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Hancock, Bauval and `intellectual chicanery'
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Read Graham Hancock's Position Statement . . . Recently published:
Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind - or, in North
America, The Message of the Sphinx, same subtitle - by Robert Bauval and
Graham Hancock. As expected, the book repeats the forgery claim; a comparison
with Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) suggests that Hancock is largely responsible
for this section. Here, as there, he imputes a double standard to Egyptologists.
The main difference is that the `Inventory Stela' is replaced by one of Bauval's
concerns - the iron plate discovered by J. R. Hill - with incongruous results:
Double standard The story of the Great Pyramid's shafts, and the oddly
contradictory Egyptological responses to whatever is discovered in them -
or whatever new ideas are proposed concerning them - goes back to the late
1830s when the British explorer Colonel Howard Vyse `sat down before the
Great Pyramid as at a fortress to be besieged'. This comment, from one of
his contemporaries [a `Victorian lady admirer', according to Tompkins], alludes
to Vyse's renowned use of dynamite to `explore' the Great Pyramid. [reference:
`Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, op.cit., p. 61.'] [The quarrymen
hired by Vyse used gunpowder - there was no dynamite in 1837. It's not even
clear who first had the idea; it could have been Perring, who had recently
built a quarry tramway.] It might have been more appropriate, though less
polite, to say that he confronted the last surviving wonder of the ancient
world as though it were a woman to be raped. [A new low, even for Hancock.]
Nevertheless, the fact remains that during a hectic season of explorations
and intrusive excavations (1836-7), Vyse and his team did manage to make
what looked like two extremely important discoveries: A section of flat iron
plate, about one eighth of an inch thick, a foot long and four inches wide,
extracted from the masonry of the southern face of the Pyramid at the exit
point of the southern shaft of the King's Chamber (the shaft targeted on
Orion's belt). `Quarry marks' daubed inside the so-called relieving chambers
above the King's Chamber. These hieroglyphis are the first and only
`inscriptions' ever found inside the Great Pyramid. They take the form of
loosely scrawled graffiti and include the names of Khufu, the Fourth Dynasty
Pharaoh whom Egyptologists suppose to have been the builder of the monument.
The second find - the appearance Khufu's name - has been repeatedly hailed
by Egyptologists during the past 160 years as proof positive that the otherwise
anonymous Pyramid was indeed built by the Pharaoh Khufu. The first - the
iron plate - has been dismissed as a fraud and the plate itself now lies
in a narrow drawer in the British Museum, as ignored and forgotten as the
skull of Piltdown Man. [note: `Where, after some difficulty, we were able
to arrange to view it on 7 November 1995.'] [I can think of few things less
`ignored and forgotten' than `the skull of Piltdown Man'.] Suppose, however,
that the Egyptologists have got things the wrong way round? Suppose that
it is the `quarry marks' that are forged and the iron plate that is genuine?
[Hancock sets up a false dilemma. Suppose they're both genuine.] In this
case the tidy and well-worked-out chronology of the evolution of Egyptian
society, which appears in all the standard textbooks, would be shown to rest
on frighteningly insecure foundations, the attribution of the Great Pyramid
to Khufu would revert to undocumented speculation, and the orthodox date
of the of the Iron Age in Egypt - placed by Egyptologists as being not earlier
than 650 BC [reference: `Bernd Scheel, Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, Shire
Egyptology, Bucks, 1989, p. 17. For a more detailed discussion see A. Lucas,
Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, Histories & Mysteries of Man
Ltd, London 1989'] - would have to be pushed back almost 2000 years [accepting
the orthodox dating of the pyramid]. We [?] have argued elsewhere, and at
length, that the quarry marks inside the Great Pyramid could have been forged
- and specifically that Howard Vyse, who had spent £10,000 on his 1836-7
excavations (a princely sum in those days) had both the motive and the
opportunity to forge them. [reference: `A very interesting discussion is
found in Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven, Avon Books, New York,
1980 [sic - 1983], pp. 253-79.'] Briefly: It is notable that the marks were
only discovered in the four `relieving chambers' opened by Vyse himself,
and not in the chamber immediately below these (and immediately above the
ceiling of the King's Chamber) which had been opened [emphasis mine] by a
previous explorer, Nathaniel Davison, in 1765. [Davison didn't open the chamber
- he found it open already. It was heavily infested with bats - by itself
a very good explanation for the absence of surviving quarry marks.] It is
also notable that Vyse's diary entry for the day on which he first opened
and accessed the lowest of `his' four chambers (i.e. the ones above Davison's
Chamber) reports a thorough examination but makes no mention whatsoever of
any hieroglyphs prominently daubed on the walls in red paint. [Vyse says
nothing about the examination being `thorough'. The claim that it was thorough
comes entirely from Sitchin.] On the very next day, however, when Vyse returned
to the chamber with witnesses, the hieroglyphs were suddenly there - almost
as though they had been painted overnight. [reference: `Joseph R. Jochmans,
The Hall of Records, op.cit., pp. 194-5.': an unpublished manuscript dated
1985.] [Or, during a cursory initial examination, in the flickering light
of a torch or candle, Vyse just didn't see the faint red ochre marks. They
were noticed only when the chamber was measured. Measurement entailed getting
close to the walls, in order to hold the tape; circumstances in which faint
markings might easily be noticed for the first time. Vyse's account is perfectly
consistent, yet Hancock asks us to believe that he gave away the greatest
archaeological hoax ever by publishing an incriminating diary entry.] As
one of Vyse's critics has perceptively pointed out, `the perspective and
angles at which the inscriptions were made shows that they were painted not
by the quarry masons before the blocks were moved, but rather by someone
working in the cramped quarters of the [relieving] chambers after the blocks
had been placed in the Pyramid. Instructions for locating blocks in a
construction project [which is what the quarry marks purport to be] [wrong
- the quarry marks `purport to be' the names of work-crews] serve no purpose
after the fact has been accomplished. Clearly they were added by someone
else and not by the builders themselves.' [reference: `Ibid., p. 195.' i.e.
Jochmans, as above.] There are horrendous `orthographic' problems with the
hieroglyphs. These problems were first pointed out in the nineteenth century
by Samuel Birch, a British Museum expert on the ancient Egyptian language.
Although nobody either then or now [including Graham Hancock] has paid any
attention to his comments, he made the important observation that the styles
of writingexpressed in the `quarry marks' are a strange anomalistic hotchpotch
of different eras. [No, they're not - neither did Birch say so.] Some of
the cursive forms and titles used in these supposedly Fourth Dynasty inscriptions
are found nowhere else in Egypt until the Middle Kingdom, about 1000 years
later (when they became plentiful). Others are unknown until the Twenty-sixth
Dynasty(664-525 BC). [The allusion is to Birch's misreading of a particular
crew-name. Hancock gave a correct translation of the name in FOG.] Perhaps
most telling of all, however, is the use of certain words and phrases in
acompletely unique and zany way that occurs nowhere else in the entire sprawling
corpus of writings that has come down to us from ancient Egyptian times.
To give an example, the hieroglyph for `good, gracious' appears where the
number 18 is meant. [reference: `See Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven,
op.cit., p. 266.'] [No, it doesn't - neither did Birch say so. He said it
was accompanied by numerals.] [All Hancock does is repeat, in detail, claims
made by Sitchin. He shows no sign of having checked these claims; he shows
no familiarity with Birch's comments, beyond Sitchin's selective and misleading
version of them.] There are difficulties with the name Khufu itself as it
is given in the quarry marks. It contains a mistake (a dot surrounded by
a circle instead of a simple filled-in circle [sic]) that - like the usage
of the `good, gracious' hieroglyph - is repeated on no other ancient Egyptian
inscription. [The name contains no such mistake. There are three horizontal
hatching lines within the circle: - an unambiguous rendition of the `kh'
sign. Besides which, the distinction between the `kh' and `ra' signs was
sometimes lost in cursive script - see, for examples, Goedicke's Old Hieratic
Paleography.] Interestingly, however, this same mistake in the writing out
of the name Khufu occurs in the only two source books on hieroglyphs that
would have been available to Vyse in 1837: Leon de Laborde's Voyage de l'Arabie
Petree and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's Materia Hieroglyphica [neither of
which depicts `a dot surrounded by a circle']. [reference: `Ibid. [i.e. Sitchin],
pp. 266, 271-2, 274.'] [Hancock achieves the distinction of being mistaken
even about the mistake that Sitchin mistakenly alleges.] Last but not least,
even if the quarry marks were not forged by Vyse, what do they really prove?
Isn't attributing the Great Pyramid to Khufu on the basis of a few lines
of graffiti a bit like handing over the keys of the Empire State building
to a man named `Kilroy' just because his name was found spray-painted on
the walls of the lift? [No, it's like handing the keys of the White House
to the President of the USA - Khufu was the Pharaoh, you dolt!] We are frankly
puzzled that such questions are never asked [ROTFL] {Rolls on the floor laughing
LB} and, in general,that Egyptologists are so ready to accept the quarry
marks as `proof' of Khufu's ownership of the Pyramid. Their credulity on
such matters is of course their own business. Nevertheless, we think that
it verges on intellectual chicanery [!] for the same dubious attribution
to be regurgitated again and again, in all the standard texts, without any
cautionary notes about the many problems, anachronisms and inconsistencies
that cast doubt on the authenticity and significance of Vyse's `discovery'.
[reference: `I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Pelican Books, London,
1949 [sic - the first edition was in 1947].'] [On present showing, I'd say
that `intellectual chicanery' is something Graham Hancock knows about. And,
sadly, since he's put his name to this, the same goes for Robert Bauval.
The reader is invited to consider the ethics of combining sloppy research
and character assassination in pursuit of `best-sellerdom'.] Strangely, however,
his other `discovery', which Egyptologists today unhesitatingly write off
as a forgery, gives every indication of being genuine - and highly significant.
This was the discovery of a flat iron plate embedded in the masonry of the
Pyramid's southern face. The iron plate affair As we have seen, the two main
chambers in the superstructure of the Great Pyramid - the King's Chamber
and the Queen's Chamber - are each equipped with two long, narrow shafts
which bore deep into the solid masonry, one directed northward and the other
to the south. Those emanating from the King's Chamber cut right through to
the outside. Those emanating from the Queen's Chamber stop somewhere within
the core of the monument. The existence of the King's Chamber shafts was
first recorded by Dr John Greaves, a British astronomer, in 1636. It was
not until 1837, however, that they were investigated thoroughly - by Colonel
Howard Vyse with the assistance of two civil engineers, John Perring and
James Mash. Another member of Vyse's team was Mr J. R. Hill [who, according
to Sitchin, forged the quarry marks], an obscure Englishman living in Cairo,
who in May 1837 was put in charge of clearing the mouth of the southern shaft
(which emerges at the 102nd course of masonry on the south face of the Pyramid).
In accord with Vyse's methods elsewhere, Hill was instructed to use explosives
and was thus responsible for the ugly vertical scar which may be seen to
this day running up the south side of the Great Pyramid. On Friday, 26 May
1837, after a couple of days of blasting and clearing, Hill discovered the
flat iron plate mentioned above. Vyse was soon afterwards to trumpet it in
his monumental opus, Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh as `the
oldest piece of wrought iron known', [reference: `Colonel Howard Vyse, Operations
carried out [sic] at the Pyramids of Gizeh: With an account of a Voyage into
Upper Egypt and Appendix, James Fraser of Regent Street, London 1837, vol.
I, p. 275.'] but Hill at the time was content to write up the discovery in
the proper, sober manner: This is to certify that the piece of iron found
by me near the mouth of the air-passage [shaft], in the southern side of
the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, on Friday, May 26th, was taken out by me from
an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the
stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening
of any sort was connected with the above mentioned joint, by which the iron
could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid.
I also shewed the exact point to Mr. Perring, on Saturday, June 24th. [reference:
`Ibid., p. 276.' i.e. Vyse] John Perring, a civil engineer, thus examined
the exact spot of the find. With him was James Mash, also a civil engineer,
and both were `of the opinion that the iron must have been left in the joint
during the building of the Pyramid, and that it could not have been inserted
afterwards'. [reference: `Ibid.' i.e. Vyse] Ultimately Vyse sent the mysterious
artefact, together with the certifications of Hill, Perring and Mash, to
the British Museum. There, from the outset [a claim for which Hancock provides
no reference], the general feeling was that it could not be a genuine piece,
because wrought iron was unknown in the Pyramid Age, and that it must therefore
have been `introduced' in much more recent times. Did you get that? Bauval
and Hancock pose as J. R. Hill's champions: the sobriety of Hill's report
is compared favourably with the (supposed) excess of Vyse's account; the
testimony of John Perring and James Mash is cited as solid support for Hill's
statement. (Perring and Mash were, like Bauval, engineers and therefore splendid
fellows.) Yet Bauval and Hancock also endorse the forgery claims of Zecharia
Sitchin, when, according to Sitchin's detailed scenario, this same J. R.
Hill perpetrated the forgery! Sitchin claims even to have eyewitness evidence
that Hill - at Vyse's bidding - painted the quarry marks! As for Perring,
Sitchin treats him as a co-conspirator! (Keeper of Genesis in Japanese)
[Home] [Contact] Martin Stower http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins