The two great mysteries of this monument continue to be "how" and "when". The "purpose" of the building seems less controversial, with most people believing that it served as a burial "tomb" for the Pharoah Cheops or Khufu of the 4th Dynasty. That will be discussed in a related article. For now, this article will deal only with the "when" question.
As mentioned in the "Cycles of Precession" article, the re-dating of the Sphinx due to a precipitation-based weathering pattern as proposed by Robert Schoch, has stirred intense debate within the world of Egyptology. It provides the first bit of scientific evidence that portions of the Giza complex may have existed thousands of years earlier than originally thought. The "portions" I'm referring to in this article are the Pyramids. Current Egyptology accepts them as contemporaneous with the Sphinx by believing that the Sphinx was built by Khufu's father Khafre or Cephren the supposed builder of the 2nd pyramid. If the Sphinx could be thousands of years older, then it follows logically that the Great Pyramid might be too.
Edgar Cayce
The only source that claims a date that far back into antiquity is not scientific and subject to much ridicule by mainstream science. It is the controversial Edgar Cayce who claimed on July 1, 1932, while in a trance, that the Great Pyramid was constructed over a one hundred year period from the year 10,490 to 10,390BC. Mark Lehner, who now denounces this time frame (see NOVA interview below) actually wrote a book once for Cayce's organization (Association for Research and Enlightenment) called The Egyptian Heritage. In it he writes:
As opposed to the popular belief, the construction of the Great Pyramid did not necessarily involve thousands of workers dragging huge blocks of stone up an inclined plane.
Q-14. How was this particular Great Pyramid of Gizeh built?
A-14. By the use of those forces in nature as make for iron to swim. Stone floats in the air in the same manner. This will be discovered in '58*.
(5748-6)
* [One of the leading physicists of the German Institute of Field Physics at Goettingen, Germany, Dr. Burkhard Heim had been searching for the answer to the riddle of gravity. He said that he had discovered a positive lead to antigravity. The discovery involved an intermediate field, neither electromagnetic nor gravitational. The results, applied to space flight, would be direct levitation, conversion of electricity into kinetic energy without any waste, and "immunizing the occupants and the structures of such vehicles against any effects from acceleration of the vehicle, however great or violent. During the 1955 holiday week of Thanksgiving Day, the New York Herald Tribune, and The Miami Herald carried announcements about the completion of contractual arrangements between Burkhard Heim and Glenn Martin Aircraft. Heim was to assist them with their gravity control propulsion project. In November 1957, Heim delivered a lecture about his propulsion theory to the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Raketentechnik und Raumfahrt (German Society for Rocket Technology and Space Travel), Frankfurt. In 1959, Heim completed his first publication. Zeitschrift für Flugkörper (Magazine for Missiles) carried a series of four articles about his theory (Heim, 1959 a,b,c,d). The series of papers carried claims and sample calculations that were similar to his 1956 progress report at the Gravity Research Foundation. Heim discussed "the principle of the dynamic Kontrabarie" in which he examined how a field drive would be more effective than the best chemical drive for rockets. Heim stopped work on the propulsion aspect of his theory in 1959. Neither failures nor flaws had made Heim discontinue his propulsion research – it was the unbridled interest of unsavory firms. The preface by Helmut Goeckel to Heim’s (1959a) first paper in the series of four articles published by Magazine for Missiles indicated various aerospace and ordnance companies had made several attempts to kidnap him. Subsequently, the remainder of his life was devoted to refining the unified field attributes of his theory.]
see also:
Heim, B. (1956). "Bericht über die Entwicklung des
Prinzips der dynamischen Kontrabarie" [A report on the
development of the principle of dynamic contrabarie].
New Boston, New Hampshire: Gravity Research Foundation
(original and English translation are available).
Heim, B. (1959a). "Das Prinzip der dynamischen
Kontrabarie." Zeitschrift für Flugkörper (Magazine for Missiles), 1(4),
100-102.
Heim, B. (1959b). "Das Prinzip der dynamischen
Kontrabarie (II)," Zeitschrift für Flugkörper, 1(6),
164-166.
Heim, B. (1959c). "Das Prinzip der dynamischen
Kontrabarie (III)," Zeitschrift für Flugkörper, 1(7),
219-221.
Heim, B. (1959d). "Das Prinzip der dynamischen
Kontrabarie (IV)," Zeitschrift für Flugkörper, 1(8),
244-248.
Q-3. By what power or powers were these early pyramids and temples constructed?
A-3. By the lifting forces of those gases that are being used gradually in the present civilization, and by the fine work or activities of those versed in that pertaining to the source from which all power comes.
(5750-1)
Even with these methods, the Pyramid took a hundred years to complete.
Q-5. What was the date of the actual beginning and ending of the construction of the Great Pyramid?
A-5. Was one hundred years in construction. Begun and completed in the period of Araaraart's time, with Hermes and Ra.
Q-6. What was the date B.C. of that period?
A-6. 10,490 to 10,390 before the Prince entered into Egypt.
(5748-6)
The problem with such an early construction date is that mankind was in the Stone Age and not supposed to be able to build something like the Great Pyramid. But is this a fact? Was mankind in the Stone Age then or is this also a theory that should be subject to testing? What do we know about our development prior to 3100BC when the Egyptian culture seemingly came out of nowhere? The only fact, is, there are very few facts. If Yukteswar is correct, and mankind did reach a peak of mental development in 11500BC then that throws an entirely different light on a completion date of 10390BC. This would place the construction of the Great Pyramid in the Satya Yuga or "Golden Age" a mere 1100 years after the point when man had reached his peak of development in the 24,000 year cycle. Curiously, in the same reading that Cayce gave for the date of the Great Pyramid, he also said that at that time:
...there were periods when a much closer relationship existed, or rather should it be said, there was a much better understanding OF the relationship that EXISTS between the creature and the Creator.
During the Satya Yuga, Yukteswar claims that:
...dharma, the mental virtue, is in its fourth stage and completes its full development; the human intellect can comprehend all, even God the Spirit beyond this visible world.1
All creation is governed by law. The ones which manifest in the outer universe, discoverable by scientists, are called natural laws. But there are subtler laws ruling the realms of consciousness which can be known only through the inner science of yoga. The hidden spiritual planes also have their natural and lawful principles of operation. It is not the physical scientist but the fully self-realized master who comprehends the true nature of matter. (Yukteswar)
When viewed in this context, it is evident that if the Great Pyramid was built in the 10500BC era, it was built by humans, some of which had an intellectual capacity that we have not yet reached in this current Dwapara Yuga and apparently won't reach for at least another 10,000 years! (see diagram)
Is it any great surprise then, that we are still at a loss as to the method of construction and to the purpose behind this great building?
The following two sections, Fourth Dynasty Tomb and Searching for Khufu are excerpted from William Fix' excellent book, Pyramid Odyssey.
Fourth Dynasty Tomb
The Great, Second and Third Pyramids of Giza, the large temples immediately east of these and the Valley Temple immediately south of the Sphinx have other characteristics separating them from everything else in Egypt. These characteristics reveal a general excellence of workmanship and imply a higher technological capability than that employed elsewhere. In these structures, massive blocks of granite were used as building materials on a scale not seen elsewhere in Egypt. The blocks of stone in these buildings, whether granite or limestone, are much larger than those found in other pyramids and temples. Because the other pyramids consist of much smaller blocks, they were built as a series of shells with multiple internal retaining walls to give cohesiveness. The three large Gizeh Pyramids do not have these internal casings. The very size of the blocks produce the necessary stability.
These Pyramids and the large Gizeh temples are further separated stylistically from the rest of Egyptian antiquities in their general lack of ornament and inscription. At Giza, the walls and chambers of these major structures are blank, but the walls and columns of the temples and tombs at Luxor and the chambers of the pyramids at Saqqara are literally covered with carved symbols and inscriptions.2
Was language a cumbersome and unnecessary means of communication in those days? Was the human intellect able to "comprehend all, even God the Spirit beyond this visible world" as Yukteswar claimed, which made oral and written communication superfluous? How else can you explain the marvelous technological feats at Giza, but no written word or plans or tools of any kind are to be found outside the dates assigned to the Old Kingdom. In fact this is one of the main arguments used by Egyptologists in favor of their time frame construction period. They ask where is the evidence for these ancient cultures? As an example, here is an excerpt of an interview conducted by NOVA with noted Egyptologist Mark Lehner: [my comments are added in brackets]
NOVA: Can you give
us an example of a single aspect of material culture,
from ancient Egypt that you might use as a starting
point for dating the pyramids?
LEHNER:
The pottery, for example. All the pottery you find at
Giza looks like the pottery of the time of Khufu,
Khafre, and Menkaure, the kings who built these
pyramids in what we call the Fourth Dynasty, the Old
Kingdom. We study the pottery and how it changes over
the broad sweep, some 3,000 years.
NOVA: Is there
any evidence at all that an ancient civilization
predating the civilization of Khufu, Khafre and
Menkaure was there?
LEHNER: It's a good question. If they were
there, you see -- civilizations don't disappear without
a trace. If archaeologists can go out and dig up a
campsite of hunters and gatherers that was occupied
15,000 years ago, there's no way there could have been
a complex civilization [as we know it]
at a place like Giza or anywhere in the Nile Valley
[see below] and
they didn't leave a trace....as I say to New Age
critics, show me one pot shard of that earlier
civilization. Because the only way they could have
existed [that he is aware of]
is if they actually got out with whisk brooms, scoop
shovels and little spoons and cleared out every single
trace of their daily lives, their utensils, their
pottery, their wood, their tools and so on, and that's
just totally improbable. [the premise being
that they had utensils, pottery, wood and
needed tools in the first place].
As far as the comment that "...there's no way there could have been a complex civilization at a place like Giza or anywhere in the Nile Valley...", Dr. Schoch has an interesting observation in his new book:
Giza is a convenient archaeological site to study because it lies above the Nile floodplain and has escaped the annual flooding that, before the damming of the Nile at Aswan, typically deposited one millimeter of soil each year. Over the 10,000 years between the beginning of the Neolithic Period and now, a little over 26 feet of soil has accumulated, burying any ancient sites to be found there. The Nile itself has changed course many times during that same period, and the Mediterranean coastline has also shifted. The heavy post-Ice Age rains that deluged Giza and weathered the Sphinx raised the sea level hundreds of feet, drowning any cities, villages or holy sites on what used to be the shore. It is possible that the ruined settlements of the people who carved the Spinx and held holy the site of Kahfre's Pyramid lie hidden under silt or sea.3
The problem Egyptologists are having with "older" dates for Giza is they are assuming the conventional theories of our history are fact. We are an offshoot of primates, they reason, who originally lived in caves and slowly over thousands of years "developed" our intelligence to the present state. They are naturally projecting our own current civilization and the parameters associated with existing in it, and arriving at conclusions based on the assumption that Stone Age man eventually developed to the current civilization because no other evidence exists to the contrary, except for anomalies like Giza. Therefore, they keep trying to force or wedge the Great Pyramid into a time frame when it couldn't possibly have been built based on their studies of "pottery and how it changes over the broad sweep, some 3000 years." Irrespective of pottery studies, to have lifted into place, perfectly fitted 70 ton granite beams which roof the ceiling of the King's Chamber, using ropes and copper implements is just beyond comprehension. Chris Dunn has written some interesting articles about some of the tools that had to be used at Giza. In an article dealing with Coral Castle, he writes:
While the cutting techniques of the ancient pyramid builders have been a continuing topic for debate, they have not received the same attention and controversy as the proposed methods that were used to lift and transport huge cyclopean blocks of stone. While Egyptologists and orthodox believers in primitive methods argue that the huge blocks were moved and put into place using only man power, experts in moving heavy weights using modern cranes throw doubt on the subject.
My company recently installed a hydraulic press that weighed 65 tons. In order to lift it and drop it through the roof, they had to bring in a special crane. The crane was brought to the site in pieces and was transported from 80 miles away over a period of five days. After 15 semi-trailer loads, the crane was finally assembled and ready for use.
As the press was lowered into its specially prepared pit, I asked one of the riggers about the heaviest weight he had lifted. He claimed that it was a 110-ton nuclear power plant vessel. When I related to him the 70 and 200 ton weights of the blocks of stone used inside the Great Pyramid and the Valley Temple, he expressed amazement and disbelief at the primitive methods that are promoted by Egyptologists.
The tools displayed as instruments for the creation of these incredible artifacts are physically incapable of even coming close to reproducing many of the artifacts in question. Along with the enormous task of quarrying, cutting and erecting the Great Pyramid and its neighbors, thousands of tons of hard igneous rock, such as granite and diorite, were carved with extreme proficiency and accuracy. After standing in awe before these engineering marvels and then being shown a paltry collection of copper implements in the tool case at the Cairo Museum, one comes away with a sense of frustration, futility and wonder.
To give an idea of the enormous size of the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid is slightly larger than Kahfre's shown above. Can you imagine trying to haul all those millions of blocks? And remember, the casing stones, made of a marble-like white Tura limestone, have been stripped off. They all had to be individually cut on six sides and had to fit perfectly on top of the blocks shown above so as to give a smooth flat surface for the exterior.
The amount of work required to cut and fit all these casing stones and then cover the entire pyramid with them up to a height of about 480 feet just boggles the mind.
How were these huge granite blocks shown above cut and lifted into place? Can you do this with some rope and copper tools? It's amazing the apparent ease with which the Egyptians moved huge blocks of stone and placed them so perfectly with the tools that were available in 2500BC, isn't it?
It seems to me, that by exclusively examining Old Kingdom artifacts over a broad sweep of 3000 years, you may learn a lot about the Old Kingdom of Egypt. However, if the Great Pyramid pre-dates that era by thousands of years, what can you possibly learn about it with this method? You would be basing your conclusions on a false premise.
That is not to say there were no "campsites of hunter-gatherers" that can be excavated. But how are they being dated? By the same assumptions we believe are true about our past! It may also be true that nomadic hunter-gatherers is a misnomer. Perhaps they were just nomadic. Perhaps we are assuming they were hunting and gathering because of our pre-conceived notions of our past:
...from having been nomads, following herds of wild prey and collecting what nature had to offer...to humans becoming sedentary village-dwellers, relying on domesticated plants and animals for their daily survival....4
This rise of agriculture some 10,000 years ago was arguably one of the most crucial events in the history of mankind. But was this crucial event a progression or a regression into a lesser society that was now forced into providing for itself? In trying to determine the causes of this transition a recent study noted:
In the older literature, this process was traditionally regarded as a "revolutionary invention", purposefully made by welfare-maximizing rational individuals in search of a more efficient mode of food production. Agriculture was seen as a natural, almost inevitable step away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes characterized as "nasty, brutish and short". However, archeological and anthropological research during the last decades have demonstrated that there are almost no indications of increased standards of living after the agricultural transition. Rather, it appears that the early agriculturalists had to work more hours (Harlan, 1995) were more prone to lethal disease and malnutrition (Diamond, 1997; Cohen and Armelagos, 1984) and had to endure less egalitarian social structures than hunter-gatherer societies (Wittfogel 1957; Fernandez-Armesto, 2000). If this is so, then rather than being a blessing or a sign of maturity, the transition to agriculture seems like something of a curse. What indeed is the economic rationale for its occurrence?5
In other words, it doesn't make sense. If however, people living during the Satya Yuga didn't require food and water because of their advanced God-like state and subsequently lost some of this ability in the thousands of years that followed, then this casts an entirely different light on the subject. There have even been documented cases of people in this day and age living normal lives without food or water for decades, although science is reluctant to investigate these so-called miracles. People would typically have complete knowledge of the source of energy and power of the universe in the Satya Yuga era. As Swami Vivekananda noted when talking about God as prana or the ultimate manifesting power of the universe:
This opens to us the door to almost unlimited power. Suppose, for instance, a man understood the Prana perfectly, and could control it, what power on earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and stars out of their places, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the biggest suns, because he would control the Prana. This is the end and aim of Pranayama. When we become perfect Yogis, there will be nothing in nature not under our control. If we order the gods or the souls of the departed to come, they will come at our bidding. All the forces of nature will obey us as slaves. When the ignorant see these powers of the Yogi, they call them the miracles.6
Is this the state of man Yukteswar was referring to in the Satya Yuga when he said the "human intellect can comprehend all, even God the Spirit beyond this visible word"?
A nomadic lifestyle might have been the norm and the assumption that this was for hunting and gathering food would be invalid. There would be no tools, machines or other normal traces of our current pre-conceived ideas of what constitutes civilization. Telepathic or clairvoyant abilities may also have been commonplace in that long-ago bygone era, but were eventually lost over thousands of years of decreasing dharma. Language and then writing may have developed as a practical necessity, as was agriculture, because of this loss. That might explain why some of the most amazing Giza monuments are blank and other lesser temples that may have followed are "literally covered" with inscriptions.
Fix goes on to say:
The Giza pyramids are also unique in having subterranean passages and chambers carved out of the underlying solid rock. The general pattern in other pyramids is that the descending passages were dug out as open trenches and the chambers were excavated as open pits. The trenches and pits were then roofed with stone and the pyramids were built on top of them. The Pyramid at Abu Roash, which was supposedly constructed immediately after the Great Pyramid, reverts to the trench and pit technique.7
According to the currently accepted theories of Egyptology, Khufu built the above pictured pyramid. His son, Djedefre, built the structure pictured below. In the background of the second picture, you can see, in the distance, the pyramids of Giza. Was there a bit of a "drop-off" in pyramid building quality from father to son? This scenario is supposed to be logical and based on science. The tents are being used by excavators to sift through the remains of whatever once stood there.
As Fix also concludes:
The many fundamental differences between the major Giza monuments and the rest of Egyptian pyramids and temples indicate that they do not fit neatly into the contended chronology for dynastic Egypt.8
