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

‘pointer’.
    2.         On a site that is as profoundly astronomical as Giza one would naturally expect an equinoctial monument dating from the ‘Age of Taurus’ either to have been built in the shape of a bull, or at any rate to symbolize a bull. The Sphinx, however, is emphatically leonine in form.
    3.         It is a simple fact of precession that one must go back to the ‘Age of Leo’ beginning at around 10,500 BC, in order to obtain the ‘correct’ sky-ground symbolism. This, as it turns out, is the only epoch in which the due-east-facing Sphinx would have manifested exactly the right symbolic alignment on exactly the right day—watching the vernal sun rising in the dawn sky against the background of his own celestial counterpart. [125]
    To clarify this latter notion, let us return to our computer simulation of the skies over Giza in 10,500 BC, instructing the program to recreate the positions of the sun and stars just before dawn on the spring equinox in that epoch. And let us set our direction of view due east in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. Indeed, with the aid of a little virtual reality and poetic license, let us imagine that we are standing between the paws of the Sphinx itself at that date—a date that we already know accords rather well with the geology of the monument.
    What we would see, occupying the portion of the sky into which the sun is about to rise, would be the splendid zodiacal constellation of Leo—a constellation that very strongly resembles its namesake the lion and thus also the leonine Sphinx.

    28. In the pre-dawn on the vernal equinox in 10,500 BC, with the sun some 12 degrees below the horizon, the Great Sphinx would have gazed directly at his own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo—which experienced what astronomers call its heliacal rising at this moment.

    29. Superimposed images of the rising of Leo in 2500 BC, when the Great Sphinx is presumed by archaeologists to have been built, and in 10,500 BC. It is only in this latter epoch that the perfect sky-ground correlation is attained, at the heliacal rising of Leo, when the Sphinx would have gazed directly at his own celestial counterpart in the pre-dawn.
    The minutes pass. The sky begins to lighten. Then, at the exact moment at which the top of the solar disc breaks over the horizon directly ahead of us we make a 90-degree right turn—so that we are now looking due south. There, culminating at the meridian at altitude 9 degrees 20’, we observe the three stars of Orion’s belt forming a pattern in the sky that is identical to the ground plan of the Giza Pyramids.
    The question reduces to this: is it a coincidence, or more than a coincidence, that the Giza necropolis as it has reached us today out of the darkness of antiquity is still dominated by a huge equinoctial lion statue at the east of its ‘horizon’ and by three gigantic Pyramids disposed about its meridian in the distinctive manner of the three stars of Orion’s belt in 10,500 BC?

    30. The moment of sunrise on the vernal equinox in 10,500 BC. At the exact moment that the top of the solar disc broke over the horizon due east in direct alignment with the gaze of the Sphinx the three stars of Orion’s belt culminated at the meridian in the pattern that is mimicked on the ground by the three great Pyramids. Sphinx and Pyramids thus appear to ‘work together’ as an architectural representation of this unique celestial conjunction.
    And is it also a coincidence that the monuments in this amazing astronomical theme park manage to work together— almost as though geared like the cog-wheels of a clock—to tell the same ‘time’?
    Throughout the ancient world the moment of sunrise, and its conjunction with other celestial events, was always considered to be of great importance. [126] At the spring equinox in 10,500 BC, as should by now be obvious, a particularly spectacular and statistically improbable conjunction took place—a