The Message Of The Sphinx Part 6

After completing an extremely careful and detailed study, the two metallurgists reported as follows: 'It is concluded, on the basis of the present investigation, that the iron plate is very ancient. Furthermore, the metallurgical evidence supports the archaeological evidence which suggests that the plate was incorporated within the Pyramid at the time that structure was being built.'[211]

When Jones and El Gayer submitted their findings to the British Museum, they were in for quite a surprise. Instead of being excited, officials fobbed them off: 'The structure of the iron plate is unusual,' conceded Paul Craddock and Janet Lang. 'We are not sure of the significance or origin of this structure but it is not necessarily indicative of great age.'[212]

The British Museum's view

Because the iron plate appeared to have been removed originally from within or near the mouth of the King's Chamber's 'Orion' shaft it was of great interest to us. We decided to take a look at it. Through Dr. A. J. Spencer, a.s.sistant Curator of the Egyptian Antiquities Department at the British Museum, we arranged a viewing on 7 November 1993. We were permitted to handle the plate and were intrigued by its unusual weight and texture. We could also hardly fail to notice that under its surface patina the internal metal possessed a brilliant shine-which was revealed at the point where the fragment had been cleanly sliced off for El Gayer's and Jones's a.n.a.lysis. Dr. Spencer repeated the British Museum's official line-that the plate was not old but had been introduced, probably deliberately, in Vyse's time-and that El Gayer and Jones's conclusions were 'highly dubious'.[213]

How and why could the conclusions of such eminent metallurgists be deemed 'highly dubious', we asked?

Dr. Spencer had no answer and Dr. Craddock, whom we spoke to on the phone, did not wish to elaborate.

A few days later we called Dr. M. P. Jones and heard from him how he and Dr. El Gayer had examined the plate in the laboratories at Imperial College London in 1989. Dr. Jones is now retired and lives in Wales. When we asked him what he thought of the British Museum's view of his conclusions he was, understandably, rather irritated. He insisted that the iron plate was 'very old' and, like us, he felt-since there were two opposing views-that the best way to resolve this matter would be further testing in an independent laboratory.

After all, the implications of man-made iron in 2500 bc are tremendous. And this isn't just a matter of redating the so-called Iron Age. Perhaps in a way more intriguing are the questions raised as to the function that an iron plate might have had, inside the southern shaft of the main chamber in the Great Pyramid, many thousands of years ago. Could there be a relationship between this plate and the stone portcullis door with copper 'handles' that Rudolf Gantenbrink had so recently discovered at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber-a shaft directed to 'Sirius-Isis', the consort of 'Orion-Osiris'?

In their 1989 report, El Gayer and Jones noted that the plate was probably a fragment coming from a larger piece which might originally have composed a square plate that would have fitted, like a sort of 'gate', neatly over the mouth of the shaft.

Stargate

In later chapters we will make detailed reference to the so-called 'Pyramid Texts' of ancient Egypt. These texts take the form of extensive funerary and rebirth inscriptions carved on the tomb walls of certain Fifth-and Sixth-Dynasty pyramids at Saqqara, about ten miles south of Giza. Egyptologists agree that much if not all of the content of the inscriptions predates the Pyramid Age.[214] It is thus unsettling to discover in these ancient scriptures, supposedly the work of neolithic farmers who had hardly even begun to master copper, that there are abundant references to iron.

The name given to it is B'ja-'the divine metal'-and we always encounter it in distinctive contexts related in one way or another to astronomy, to the stars and to the G.o.ds.[215] For example B'ja is frequently mentioned in the texts in connection with the 'four sons of Horus'-presumably related in some way to strange beings called the Shemsu Hor, the 'Followers of Horus' and 'Transfigured Ones', whom we shall also be discussing in later chapters. At any rate, these very mysterious 'sons of Horus' seem to have been made of iron or to have had iron fingers: 'Your children's children together have raised you up, namely [the four sons of Horus] ... your mouth is split open with their iron fingers ...'[216]

Iron is also mentioned in the texts as being necessary for the construction of a bizarre instrument called a Meshtyw. Very much resembling a carpenter's adze or cutting tool, this was a ceremonial device which was used to 'strike open the mouth' of the deceased Pharaoh's mummified and embalmed corpse-an indispensable ritual if the Pharaoh's soul were to be re-awakened to eternal life amidst the cycles of the stars.

In the Pyramid Texts we thus find a high priest making this cryptic statement: Your mouth is in good order for I split open your mouth for you ... O king, I open your mouth for you with the adze of iron of Upuaut, I split open your mouth for you with the adze of iron which split open the mouths of the G.o.ds ... Horus has split open the mouth of this king with that wherewith he split open the mouth of his father, with that wherewith he split open the mouth of Osiris ...[217]

From such utterances, and many more like them, it is clear that iron was somehow seen by the composers of the Pyramid Texts as being imperative in the rituals aimed at ensuring new life-cosmic and stellar life-to the dead king. More importantly the above verse also connects the metal and its uses to the ancient prototype of all such rituals by means of which Osiris himself, Egypt's 'Once and Future King', died and was then restored to immortal life as Lord of the sky-region of Orion. This region, as we shall see in Part III, was known as the Duat. In it all the Pharaohs of Egypt hoped that they would reside eternally after their own deaths: The gate of the earth is open for you ... may a stairway to the Duat be set up for you to the place where Orion is ...[218]

O king ... the sky conceives you with Orion ... the sky has borne you with Orion ...[219]

O king, be a soul like a living star ...[220]

The gate of the earth-G.o.d is open ... may you remove yourself to the sky and sit upon your iron throne ...[221]

The aperture of the sky window is opened for you ...[222]

The doors of iron which are in the starry sky are thrown open for me, and I go through them ...[223]

What seems to be envisaged here, taken literally and reduced to the basic common denominators running through all the above utterances, appears to be nothing less than an iron 'stargate' intended to admit Osiris, and all the dynasties of dead kings after him, into the celestial realms of the belt of Orion. But if the Pyramid Texts are describing a stargate then they are also describing a timegate-for they express no doubt that by pa.s.sing through the iron-doored portals of the sky the soul of the deceased will attain a life of millions of years, navigating eternity in the vessels of the G.o.ds. Naturally, therefore, by virtue of its original position at or near the end of the southern shaft of the King's Chamber, we are tempted to wonder whether the neglected iron plate in the British Museum might have been connected with such amazingly sophisticated concepts and beliefs about immortality and about the ability of 'the equipped spirit' to gain a complete mastery over death and time.

We wonder, too, what might have been the function of other mysterious objects that were discovered in the shafts of the Queen's Chamber when these were first opened in 1872 by Waynman Dixon, an enterprising engineer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Unknown dark distance

Unlike the King's Chamber shafts, those in the Queen's Chamber (a) do not exit on the outside of the monument and (b) were not originally cut through the chamber's limestone walls. Instead the builders left the last five inches intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts-thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder.

The reader will recall the mention of Charles Piazzi Smyth and his prophetic theories about the Great Pyramid at the start of this chapter. In the early 1860s, when he was formulating these theories, he befriended a certain William Petrie, an engineer, whose son, W. M. Flinders Petrie, was later to be universally acclaimed as the founder of the academic discipline of Egyptology.[224]

William Petrie was amongst the first 'Pyramidologists' of the Victorian Age to give strong support to Piazzi Smyth's notion that the Great Pyramid might be some sort of prophetic monument to Mankind encoding a Messianic blueprint designed to serve as an advance-warning mechanism for the 'Second Coming' of Christ.[225] 'There had been a time', wrote Professor Hermann Bruck and Dr. Mary Bruck in their authoritative biography of the Astronomer Royal, 'when Flinders Petrie and his father had wholeheartedly concurred with most of Piazzi Smyth's ideas.'[226] Indeed as these two eminent astronomers and authors point out, the young Flinders Petrie set out to Egypt in 1880 on his famous study of the Great Pyramid precisely because he wanted to 'continue Piazzi Smyth's work'.[227]

Returning now to the shafts in the Queen's Chamber, we were interested to learn that their discoverer, the engineer Waynman Dixon-together with his brother John-had also maintained very close ties with Piazzi Smyth. Indeed, it had been through the Astronomer Royal's direct influence that the Dixons were able to explore the Great Pyramid in 1872 and discover the previously concealed entrances to the northern and southern star-shafts in the Queen's Chamber.[228]

Waynman Dixon's curiosity had been aroused by the shafts in the King's Chamber which provoked him to look for similar features in the Queen's Chamber. This search, which took place some time early in 1872, was undertaken with the full knowledge of Piazzi Smyth, who later described the whole matter in his book. The story goes that after noticing a crack in the southern wall of the Queen's Chamber-roughly where he thought that he might find shafts-Waynman Dixon set his 'carpenter and man-of-all-work', a certain Bill Grundy 'to jump a hole with a hammer and steel chisel at that place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a will which soon began to make a way into the soft stone at this point when lo! after a comparatively very few strokes, flop went the chisel right through into something or other.'[229]

The 'something or other' Bill Grundy's chisel had reached turned out to be 'a rectangular, horizontal, tubular channel, about 9 inches by 8 inches in transverse breadth and height, going back 7 feet into the wall, and then rising at an angle into an unknown dark distance ...'[230]

This was the southern shaft.

Next, measuring off a similar position on the north wall, Waynman Dixon 'set the invaluable Bill Grundy to work there with his hammer and steel chisel; and again, after a very little labour, flop went the said chisel through into somewhere; which somewhere was presently found to be a horizontal pipe or channel of transverse proportions like the other, and, at a distance within the masonry of 7 feet, rising at a similar angle, but in the opposite direction, and trending indefinitely far ...'[231]

Together with his brother John, Waynman Dixon made efforts to probe both the northern and southern shafts-using a jointed rod, something like a chimney-sweep's rod, for this purpose.[232] Late-nineteenth-century technology was not up to the job and a segment of the rod became wedged in the northern shaft, where it still remains.[233] Before this happened, however, the Dixons found three small relics in the shafts.

33. Detail of Queen's Chamber shaft.

These objects-a rough stone sphere, a small two-p.r.o.nged hook made out of some form of metal, and a fine piece of cedar wood some 12 centimetres long with strange notches cut into it[234]-were exported from Egypt in the summer of 1872 and arrived safely in England a few weeks later.[235] During the next year or so they were commented upon in books, and even ill.u.s.trated in scientific and popular magazines such as Nature and the London Graphic.[236] Before the turn of the century, however, they had disappeared.[237]

Links

A curious series of links exists involving all of the following: the discovery of the Queen's Chamber shafts with their const.i.tuent relics; the formation of the Egyptian Exploration Society (the EES, British Egyptology's most prestigious organization); the foundation, at University College, London, of Egyptology's most prestigious Chair; British Freemasonry.

In 1872, whilst the Dixon brothers were exploring the Great Pyramid, a well-known Freemason and parliamentarian, Sir James Alexander, proposed a motion to bring to Britain the incorrectly named 'Cleopatra's Needle'-a 200-ton obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmosis III which had originally been erected some 3500 years ago in the sacred city of Heliopolis.[238] Funding for the project came from the personal fortune of another Freemason, the eminent British dermatologist, Sir Erasmus Wilson,[239] and Sir James Alexander recommended that the civil engineer John Dixon-also a Freemason-should be engaged to collect the obelisk from Egypt. On this basis Sir Erasmus Wilson promptly recruited John Dixon-and also his brother, Waynman, who was then living in Egypt.[240]

A few years later the same Erasmus Wilson was responsible for the creation of the Egyptian Exploration Society (the EES) and served as its first president.[241] Then in 1883, Wilson and the Victorian author Amelia Edwards co-founded the important Chair in Egyptology at University College London-and it was through Wilson's personal recommendation that the young Flinders Petrie became the first scholar to occupy it.[242]

Perhaps all such connections are nothing more than quaint coincidences. If so, then it is probably also a coincidence that in the seventeenth century the founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, one of the most prestigious of today's Egyptological research centres (which holds the coveted 'Petrie Chair'), was none other than Elias Ashmole-the first man ever, according to Masonic historians, to be openly initiated on British soil into the hitherto secret society of Freemasonry.[243]

We have no evidence that the Brotherhood is still a significant influence in Egyptology today. Our researches into the pedigree of this insular discipline, however, did, in a rather oblique way, lead to the rediscovery of two of the three missing 'Dixon' relics.

The British Museum and the missing cigar box

These three items are the only relics ever to have been found inside the Great Pyramid. Moreover the place in which they were found, i.e. the star-shafts of the Queen's Chamber, links them directly to one of the key aspects of our own research. In the summer of 1993, therefore, 121 years after they had been discovered, we resolved to try to find out what had happened to them.

Going back through press reports, and the private diaries of the figures involved, we found out that John and Waynman Dixon had brought the relics to England in a cigar box. We also learned, as noted earlier, that the Dixons had been involved in bringing to England Cleopatra's Needle. The obelisk was erected on the Thames Embankment, where it stands to this day. John Dixon was at the inauguration ceremony and was on record as having buried 'a large cigar box, contents unknown' beneath the pedestal of the monument.[244]

The logic looked persuasive. John Dixon brought the relics to England in a cigar box. John Dixon brought Cleopatra's Needle to England. And John Dixon buried a cigar box beneath Cleopatra's Needle. Around that time the relics disappeared. The strong Masonic link in this affair called to mind a well-known practice in operative and speculative Freemasonry which involves certain rituals when placing the corner-stones of Masonic monuments and edifices. This practice suggested the possibility that the relics from the Great Pyramid could have been hidden under Cleopatra's Needle along with the other Masonic paraphernalia and memorabilia known to have been installed there.[245]

At any rate, the relics did genuinely seem to have disappeared and the experts whom we consulted at the British Museum said they had no idea where they could have gone to. We also consulted Professor I. E. S. Edwards, the Museum's former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities (1954-74) and a former vice-president of the EES. Edwards is Britain's foremost authority on Giza and the author of a definitive text, The Pyramids of Egypt, first published in 1946 and reprinted virtually every year since then. In all editions of this book we found that he had mentioned Waynman Dixon and reported how the shafts in the Queen's Chamber were discovered, but had made absolutely no reference to the relics. This, he told us, was because he had no recollection of them and therefore, of course, no idea concerning what their ultimate fate might have been.

Like ourselves, however, Professor Edwards knew of the link between Flinders Petrie, Piazzi Smyth and the Dixons, and knew that Petrie's exploration of the Great Pyramid had immediately followed that of the Dixons.

Oddly enough, Petrie, too, makes no mention of the relics in his own famous book Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh-though he does speak of the Dixons and the shafts. But could he have referred to them elsewhere in his voluminous publications? Edwards suggested that we ask Petrie's biographer, the Egyptologist Mrs. Margaret Hackford-Jones, to research the matter in Petrie's diaries and private papers. If he had made any mention of the Dixon relics then she would definitely be able to find it. But a thorough search by Mrs. Hackford-Jones brought no results.[246]

In the absence of viable alternatives, therefore, we wondered whether it might not be worth looking to see whether the three curious objects might not still be in Dixon's cigar box underneath Cleopatra's Needle.

The story was picked up by the Independent, a British national newspaper, on 6 December 1993. Interviewed in the report, Professor Edwards stated categorically that neither he nor anyone else he knew had heard of these relics before.[247] We were therefore taken by surprise on 13 December 1993-only a week after the article containing Edwards's quote was published-when Dr. Vivian Davies, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, casually announced in a letter to the Independent that the relics, still in the cigar box, were in his Department's keep.[248]

So why had his Department not admitted to having them before?

'I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding about this whole business,' soothed a Museum PR spokesman a few days later. 'We didn't say we did not have them, we said we were not aware of having them.'[249]

After doing some more digging we discovered what had happened. The relics (or rather two of them because the only carbon-datable item, the piece of wood, was missing) had not been placed under Cleopatra's Needle as we had at first conjectured. Instead they had remained in the hands of the Dixon family for exactly a hundred years. Then, in 1972, Dixon's great-granddaughter had taken them along to the British Museum and had generously donated them to the Egyptian Antiquities Department. Their receipt was recorded in the meticulous hand of the Keeper himself-Dr. I. E. S. Edwards.[250] Thereafter the relics seemed simply to have been forgotten and only resurfaced in December 1993 because an Egyptologist named Dr. Peter Sh.o.r.e happened to read the Independent's story about our search for them. Now retired in Liverpool, Sh.o.r.e had been Edwards's a.s.sistant in 1972. He remembered the arrival of the relics at the British Museum and now promptly notified the relevant authorities that they had a potentially embarra.s.sing incident on their hands.

We naturally wondered how it was possible that mysterious relics recovered from unexplored shafts inside the Great Pyramid of Egypt could have been treated with such indifference by professional Egyptologists. To be completely honest we found it very difficult to accept that they really could just have been forgotten for twenty-one years by the British Museum's Egyptian Antiquities Department. What we could not understand at all, however, was how they could have stayed forgotten during most of 1993 after a robot had explored the very same shafts and found a much publicized closed 'door' deep within one of them. Indeed more than two weeks before the article in the Independent came out, Rudolf Gantenbrink, the discoverer of the 'door', had visited London and given a full lecture at the British Museum to a large group of Egyptologists-including Professor Edwards, Dr. Vivian Davies and many others who knew of our search for the 'Dixon' relics. During the lecture, Gantenbrink showed and explained detailed video footage, taken by his robot, of the interior of the Queen's Chamber shafts-i.e. the shafts in which the relics had been found. As well as the 'door' at the end of the southern shaft, the footage also clearly showed, still lying on the floor of the northern shaft, but at higher levels than the Dixons had been able to reach, at least two distinct objects-a metallic hook, and an apparent baton of wood.[251]

In the next chapter we shall take a look at Gantenbrink's exploration, and at the events that led up to and followed it.

Chapter 7.

The Case of the Robot, the Germans and the Door 'Upuaut, a wolf deity ... He was chiefly revered for his role as Opener of the Ways to the Underworld, showing the dead souls the path through that dark realm ...'

Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, 1982 The introduction of a robot-camera into the narrow mouth of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber in March 1993, and the subsequent spectacular discovery of a closed portcullis 'door' 200 feet along that shaft, are not events that occurred in a vacuum. On the contrary, although mainstream Egyptologists profess little interest in the Queen's Chamber (which they generally regard as an 'unfinished', 'abandoned' and unimportant feature of the Great Pyramid), quite a lot of activity had taken place around it during the previous decade.

In 1986, for example, two French architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin, somehow managed to obtain a scientific licence to conduct a spectacular exploration inside the Great Pyramid. Dormion and Goidin had persuaded certain senior officials at the Egyptian Antiquities Organization that a 'hidden chamber' could lie behind the west wall of the horizontal corridor leading to the Queen's Chamber. In a rare move, the EAO gave permission for the drilling of a series of small holes to test the theory. Apparently some evidence was found of a large 'cavity' which was filled with unusually fine sand-nothing more-but this was enough to send the world media into a frenzy and to turn Dormion and Goidin into hot media properties for a while. Egyptologists fumed on the quiet. The project was eventually stopped and Dormion and Goidin were never to resume their work in the Great Pyramid.[252]

The same thing happened again in 1988 when a j.a.panese scientific team from Waseda University took up the challenge. They were led by Professor Sakuji Yoshimura. This time the j.a.panese used 'non-destructive techniques' based on a high-tech system of electromagnetic waves and radar equipment. They, too, detected the existence of a 'cavity' off the Queen's Chamber pa.s.sageway, some three metres under the floor and, as it turned out, very close to where the French had drilled. They also detected a large cavity behind the north-west wall of the Queen's Chamber itself, and a 'tunnel' outside and to the south of the Pyramid which appeared to run underneath the monument. Before any further exploration or drilling could be done, the Egyptian authorities intervened and halted the project. Yoshimura and his team were never to return to complete their work in the Queen's Chamber.[253]

It seems odd, despite all the buzz concerning hidden chambers in the vicinity of the Queen's Chamber, that n.o.body should have taken a closer look into the Queen's Chamber's mysterious and hitherto unexplored shafts. Disappearing as they do, one northwards and the other southwards, into the bowels of the monument, one would have thought that somebody would have had the gumption to investigate them (using video-camera reconnaissance instead of all these unsatisfactory and inconclusive drillings and radar scanning probes). Indeed, as we have argued elsewhere, there is much about their construction and design that could almost have been deliberately contrived to stimulate and invite such investigations.[254] Throughout the 1980s, however, the consensus of senior Egyptologists was that the shafts, like the Queen's Chamber itself, were 'abandoned' features of the Great Pyramid. No doubt it was the power of this consensus, and the built-in reluctance to challenge it, that discouraged individual Egyptologists from interesting themselves in the shafts. After all, what would be the point of exploring obscure parts of the Pyramid that everyone knew had been 'abandoned' during construction.

As a non-Egyptologist, the German robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink did not suffer from such inhibitions. Early in 1991 he submitted a proposal for the videoscopic examination of the shafts to the German Archaeological Inst.i.tute in Cairo.

Planning an adventure

Gantenbrink's story, as he reported it to us in many hours of doc.u.mented conversations, goes back to August 1990 when the Egyptian Antiquities Organization commissioned the German Archaeological Inst.i.tute in Cairo to install a ventilation system inside the Great Pyramid. This project would mainly involve the 'cleaning' of the two shafts of the King's Chamber which (unlike those in the Queen's Chamber) emerge on the outside faces of the pyramid and thus could be of some conceivable use for ventilation. After cleaning, powerful electric fans would be installed in their mouths to boost the natural air-flow through them.

A few months after accepting the EAO's commission for the ventilation project Rainer Stadelmann, the Director of the German Archaeological Inst.i.tute, received Rudolf Gantenbrink's proposal for the exploration of the Queen's Chamber shafts using a high-tech miniature robot. This proposal, a copy of which Gantenbrink has kindly supplied to us, is ent.i.tled Videoscopische Untersuchung der sog. Luftka.n.a.le der Cheopspyramide (Videoscopic Investigation of the so-called Air Shafts in the Pyramid of Cheops).[255]

The proposal outlines Gantenbrink's plans to build a special robot equipped with two powerful lamps and a 'CCD Farbvideokamera' with a special fixed-focus lens giving a full go-degrees angle of vision. The specifications of the robot would include a powerful electric motor in order for it to be able to tackle the steep slopes of the shafts. The video camera and the motor would be controlled from a console and monitor unit stationed inside the chamber and linked to the robot by electric cables. Caterpillar tracks would be fixed above and below the robot's cha.s.sis and adjusted with two sets of powerful hydrolic-suspension units in order to ensure a good grip on the ceiling and floor of the shafts.

There is nothing in the Videoscopische study about ventilation. What it describes is unambiguously an exploration into the uncharted regions of the Great Pyramid, an adventure in the Queen's Chamber shafts-a 'robot's journey into the past'.[256] Nevertheless the next move was logical enough: Stadelmann pa.s.sed over the EAO's 'ventilation' scheme to Rudolf Gantenbrink.

Nor did Gantenbrink object. He had intended, in any case, to examine the King's Chamber shafts at some point during his project and saw no difficulty in fitting these shafts with the electric fans called for by the ventilation scheme. Indeed the idea of getting involved in ventilating the Pyramid as well as exploring it rather appealed to him since it added a 'conservation and restoration' element to his work.

Diversion and delay