Pyramids and Pharaohs

The pyramids have toward over the desert at Giza in Egypt for over 3,000 years. How the Ancient Egyptians built them is one of the worlds greatest marvels. Why they did, is one of its most intriguing secrets.

Pyramid Power

During the 1800s, archaeologists flocked to Egypt to excavate the Pyramids. Some experts theorized that they were stairways leading to Heaven. Others that they were arranged to align with major stars. Some mathematicians thought that a line drawn from the Great Pyramid of King Cheops divided the world exactly in half, and that the Pyramids marked the middle of the world.

Stopping The Rot

One of the most unusual theories about the purpose of the Pyramids looked at how their shape seemed to have the shape to stop things rotting. Experts from around the world built small Pyramids and found that if they put meat or fruit inside them, it did not rot. A Frenchman called Antoine Bovis even put a dead cat inside a model Pyramid: it did not decompose, but just dried out.

Razor Sharp

The Pyramid shape has another strange power, too. Blunt razor blades placed inside a model Pyramid become sharp again. It only works, though, if the blade faces in the same direction as the main chamber inside King Cheops?ramid. Nobody has managed to explain why.

Disturbed

Whether the Ancient Egyptians realized the powers their Pyramids seemed to possess, we do not know. They built the pyramids to last forever, though, and sealed them carefully so that their pharaohs?dies would not be disturbed as they journeyed to another life after death; The Egyptians left gifts and food for the dead to use in the nest life.

Tutankhamun?omb

In November 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died more than 1350 years before Christ was born. Some say that Carter quickly hid a stone tablet at the entrance to the tomb. It bore the message, ?th will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the Pharaoh?eace? Egyptian symbols called hieroglyphics. Perhaps he should have heeded this clear and direful.

Poisoned

Over the next four years, twenty-two people connected with the opening of Tutankhamun?omb died strange deaths. Many of them just seemed to lose the will to live. Some experts thought that the Egyptians may have sealed a poison in their tombs that still had the power to kill thousands of years later. Others thought that the deadly germs of ancient diseases could have been left in the tomb by the bearers of the pharaoh?offin, and been ?ght? whoever entered the tomb and breathed them in. Carter?inancial backer, Lord Carnarvon, later received evidence of the powers the Ancient Egyptians possessed in a letter from a close friend, Count Louis Hamon.

Hand Of Doom

Hamon worked as a kind of healer. He had been given an unusual gift by a grateful patient in Egypt- the mummified hand of a princess who had died in Tutankhamun?ime. Her farther, Akhenaten, had cut off her hand after an argument. Without it, she could not enter the afterlife. Her hand was buried near the pyramids. Hamon and his wife locked the shrivelled hand in a safe for over thirty years. In October 1922, they opened it, and were horrified to see that the hand was plump and fresh. The princess?lesh seemed to be returning to life??lt;br>
Shocking Sight

Countess Hamon insisted that the hand should be destroyed. Her husband placed it in the fireplace and read some of the ?k Of The Dead? book of funeral prayers and spells written by the Ancient Egyptians. As his incantation came to a close, the figure of a young woman, dressed in the glittering clothes of the pharaoh?amily, shimmered in the air before the petrified couple. One of her arms had no hand. The figure then vanished, as did the hand in the fireplace. Count Hamon and his wife cowered in shock, unable to move.

Too Late

Four days later, recovering in hospital, Hamon read that Carter and his friend Lord Carnarvon were about to enter Tutankhamun?omb. He wrote, warning his friend to take care, but his letter did not arrive in time to stop them. Carnarvon and his wife were among the twenty-two people who died from what was later called ? curse of the Pharaohs?

Dorothy Eady

For one young English girl, the pharaoh?urse was also very real. From 1907, when she was three years old, Dorothy Eady began to say that she had lived in the time of Pharaoh Sety I, almost 3,500 years ago. She said that she had been Sety?istress, Bentreshyt, who had been forced to kill herself once the affair was known.

Strange Knowledge

Dorothy studied hieroglyphics and went to live in Egypt. She seemed to know about everyday life in Ancient Egypt and could walk around ancient temples in the dark, as if she had been there before. Dorothy claimed that Sety?host visited her and that she had ?n beck? Ancient Egypt in her mind many times. This is how she new details that baffled experts, she said.


Deathly Curse

Princess Amen-Ra died in Egypt over 3,000 years ago. Her body was sealed inside a decorated mummy case. In the 1900s, her tomb was discovered and the mummy case sold to four Englishmen. Within weeks, all four were either dead or terribly ill. When a London museum brought the mummy, anyone who went near it died. A ghost expert warned that the Princess had left a curse on anyone who disturbed her tomb. Unafraid, an American archeologist took on board the brand new ship, Titanic, bound for New York. On the night of April 15th, 1912, the ship hit an iceberg and sank, drowning 1,502 people. Nobody mourned the loss of the mummy, which vanished without trace in the icy Atlantic.

Although the night of the disaster was a clear one, the crew did not see the iceberg in time.
Several people saw the Titanic sinking in dreams. Others cancelled their tickets on the ship at the last minute- was it just luck or could they foresee something?

The Great Sphinx Of Giza

From the time of the Ancient Egyptians of the New Kingdom (c. 1400 B.C.) right up to the founding of modern Egyptology just over a century ago by Sir Flinders Petrie and others, the consensus of opinion regarding the age of the Great Sphinx of Giza had always been that it predated the fourth Dynasty of Egypt (which began in c. 2550 B.C.). Twentieth-century researchers, on the other hand, are adamantly convinced that it was built in c. 2500 B.C. during the reign of the fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khafre (Chephren), and that its face is that of Khafre himself.
Consequently, considerable reverberations echoed through the Egyptological community when in 1991 Boston University geologist Dr Robert Schoch published some thought provoking evidence indicating that the earlier opinions had been correct after all and that the Great Sphinx probably dated back to 7000-5000 B.C. More specifically, he claimed that the core body of the Sphinx dated back to this period, concluding that this mighty colossus was built in several stages, beginning with the core and reaching completion considerably later with the sculpture of the rear portion. Most Egyptologists assume that the Sphinx had been built as a guardian for the Pyramids, yet if Schoch is correct; it had existed for several millennia before these great structures had even been erected.
Schoch was led to his dramatic conclusion by the type of weathering exhibited by the Sphinx, for whereas other sculptures in the area display the expected sand and wind abrasion, the Sphinx?eathering pattern seems consistent with erosion caused by water- and the last period of flooding and extensive rainfall here was the Nabtian Pluvial, occurring between 12,000 and 3000 B.C. His pre-dynasty dating for the Sphinx was corroborated by seismic analyses too, and he is presently hoping to obtain permission from the Egyptian-government to take samples from the Sphinx for radioisotope dating, using chlorine-36.
Schoch also disbelieves the theory that the Sphinx shares Khafre?ace, citing evidence presented by New York forensic expert Frank Domingo that readily distinguishes the two, and which shows the face of the Sphinx to be distinctively ?ican??.e. Negroid).
Although his researches are the most scientific, Schoch is not the only recent worker to sugest that the Sphinx is pre-Dynastic. ?Serpent In The Sky?elf-taught Egyptologist John Anthony West proposed a minimum date of 10,000 B.C. for its creation, but his theory that its creators were survivors from Atlantis served only to alienate his ideas from the Egyptological community. Journalist Graham Hancock has claimed in ?gerprints Of The Gods?at the Sphinx may indeed have been built in pre-Dynastic times, by a great civilisation that formally existed, he believes, in a once-habitable portion of Antartica and later travelled by sea to resettle in other areas of the world, including the Nile Valley.
Regardless whether or not this sounds feasible, we must acknowledge that if the Sphinx is truly pre-Dynastic, then it was evidently built by an advanced race of people other than the Ancient Egyptians: but who were they? Just like its mythological Greek counterpart, the Great Sphinx of Giza is highly skilled at posing profoundly difficult riddles.