Author and Sumerian scholar Zechaia Sitchin says he has unraveled a mystery that could tear down the temples of Egyptology. He calls it the "pyramid fraud."
The mysterious tale twists and turns, befitting those three wondrous pyramids that rise on the Giza Plateau not far from Cairo. Part of the story is chronicled in Sitchin's three book series, "The Earth Chronicles," which has been published in a dozen languages and sold millions of copies. His latest and 13th book is "There Were Giants Upon the Earth."
For 150 years Egyptologists have maintained that the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza was the IVth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu, called Cheops by the Greeks. This belief is based on the discovery in 1837 of Khufu's "cartouche," or royal name, inscribed in red paint within the pyramid's relieving chamber, designed to take the pyramid's immense downward pressure.
The other source is Herodotus, who--in the 5th century B.C.--wrote concerning the monuments after questioning his Egyptian guide. He also was an initiate of the ancient mystery schools, pledged on threat of death not to reveal their secrets.
Sitchin states in his book, "The Stairway to Heaven," that the inscription was a forgery perpetrated in 1837 by an Englishman, Col. Richard Howard Vyse, and his assistants. Now evidence has come to life confirming this, says Sitchin, 90, who died last October in New York City. These interviews were conducted before his death.
"The doubt whether the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu is not mine alone," the author says. "Many have questioned the ability of the Egyptians nearly 4,600 years ago to put up such monuments. Succeeding pharaohs, who supposedly had more technology, built inferior pyramids that have crumbled. Only the three at Gizeh have withstood the thousands of years."
These three pyramids differ from the 60 or so later Egyptian pyramids in that they are constructed of bare stone. Also, later Egyptian pyramids have colorful paintings, decorations and inscriptions from known pharaohs and quotations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Egyptologists attribute the three Giza pyramids to three IVth Dynasty pharaohs, Khufu (called Cheops by the Greeks), then Khafra (Chephren) and Menkaura (Mycerinus). This attribution is based on the theory that pharaohs built the pyramids as their everlasting tombs. "But this smooth sequence skips a few inconvenient facts," Sitchin says. "Chephren was not the successor of Cheops. Between them reigned a pharaoh called Radedef. He, too, built a pyramid, but way north of Giza and of no comparable size.
"And the successor after Mycerinus, Shepsekaf, failed in all his efforts to build a true pyramid. Ruins of several of his attempts have been found. He ended up returning to a mastaba (a flat tomb structure) as a lasting monument.
"Kings of the Fifth Dynasty returned to the pyramid style as their monuments, building small, safe-angled pyramids or pyramid-topped temples at or near Saqqara. Those of the Sixth Dynasty did the same. There was a hiatus for centuries until 12th Dynasty when pharaohs erected their pyramidical monuments farther south near Fayum."
The author, one of 250 people in the world who read Sumerian, the oldest written language, says he became interested in the Giza pyramids when he found mentions and pictorial depictions of them and the Sphinx in Sumerian texts that preceded by thousands of years their purported building date (roughly 2700 to 2550 B.C.).
"So the question was: How could the Sumerians, who were not supposed to be aware of the pyramids and who preceded those pharaohs who are credited with building the Gizeh pyramids, describe something that was not built yet?
"I began the investigation by asking myself: Why do we attribute the building of the three Giza pyramids to three pharaohs? What I found was each Egyptologist, each textbook quoted the authority of the previous textbook.
"It turned out that the only source for all the theories over the past 150 years were the work of a retired English army colonel called Vyse, the black sheep of an aristocratic family who went to Egypt in the 1830s and dug within the pyramids.
"He even used explosives to blast his way inside the Great Pyramid, so anxious was he to find something. There he discovered chambers that were never entered before, and within these chambers he claimed he found not just inscriptions, but the cartouche (name) of the Pharaoh Khufu, although there are nowhere any inscriptions within the Giza pyramids.
"Colonel Vyse then had the British consul and the Austrian consul general in Cairo let him into the Great Pyramid's relieving chamber by an assistant, a Mr. Hill. There, a facsimile of the inscriptions was made on large sheets of paper. They, and a Lord Abernathy and the two consuls and Hill signed that this was a true facsimile of inscriptions within the chambers."
The facsimile was then wrapped in cloth and sent to the British Museum in London.
"All the Egyptologists for 150 years cite Colonel Vyse's evidence. So then I started to research Vyse's activities, which were described in daily detail in his diaries. There you can trace how he spent his family fortune for almost a year and a half digging, finding nothing, and how he became more and more desperate.
"Then one night his assistant, Mr. Hill, crawled into those newly discovered chambers, long and narrow and no more than 3 or 4 feet high, with a lantern, then came back and said, 'I've seen inscriptions with red paint.' They then called the consuls."
Generations of archaeologists excavated in and around the third pyramid, that of Menkaura, before Colonel Vyse. They found only an empty sarcophagus. "But," says Sitchin, "Vyse wrote that upon resifting this pyramid debris he discovered a piece of a wooden coffin within the sarcophagus with the name of the Pharaoh Menkaura supposedly written on it--and the skeleton of the pharaoh.
"Egyptologists said that the piece of coffin with the inscription and the skeleton are evidence that Pharaoh Menkaura built the third Giza pyramid."
Sitchin says he read almost every book on the pyramids and then noted that in the last 30 or 40 years Colonel Vyse's claim of authenticity concerning the coffin lid and skull were omitted from textbooks. "I found that in the 1950s it was established that the coffin lid was from a time 600 years after the Pharaoh Menkaura was supposed to have lived, and radiocarbon tests dated the skeleton to Christian times.
"This is what scholars call an intrusive burial because there was a custom to bury the newly dead in older tombs built by others. Therefore, they did not mention it. But I said, 'Wait a minute. This is not so simple.'
"For someone to take a piece from a coffin, say, 2000 B.C. and put a skeleton from 200 A.D. together in a pile of debris that has been sifted by others ... that means this was a deliberate act, a deliberate fraud. Who did this? Colonel Vyse and his assistants."
If Vyse perpetrated one fraud, perhaps he performed another in the Great Pyramid, Sitchin says. To research this possibility, Sitchin journeyed to London in 1979, visited the British Museum and asked to see the unexhibited Vyse facsimile and was told by curators they couldn't find it. "Then someone said, 'Oh, you mean the Hill facsimile,' and they found it for me.
"They said I was the first person in a century and a half to ask to see it. I put it on the desk, and the minute I saw it I said the forgery is obvious. The name of the Pharaoh Khufu was misspelled. Whoever wrote it wrote not Kh-ufu, but Ra-ufu in the hieroglyphics. The inscriber used the name of the great god Ra incorrectly and in vain; it was blasphemy in ancient Egypt."
He submitted this as circumstantial evidence in his book "Stairway to Heaven." "After all, I did not see them forge it," he says, smiling.
A year after "Stairway" was published, Sitchin received a letter from Walter M. Allen, 69, a retired civil engineer living in Pittsburgh. "He wrote me, 'What you say in your book about the Vyse forgery has been known in my family for 150 years ... My great-grandfather was an eyewitness to the forgery.'
Allen's great grandfather, a civil engineer named Humphries Brewer, went to Egypt to help build an eye clinic for Colonel Vyse's Egyptian workers, Allen confirmed in a phone conversation to Sitchin. Colonel Vyse then hired him to supervise the use of gunpowder within the pyramid. His family included five generations of quarry masters in Wiltshire, England.
Brewer recorded his experiences in letters to his father in England. In one, he wrote that he has lost his job. He had seen, he wrote, two assistants of Colonel Vyse, a Mr. Raven and Mr. Hill, enter the pyramid with brushes and red paint, purportedly to repaint faint marks, but actually to draw new ones.
Years later, the Brewer family moved to America, bringing its heirlooms and letters. Here, Allen began in the 1950s to assemble a family history, interviewing surviving family elders. Brewer's Egyptian experiences, including the forgery tale, were recorded by Allen, who sent photocopies of his logbook's relevant entries from 30 years ago.
"My mother had known about it for some time," Allen wrote Sitchin. "I heard about it in the '50s when we were doing a genealogic study. My mother had related it to us and I wrote it down in the logbook. Years later when I happened to read your book, I thought it was almost the same story. It didn't reveal anything new. I just confirmed the conclusions that you have reached. My mother's information fit in exactly with the books about the Vyse expeditions. I was surprised my mother's information was so accurate."
This also sheds light on the Inventory Stela in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Sitchin says. "This clear-cut inscription says the Sphinx that stands beside the pyramid was renovated by a pharaoh who reigned before the IVth Dynasty pharaoh Khafra, who was supposed to have built it. It embarrassed Egyptologists, who explained it as a forgery.
"But if you realize that the forgery occurred in 1837 by Colonel Vyse, then the Inventory is authentic. The Great Pyramid was built before Khufu."
Sitchin says he has had no official response from Egyptologists, but he recalls an incident that happened in 1985. "An Egyptian archaeologist was spending a sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania so I sent him my book. I wanted him to help me get into the pyramid chambers.
"He said to me, 'Mr. Sitchin, we know that the pharaohs did not build those pyramids. What do you want us to do, destroy tourism to Egypt?'
Sitchin cites the work of Dr. Robert Schoch, a geologist at Boston University, that states that patterns of erosion on the Sphinx and other meteorological data indicate that the Sphinx has been standing since before the Giza plateau become a desert in "7000 B.C. or earlier."
He also points to the work of John Anthony West who presented forensic evidence that the face on the Sphinx in no way showed the features of the Pharaoh Chephren, as Egyptologists have claimed. West claims in his books that he estimates the age of the Sphinx at 9000 B.C.
As he says, "Egyptologists face a blank wall.
"If Khufu didn't build the Great Pyramid, who did?
"They have no candidates."
