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BOOKS WRITTEN IN STONE
ENOCH THE SEER, THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA, AND THE LAST DAYS Volume 1
By J. Marc. Merrill
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 J. Marc. Merrill
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-3171-8
Chapter One
BREAK-IN
"He who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber." (John 10:1)
In 820 AD the caliph of Baghdad, Abdullah al-Mamun, mounted an expedition to Egypt—which had come under his control that same year—with the intention of directing a team of architects, engineers, stonemasons and laborers in an effort to find a way into the Great Pyramid of Giza. In Secrets of the Great Pyramid Peter Tompkins notes that the caliph was acting on claims that the pyramid was a repository of ancient "maps and tables of the celestial and terrestrial spheres" (6), as well as books that dealt with the stars (Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald, Giza: The Truth 16).
At that time the Great Pyramid was covered by a polished white limestone casing that Paul Brunton says "reflected the sun's rays with a fierce brilliance [which] justified its old Egyptian name of The Light" (A Search in Secret Egypt 47). These casing stones not only fit together "with hairline precision, displaying an accuracy of engineering that impresses even present-day builders" (George Constable, editor, Mystic Places 48), but they were also impervious to the tools wielded by al-Mamun's crew as they hacked futilely at the north face of the pyramid (Colin Wilson, From Atlantis to the Sphinx 57 and 59).
As a last resort, bonfires were used to heat a section of the casing until the stones were red-hot and then they were doused with cold vinegar until they cracked. With the aid of battering rams, the caliph's men broke open an entrance that measured about 5 feet wide and 8 feet high. Now they were able to begin boring into the world's largest man-made building (Richard W. Noone, 5/5/2000, page 27; J. P. Lepre, The Egyptian Pyramids 71).
When they were 100 feet into the interior and about to give up because nothing of value had been found, one of the workers heard something heavy crash to a floor not too far away. Changing direction, the crew tunneled toward the east side of the pyramid until they managed to link up with a dark narrow passage "24 feet left of centre" (Colin Wilson 59) that measured 3½ feet wide and 4 feet high (Lepre 72).
On the floor of this passage, which sloped downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, 31 minutes and 23 seconds, was a block of white limestone shaped like a prism. This stone was obviously the object that had fallen from the ceiling to the floor (I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt 101; Colin Wilson 59).
Ignoring the stone for the moment, al-Mamun's laborers climbed the upward slope of the passage until they reached the end, where they found the original entrance which had been hidden by the exterior casing (Tompkins 9).
With torches flaming, the workers, having to advance bent over because the corridor never changed in height, turned around and worked their way to the bottom, some 350 feet away from the entrance (Colin Wilson 59; W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh 19). At that point, the passage ran horizontally for 29 feet (Edwards 101), where it finally culminated in what the explorers were looking for—a chamber.
A chamber that had been cut out of solid bedrock "nearly 100 below ground level" (Lepre 72). To enter the chamber required a step down of 18 inches; however, there was no actual step, only a bumpy uneven drop that demanded caution in order to keep from stumbling (Lepre 114; Rutherford, Pyramidology, Book I, 135).
Moving carefully into the chamber, the caliph's men were greeted by an incredible sight—incredible, but not what they had hoped for, and certainly not what they had expected. For the floor of the chamber "rolled up and down like a trench that had been bombarded" (Brunton 62), and in the western half of the 46-foot-long room a rugged chasm divided chunky masses of rock that thrust up toward the low ceiling (Edwards 101; Rutherford, Pyramidology, Book III, 1084). It was easy to conclude that "a madman, rather than a master architect, had his hand at ... giving this chamber a very distorted look" (Lepre 114).
This impression was increased by the discovery of a pit in the floor, the mouth of which was near the east wall. With a diagonal of 100 inches, the pit appeared to go straight down and, despite the torches, was terrifyingly dark and ominous (Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, The Message of the Sphinx 49; Rutherford, Book III, 1084 and 1089).
In the south wall of the chamber was another horizontal passage, which proved to be even more cramped than the previous one. Surely it would lead to hidden treasure. But it did not. Instead, it ran south for about 50 feet and then came to a dead end (Bill Schul and Ed Pettit, The Secret Power of Pyramids 27).
Frustrated, but not ready to give up, al-Mamun's men returned to the point where they had broken into the descending passage. Examining that part of the ceiling that had been exposed when the prism stone had been dislodged, they found another stone that was unlike all the others they had seen so far; this one was granite, red granite (Colin Wilson 59).
And, like the casing stones, it too proved to be impervious to their tools. If they wanted to discover what might lie behind this blockage they would have to go around it (Constable 49), but to their surprise—and dismay—the caliph's team, after gouging out a tunnel through the softer limestone on the west side of the granite block, discovered that what lay beyond was another red granite block. And beyond the second block was yet a 3rd one. Altogether, the 3 blocks of granite took up 180 inches (Worth Smith, Miracle of the Ages: The Great Pyramid of Gizeh 82; Colin Wilson 60).
The workers' efforts, however, seemed to have been rewarded when they at last forced an entrance into one more passage, this one ascending rather than descending. Working their way up the incline, they found another horizontal passage that led to a second chamber within the pyramid itself. But more disappointment followed when this second chamber, which contained a shallow niche in the east wall, proved to be empty. No mummy, no treasure (Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods 323).
Additional exploration resulted in the discovery of a second ascending passageway that continued upwards at the same angle as the earlier one, but with a major difference. Whereas the first ascending passage had been about the same height and width as the descending passage, this new one opened up into an amazing gallery that measured 7 feet wide, 28 feet high, and 153 feet long (Lionel Casson, Ancient Egypt 136; Lepre 79).
Unfortunately, in keeping with the other sloping passageways, the Grand Gallery, as it would come to be called, was a slick ramp and difficult to climb (C. W. Ceram, The March of Archaeology 93). But the Caliph's men persevered and eventually reached its south end, where a block of limestone rose up 3 feet from the floor (Lepre 85; Tompkins 13).
At the top of this broad platform was a narrow entrance into an antechamber, then another low but extremely short horizontal passage brought them into a 3rd large chamber. Composed of red granite, this brilliant impressive room was surely the chamber where the pharaoh who had built the Great Pyramid had been buried (Zechariah Sitchin, Stairway to Heaven 245).
As expected, there was a sarcophagus. It was near the west wall. But, like the chamber itself, the sarcophagus was empty (Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery 44).
Where was the pharaoh's body?
And where was the treasure?
Chapter Two
TREASURE
"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:19-21)
Since al-Mamun's time, many others have entered the Great Pyramid—more often than not by way of the forced passage attributed to the caliph—intent on finding treasure of one kind or another. Among them have been a number of Englishmen, including John Greaves, an astronomy professor who in 1638 discovered a shaft that began near the northern wall of the Grand Gallery on the west side (Constable 51 and 54).
This well shaft, as it is now termed, gave the impression of having been drilled vertically into the pyramid's masonry. At a mere 28 inches square (Petrie 88), it was much narrower than either the descending or ascending passages. Nevertheless, Greaves decided to explore the shaft, which had been provided by its builders with footholds and handholds cut into the opposite sides of the walls, which made it possible to climb down—if one was extremely careful—instead of sliding or falling.
After about 60 feet, Greaves came to a small chamber that opened west off the shaft. Known today as the grotto, this chamber was as empty of treasure as the others. The shaft itself continued downwards but Greaves descended only a little farther before giving up because the air was too foul to breathe (Schul and Pettit 29).
Greaves returned to England puzzled, as Peter Tompkins observes, by the pyramid's having been "built around a single chamber [the King's Chamber] with a single empty coffer [a word frequently used for the sarcophagus]" and by "the complexity of its antechamber where the walls changed mysteriously from limestone to granite" (26).
The next Englishman to probe the well shaft was Nathaniel Davison. He had himself lowered by rope for nearly 100 feet below the grotto, but then he could go no farther because of a blockage formed by sand and debris. Davison, however, would not be remembered solely because of his descent into the well, for he detected yet another chamber that had been known about but had never been found.
Noticing a rectangular hole a little more than two feet wide at the top of the Grand Gallery's east wall "where it joins with the south wall at the ceiling" (Lepre 106), he linked together 7 ladders, climbed up, squeezed into the hole and then crawled for 25 feet through bat dung before he entered a compartment that was directly over the King's Chamber. However, whereas the ceiling of the King's Chamber was composed of 9 granite slabs which weighed up to 70 tons, the ceiling of this compartment was composed of 8 slabs. In addition, the maximum height was no more than 4 feet, and there was nothing of real interest to see. Like the rest of the pyramid, this new find contained no statues, no wall reliefs, no paintings, no hieroglyphs, no indication of its purpose, and no treasure (Lawton and Ogilvie-Herald 32-33; Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids 45; Tompkins 35-36).
After Davison came the French under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, along with his army, brought more than 100 civilian scholars to investigate the Great Pyramid. Greaves and Davison had been partially hindered in their exploration by numerous bats; the French fared no better. As a result, they uncovered nothing new in the interior of the pyramid, but on the exterior, after removing piles of sand, stone fragments and other debris at the northeast and northwest corners, they exposed what came to be known as sockets (Schul and Pettit 31).
There were 2 of them. They were rectangular and measured 10 feet by 12 feet and were sunk 20 inches into the limestone pavement that extended out for several feet north of the pyramid. Believing these sockets had been the sites for the original cornerstones, the French used them to measure the structure's base (Tompkins 44).
Further calculations, combined with information from Greek classical texts, convinced Edme-Francois Jomard, one of the brightest of the "savants", that the builders of the pyramid had the necessary astronomical know-how to measure a geographical "degree and thus the true circumference of the earth, and had developed an advanced science of geography and geodesy [the study of the earth's shape and size] which they had immortalized in the geometry of the Great Pyramid" (Tompkins 48).
Jomard and his colleagues were succeeded by Giovanni Battista Caviglia, a Genoese merchant, who managed to unplug the well shaft and in so doing discovered that it ran from the Grand Gallery all the way down to the descending passage, where an opening had been cut into the west wall (Lemesurier 156-57).
The next important discovery inside the pyramid came from another Englishman, Richard Howard Vyse (sometimes spelled Howard-Vyse). Like others before him, Vyse hoped to find additional passages and chambers. In 1837, after 31/2 months of employing gunpowder to force a vertical passage above the King's Chamber, he broke through the east wall of 4 more compartments that were stacked above the one that had been discovered by Nathaniel Davison (Lehner 53).
The 2nd compartment, as Tompkins tells us, presented something entirely new and unexpected: "the floor was covered with a thin black powder which when analyzed turned out to be exuviae, or the cast-off shells and skins of insects" (63). No living insects, however, were in evidence.
If Vyse had been surprised by the black powder on the floor of the second compartment, he was probably even more surprised to find in all 4 compartments cartouches and other marks and symbols on the walls, some of them in red, others in black, and some of them upside down (Sitchin, Stairway to Heaven 263-270; Lehner 53).
Vyse considered the cartouches, the marks and symbols to have been for the use of the ancient work gangs; he also considered the 5 compartments to have been built in order to relieve stress on the King's Chamber, which had a flat ceiling (Colin Wilson 68).
Of the 4 compartments discovered by Vyse, the first 3 were similar to Davison's in that their height varied from 2 to 4 feet; however, the topmost compartment was 7 feet high, and its ceiling, instead of being flat, was gabled. In addition, this particular ceiling, unlike the others, was composed of limestone rather than granite (Lawton and Ogilvie-Herald 49; Lepre 108-09).
Not satisfied with the success he had enjoyed so far, Vyse had the rubbish that was still piled high in the middle of the Great Pyramid's north face removed and that brought to light 2 of the original casing stones, which were true to descriptions recorded by Herodotus and other classical writers who had seen the pyramid when all the casing stones had been intact. The stones were highly polished and perfectly joined together, their length being 12 feet, their width 8 feet, and their height 5 feet (Tompkins 2-3 and 67; Worth Smith 61).
Certainly one of the most important benefits to be derived from the casing stones as far as future surveyors of the Great Pyramid were concerned was the opportunity to measure their slope, which proved to be 51 degrees, 51 minutes (Lawton and Ogilvie-Herald 55). That information would help to determine that the ancient builders' use of pi was, in the words of Peter Lemesurier, "basic to the whole design" (The Great Pyramid Decoded 25).
An examination of the upper courses of the pyramid's exterior revealed that 2 small openings in the King's Chamber, one in the north wall and one in the south, which had been noticed by Greaves but not examined to any extent, ran through the masonry to exit at the 101st course for the northern shaft and at the 102nd course for the southern shaft (Lemesurier 45).
On May 26, 1837, J. R. Hill, a fellow Englishman hired by Vyse, began clearing the southern shaft, which was blocked at its exit point. After using explosives that demolished "two outer tiers of the stones" (and that also left a gaping hole in the south face of the pyramid), Hill detected an iron plate in "an inner joint" in the shaft, which he retrieved, claiming that it could only have been placed there while the pyramid was being built since there was no other opening or joint that would have permitted the insertion of the plate at a later time. Two civil engineers who were also working for Vyse examined the joint where the iron plate had been found and agreed with Hill's assessment; the plate had to have been left there by the original builders (Hancock and Bauval 105).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BOOKS WRITTEN IN STONE by J. Marc. Merrill Copyright © 2012 by J. Marc. Merrill. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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