Graham Hancock

It's aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east and west within three sixtieths of a single degree. Sixtieths because degrees are divided into degrees. And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of the thing. Plus it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it.

You know, in the 9th century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place. But there was an Arab caliph, Caliph al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the North Face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured, if there's an entrance to this thing, it's going to be in the North Face somewhere.

So he put together a team of workers and they went in with sledgehammers and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. And then the hammering that they did

dislodge something they heard a little bit further away something big falling and they realized there was a cavity there and they started heading in that direction and then they joined the internal passageway of the system of the great pyramid the descending and the ascending corridors that go up when you go up the ascending corridor every

One of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid.

If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber, you go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus. And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway.

It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place. Above the king's chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the king's chamber of the weight of the monument.

But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down, where more weight was involved, you have the queen's chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that.

In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vise, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found, well, he claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang naming the pharaoh Khufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, quite recognizable.

But the dispute around it is, is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the old kingdom or whether Howard Weiss actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the pyramid is the work of Khufu.

Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jaf papirai, where on the Red Sea, a diary, the diary of an individual called Merer was found. And he talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. And it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid.

He's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure.

And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You've got to go down a 26-degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet.

It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're going to walk a distance of about, not walk, you're going to eight walk. You're almost going to have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them because they're only three feet, five inches high.

You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology... is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu.

But after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26-degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there, and they built

what's now known as the queen's chamber as his burial chamber but then they decided that wouldn't do either so they then built the king's chamber and that's where the pharaoh is supposed to have been buried those arab raiders under khalif mamun didn't find anything in the great pyramid at all so your idea is that uh

Mm-hmm. That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when the gods walked the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt, and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization.

There are king lists, by the ancient Egyptians themselves, there are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt. Considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists, but nevertheless, it's interesting that there's that reference to remote time. Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies.

The followers of Horus are one of those, specifically tasked. with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods. The souls of Pe and Neken are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysm