giza Plateau Project which also numbers David Koch and Bruce Ludwig amongst its funders and which is also directed by Mark Lehner.[173]

Pulling away

When, exactly, Professor Lehner began to pull away from the influence of the Edgar Cayce Foundation and cross over into the mainstream of professional Egyptology and its orthodoxy is not especially clear. However, some light may be shed on the matter by an interview that he gave in August 1984 to Robert Smith, editor of the ARE magazine Venture Inward. The interview was published in two parts in the January-February issues of 1985. Asked about his work at Giza, Lehner explained: The history of my involvement began in 1972 when I went on an ARE tour. We stopped in Egypt for a week and I went out to the Giza plateau with a group, and then I went out to the Giza Pyramids again by myself and sat for awhile in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid. I wandered around the cemeteries that are outside the Pyramid, and something plugged into me about this place. I vowed that I would be back in a year, and so I was. I went back to study at the American University in Cairo. During that year before returning to Cairo, I enthusiastically researched the Cayce readings on Egypt and put together the book, The Egyptian Heritage. The readings describe not only a civilization in Egypt in 10,500 bc, but also, preceding that, the lost civilization of Atlantis, which was in its final days, according to the Cayce information, when the Sphinx and the Pyramids were built ...[174]

Lehner then explained how he had come to realize that 'there's a great disparity between the dating of the monuments by professional scholars and that given in the Cayce readings'. He added that for him investigating the Sphinx was 'just a focus of a general metaphysical and spiritual quest'. This had led him to work, he elaborated, 'with the bedrock realities [and] ground truth'-realities that had made him bracket all his expectations and ideas and 'just deal with what the site has to offer'.[175]

In Venture Inward magazine of May-June 1986, Robert Smith published an illuminating report about a meeting that took place at the Edgar Cayce Foundation attended by Mark Lehner, Charles Thomas Cayce (President of the ARE), James C. Windsor (President of the Edgar Cayce Foundation), Edgar Evans Cayce, and other ARE officials. On the agenda was the evaluation of future ECF/ARE activities at Giza. Setbacks and mounting scientific evidence against the Cayce prophesies had caused some to question whether it was still worthwhile funding projects there. Ironically, much of the adverse evidence was being turned up by Lehner's research.[176] Robert Smith recounts the discussion that took place: 'What do we do next?' asked Edgar Evans Cayce, the younger son of Edgar Cayce and a member of the Board of Trustees.

'Should we drill more holes?' asked Charles Thomas Cayce, president of the ARE, and grandson of Edgar Cayce.

Neither has given up the search for Ra-Ta. Lehner, the young archaeologist who has led the search at Giza for the past decade, wants to press on with it too.

'You are not as optimistic now about the prospects of vindicating some of the things that were said about this area in the readings,' noted James C. Windsor, President of the Edgar Cayce Foundation. 'Do you have any interest in the Hall of Records? Is it worth looking for?'

'Oh, absolutely,' replied Lehner. 'I think it is, but not in as tangible a way as I used to think.'[177]

Lehner went on to explain at length why various archaeological and scientific tests had frustrated his hopes that the Cayce readings might be linked to a suitably 'tangible' reality. 'Why then continue the search?' wondered Robert Smith.

'I have a sort of gut feeling that something is under the Sphinx and that something is out there at the pyramids in the way of a mystery,' said Lehner. 'I like to think of it as something kind of pulsating.'[178]

During the meeting at the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Charles Thomas Cayce reportedly asked Lehner whether it would be possible to drill holes at regular intervals in order to locate underground pa.s.sages near the Sphinx, but Lehner felt that the Egyptians would 'balk' at this idea. He suggested in pa.s.sing, however, that a certain American oil company official, who at that time was apparently working for an American museum might be interested in using his 'crack geophysical prospecting team' for explorations beneath the Sphinx.[179]

Since making these statements and proposals-because, he says, of what the site has taught him-Lehner has veered further and further away from the Edgar Cayce influence. Today he repudiates any notion of an earlier civilisation in 10,500 bc. Indeed, so complete does his conversion appear to have been that in a recent denunication of John West's geological theories concerning the Sphinx he felt compelled to state: 'I believe we have a professional responsibility to respond to notions-like those of Cayce and West-that would rob the Egyptians of their own heritage by a.s.signing the origins and genius of Nile Valley civilization to some long-lost agent like Atlantis.'[180]

Lehner does not attempt to deny his own former involvement with the Edgar Cayce Foundation, or with ideas about Atlantis, but seeks instead to find ways to reconcile the origins of his former interests in 'mystical interpretations of the Pyramids and the Sphinx' with his present hardcore commitment to 'bedrock realities'. Lehner compares his situation to that of Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, who had come to Egypt in the 1880s 'to test the mystical "pyramid inch" against the stone of Khufu's pyramid'-and found the 'pyramid inch' wanting.[181] Petrie, as we shall see in the next chapter, had followed in the footsteps of his father, William, and the notorious Astronomer Royal of Scotland, Piazzi Smyth-both of whom pa.s.sionately believed that the Great Pyramid had been built under divine inspiration by the Israelites during their bondage in Egypt.[182]

Lunch with Mr. Cayce

In May 1994 we flew to New York and made our way by car to Virginia Beach in Norfolk, Virginia, where the headquarters of the Edgar Cayce Foundation, and its partner organization the a.s.sociation for Research and Enlightenment, are located. We wanted to explore the unexpected connections that this organization had at one time enjoyed with Mark Lehner, and were curious to know how-if at all-the Egyptian Antiquities Organization and Zahi Hawa.s.s, Lehner's colleague at Giza, fitted into all this.

Mutual friends arranged a meeting for us with the current President of the ARE and the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Mr. Charles Thomas Cayce, the grandson of Edgar Cayce. We were also to meet two prominent ARE members who, we were informed, had contributed to various projects at Giza in the 1970s and 1980s and to the more recent geological investigations carried out by John West and Robert Schoch.

The venue was the Edgar Cayce Foundation and ARE headquarters on Atlantic Avenue. There we were greeted by cheerful and friendly staff. It was a normal busy day and we saw visitors of all ages browsing in the well-stocked library and bookshop and making their way to various lectures and meditation cla.s.ses. The general atmosphere was a bit like that of the campus of a small university or college.

We were taken for lunch by Mr. Cayce at the nearby Ramada Oceanfront Hotel. There we were joined by the two senior ARE members who had come from New York and Washington to meet us. The discussion at the table ranged widely and included what seemed to be a completely open and honest review of the ARE's various initiatives at Giza over the previous two decades. Everyone seemed to know Mark Lehner well, and both the man from Washington and the man from New York also spoke of Zahi Hawa.s.s in extremely personal and friendly terms.

At this point we could not avoid bringing up the matter of John West's recent sensational NBC television doc.u.mentary, Mystery of the Sphinx which, as we saw in Part I, Lehner had treated with disfavour and which had also provoked the following vigorous reb.u.t.tal from Zahi Hawa.s.s: The film indicates an attempt by these pretenders to prove that the age of the Sphinx dates back to fifteen thousand years ... [and that] the builders of the Sphinx, and consequently the Pyramids and other great antiquities, were not the ancient Egyptians but other people of higher culture and education that came from the 'Atlantis' continent after its destruction and put beneath the Sphinx the scientific records of the lost continent! It is evident that this John West represents nothing but a continuation of the cultural invasion of Egypt's civilization. Before him was Edgar Cayce in Virginia who pretended he lived in Atlantis fifteen thousand years ago and then fled to Egypt with the records which he buried near the Sphinx before the destruction of the continent! ...[183]

Presented late in 1993 by the Hollywood actor Charlton Heston, Mystery of the Sphinx had been partially financed by the ECF/ARE and their supporters, and had very strongly endorsed the view that the Sphinx, and a number of the other monuments on the Giza necropolis, must date back to at least the eleventh millennium bc.[184] As we reported in Part I, it was this same doc.u.mentary that had also broken the news of Thomas Dobecki's seismic surveys around the Sphinx and his discovery of a large rectangular chamber buried deep in the bedrock beneath its front paws. This, of course, had suggested to the ECF/ARE that there could be a connection with Cayce's 'Hall of Records'. As Charlton Heston remarked in his commentary: 'the unexpected cavity detected by the seismograph was located precisely where Edgar Cayce said it would be-under the front paws of the Sphinx.'[185]

We asked Charles Cayce and his two colleagues how they felt about Hawa.s.s's angry and dismissive reaction to the film and his talk of 'pretenders'.

The ARE men simply smiled and shrugged their shoulders. They were very confident, they informed us, that everything was working for the best: no matter what anybody said or did, the truth about Giza was going to emerge and the 'Hall of Records' was going to be discovered, just as Edgar Cayce had prophesied.[186] On this note we parted company.

Correspondence

On 15 October 1995, Mark Lehner wrote us a five-page letter in response to a draft of this chapter that we had asked him to review.[187] In the same letter he informed us that he had recently resigned from Chicago University's Oriental Inst.i.tute to 'devote more time to research and writing'. He also notified us that he intended to publish a book on 'New Age beliefs and Ancient Egypt' which, he said, would expound, in greater detail than we have done here, on his involvement with work funded by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.[188]

Our correspondence with Lehner was care of the Harvard Semitic Museum in the state of Ma.s.sachusetts. As we write these words his colleague in Egypt, Dr. Zahi Hawa.s.s, is supervising the excavation of a newly discovered 'Old Kingdom' temple complex with underground tunnels immediately to the south-east of the Great Sphinx of Giza.[189] Interviewed in December 1995 for a possible television doc.u.mentary concerning the mysteries of the Sphinx, Hawa.s.s led the film crew into a tunnel beneath the Sphinx itself. 'Really,' he said, 'even Indiana Jones will never dream to be here. Can you believe it? We are now inside the Sphinx in this tunnel. This tunnel has been never opened before. No one really knows what's inside this tunnel. But we are going to open it for the first time.'

POSTSCRIPT: Further correspondence with Mark Lehner, giving his comments on this chapter, is reproduced in Appendix 3.

Chapter 6.

The Case of the Iron Plate, the Freemasons, the Relics and the Shafts 'I am more than convinced of the ... existence of a pa.s.sage and probably a chamber (in the Great Pyramid) containing possibly the records of the ancient founders ...'

John Dixon. Letter to Piazzi Smyth dated 25 November 1871, commenting on the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid 'Deep inside the Great Pyramid lies a dead end [in the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber]. Rudolf Gantenbrink could explore beyond it, but no one will let him.'

Sunday Telegraph, London, 1 January 1995 Perhaps the most exotic researcher ever to have p.r.o.nounced on the mysteries of the Pyramids was Charles Piazzi Smyth, a nineteenth-century Astronomer Royal of Scotland. Like Edgar Cayce, he believed the Great Pyramid to be somehow linked to Biblical prophecies concerning the 'Second Coming' of Christ. And like Edgar Cayce, too, his name turns up most unexpectedly in connection with recent remarkable discoveries at Giza.[190]

We will see why, later in this chapter. Meanwhile, as many readers will recall from the international news coverage it received at the time, high hopes were raised in March 1993 of a possible hidden chamber deep within the Great Pyramid. Rudolf Gantenbrink, a Munich-based German engineer, had used a tiny, hi-tech robot camera to explore the long narrow shafts emanating from the northern and southern walls of the Queen's Chamber and, at the end of the southern shaft (the one targeted on the star Sirius) had discovered a small portcullis door complete with copper handles. Immediately after the find was made, Dr. Zahi Hawa.s.s enthused to a German television team 'in my opinion this is THE discovery in Egypt' and expressed the hope that 'records' on papyrus scrolls to do with the 'religion' of the builders and maybe the 'stars', might be stashed away behind the tantalizing door.[191] Similar hopes were also raised in The Times of London which, in addition, noted a curious link with Edgar Cayce and the 'Hall of Records': SECRET Pa.s.sAGE POSES PYRAMID MYSTERY: In the 1940s Edgar Cayce, the American clairvoyant, prophesied the discovery, in the last quarter of the 20th century and somewhere near the Sphinx, of a hidden chamber containing the historical records of Atlantis. Whether recent discoveries in the Great Pyramid of Cheops [Khufu] have anything to do with that is far from certain, but the discovery of a small door at the end of a long, hitherto unexplored, 8-inch square shaft has set many speculating about what, if anything, might lie behind it ...'[192]

As we write these words, more than three years after Rudolf Gantenbrink made his amazing discovery, no further exploration has been permitted inside the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber and the mysterious portcullis door remains unopened. During this period we note that Dr. Zahi Hawa.s.s (rather like his friend Mark Lehner over the issue of 10,500 bc) has executed a radical volte-face. Gone are the eulogies and the great expectations and he now a.s.serts: 'I think this is not a door and nothing is behind it ...'[193]

Double standard

The story of the Great Pyramid's shafts, and the oddly contradictory Egyptological responses to whatever is discovered in them-or whatever new ideas are proposed concerning them-goes back to the late 1830s when the British explorer Colonel Howard Vyse 'sat down before the Great Pyramid as at a fortress to be besieged'. This comment, from one of his contemporaries, alludes to Vyse's renowned use of dynamite to 'explore' the Great Pyramid.[194] It might have been more appropriate, though less polite, to say that he confronted the last surviving wonder of the ancient world as though it were a woman to be raped. Nevertheless, the fact remains that during a hectic season of explorations and intrusive excavations (1836-7), Vyse and his team did manage to make what looked like two extremely important discoveries: 1. A section of flat iron plate, about one eighth of an inch thick, a foot long and four inches wide, extracted from the masonry of the southern face of the Pyramid at the exit point of the southern shaft of the King's Chamber (the shaft targeted on Orion's belt).

2. 'Quarry marks' daubed inside the so-called relieving chambers above the King's Chamber. These hieroglyphs are the first and only 'inscriptions' ever found inside the Great Pyramid. They take the form of loosely scrawled graffiti and include the name of Khufu, the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh whom Egyptologists suppose to have been the builder of the monument.

The second find-the appearance of Khufu's name-has been repeatedly hailed by Egyptologists during the past 160 years as proof positive that the otherwise anonymous Pyramid was indeed built by the Pharaoh Khufu. The first-the iron plate-has been dismissed as a fraud and the plate itself now lies in a narrow drawer in the British Museum, as ignored and forgotten as the skull of Piltdown Man.[195]

Suppose, however, that the Egyptologists have got things the wrong way round?

Suppose that it is the 'quarry marks' that are forged and the iron plate that is genuine?

In this case the tidy and well-worked-out chronology of the evolution of Egyptian society, which appears in all the standard textbooks, would be shown to rest on frighteningly insecure foundations, the attribution of the Great Pyramid to Khufu would revert to undoc.u.mented speculation, and the orthodox date of the Iron Age in Egypt-placed by Egyptologists as being not earlier than 650 bc[196]-would have to be pushed back almost 2000 years.

We have argued elsewhere, and at length, that the quarry marks inside the Great Pyramid could have been forged-and specifically that Howard Vyse, who had spent 10,000 on his 1836-7 excavations (a princely sum in those days) had both the motive and the opportunity to forge them.[197] Briefly: 1. It is notable that the marks were only discovered in the four 'relieving chambers' opened by Vyse himself, and not in the chamber immediately below these (and immediately above the ceiling of the King's Chamber) which had been opened by a previous explorer, Nathaniel Davison, in 1765. It is also notable that Vyse's diary entry for the day on which he first opened and accessed the lowest of 'his' four chambers (i.e. the one above Davison's Chamber) reports a thorough examination but makes no mention whatsoever of any hieroglyphs prominently daubed on the walls in red paint. On the very next day, however, when Vyse returned to the chamber with witnesses, the hieroglyphs were suddenly there-almost as though they had been painted overnight.[198]

2. As one of Vyse's critics has perceptively pointed out, 'the perspective and angles at which the inscriptions were made shows that they were painted not by the quarry masons before the blocks were moved, but rather by someone working in the cramped quarters of the [relieving] chambers after the blocks had been placed in the Pyramid. Instructions for locating blocks in a construction project [which is what the quarry marks purport to be] serve no purpose after the fact has been accomplished. Clearly they were added by someone else and not by the builders themselves.'[199]

3. There are horrendous 'orthographic' problems with the hieroglyphs. These problems were first pointed out in the nineteenth century by Samuel Birch, a British Museum expert on the ancient Egyptian language. Although n.o.body either then or now has paid any attention to his comments, he made the important observation that the styles of writing expressed in the 'quarry marks' are a strange anomalistic hotchpotch of different eras. Some of the cursive forms and t.i.tles used in these supposedly Fourth Dynasty inscriptions are found nowhere else in Egypt until the Middle Kingdom, about 1000 years later (when they become plentiful). Others are unknown until the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664-525 bc). Perhaps most telling of all, however, is the use of certain words and phrases in a completely unique and zany way that occurs nowhere else in the entire sprawling corpus of writings that has come down to us from ancient Egyptian times. To give an example, the hieroglyph for 'good, gracious' appears where the number 18 is meant.[200]

4. There are difficulties with the name Khufu itself as it is given in the quarry marks. It contains a mistake (a dot surrounded by a circle instead of a simple filled-in circle) that-like the usage of the 'good, gracious' hieroglyph-is repeated on no other ancient Egyptian inscription. Interestingly, however, this same mistake in the writing out of the name Khufu occurs in the only two source books on hieroglyphs that would have been available to Vyse in 1837: Leon de Laborde's Voyage de l'Arabie Petree and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's Materia Hieroglyphica.[201]

5. Last but not least, even if the quarry marks were not forged by Vyse, what do they really prove? Isn't attributing the Great Pyramid to Khufu on the basis of a few lines of graffiti a bit like handing over the keys of the Empire State building to a man named 'Kilroy' just because his name was found spray-painted on the walls of the lift?

We are frankly puzzled that such questions are never asked and, in general, that Egyptologists are so ready to accept the quarry marks as 'proof of Khufu's ownership of the Pyramid. Their own credulity on such matters is of course their business. Nevertheless we think that it verges on intellectual chicanery for the same dubious attribution to be regurgitated again and again, in all the standard texts, without any cautionary notes about the many problems, anachronisms and inconsistencies that cast doubt on the authenticity and significance of Vyse's 'discovery'.[202]

Strangely, however, his other 'discovery', which Egyptologists today unhesitatingly write off as a forgery, gives every indication of being genuine-and highly significant. This was the discovery of a flat iron plate embedded in the masonry of the Pyramid's southern face.

The iron plate affair

As we have seen, the two main chambers in the superstructure of the Great Pyramid-the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber-are each equipped with two long, narrow shafts which bore deep into the solid masonry, one directed northward and the other to the south. Those emanating from the King's Chamber cut right through to the outside. Those emanating from the Queen's Chamber stop somewhere within the core of the monument.

The existence of the King's Chamber shafts was first recorded by Dr. John Greaves, a British astronomer, in 1636. It was not until 1837, however, that they were investigated thoroughly-by Colonel Howard Vyse with the a.s.sistance of two civil engineers, John Perring and James Mash. Another member of Vyse's team was Mr. J. R. Hill, an obscure Englishman living in Cairo, who in May of 1837 was put in charge of clearing the mouth of the southern shaft (which emerges at the 102nd course of masonry on the south face of the Pyramid). In accord with Vyse's methods elsewhere, Hill was instructed to use explosives and was thus responsible for the ugly vertical scar which may be seen to this day running up the centre of the south side of the Great Pyramid.

On Friday, 26 May 1837, after a couple of days of blasting and clearing, Hill discovered the flat iron plate mentioned above. Vyse was soon afterwards to trumpet it in his monumental opus, Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh as 'the oldest piece of wrought iron known',[203] but Hill at the time was content to write up the discovery in the proper, sober manner: This is to certify that the piece of iron found by me near the mouth of the air-pa.s.sage [shaft], in the southern side of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, on Friday, May 20th, was taken out by me from an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening of any sort was connected with the above mentioned joint, by which the iron could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid. I also shewed the exact spot to Mr. Perring, on Sat.u.r.day, June 24th.[204]

John Perring, a civil engineer, thus examined the exact spot of the find. With him was James Mash, also a civil engineer, and both were 'of the opinion that the iron must have been left in the joint during the building of the Pyramid, and that it could not have been inserted afterwards'.[205] Ultimately Vyse sent the mysterious artefact, together with the certifications of Hill, Perring and Mash, to the British Museum. There, from the outset, the general feeling was that it could not be a genuine piece, because wrought iron was unknown in the Pyramid Age, and that it must therefore have been 'introduced' in much more recent times.

In 1881 the plate was re-examined by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie who found it difficult, for a variety of cogent reasons, to agree with this a.n.a.lysis: Though some doubt has been thrown on the piece, merely from its rarity, [he noted] yet the vouchers for it are very precise; and it has a cast of a nummulite [fossilized marine protozoa] on the rust of it, proving it to have been buried for ages beside a block of nummulitic limestone, and therefore to be certainly ancient. No reasonable doubt can therefore exist about its being a really genuine piece ...[206]

Despite this forceful opinion from one of the oddball giants of Egyptology in the late Victorian Age, the profession as a whole has been unable to cope with the idea of a piece of wrought iron being contemporary with the Great Pyramid. Such a notion goes completely against the grain of every preconception that Egyptologists internalize throughout their careers concerning the ways in which civilizations evolve and develop.

Scientific a.n.a.lysis

Because of these preoccupations, no further investigations of any significance were undertaken into the iron plate for another 108 years and it was not until 1989 that a fragment from it was at last subjected to rigorous optical and chemical tests. The scientists responsible for the work were Dr. M. P. Jones, Senior Tutor in the Mineral Resources Engineering Department at Imperial College, London, and his colleague Dr. Sayed El Gayer, a lecturer in the Faculty of Petroleum and Mining at Egypt's Suez University, who gained his Ph.D. in extraction metallurgy at the University of Aston in Birmingham.[207]

They began their study by checking on the nickel content of the iron plate. Their reason for doing this was to exclude the faint possibility that it might have been manufactured from meteoritic iron (i.e. iron from fallen meteorites-a material that is known, very rarely, to have been used during the Pyramid Age). Ready-made meteoritic iron of this sort, however, is always extremely easy to identify because it invariably contains a significant proportion of nickel-typically seven per cent or more.[208] On the basis of their first test Jones and El Gayer noted: 'The iron plate from Giza is clearly not of meteoritic origin, since it contains only a trace of nickel.' The metal, therefore, was man-made. But how had it been made?

Further tests proved that it had been smelted at a temperature between 1000 and 1100 degrees centigrade. These tests also picked up the odd fact that there were 'traces of gold on one face of the iron plate'.[209] Perhaps, Jones and El Gayer speculated, it might originally have been 'gold-plated, and this gold may be an indication that this artefact ... was held in great esteem when it was produced'.[210]

Finally, when was it produced?