Biographical note:

Egyptian-born Robert Bauval began studying ancient Egypt and the Giza Pyramids in 1983. The acclaimed discoverer of the Orion Correlation Theory, he is the author of several books, including Black Genesis, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven, The Vatican Heresy, and the bestsellers The Orion Mystery and Message of the Sphinx. His discoveries have been the subject of several major TV documentaries on BBC, ABC, NBC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. He lives with his wife near Malaga, Spain.

Excerpt from book:

Chapter 1
ROBOT, RADAR, AND DRILLS

There is nothing more awesome or more provocative than the sight of the Giza necropolis, the home of the Three Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. Giza, few will deny, personifies the mysteries of our remote past and also symbolizes that universal yearning and age-old expectation that one day a great discovery will be made, one that will totally alter our perception of who we really are and where we have come from.

The Giza necropolis is situated approximately ten kilometers west of modern Cairo, half an hour by car from central Cairo. The necropolis is best approached from the east through the village of Nazlat El Sam’man. Flanked by busy coffee bars, souvenir shops, and restaurants, the high street of Nazlat is a bustling array of donkeys, camels, horses, street vendors, and the proverbial hawkers. Upon reaching the extremity of this street, the humdrum of modern Egypt suddenly switches itself off as you are confronted with an alien landscape and the gaze of the venerable sentinel of the ancient mysteries, the human-headed lion-bodied statue universally known as the Sphinx.

The Sphinx has been deliberately made to face due east, the place of the rising sun at the equinoxes. Weather-beaten by the elements and scarred by vandals and thieves, the Sphinx testifies to the passing of three great civilizations: Pharaonic, Greek, and Roman. It may well see our civilization through, as well. The Sphinx is sixty-five feet tall and forty-five feet wide. It sits, with front paws outstretched, in a U-shaped pit.

In 1991, Boston geologist Robert Schoch and Egyptologist John Anthony West created a huge controversy over the age of the Sphinx. They pointed out that the vertical erosion fissures attached a date of more than 8,000 years on the statue. In 1996, Graham Hancock and I showed, with the use of precessional astronomy, that the Sphinx must be linked to the date of 10,500 BCE.

MANSIONS OF ETERNITY

Weighing as much as six million tons and towering 480 feet above the ground, the statistics of the Great Pyramid are mind-boggling: more than two and a half million blocks--each weighing an average of two tons--were needed; the construction is perfectly set out and perfectly aligned to the four cardinal directions, and all this, according to Egyptologists, without the use of iron tools, the wheel, or even the simple pulley. As if this was not enough, the builders flaunted further their engineering prowess by incorporating within the pyramid a complex system of inclined passages, tunnels, galleries, and chambers. There are three chambers in the Great Pyramid: one subterranean and two within the superstructure, the latter two being known as the Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber. Some of the blocks and beams that make up the King’s Chamber weigh as much as seventy tons, jointed so tightly that even a razor blade cannot be passed through them.

The “Relief” Chambers
Above the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid are five so-called Relief Chambers. This nomenclature, as the eminent French structural engineer Professor Jean Kerisel observed, could not be more inappropriate, for these chambers are anything but “relief” to the pyramid. They actually add some 2,000 tons of dead weight to the walls A firsthand, behind-the-scene account of the controversies surrounding modern explorations at Giza

• Investigates the recent scandals at Giza and claims of secret excavations and tunneling inside the Great Pyramid

• Reveals the historical evidence in support of secret chambers in the Great Pyramid and beneath the Great Sphinx

• Exposes the secret agendas behind the latest explorations on the Giza plateau

Since 1993 Robert Bauval has been embroiled in the many controversies involving the search for the lost treasures of the pyramid builders and the quest for the legendary Hall of Records of Atlantis. The strange but true story that he unfolds implicates American business moguls, the prestigious National Geographic Society, several Ivy League universities, the Edgar Cayce Foundation, the Freemasons, Christian fundamentalists, Zionists, and the Egyptian government.   

In this fully updated edition of Secret Chamber, including new color photographs, Robert Bauval pursues his in-depth investigation of clandestine events at Giza and the role played by the controversial ex-Minister of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass. What lies behind the mysterious doors at the end of the star shafts in the Great Pyramid? What do the mysterious inscriptions found behind the Gantenbrink door mean? What is the real purpose of the Relief Chambers and the red ochre “graffiti” in them? Who is behind the secretly tunneling and excavating in these chambers, and why? Is there really a hidden Hall of Records from Atlantis beneath the Great Sphinx? Is the Great Pyramid just a tomb or does it serve a higher purpose involving a lost science of immortality? Why do the ancient texts ascribe the Pyramid’s design to the supreme god of wisdom Thoth, the writer of the fabled Books of Hermes? Will the Great Pyramid prove to be the “missing link” to our true origins or a “metaphysical machine” to access the world beyond?

Providing a firsthand account of the strange events that have taken place at the Giza plateau in the last three decades, Bauval reveals the hidden agendas behind these events and raises important questions about the meaning of Egypt’s ancient structures and the very origins of civilization.