Under the great pyramids of Giza
Investigation of the underworld of Ancient Egypt
As an "all-Egyptian" archaeological team moves to find the answers we hope will reveal what's really there.
Egypt's leading Egyptologist, Dr Zahi Hawass, has revealed that an excavation team under his direction is investigating an ancient tomb, which has been at the center of claims of a supposed discovery of an underground world beneath the Pyramids of Giza.
This is a surprising announcement for several reasons, not least that the "alleged" cave system has already been explored and photographed by British writer and explorer Andrew Collins. In August 2008, Collins announced that he had rediscovered the entrance to an unexplored cave system, and entered it through a mysterious tomb several hundred meters west of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps it was the manner in which Collins had discovered the cave that caused the controversy.
The alignment of the three pyramids with the stars of Orion's belt is not perfect.
Many observations have been made on the three pyramids of the Giza plateau, which appear slightly misaligned. They are not on a straight line. Being in awe of the mathematical precision of the ancient Egyptians, researchers wondered why. Thus, when in 1993 Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert in their best-selling book “The Orion Mystery” identified the three stars of Orion's belt as corresponding to the positions of the Pyramids of Giza, the theory was greeted with caution enthusiasm. Not everyone was convinced by this theory.
The alignment wasn't "perfect," but it was close enough for many Egyptologists. But not for Andrew Collins.
The alignment with the "wings" of the Swan is perfect.
Collins discovered another group of stars in the constellation Cygnus, which he found to correspond with the same perfection that was the hallmark of the Egyptians. By superimposing the stars of Cygnus on the three pyramids he could see that one star, Deneb, was not aligned. There had to be something - a pyramid or temple - but there was nothing. Maybe time has destroyed it? Maybe he was buried? Or perhaps it was a sign that something was beneath the plateau, waiting to be discovered.
Collins then found clues left in the memoirs of two centuries ago, by British diplomat and explorer Henry Salt. Salt wrote that, in 1817, he and the Italian explorer Giovanni Caviglia had investigated the "catacombs" of Giza for a distance of "several hundred meters" before entering a "large" chamber. This chamber was connected to three others of equal size, from which various labyrinthine passages departed, one of which was later explored by the Italian for a distance of "another hundred metres".
Collins decided to search for these caves in the area where the indicated star of Cygnus would be aligned, in relation to the three pyramids. He discovered a series of catacombs, as Henry Salt had described, but no sign of caves. Then, as he was about to leave the site, he noticed a break in the wall of a catacomb, which eventually revealed the entrance to the network of a huge cave complex.
Excited by this grand discovery, Collins immediately went to inform the Egyptian authorities and expected them to be as excited as he was. Wrong!
Why Cigno X-1 is unusual
Several thousand light-years away, near the "heart" of Cygnus, two stars are locked in a gravitational embrace. One star is a blue supergiant, known as HDE 226868. It has about 30 times the mass of the Sun and is 400,000 times brighter. The other star is 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun, but is extremely small. The object must be the collapsed core of a star. Its mass is too large to be a white dwarf or a neutron star, however, so it must be a black hole - the corpse of a star that once resembled the supergiant.
The system is called Cygnus X-1, indicating that it was the first source of X-rays, discovered in the constellation Cygnus. Discovered by the Uhuru X-ray satellite in the early 1970s, it was also one of the first suspected black holes.
The X-rays come from a disk of gas that forms a spiral inside the black hole. Since the two stars orbit each other once every 5.6 days, the black hole's gravitational pull causes the blue supergiant to "bulge" toward it. In profile, the supergiant would resemble an egg, with the small end facing the black hole. But this egg does not have a smooth edge.
Instead, streams of hot gas rush from the star toward the black hole. The gas forms a large accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The friction heats the gas to a billion degrees or more, causing it to emit a torrent of X-rays - enough to fry anything living around it, for millions of miles.
But X-ray light is not constant. It flashes and provides evidence that identifies the dark member of the binary star as a black hole. The gas enters from the outer edge of the accretion disk then spirals closer to the star. If the center of the disk contained a normal star, or even a superdense neutron star, the disk would be hotter and brighter all the way to its center, with bright X-rays coming from the center. Instead, the X-ray glow cuts well outside the center of the disk. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope show that the central region occasionally produces patches of gas disruption around the inner edge of the disk and the spiral into the black hole.
These spots are accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, so that they revolve around the black hole hundreds of times per second. This generates the "flickering" of the a black hole.
The strong gravitational field of the black hole "re-channels" the energy emitted by this gas at longer wavelengths and for longer. Eventually, as the gas approaches the event horizon, the changes become so large that the material disappears from view – just before forming the spirals in the black hole.
The Egyptian authorities try to hide the discovery of the cave
According to Collins,
"Dr Hawass [General Secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities for Egypt] actually denied the existence of the caves. He did so publicly. Why he did this is a debated question.The simplest explanation is that the preliminary investigations that followed our visit to inform him of the discovery of this cave, in April 2008, meant that his parents, having gone to the tomb, neglected the entrance, as we had done us too initially. "
Fifteen months later, bowing to the research carried out by the Egyptian press and scholars, Dr. Hawass confirmed that he had ordered a team of all-Egyptian researchers to explore the tomb at the center of the controversy. Controversy? How could a discovery of a does this scale cause controversy?
“We are trying to understand this complex, and it is a late period catacomb, like many others across Egypt,”
he said.
"There is no mystery about it, and there is no connection with esoteric matters. We will publish our findings as part of our normal activity."
While Dr. Hawass applauds the new interest on the site, Collins remains skeptical of his motives. "We knew that in August he had started emptying the grave," he said. "Excavations began almost immediately after news of the cave's discovery hit the Internet."
Collins is also not convinced by Hawass' explanation of what he calls the catacomb." "Does he now use the term 'system' to suggest that he has found and entered the cave, the existence of which he had previously denied?" He asks.
“My colleagues and I have examined photographic evidence of dynastic catacombs throughout Egypt, and they all appear to have been carved by human hands.”– Hawass
But the photos don't lie. Collins said:
"The ones at Giza are natural, and penetrate many hundreds of meters deep into the rock, perhaps following the course of local geological faults."
Although Dr. Hawass suggests that there is no mystery surrounding the “catacomb,” Collins suspects that the caves extend beneath the second pyramid, where ancient tradition places the legendary tomb of Hermes, the legendary founder of Egypt. This is important because Hermes is known as the conductor of Great Wisdom and Collins suspects that the chambers might reveal something left behind by Hermes - something like the mythical Hall of Memories.
The Hall of Memories - as prophesied by Edgar Cayce?
According to the legendary psychic seer, Edgar Cayce, the pyramids were built by an ancient civilization that had its origins in Atlantis. This great civilization existed somewhere around 10,000 - 11,000 BC and was responsible for the construction of the Great Pyramid, and preserved the history of the lost human race in a room called "The Hall of Memories".
“The memoirs are a… [They contain] “… a history of Atlantis from the origins of those times when the spirit took form and began to settle in that land.”– Cayce
The memories extend through the destructions before that ancient civilization, the exodus of Atlantis to other lands, and the final destruction of Atlantis. They contain a description of the construction of the Great Pyramid, as well as a prophecy of "who, what, where, would come [to do] the opening of the memories".
Collins said:
“This has never been found. So, perhaps, it is still there, awaiting discovery, somewhere near where Salt and Caviglia arrived, almost 200 years ago.”"I believe that the caves we entered are part of a larger complex that extends right beneath the entire Giza plateau."
Collins explains that the caves are natural and resemble holes in Swiss cheese. He believes they formed long before the pyramids were built and suggests they may be the reason the pyramids were built on this site. Early civilizations believed that part of the dying process involved crossing the so-called "Underworld" and these caves might have been regarded as the entrance to this underworld. There is evidence of human activities in the deeper parts of the caves.
According to Collins
"Satellite imagery would tend to suggest that the caves ... reach all the way to the second pyramid."
A little west of here archaeologists found a collection of bird mummies. Since the constellation Cygnus is historically represented as a bird, a swan in particular, it has been theorized that the faithful deposited mummified birds as an offering associated with this stellar configuration or perhaps for Sochar, the bird-like god who was the lord of the underworld.
From the entrance to the caves it appears that one could travel towards the second pyramid and directly below the point where the star of Cygnus, Deneb, would be in line with the three pyramids and the wings of Cygnus. Is it at this point that we will find the famous "Hall of Memories"? Is it the Egyptian government's will to let the world know what is really there? Why must they be so jealous of the secret?
