I must admit that I am a HUGE fan of this genre … and have read a number of other books by its authors and their assorted other associates. It is frustrating that, given the attention and fieldwork involved in this quest, more material remnants have not come to light.Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind is by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, being yet another look at the peculiarities of the Giza Plateau in Egypt. Bauval and Hancock (with others, such as John Anthony West) promote a belief that there was an ancient “root civilization” which both preceded and seeded the historical ancient cultures which arose in the past few thousand years. West (not involved in this project), has traveled over the world and compared the massive buildings, with mortarless finely-set huge stones, and it is with these sorts of examples that Bauval (an engineer by training) starts asking questions … as the older monuments (such as the “Sphinx Temple”) have megalithic construction featuring stones weighing from 50 to 200 tons apiece … stones that we would be hard-pressed to even MOVE without the most powerful lifting technology developed. In addition to those issues, there's the weathering of the stone within the Sphinx enclosure, famously studied by Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, and by others since. By their determination the Sphinx enclosure had to have been carved out in a time when the weather in Egypt was much wetter, with an estimate of prior to 10,000 BC. Standard Egyptologists hold that everything at Giza dates only to about 2,500 BC, and consider any other projections “pure fantasy”, however they do not have the technical specialization for either the engineering questions nor the geological questions, and, frankly, the data that much of the dating is based on is very flimsy.
Most of this book, however, is based on astronomical considerations. Current “sky map” programs allow researchers to run time forward and backwards connecting to various observation points on Earth. The alignment of the stars in the constellation of Orion (representing Osiris to the Egyptians) has been mapped with remarkable precision to the area of Giza, with the 3 large pyramids falling in alignment with the stars in “Orion's belt”. However, the specific alignments that the stars-to-Giza mappings are for a time, again, far before the “official” dating of the area, including the placement of the Sphinx, which is aligned to a point on the horizon which would have been the Sun rising in Leo (in the “age of Leo”, like the “age of Pisces” giving way to the “age of Aquarius” now), in approximately 10,500 BC.
Other aspects come into play as well, like the “shafts” coming out of the “King's Chamber” which led to the discovery of the hidden shafts that explorers found in the “Queen's Chamber” by punching through the stone walls. These shafts also point to key stars, stars whose cultic significance goes back to some of the earliest Egyptian documents, preserved as astrological texts inscribed in sarcophagi and tombs. The argument that Bauval and Hancock come up with is that while the major pyramids were built approximately 3,000 BC, they were sited on a far earlier plan, and constructed with processes that we still can't satisfactorily figure out (aside from things like their remarkably precise orientations, sixty times more accurate than what could be expected from any “by sight” measuring, the most “popular” suggestions for schemes of moving the blocks into place would have required ramps involving many times more material than what is in the pyramids, with no sign of any such massive earth moving having been done there). This implies that there was an advanced culture of which the ancient Egyptians were a survival.
Of course, no “incontrovertible” evidence of any such civilization has been discovered, although there are tantalizing pointers towards such in the more ancient monuments of many regions on the planet, where massive constructions were achieved with megalithic blocks, finely hewn, and set precisely without mortar in ages when most of humanity was, by “official” timelines, barely out of the stone age. As the authors repeatedly return to, there are facts about Giza which are there to be measured, facts that are hard to dismiss if they are taken on their own terms (moving a 200 ton block with Bronze Age technology, for example, or aligning a 13-acre monument with precision that would require a laser theodolite with “atomic clock” accuracy), despite how willingly they are dismissed by Egyptologists with no experience in engineering, surveying, or even religion.
The difficulty is, clearly, that this can very quickly descend into either “Space Aliens” or “Atlantis” territory. Indeed, much of what is discussed here keeps returning to work that A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce group) has spearheaded around the Sphinx (which featured prominently in his “prophecies” regarding Atlantis), and it's hard not to drift off into Zechariah Sitchin-esque considerations of “outside influences” having a hand in developing early human cultures (or, early humans themselves) when looking at the technological advancement that would be required to create what's sitting there at Giza ... one of the things that Egyptologists such as Zahi Hawass claims to be “racist” as it suggests that the people of Egypt/Africa could not have possibly achieved these things on their own.
It appears that Keeper of Genesis is currently out of print (which seems odd to me, given how related material is so frequently featured on the History Channel, etc.), but used copies are available … I got mine via Amazon's new/used vendor listings, and “mass market paperbacks” (like what I got) are there for as little a 1¢ (plus $3.99 shipping) in “good” condition. This wasn't my favorite book in this genre, or by its authors, but it was certainly a fascinating (if frustrating in parts) read, and I'd recommend it to anybody interested in these outer fringes of historical research.
