Customer Reviews

The Message of the Sphinx A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind

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I am an avid reader of Scientific American--and this is an extraordinarily interesting book. Intelligently written, well-researched, each chapter presents new discoveries and surprises--some of which are astonishing for their implications.

Here, perhaps for the first time in a single reference, is a recounting of all the remarkable achievements of the pyramid builders with ample evidence to document just how fantastic those achievements were. The scientific community's notion of people putting 200 ton blocks of stone in place with precision by sliding them up long ramps of mud is preposterous--now here is the engineering to prove it.

The book argues that the pyramids were built by a much older civilization of great wisdom and practical knowledge.

The book also provides an intelligent account of the importance of eastern (Vedic) astrology in the spiritual journey of mankind, at least as accepted by the ancients.

One caveat: The book is an easy read--an exciting book--and I sent it to five friends, four of whom couldn't get through it. The fifth loved it. You will need to have an interest in the subject manner and scientific detail. This is not a book that replaces scientific reasoning with easily rebuked, flaky theories so popular with the Atlantis/Aliens crowd.

When I first saw this book at a bookstore, I figured it was another one of those goofy conspiracy-theory books. This time the bad guy was academia and they were conspiring to keep us from the truth about the Sphinx.

Thank goodness I actually gave the book a try. It's incredibly well written, full of well-documented facts and packed with footnotes and pictures. Hancock and Bauval turn out not to be conspiracy cranks at all; they have found amazing evidence about the age and orientation of the Sphinx and the pyramids. The problem is that the evidence flies in the face of everything that Egyptologists want to believe.

I went on to read source material on the Sphinx and am now reading Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" and am now more convinced than ever that Hancock and Bauval speak the truth.

Pseduo-scientists? Well, only if you think that you have to be a PhD to do painstaking research. Sometimes all it takes is a dediction to discovering the truth.

This is a controversial yet thought-provoking book in which the authors put forward a theory, based primarily on archeo-astronomy, which suggests that certain man-made structures at the Giza necropolis (e.g. the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the temples nearby) may have had their origin traced back to around 10,500BC, making them vastly more ancient than most orthodox Egyptologists would have us believe.

While it is difficult at this stage to prove conclusively whether or not such a provocative theory is correct (although, as this work has become a best-seller, it would hopefully lead to more transparency in future excavation work at Giza, which, after all, houses one of the greatest heritage of human civilisation), the arguments put forward in support of the authors' views are very interesting and, at times, even enlightening. In particular, with the aid of well-produced diagrams, the authors have successfully led the reader step by step through a historical and astronomical minefield towards the startling revelation that the heaven (as represented by the stars) and the earth (as represented by the mega-structures at Giza) actually mirrored each other to an astonishing extent in that mysterious early epoch and that such heaven-earth symmetry appears to be consistent with the ideas apparently expressed in certain ancient Egyptian texts, leaving the reader wondering whether it is all mere coincidence or whether there has indeed been some clever planning by our forebears which is now lost in the mist of time.

It is evident that the authors have put in much effort in explaining their propositions clearly from basic principles and thus knowledge in astronomy or Egyptololgy is not a prerequisite before one can follow their train of reasoning. Nevertheless, this is bascially a one-sided analysis where those who have opposed to the theory and some others in the orthodox academia are often portrayed as narrow-minded bigots or are having a secret agenda of their own. The style of writing is not that remarkable and there is a fair amount of repetition and some not too judiciously considered section divisions, which sometimes impede the flow of argument. Nevertheless, this is one of the books which have opened up an entirely new dimension in a much debated and researched field and those who like subject matters relating to mysteries of ancient civilisation will certainly find it indispensible. Personally, I would hope that, whatever the merits of the arguments contained therein, it will encourage everybody, including orthodox archeologists, to examine the Giza necropolis more thoroughly so that one day, we can unravel all the mysteries (if any) which the Sphinx has been guarding throughout the ages.

Here is a revolution in Egyptology. The reviews I've read of this book, the ones who have dismissed it only prove how narrow-minded people can be, after being spoon-fed a certain history for all their lives. Hancock and Bauval capture, in comprehensive detail many of the riddles of the origin of the Sphinx and solve many of them. From other recent books, we know that the pyramids mirror the exact position of the constellation Orion in the skies as it was in about 10,500 b.c.,that they are aligned exactly north, and we also know that the Sphinx and the pyramids show signs of water damage in an area that has been arid according to scientists for at least 8,000 years. The question is this, what if the pyramids, and the Sphinx, were built by a civilization far older than Egypt, not 2500 b.c., but in 10,500 b.c.? Egyptologists and the narrow minded scoff at this, of course, because it would mean a radical rewriting of Egyptology, not to mention human history, but consider this: even the best archeology is just guesswork, no matter how educated the academic, no matter how logical the theory sounds. The bottom line is no one really knows why or when the pyramids were truly built, carbon-dating is inaccurate, and the Pyramids of Giza were built with more advanced design methods than any other pyramids in Egypt, not only the ones that came before, but after. In fact, some that came after are mere piles of rubble now on the sands. None of the bodies of the three pharoahs the pyramids were supposedly built for were ever found in any of them and Khufe himself, supposedly the builder of the Great Pyramid, said in his records that he only did repair work on it, was not the one to build it. History attributes the Pyramids to Khufe and his descendents, the pharoahs themselves do not. The three smaller pyramids to the side of the monument were the tombs Khufe actually built for himself and his family. In fact, Egyptian myths themselves attribute the Great Pyramid, not to any of their Pharoahs, but to the more advanced methods of their "Gods of Old." No other pyramids in Egypt, before and after, were built with the same design methods and scale of these three,and Egyptologists have long been baffled as to why the pyramid progression happened as it did. Who built them then? Frankly, I don't think it was aliens, but I don't agree with the traditional historical assumption either. Egyptian chronologies attribute the Age of the Gods, to about 10,500 b.c., the same time frame that Plato places for Atlantis in his dialogues. Now, before critics harp on any mention of Atlantis, accept that humanity has been around as we know it, for at least one hundred thousand years, and that civilization has only risen to it's current status in the last five thousand, and you can see we are missing more than a little of our history. Humanity has risen and fallen many times throughout the ages, with little that the generations before us built remaining. Accept that, and also that the whole of Egyptian civilization, it's pyramids and it's gods, are simply a copy of an earlier civilization, one with far more advanced methods, and all the mysteries, the inconsistencies of the other pyramids, all seem to fall neatly in place. Hancock's and Bauval's theories are as good as any of the others that have been accepted over the last two thousand years. And actually, no one can even say that they are really right or wrong, mostly because none of us were really there, and no one can say for sure.

You would better start with "The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids" by Robert Bauval. Graham Hancock did so at his time, and - ended up with their common work beautifully named "The Message of the Sphynx". There is no wonder: the subject of the Bauval's book was so fascinating that attracted the attention of many, and probably that inspired both of them to go on, and give a closer look at the most intriguing mystery of the civilization.

The main point of the book is the considerably greater antiquity of the Sphynx, the Giza pyramids, and some other monuments that can be found at Giza. Luckily some geologists, after providing the in-field research, have supported the hypothesis of the older Sphynx. What is more important, however, is that the monuments at the time of their construction were porobably correlated with some astronomical bodies. And the picture logically built by the authors shows that there much likely existed an ancient civilization, which is much older than the Egyptian one, that possessed a great deal of astronomical and mathematical knowledge that even perhaps helped them millenia ago understand what a star precession is, how it works, and how it may help them with leaving a message for future generations. One may find it difficult to believe in such a wisdom of an ancient people, the most common question that arises is "Where is the hard evidence?". "Right at Giza. Just have look at the Sphynx and the three pyramids", the authors would probably reply. One still may be left in doubt, but the fact remains: the pyramids were build with an incredible precision, the one that seem to be hardly possible even for the modern day construction industry, and there was very likely a definite plan of locating those pyramids, the meaning of which is though never yet clear.

These days more theories on constructing the pyramids and linking them to some astronomical knowledge emerge, some of them readily support the conservative points of view of the mainstream Egyptology and Archaeology. The hypothesis of Bauval and Hancock, however, has no less rights for existing than any conservative one, since it is very strong logically, it is scientifically supported, it is very thought-provoking, and - it may be true, since no one has ever proved the opposite.

The truth is still somewhere out there, and we would only hope it will be revealed one day, though those stories of holding some secret investigations inside the Great Pyramid, hidden investigating the unnumbered underground chambers at Giza, keeping secrets of the hidden chamber in the Khufu Pyramid discovered by Gantenbrink, and not letting the scientists supporting the alternative theories continue their researches at Giza, those stories leave us with less optimism and less hope for a soon breakthrough in gathering knowledge about the ancient civilizations that existed in the territory of Egypt millenia ago.

How old is the Sphinx? The question, and it's paradigm-busting potential for Egyptology, and history as a whole, is the subject of this compelling book.

€ Robert Bauval, a Belgian engineer, and Graham Hancock, former East Africa correspondent for the Observer, have authored previous bestsellers on archaeological mysteries of the ancient world. Here they combine forces to question the conventional wisdom regarding Ancient Egypt, and step bravely into the academic no-man's land that lies between history and prehistory.

€ It was Bauval who made the discovery that the Great Pyramids are exact likenesses, in position and scale, of the three stars in the belt of Orion. Hancock, for his part, claims that the precisely engineered structures of the Gizeh plateau are repositories of complex astronomical data. In The Message of The Sphinx the authors conclude that the Ancient Egyptians were heir to a civilization much greater and older than their own.

€ The most compelling evidence in this regard was announced in 1993, when evidence was presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than previously thought.

€ This haunting monument, the authors assert, with its refashioned, possibly once-leonine head, was created in 10,500 BC. The creators of the Sphinx were survivors of a primordial catastrophe that wiped out most of their civilization.

€ Hancock and Bauval point to the "followers of Horus" in ancient texts as dim memories of these survivors, and suggest the ancient Egyptians were inheritors -- not originators -- of their complex cosmology. The pyramids were completed at a later date than the Sphinx, and the authors present the extraordinary possibility that these enormous stuctures (particularly the great pyramid of Khufu, with its complex galleys and passages) were not meant as tombs at all, but as architectural maps of a region of the heavens known as the "duat", centered in Orion: the cosmogenic realm where souls are spawned and return upon death. The pyramids were used, they theorize, for ritualistic reenactments of astronomical events.

€ The author's labours have made for a mind-bending read, though Hancock and Bauval's ultimate vindication awaits the archaeologist's spade.

This book, like others of it's kind, stretch the imagination beyond what we know today or have assumed to be true. This book claims that the Sphinx goes back in history even further than the oldest proposed dates of the Pyramids at Giza. Through computer animation, the Sphinx has been shown to point directly at the Leo star constellation as far back a 10,500 b.c. If you examine the neck of the Sphinx, you will see water damage that was either caused by a great flood or torrential rains that were not known to exist, prior to 8000 b.c.

Stones that were used to build the Sphinx are said to weigh over 200 tons. Currently, there are only 3 or 4 cranes in the world that can lift this amount of weight. It is estimated that it would take 1800 men to move blocks this size and it is still unknown how the blocks would have been cut with such accuracy.

The organization of the stars in alignment with the Pyramids at Giza and even in the surrounding areas is astonishing. This book is an excellent and detailed view of the star configuration theory, but you should also read "The Orion Mystery" as a follow-up resource. These books compliment each other wonderfully and will make you question the real origins of mankind and our relationship to the heavens.

The easy way out is to view ancient technologies as having been developed by an alien civilization...but a more thought provoking challenge, is to examine these civilizations as having been built by our own ancestors, by as yet undiscovered technology.

I was pleased, upon finishing this book, to note that it omitted the dippier elements (earth crust displacement, lost civilizations in Antarctica, etc.) of Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods." I was dismayed, however, to note that once again a bestselling book supposedly concerned with history and archaeology had been penned by authors with little real experience in either field. Hancock's "research" involves reading and incorporating speculations made by others while roundly ignoring (or ridiculing) those that do not easily agree with his own predilections. Bauval's contribution as an engineer is perhaps notable, but not convincing. While soundly criticizing Egyptologists and other scientists, it seems that neither of these men ever bothered to learn to read hieroglyphics, to seriously study Egyptian history beyond a few basic texts, or to otherwise gain real expertise in the fields that apply to their arguments regarding the Sphinx. For example, the claim that the Sphinx exhibits extensive signs of water erosion is interesting, and borne out by a cursory examination of the photos available, but one wonders if the supposed consensus on this point among geologists really exists. Are there other ways to produce the erosion patterns seen today on the Sphinx? One would never know from reading this book, but a brief search on the web gave me a good hypothesis for one. From reading this book, one might also come away with the impression that most research on the Sphinx over the past 30 years has been performed under the auspices of Edgar Cayce's organization; don't modern archaeologists do anything? In the end, I find the notion that the Sphinx, and the ground plan of the monuments at Giza, predates the supposed origin of Egyptian civilization to be provocative and worth a closer look. I just wish someone more diligent, more even-handed, and more informed would take that closer look.

When it comes to the field of speculative/alternative world history there's nothing more fascinating to speculate about than the true age and origin of the two most impressive, awe inspiring monuments on the face of the Earth, the great Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx. When you add to the discussion ancient mystery schools, occult considerations and the transmission of arcane knowledge you've got my undivided attention!

I've been fascinated by the image of the Sphinx for as long as I can remember. That calm, unconcerned limestone effigy has puzzled mankind since the beginning of recorded time and it still sustains its grip on the human psyche like no other image in history, except maybe the Devil. Was the Sphinx built in approximately 2500 BCE as conventional historians tell us? Was it constructed to honor a Pharoah of Egypt, the face of that Pharoah carved into onto the body of a lion as a symbol of his power?

Or is it older and much more ancient than any of us have yet to fathom? Does this monument reach further back into antiquity, maybe as far as 10,000 to 9,000 BCE? Is it a symbol from an almost mythic time known as Zep Tepi, meaning the "First Time?" If it does reach back to a time preceding the Pharoah's than what was the purpose for its construction and who or what does the figure signify? Ahh......., the question of the ages!

I'm not a scientist or an astronomer. I'm not particularily strong in mathematics in general for that matter. So advanced mathematics and astronomical calculations concerning star alignment, planetary rotations and the procession of the equinox that Hancock and Bauval use as evidence for their conclusions is something I cannot substantiate. I can only read and ponder the implications and conclusions if the authors are indeed correct in their analysis.

FACT? FABLE? FABRICATION? FASCINATING!!!

The argument that the Sphinx and the three pyramids at Giza are much
older than Egyptologists and academic archaeologists have admitted
goes back to Rene Aor Schwaller de Lubicz and to John Anthony
West. Both recognized that the weathering of these megalithic
structures was the result of vertical rainfall thousands of years
before dynastic Egypt, not floods nor wind erosion. Using the newly
founded science of archaeoastronomy Bauval has wound the clock back
and has successfully argued that the lion body of the Sphinx once
faced the constellation Leo with a similar face, a stone fulfillment
of man's repeated urge to re-create the heavens on Earth, but at a
time when Leo was the rising constellation -- 12,000 years ago. In
doing so they have helped open the door to marvelous discoveries about
all the great star-oriented megaliths on Earth. These discoveries
hearken back to a rediscovery of Plato's Atlantis, and the description
of a civilization destroyed at about the same time as the construction
of the megaliths of ancient Egypt, on a true island-continent.