The Sphinx and Great Pyramids
A Postmodern History
In spite of what many people seem to think, the pyramids were not built by Jewish slaves or ancient aliens. Surprisingly, there is some truth to the idea of the “Great Flood” though. That is to say, about 12,500 years ago, near the end of the last glacial period of the Ice Age, sea levels rose by a few hundred feet. As such, hundreds of thousands of people around the world died. This was particularly devastating to the Natufians of Africa, in what is now Egypt. This was a period of catastrophic upheaval in the evolution of modern humans that lasted for generations. As a result, the universal myth of the deluge emerged from various different anecdotal disaster reports that were handed down over time in an effort to remember what happened when the Constellation Leo became visible behind the vernal sunrise, all those years ago.
In the end, the Old Stone Age eventually gave way to the New Stone Age when the post-flood survivors decided to take root where an outcrop of limestone was first witnessed appearing in northeastern Africa. Since the Giza Plateau is a few hundred feet above sea level, the proverbial “primordial mound” of the Ancient Egyptians first appeared to the Natufians as if by a miracle of some sort. There the wandering nomads built what later became the Sphinx to symbolically reclaim the land from the sea. As part of this, the great statue was originally an enormous white lion that gazed directly at the constellation Leo, serving as a marker for the spring equinox. This was also the site of the first temple in prehistory, predating Gobekli Tepe in Turkey by a millennium.
Regardless, to carve the massive monolith and build the accompanying temple out of the rough terrain around them, a team of around 100 highly skilled stonemasons worked tirelessly for years on end. They pounded stone hammers into solid rock at a rate of about forty strikes per minute, from sunrise to sunset day in and day out. The resulting one hundred foot tall, two hundred and fifty-foot long monolith then served as an important beacon of hope to the settlers. Meanwhile, the temple was built from the quarried stone slabs. As such, the Natufian tribes thrived together living in this way for millennia, however, by 3500 BCE the fully vegetated landscape quickly vanished in the span of about a century.
The desertification of Ancient Egypt changed everything forever. With each passing generation, the land became less and less sustainable, killing off more and more of their society. As a result, the scarcity of rain and grain gradually led to an abandonment of the animistic ways of old. After praying for much-needed water for years on end, the shamans finally had to admit defeat. The monsoon was too far south for the spirits to have answered the prayers of the rain dancers, but they were completely unaware of meteorology. So, they inevitably migrated east to the Valley of the Nile toward the more fertile ground, in hopes of finding what they needed. This gave rise to polytheistic priests with new pantheons of deities, like that of Isis and Osiris.
Over time certain local cultures were replaced by that of others, so the Natufian society vanished as civilization progressed. By 4500 BCE the Badarian culture gave way to the Naqadan and so on and so forth. Then, around 3100 BCE, the Ancient Egyptians emerged when Narmer unified the Kingdom in the 1st dynasty. Their copper age society became the most advanced due to a regional fluke of chemistry that taints their ore with arsenic making the metal more durable than anywhere else in the world. This gave them the sharpest chisels in antiquity. Still, at first, the Ancient Egyptians only built single-story flat-roofed tombs for their pharaohs. Then, the Step Pyramid of Djoser was finally built in the Saqqara necropolis by stacking layers on top of each other to build a manmade mountain for the first time in history.
After about a century of building tombs in Saqqara, a pharaoh named Khufu decided to move the whole operation north to Giza, where there was far more raw material to build with. The site was also important because there was an essential line of sight from Giza to Heliopolis, creating a clear view from the tomb to the temple. This allowed a beam of light to pass between them and thereby convey the power of the Sun god in the process. Similarly, the smooth-faced pyramids were meant to capture the first rays of morning sunshine and channel them down into the land of Egypt, thereby sustaining existence. In many ways, the pyramids were meant to be earthly incarnations of the Sun’s rays gleaming white with a brilliant limestone casing. At 455 feet tall, the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza was the zenith of Ancient Egypt, in every sense of the word.
As part of this, although there are more than a hundred different Ancient Egyptian pyramidal tombs symbolizing the primordial mound, there is something extra special about the three famous structures at Giza. They were designed in the 4th dynasty by sophisticated engineers with decades of knowledge and skill to draw upon. The Great Pyramid of Khufu even became one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It took 100,000 men 23 years to build it, with a new block put in place every two minutes of each workday. To do this, there were 75,000 unskilled villagers who did all the heavy lifting during a few months of the year. Plus, there were 25,000 craftsmen who lived and worked on-site all year round. Workers even mass-produced 50-ton granite blocks using toothless saws and sand far to the south. Those were then floated on boats more than 600 miles up the Nile.
The logistics of this were all done by couriers carrying papyrus scrolls with instructions written in hieroglyphics. Plus, the workforces were expertly organized into crews of 2,000 workers, which were then broken up into groups of 200, and finally into 10 man teams. They worked under the supervision of overseers in three-month shifts as part of a master plan devised by powerful bureaucrats like the pharaoh Khufu and his royal vizier Hemiunu. The ruling elites envisioned a vast complex with astronomical and theological form and function in mind, building an entire metropolis just to construct a necropolis. The amount of food alone that was required to do this was unprecedented. The 25,000 on-site employees even got free healthcare, including mending broken bones. This was because everything the rulers expected to be done had to be executed with the utmost precision and care, as well as within the lifetime of the god-king himself.
To build the Great Pyramid of Giza, the royal engineers first mapped out the outermost edge of the building itself. Next to that, workers dug a water trench around the edge of the base to make sure the whole thing was horizontal. This was then checked with a hanging plumb-line level for quality control. In line with this, the sides of the pyramid were aligned to the cardinal directions, such that due north was only off by 1/20th of a degree. More surprisingly, the 755 feet long sides of the building only deviate by two inches at most. To achieve this level of precision, the outer surface blocks were all put in place first. Then, the pyramid was built from the inside out, using an internal ramp to reach the point of the outer blocks. Along with this, a long, straight external ramp was used to create the first two-thirds of the tomb. After that, the Egyptians dismantled the external ramp and brought up the remaining blocks on cedar sleds in order to finish the top of the pyramid.
At one point, Khufu’s son Khafra even had his own face carved into the heavily eroded lion head at the Natufian temple, thus creating the classic Great Sphinx of Giza on the west bank of the Nile River. It was all part of a daring project to bring the Belt of Orion from Heaven to Earth. The complex monuments were then constructed by thousands of conscripted laborers between 2575 BCE and 2465 BCE. Sculptors used copper chisels to shape limestone blocks, living and working into their early forties. Meanwhile, builders used levers, wedges, and rope to haul and hoist the giant slabs. As a result, they often died naturally in their thirties, if not at a much younger age in a work-related accident on the job site. There was a very significant loss of life and limb, in which tens of thousands of peasant laborers toiled away at back-breaking work for generations on end as part of their civic obligation to the state and the gods that it represented.
In addition to that, the Constellation Orion was seen as Osiris in Ancient Egypt, so the Egyptians wanted to bring divinity to humanity, but they were also calling back to the Natufians in the Age of Leo thereby commemorating the Great Flood. That is to say, the alignment of Orion’s belt that they used was not from their era but that of their ancestors, the Natufians. As part of this, the Nile corresponds to the Milky Way and the pyramids of Giza with Orion’s Belt, but only as they appeared in the year 10500 BCE and no other. So, ultimately, Khufu’s priests saw all the way from the Time of the Lion to the Belt of Orion and back again. As if that wasn’t magical enough, the shaft leading out of the King’s Chamber points directly to the god Osiris (Orion) and the shaft coming from the Queen’s Chamber points to the goddess Isis (Sirius). Thus, the shafts were passageways for the recently departed souls of mummified remains which were then deified in the stars. Such was the politico-religious history of the Giza Plateau, in all of its splendor.
