Graham Hancock

And new chambers, one of them has even been opened up already, are being found as a result of this. So it may be that the Great Pyramid will ultimately give up its secrets. I often think that the Great Pyramid is partly designed to do that. It's designed to invite its own initiates.

Some people aren't interested in the Great Pyramid at all, but some people are fascinated by it and they're drawn towards it. And when they're drawn towards it, it immediately starts raising questions in their minds and they seek answers to their questions. So it's like saying, here I stand. investigate me, find out about me, figure out what I am.

Why have I got these two shafts cut into the side of the so-called Queen's Chamber? Why do they slope up through the body of the Great Pyramid? Why do they not exit on the outside of the Great Pyramid? Why, when we send a robot up those shafts, do we find them after about 160 feet blocked by a door with metal handles?

Why, when we drill through that door to see what's beyond it, three or four feet away, we see another door? It's like very frustrating, but it's saying to us, keep on exploring. If you're persistent enough, we'll eventually give you the answer. So I'm hoping that that answer will come as to how this most mysterious of monuments was actually built and the inspiration that lay behind it.

Certainly, I'm sure it was never a tomb or a tomb only. later pyramids might have been. Actually, no pharaonic burial has been discovered in any pyramid, but nevertheless, it's pretty clear that the later pyramids, with the pyramid texts written on the walls, like the Pyramid of Unas, Fifth Dynasty Pyramid at Saqqara, were tombs. But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb,

to make it a scale model of the Earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it six million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device. This is something that is asking us to understand it. And I hope we will understand it. And I hope Egyptologists will understand

be willing to set aside that prejudice that they're only looking at a tomb and consider other possibilities. And as new tech is revealing these previously unknown inner spaces within the Great Pyramid, I think that's going to become more and more likely.

Yeah, very, very much so. As above, so below. Which is an idea in the Hermetica. The god Hermes for the Greeks was the Greek version of Thoth, the wisdom god of ancient Egypt. And that's where that saying comes from. It comes from the Hermetica. But it's expressing an ancient Egyptian idea to mirror the perfection of the heavens on earth.

Yeah, ramps won't do it. Ramps won't do it, nor will wet sand. It's true that the ancient Egyptians did haul big objects on sleds on wet sand. There are even reliefs that show the process where an individual is standing on the front of the sledge pouring water down to lubricate the sand underneath.

And that's a perfectly respectable way to move a 200-ton block of stone across sand, flat sand, if you have enough people to pull it. But that is not going to help you get results.

dozens of 70 ton granite blocks, 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King's chamber and the floor of the chamber above it and the roof of that chamber and the floor of the chamber above that and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there. Somehow they were lifted up there. Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps?

If you're going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you're going to need a ramp that's going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10-degree slope. And it's calculated that a 10-degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp.

And that ramp can't just be compacted sand since heavy objects are being hauled up. It's going to have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it? We don't see any trace of those so-called ramps that are supposed to have been involved in the construction of the pyramid. I think we don't know. I think we have no idea it's built.

That's why there's so many different theories. We haven't got the answer yet. But the how of it is one of the big mysteries from our past.

But what would last is massive megalithic structures like the Great Pyramid. That would last. And it could be used to send a message to the future. I think Gobekli Tepe serves a similar function. I mean, there it was. It was buried 10,400 years ago. And then for the next 10,000 years, nobody touched it. Nobody knew it was there.

It took the genius of Klaus Schmidt, the original excavator, to realize what he'd found and what it was. But the great thing about the sealing of Gobekli Tepe, the deliberate burial of Gobekli Tepe,

is it means that no later culture trod over it and imposed their organic materials on it and messed up the dating sequences and so on and so forth or vandalized it or used it as a quarry it's all there intact so you mentioned that the pyramids and some of the other amazing things that humans have built has was the results of us humans struggling with our mortality

that's the that's the ultimate the ultimate goal that seems to me what's at the heart of many pyramids around the world is that they're connected in one way or another to the notion of death uh and to the notion of the exploration of the afterlife and and this is of course the fundamental mystery that all human beings face we may we may wish to ignore it we may wish to pretend that it's not going to happen but we are of course all mortal um

Every one of us, all 8 billion or however many of us that are on the planet right now, we're all going to face death sooner or later. And the question is, what happens? And there are a few cultures that really intensely, deeply studied that mystery. We are not one of them. The general view of science, I think, is that we're accidents of evolution. When we die, the light blinks out.

There's no more of us. There's no such thing as the soul. But that's not a proven point. There's no experiment that proves that's the case. We know we die, but we don't know whether there's such a thing as a soul or not. Yeah, it's a great mystery. It's a great mystery that we all share.