Graham Hancock

Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is, what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12,500 years ago, it was the constellation of Leo. And actually, the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues...

are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely. And that it, over the thousands of years, it became damaged. It became eroded, particularly the part of it that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out.

By the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the Fourth Dynasty, the head of the lion, original lion head, would have been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then re-carved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre, but there's no real strong resemblance.

But it's definitely wearing the nemesis headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. And we think that that's the result of a re-carving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre, 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.

I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high, and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you would be better... You'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the Sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion?

And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies, and putting on the ground, as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau It's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute.

But the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau, the three great pyramids and the Great Sphinx, all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile.

I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground which memorializes a very ancient date does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. From the ancient Egyptian point of view, you're there 4,500 years ago, and there's a time

8,000 years before that, which is very, very, very important to you, you could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialize that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we're looking at, except for one thing, and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx. And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx at least does date back to 12,500 years ago. And with it,

the megalithic temples, the so-called Vali Temple, which stands just just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx Temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.

The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed, but the Vali Temple, attributed to Khafre, on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tons each. And yet, it has been... remodeled, refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks.

And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids.

They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today.

But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older, and that when we look at the Three Great Pyramids, we're looking at a renovation and a restoration and an enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill.

And that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians.

Yeah, and there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, but the... the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time.

Well, the three great pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing, is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline... that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the pyramid of the Pharaoh Djoser, the step pyramid at Saqqara, about a hundred years or so before the Giza pyramids were built.

And then we have this explosion in the Fourth Dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh, Sneferu, who built, supposedly, the pyramid at Maidum and the two pyramids at Dashur, the Bent and the Red Pyramids. And then within that same hundred year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the Orthodox chronology.

And then suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them

is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place, whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti About which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a six million ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long.