Before the Pyramids by Christopher Knight

Author:Christopher Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Before the Pyramids
ISBN: 9781780282251
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2011-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Surveying the Stars for the Giza Pyramids

So, let us now return to question as to where the astronomical knowledge underpinning the planning of the pyramids came from. Our answer is that it came from the British Isles – and there are very hard-edged reasons for making this apparently outlandish claim.

The British Isles, along with some other parts of Western Europe, still has the remains of tens of thousands of structures used for tracking and measuring the movements of the Moon, planets and stars. Thornborough itself had been in use for almost a millennium before the pyramids were built. Given that both the henges of Thornborough and the three pyramids of the Giza Plateau appear to be built in the form of Orion’s Belt, there are three possible explanations for the connection.

First, it could be that there is no connection at all. It is simply that two different cultures naturally focused their attention on Sirius, the brightest of all stars, and then noticed a nearly straight line of three stars rise ahead of it and point almost at it. They then attached some mystical significance to these stars and decided for some reason to build a model of them on the ground.

The second option is that there was contact between the ancient Egyptians and the people of megalithic Britain, and the Egyptians adopted the beliefs of the Northerners by merging their star-based astronomical ‘magic’ into their existing solar theology.

The third possibility is that the astronomical priesthood of the British megalithic culture was actively involved in the design and layout of the pyramids. Whilst all of the evidence shows that the people of Britain were far behind the Egyptians in terms of stone building and the production of bronze tools, they were clearly ahead in their astronomy and the adoption of complex multifunctional measuring systems. Critics might argue that any association between these two groups would have led to the adoption of metals in Britain at a far earlier date, but we have good reason to believe that this would have been an anathema to the megalithic priesthood. This is an argument too complicated to enter into within the scope of this book. To follow this third, ‘strong’ version of the British-Egyptian theory, it could be that either the megalithic priests came to Egypt or that the Egyptian kings sent their builder-priests north to investigate the ‘magic’ of the stars understood by a people they had learned about.

The evidence suggests it was the latter of these options that occurred.

If the pyramids were placed as we have argued – by timing the stars of Orion’s belt rising and then converting the pendulum lengths used into linear units – then we can detect where and when it was done. This is because the angle of the rising of the stars changes by latitude, and when we looked at the rising of the stars of Orion’s Belt at Giza in circa 2500 BC we found no correlation whatsoever with the actual layout of the pyramids in any units at all.

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