Free The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind by Graham Hancock; Robert Bauval

the highest altitude that they will attain in their precessional cycle—58 degrees 06 minutes above the horizon at meridian transit.
    It will never fall lower, the epoch of 10,500 BC marks the nadir of the star’s precessionally induced slide up and down the meridian (just as the epoch of AD 2500 marks its zenith). Like a slowly moving lever in a narrow vertical slot, it takes 12,960 years to descend from top to bottom, and a further 12,960 years to ascend from bottom to top again. [122]
    By exactly mimicking the disposition of the belt stars in the sky in 10,500 BC the layout of the Pyramids on the ground thus not only signifies a specific epoch but also rather precisely and surgically marks the beginning of a precessional half-cycle.
    Lion on the ground, lion in the sky
    As was pointed out in Fingerprints, of the Gods, the same role is played by the Great Sphinx—which gazes directly at the equinoctial rising point of the sun in any and every epoch, past, present and future, for ever.

    26. Artist’s impression showing the precessional cycle of Orion’s belt up and down the meridian. The pattern of the stars in 10,500 BC marks the beginning, or ‘First Time’, of the cycle. It is this pattern that is reproduced on the ground by the three great Pyramids of Giza.

    27. The rising points and trajectory of Orion’s belt in (A) 2000 AD, (B) 2500 BC, (C) 10,500 BC.
    This orientation provides us with an astronomical basis for dating the monument because it is known that the attention of astronomers in ancient times was particularly focused on the zodiacal constellation—considered to define the astrological ‘Age’—that rose just ahead of the sun in the eastern sky at dawn on the spring equinox. [123] The same phenomenon of the earth’s axial precession that affects the altitude of stars at the meridian also affects these famous constellations—Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, etc., etc—the co-ordinates of which, in relation to the rising point of the equinoctial sun, undergo slow but continuous precessionally induced changes. The result is a hard-to-observe astronomical phenomenon, known as the precession of the equinoxes, which manifests as a gradual circulation of the equinoctial point around all twelve ‘houses’ of the zodiac. In the words of historians of science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, whose essay Hamlet’s Mill is a ground-breaking study of archaic precessional mythology:
    The constellation that rose in the east just before the sun (that is, rose heliacally) marked the ‘place’ where the sun rested ... It was known as the sun’s ‘carrier’, and as the main ‘pillar’ of the sky. ... The sun’s position among the constellations at the vernal [spring] equinox was the pointer that indicated the ‘hours’ of the precessional cycle—very long hours indeed, the equinoctial sun occupying each zodiacal constellation for just under 2200 years. [124]
    In our own epoch the sun on the spring equinox rises against the stellar background of the constellation of Pisces, as it has done for approximately the last 2000 years. The ‘Age of Pisces’, however, is now approaching its end and the vernal sun will soon pass out of the sector of the Fishes and begin to rise against the new background of Aquarius. To be precise, it takes exactly 2160 years for the equinoctial point to pass completely through one constellation or ‘house’ of the zodiac.
    With this process in mind, let us now reverse Santillana and von Dechend’s ‘precessional clock’. Passing back through the Age of Pisces (and the Age of Aries that preceded it) we find that in the epoch of 2500 BC, when the Sphinx is conventionally assumed to have been built, it was the constellation of Taurus that housed the sun on the spring equinox.
    It is here that the crux of the problem lies. To state the case briefly:
    1.         The Sphinx, as we have seen, is an equinoctial marker—or