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

conjunction involving the moment of sunrise, the constellation of Leo and the meridian transit of the three stars of Orion’s belt. It is this unique celestial conjunction (which furthermore marks the beginning of the ‘Age of Leo’ and the beginning of the upwards precessional cycle of the belt stars) that the Great Sphinx and the three Pyramids of Giza appear to model.
    But why should the ancients have sought to create a simulacrum of the skies on the ground at Giza?
    Or, to put the question another way, why should they have sought to bring down to earth an image of the heavens?
    Motive in the texts
    There exists an ancient body of writings, compiled in Greek in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the early centuries of the Christian era, in which sky-ground dualisms form a predominant theme, linked in numerous convoluted ways to the issue of the resurrection and immortality of the soul. These writings, the ‘Hermetic Texts’, were believed to have been the work of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth (known to the Greeks as Hermes), who in one representative passage makes the following remarks to his disciple Asclepius: ‘Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven? Or, so to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven have been transferred down to earth below?’ [127] The purpose to which these powers were harnessed, in the Hermetic view, was to facilitate the initiate’s quest for immortality.
    Curiously, precisely such a quest for precisely such a goal—‘a life of millions of years’—is spelled out in ancient Egyptian funerary texts which supposedly pre-date the Hermetic writings by thousands of years. In one of these texts, Shat Ent Am Duat— the Book of What is in the Duat— we find what appears to be an explicit instruction to the initiate to build a replica on the ground of a special area of the sky known as the ‘hidden circle of the Duat’: ‘Whosoever shall make an exact copy of these forms ... and shall know it, shall be a spirit and well equipped both in heaven and earth, unfailingly, and regularly and eternally.’ [128]
    Elsewhere in the same text we hear again of ‘the hidden Circle in the Duat ... in the body of Nut [the sky]’: ‘Whosoever shall make a copy thereof ... it shall act as a magical protector for him both in heaven and upon earth.’ [129]
    We suspect that the ideas expressed in such utterances may hint at the true motive for the construction of the huge astronomical monuments of the Giza necropolis and may help us to find a coherent explanation for their precise alignments to the cardinal directions of the sky, their unique ‘star shafts’, and their intense celestial symbolism. At any rate, as we shall demonstrate in Parts III and IV, it is a fact that the Duat sky-region described in the ancient Egyptian texts was dominated by the constellations of Orion and Leo—both of which appear to have been ‘imaged’ on the ground at Giza (with the former additionally targeted by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid)—and by the star Sirius, which was targeted by the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. We also note in passing that the internal corridor, passageway and chamber systems of the Pyramids very closely resemble surviving vignettes (painted on Eighteenth Dynasty tomb walls) of various regions of the Duat. Of particular interest in this regard is the mysterious ‘Kingdom of Sokar’ in the ‘Fifth Division of the Duat in which ‘travellers upon the way of the holy country ... enter into the hidden place of the Duat .’ [130]
    As we shall also see in Parts III and IV, there are the repeated references in the Book of What is in the Duat, and in numerous other funerary and rebirth texts, to Zep Tepi, the ‘First Time’—the remote epoch when the gods were believed to have come to earth and established their kingdom in Egypt. [131] Those gods included Thoth-Hermes, the