The mysteries of Egyptian Pyramids and the Great Sphinx | Graham Hancock and Lex Fridman

This again is where you come to a series of mysteries which are perhaps best expressed on the Giza Plateau in Egypt with the three great pyramids and the extraordinary megalithic temples that many people don't pay much attention to on the Giza Plateau and the Great Sphinx itself. This is an area of particular importance in understanding this issue. What can you actually describe the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids and what you find most mysterious and interesting about them? Well, first of all the astronomy. And here I must pay tribute to two individuals, actually three individuals in particular. One of them is John Anthony West, passed away in 2018. He was the first person in our era to begin to wonder if the Sphinx was much older than it had been. Actually, he got that idea from a philosopher called Schwaller de Lubix, who'd noticed what he thought was water erosion on the body of the Sphinx. John West picked that up and he was a great amateur Egyptologist himself. He spent most of his life in Egypt and he was hugely versed in ancient Egypt. And when he looked at the Sphinx and at the strange scalloped erosion patterns and the vertical fissures, particularly in the trench around the Sphinx, he began to think maybe Schwaller was right. Maybe there was some sign of some sort of flooding here. And that's when he brought Robert Shock, second person I'd like to recognize, geologist at Boston University. He brought Shock to Giza and Shock was the first geologist to stick his neck out, risk the ire of Egyptologists and say, well, it looks to me like the Sphinx was exposed to at least a thousand years of heavy rainfall. And as Shock's calculations have continued, as he's continued to be immersed in this mystery, he's continuously pushed that back. And he's now, again, looking at the date of around 12,000, 12 and a half thousand years ago, during the Younger Dryas for the creation of the Great Sphinx. And then, of course, this is the period of the wet Sahara, the humid Sahara. The Sahara was a completely different place during the Ice Age. There were rivers in it. There were lakes in it. It was fertile. It was possibly densely populated. And there was a lot of rain. There's not no rain in Giza today, but there's relatively little rain. The next person, not enough rain to cause that erosion damage on the Sphinx. The next person who needs to be mentioned in this context is Robert Boval. Robert and I have co-authored a number of books together. Unfortunately, Robert has been very ill for the last seven years. He's got a very bad chest infection. And I think also that Robert became very demoralized by the attacks of Egyptologists on his work. But Robert is the genius. And it does take a genius sometime to make these connections, because nobody noticed it before, that the three pyramids of Giza are laid out on the ground in the pattern of the stars of Orion's belt. And sceptics will say, well, you can find any buildings and line them up with any stars you want. But Orion actually isn't any old constellation. Orion was the god Osiris in the sky. He was, the ancient Egyptians called the Orion constellation Sahu. And they recognize it as the celestial image of the god Osiris. So what's being copied on the ground is the belt of a deity, of a celestial deity. It's not just a random constellation. And then when we take precession into account, you find something else very intriguing happening. First of all, you find that the exact orientation of the pyramids as it is today, and pretty much as it was when they're supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago, it's not precisely related to how Orion's belt looked at that time. There's a bit of a twist. They're not quite right. But as you precess the stars backwards, as you go back and back and back, and you come to around 10,500 BC, 12,500 years ago in the Younger Dryas, you find that suddenly they lock perfectly. They match perfectly with the three pyramids on the ground. And that's the same moment that the Great Sphinx, an equinoctial monument aligned perfectly to the rising sun on the spring equinox. Anybody can test this for themselves. Just go to Giza on the 21st of March, be there before dawn, stand behind the Sphinx, and you will see the sun rising directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. But the question is, what constellation was behind the Sphinx? And 12,500 years ago, it was the constellation of Leo. And actually, the constellation of Leo has a very Sphinx-like look. And I and my colleagues are pretty sure that the Sphinx was originally a lion entirely, and that over the thousands of years, it became damaged. It became eroded, particularly the part that sticks out the head. There were periods when the Sphinx was completely covered in sand, but still the head stuck out. By the time you come to the fourth dynasty, when the Great Pyramids are supposedly built, by the time you come to the fourth dynasty, the head of the lion, original lion head, would have been a complete mess. And we suggest that it was then re-carved into a pharaonic head. Egyptologists think it was the pharaoh Khafre, but there's no real strong resemblance. But it's definitely wearing the nemesis headdress of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. And we think that that's the result of a re-carving of what was originally not only a lion-bodied, but also a lion-headed monument. It wouldn't make sense if you create an equinoctial marker in the time of Khafre, 4,500 years ago, and the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker. I mean, it's 270 feet long and 70 feet high, and it's looking directly at the rising sun on the equinox. If you create it then, you'd be more likely to create it in the shape of a bull, because that was the age of Taurus, when the constellation of Taurus housed the sun on the spring equinox. So why is it a lion? And again, we think that's because of that observation of the skies and putting on the ground, as above, so below, putting on the ground an image of the sky at a particular time. Now, the fact that the Giza Plateau, it's a fact, of course, that Egyptologists completely dispute, but the fact that the principal monuments of the Giza Plateau, the Three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx, all lock astronomically on the date of around 10,500 BC, to me, is most unlikely to be an accident. And actually, if you look at computer software at the sky at that time, you'll see that the Milky Way is very prominent and seems to be mirrored on the ground by the River Nile. I suggest that may be one of the reasons amongst many why Giza was chosen as the site for this very special place. So the point I want to make is that an astronomical design on the ground, which memorialises a very ancient date, does not have to have been done 12,500 years ago. From the ancient Egyptian point of view, you're there 4,500 years ago, and there's a time 8,000 years before that, which is very, very, very important to you. You could use astronomical language and megalithic architecture to memorialise that date on the Giza Plateau, which is what we think we're looking at, except for one thing, and that's the erosion patterns on the Sphinx. And we're pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12,500 years ago. And with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the south of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx Temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx. The Sphinx Temple has largely been destroyed, but the Valley Temple, attributed to Khafre, on no good grounds whatsoever, is a huge megalithic construction with blocks of limestone that weigh up to 100 tonnes each. And yet it has been remodelled, refaced with granite. There are granite blocks that are placed on top of the core limestone blocks. And those core limestone blocks were already eroded when the granite blocks were put there. Why? Because the granite blocks have actually been purposefully and deliberately cut to fit into the erosion marks on the, we believe, much older megalithic blocks there. So I think the Giza is a very complicated site. I would never seek to divorce the dynastic ancient Egyptians from the Great Pyramids. They were closely involved in the construction of the Great Pyramids as we see them today. But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older, and that when we look at the Three Great Pyramids, we're looking at a renovation and a restoration and an enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that. Actually, the Great Pyramid is built around a natural hill. And that natural hill might have been seen as the original primeval mound to the ancient Egyptians. So the idea is that the Sphinx was there long before the pyramids, and the pyramids were built by the Egyptians to celebrate further an already holy place. Yeah, and there were platforms in place where the pyramids stand. Not the pyramids as we see them today, but the base of those pyramids was already in place at that time. So what's the evidence that the Egyptologists used to make the attributions that they do for the dating of the pyramids and the Sphinx? Well, the Three Great Pyramids of Giza are different from later pyramids. This is another problem that I have with the whole thing, is the story of pyramid building. When did it really begin? And the timeline that we get from Egyptology is the first pyramid, is the step pyramid at Saqqara, about 100 years or so before the Giza pyramids are built. And then we have this explosion in the fourth dynasty of true pyramids. We have three of them attributed to a single pharaoh, Sneferu, who built supposedly the pyramid at Maidum and the two pyramids at Dahshur, the Bent and the Red Pyramid. And then within that same 100-year span, we have the Giza pyramids being built. This is according to the orthodox chronology. And then suddenly, once the Giza project is finished, pyramid building goes into a massive slump in ancient Egypt. And the pyramids of the fifth dynasty are, frankly speaking, a mess outside. They're very inferior constructions. You can hardly recognize them as pyramids at all. But what happens when you go inside them is you find that they're extensively covered in hieroglyphs and imagery repeating the name of the king who was supposedly buried in that place, whereas the Giza pyramids have no internal inscriptions whatsoever. What we do have is one piece of graffiti about which there is some controversy. Basic statistics, it's a six million-ton structure. Each side is about 750 feet long. It's aligned almost perfectly to true north, south, east, and west within three sixtieths of a single degree. Sixtieths because degrees are divided into sixties. And it's the precision of the orientation and the absolute massive size of thing. Plus, it's very complicated internal passageways that are involved in it. In the ninth century, the Great Pyramid still had its facing stones in place. But there was an Arab caliph, Caliph al-Mamun, who had already realized that other pyramids did have their entrances in the north face. Nobody knew where the entrance to the Great Pyramid was. But he figured, there's an entrance to this thing. It's going to be in the north face somewhere. So he put together a team of workers, and they went in with sledgehammers, and they started smashing where he thought would be the entrance. And they cut their way into the Great Pyramid for a distance of maybe 100 feet. And then the hammering that they did dislodged something. They heard a little bit further away something big falling, and they realized there was a cavity there. And they started heading in that direction. And then they joined the internal passageway of the Great Pyramid, the descending and the ascending corridors that go up. When you go up the ascending corridor, every one of the internal passageways in the Great Pyramid that people can walk in slopes at an angle of 26 degrees. That's interesting because the angle of slope of the exterior of the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. So we know mathematicians were at work as well as geometers in the creation of the Great Pyramid. If you go up the Grand Gallery, which is at the end of the so-called ascending corridor, and it's above the so-called Queen's Chamber, you go up the Grand Gallery, you're eventually going to come to what is known as the King's Chamber, in which there is a sarcophagus. And that sarcophagus is a little bit too big to have been got in through the narrow entrance passageway. It's almost as though the so-called King's Chamber was built around the sarcophagus already in place. Above the King's Chamber are five other chambers. These are known as relieving chambers. The theory was that they were built to relieve the pressure on the King's Chamber of the weight of the monument. But I think what makes that theory dubious is the fact that even lower down where more weight was involved, you have the Queen's Chamber and there are no such relieving chambers above that. In the top of these five chambers, a British adventurer and vandal called Howard Vise, who dynamited his way into those chambers in the first place, allegedly found, well, he claims he found the graffiti, a piece of graffiti left by a work gang naming the pharaoh Khufu. And it's true, I've been in that chamber and there is the cartouche of Khufu there, quite recognisable. But the dispute around it is whether that is a genuine piece of graffiti dating from the old kingdom or whether Howard Vise actually put it there himself because he was in desperate need of money at the time. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. Another reason why, but it's one of the reasons that Egyptologists feel confident in saying that the is the work of Khufu. Another is what is called the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, where on the Red Sea, a diary, the diary of an individual called Merer was found. And he talks about bringing highly polished limestone to the Great Pyramid. And it's clear that what he's talking about is the facing stones of the Great Pyramid. He's not talking about the body of the Great Pyramid, he's talking about the facing stones of the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. So that's another reason why the Great Pyramid is attributed to Khufu. But I think that Khufu was undoubtedly involved in the Great Pyramid and in a big way, but I think he was building upon and elaborating a much older structure. And I think the heart of that structure is the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid. Anybody who suffers from claustrophobia will not enjoy being down there. You've got to go down a 26-degree sloping corridor until a distance of about 300 feet. It's 100 feet vertically, but the slope means you're going to walk a distance of about, not walk, you're going to ape walk. You're almost going to have to crawl. I've learned from long experience that the best way to go down these corridors is actually backwards. If you go forward, you keep bumping your head on them, because they're only three feet, five inches high. You get down to the bottom, you have a short horizontal passage, and then you get into the subterranean chamber. The theory of Egyptology is that this was supposed to be the burial place of Khufu. But after cutting out that 300-foot-long, 26-degree sloping passage, a lot of which passes through bedrock, and having cut the subterranean chamber out of bedrock, gone to all that trouble, they decided they wouldn't bury him there, and they built what's now known as the Queen's Chamber as his burial chamber. But then they decided that wouldn't do either, so they then built the King's Chamber, and that's where the pharaoh is supposed to have been buried. Those Arab raiders under Caliph Mamun didn't find anything in the Great Pyramid at all. So your idea is that the Sphinx and maybe some aspects of the pyramid were much earlier, and why that's important is, in that case, it would be evidence of some transfer of technology from a much older civilization. The idea is that during the Younger Dryas, most of that civilization was either destroyed or damaged, and they desperately scattered across the globe, seeking refuge, and telling stories of maybe, one, the importance of the stars. Their knowledge about the stars, and their knowledge about building and knowledge about navigation. That's roughly the idea. So it's interesting that the ancient Egyptians have a notion of an epoch that they call Zep Tepi, which is the first time. It means the first time. This is when gods walked the earth. This is when seven sages brought wisdom to ancient Egypt, and that is seen as the origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. There are king lists, by the ancient Egyptians themselves, there are king lists that go back way beyond the first dynasty, go back 30,000 years into the past in ancient Egypt, considered to be entirely mythical by Egyptologists. But nevertheless, it's interesting that there's that reference to remote time. Now, what you also have in Egypt are what might almost be described as secret societies. The followers of Horus are one of those, specifically tasked with bringing forward the knowledge from the first time into later periods. The souls of Peah and Neken are another one of these mysterious secret society groups who are possessors of knowledge that they transmit to the future. And what I'm broadly suggesting is that those survivors of the Younger Darius Cataclysm who settled in Giza may have been relatively small in number. It's interesting that they are referred to in the Edfu building texts as seven sages, because that repeats again and again. It's also in Mesopotamia. It's seven sages, seven Apkallu, who come out of the waters of the Persian Gulf and teach people all the skills of agriculture and of architecture and of astronomy. It's found all around the world that there was a relatively small number of people who took refuge in Giza, who benefited from the survival skills of the hunter-foragers who lived at Giza at that time, and who also passed on their knowledge to those hunter-foragers. But it was not knowledge that was ready to be put into shape at that time. And that knowledge was then preserved and kept and handled within very secretive groups that passed it down over thousands of years. And finally, it bursts into full form in the fourth dynasty in ancient Egypt. And you know, the notion that knowledge might be transferred over thousands of years shouldn't be observed. We know, for example, in the case of ancient Israel, it goes back to the time of Abraham, which is pretty much, I think, around 2000 BC, and knowledge has been preserved from that time right up to the present day. So if you can preserve knowledge for 4,000 years, you can probably preserve it for 8.