As an "all Egyptian" archaeological team moves in to find
answers we hope they will reveal what's really there.
Wednesday, 02 December 2009
Inside Giza's cave underworld
Today, Egypt's leading Egyptologist, Dr Zahi Hawass, has
revealed that an excavation team under his charge is
investigating an ancient tomb at the centre of claims
regarding the alleged discovery of a cave underworld beneath
the Pyramids of Giza.
This is a surprising announcement for several reasons,
not the least being 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 a previously
unexplored cave system, entered via a mysterious tomb
several hundred meters west of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps it
was how Collins discovered the cave entrance that has caused
the controversy.
The alignment of the three pyramids with the stars of
Orion's belt [above] is not perfect.
Much has been made observation that the three pyramids on
the Giza plateau appear slightly mis-aligned. They are not
on a straight line. Since we marvel at the mathematical
perfection of the early Egyptians, this has bothered
investigators. Thus when in 1993 Robert Bauval and Adrian
Gilbert in their bestselling book The Orion Mystery
saw the three 'belt' stars of Orion as defining the
ground-plan of the Giza Pyramids the theory was met with
cautious enthusiasm. However, not all were convinced by the
"Orion Correlation Theory" (OCT), as it became known.
The alignment wasn't "perfect" but it was close enough
for many Egyptologists. But not for Andrew Collins.
The alignment with the "wings" of Cygnus [above] is
perfect.
Collins discovered another group of stars in the
constellation Cygnus that matched with the same perfection
that was the trademark of the Egyptians. By superimposing
the stars of Cygnus over the three pyramids he could see
that one star, Deneb, was not aligned. Looking where
something should be -- a pyramid or temple -- there was
nothing. Perhaps time had destroyed it? Perhaps it was
buried? Or perhaps it was a sign that something else was
under the plateau, waiting to be discovered.
Collins later found clues left in the 200-year-old
memoirs of British diplomat and explorer Henry Salt. Salt
wrote how, in 1817, he and Italian explorer Giovanni
Caviglia had investigated cave "catacombs" at Giza for a
distance of "several hundred yards" before coming across a
"spacious" chamber. This chamber linked to three others of
equal size, from which went various labyrinthine passages,
one of which the Italian later explored for a distance of
"300 feet further".
Collins decided to look for these caves in the area where
the unmarked star of Cygnus would align in relation to the
three pyramids. He discovered a series of catacombs, as
Henry Salt had described, but no sign of any caves. Then, as
he was about to leave the site he noticed a break in the
catacomb wall which eventually revealed the entrance to this
huge complex network of caves.
Excited by this monumental discovery, Collins immediately
went to inform the Egyptian authorities and expected them to
be as excited as he was. Wrong!
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Why Cygnus x-1 is unusual
Several thousand light-years away, near the
"heart" of Cygnus, the swan, two stars are locked in
a gravitational embrace. One star is a blue
supergiant, known as HDE 226868. It is about 30
times as massive as the Sun and 400,000 times
brighter. The other star is 5 to 10 times the mass
of the Sun, but it's extremely small. The object
must be the collapsed core of a star. Its mass is
too great to be a white dwarf or a neutron star,
though, 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 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's
spiraling into the black hole. As 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 aimed at
the black hole. But this egg doesn't have a smooth
edge. Instead, hot gas flows away from the star
toward the black hole. The gas forms a wide, flat
accretion disk that encircles the black hole.
Friction heats the gas to a billion degrees or more,
causing it to emit a torrent of X-rays -- enough to
fry any living thing within millions of miles.
But the X-ray glow isn't steady. Instead, it
flickers, which is one bit of evidence that
identifies the dark member of the binary as a black
hole. Gas enters 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, then the disk would get
hotter and brighter all the way in to its center,
with the brightest X-rays coming from the middle.
Instead, the X-ray glow cuts off well outside the
center of the disk. Observations with Hubble Space
Telescope reveal that the central region
occasionally flares up as blobs of gas break off the
inner edge of the disk and spiral into the black
hole.
These blobs are accelerated to a large fraction
of the speed of light, so they circle the black hole
hundreds of times per second. This causes the
system's X-rays to "flicker." If the blobs of gas
were orbiting a larger object, they would not move
as fast, so their high-speed revolution is one bit
of circumstantial evidence that identifies the dark
companion as a black hole.
The black hole's strong gravitational field
"redshifts" the energy emitted by this gas to longer
and longer wavelengths. Eventually, as the gas
approaches the event horizon, the redshift becomes
so great that the material disappears from view --
just before it spirals into the black hole.
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Egyptian authorities try to hide the cave discovery
According to Collins,
"Dr Hawass [Secretary General for Egypt's Supreme
Council of Antiquities] actually denied the existence of
the caves. He has done this publicly. Why he has done
this is a matter of debate.
The most easiest explanation is that the preliminary
investigations that he did following our visit to inform
him of the discovery of this cave, in April 2008, meant
that his people went in the tomb overlooked the
entrance, as we did initially."
Fifteen months later, bowing to the inquiries made by the
press and Egyptian scholars, Dr Hawass confirmed that he has
ordered an all-Egyptian team to explore the tomb at the
center of the "controversy". Controversy? How could a
discovery on such a scale be controversial?
"We are clearing this system now, and it is a Late
Period catacomb, like many others around Egypt," he
stated this week. "There is no mystery about it, and
there is no connection with esoteric topics. We will
publish our results as part of our normal process."
While applauding Dr Hawass's new interest in the site,
Collins remains sceptical of his motives. "We knew in August
that he had started clearing the tomb," he said. "The
excavations began almost immediately after knowledge of the
cave discovery hit the internet."
Collins is also unconvinced by Hawass's explanation of
what he calls the "catacomb". "Does his use of the term
'system' now suggest that he has found and entered the
caves, which he previously denied even existed? he asks.
"My colleagues and I have examined photographic
evidence of dynastic catacombs throughout Egypt, and
these all appear to be carved by human hands."
--Hawass
But photographs don't lie. Collins says, "Those at Giza are
natural, and penetrate the bedrock for many hundreds of
metres, perhaps following the course of local geological
faulting."
Although Dr Hawass suggests there is no mystery
surrounding the "catacomb", Collins suspects that the caves
extend beneath the Second Pyramid, where ancient tradition
puts the legendary Tomb of Hermes [right], Egypt's
legendary founder. This is significant because Hermes is
known as the Great Wisdom Bringer and Collins suspects that
the chambers could possibly reveal something left behind by
Hermes -- something like the legendary Hall of Records.
The Hall of Records -- as prophesied by Edgar Cayce?
According to the legendary psychic, Edgar Cayce, the
pyramids were constructed by an ancient civilization that
had its origins in Atlantis. This great civilization existed
somewhere around 10,000 to 11,000 BC and was responsible for
building the Great Pyramid, and for burying the lost history
of mankind in a chamber called "The Hall of Records."
"The records are one... [They contain] "...a record
of Atlantis from the beginnings of those periods when
the spirit took form or began the encasements in that
land." -- Cayce
The records extend through the first destructions of that
ancient civilization, the exodus of Atlanteans to other
lands, and the final destruction of Atlantis. They contain a
description of the building of the Great Pyramid, as well as
a prophecy of "who, what, where, would come [to make] the
opening of the records."
Collins says,
"This has never been found. So perhaps it is still
there, awaiting discovery, somewhere close to where Salt
and Caviglia reached nearly 200 years ago.
"I do believe that the caves that we have entered are
part of a much larger complex that stretches right
beneath the entire Giza plateau."
Collins explains that the network of caves are natural
and resemble Swiss Cheese. He believes they were formed long
before the pyramids were built and suggests that they could
be the reason the pyramids were built on this site. The
early civilizations believed that part of the dying process
involved traversing the so-called "underworld" and these
caves might have been viewed as the entrance to this
underworld. There is evidence of human activity in the
deepest parts of the caves.
According to Collins, "Satellite images would tend to
suggest that the caves... go all the way to the Second
Pyramid." A little west of here archaeologists have found a
collection of bird mummies. Since the constellation of
Cygnus is historically depicted as a bird, specifically a
swan, it is theorized that worshippers left mummified birds
as an offering associated with this star configuration or
perhaps to Socar, the bird-like figure that was the ruler of
the underworld.
From the entrance of the caves it appears that you can
travel towards the Second Pyramid and directly under the
spot where the Cygnus star, Deneb, would be aligned with the
three pyramids and the wings of Cygnus. Is this where we
will find the famed "Hall of Records"? Will the Egyptian
government allow the world to know about what's really
there? Why are they being so secretive?
