Unraveling the Age of the Pyramids and Sphinx on the Giza Plateau

By Dennis G. Balthaser
www.truthseekeratroswell.com
3-1-12

After all these years of doing research by many scholars about the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, a definitive time line is yet to be confirmed establishing when they were built, who built them or for what purpose the were built. Unlike many other ancient structures in the world, no records have been found thus far to resolve these lingering questions.

We do know that global weather has had a big part on where various civilizations lived or moved to because of such things as prolonged drought, extreme periods of moisture, etc. Egypt is of course no exception to that, since thousands of years ago Egypt for the most part was a tropical area, unlike the harsh desert terrain of today. (Ice Age map, left)

Around 12,000 BC, Earth’s sea level rose suddenly more than 60 feet in less than 200 years, a direct result of extreme glacial melting, which was the beginning of an eight-thousand-year period scientists call the end of the last Ice Age, when sea levels rose nearly 400 feet to the level they are today. About 9000 BC monsoon rains invaded Egypt, which lasted until about 3500 BC when they abruptly stopped.

A few of the theories I’ve become aware of include the most obvious one we hear about today, that the Pyramids of Giza were built for Egyptian Pharaohs, primarily of the 4th dynasty (2500 BC). The Great Pyramid was supposedly the burial tomb for Kufu to enter the afterlife, yet nothing has ever been found inside the Great Pyramid to verify that.

Sphinx water deterioration

As I’ve mentioned in previous editorials, the Sphinx has water deteriation on the back of the lion’s body, and we know there hasn’t been that amount of rainfall to cause it in Egypt for some 7000 years.

Some have said the Pyramids of Giza were built by the Israelites while in captivity in Egypt, while others refer to the great flood mentioned in the Bible, however it’s believed the deteriation would have been caused by large volumes of rainfall, not flooding. Many of the Arabs of the ninth century AD appear to have had sources of information, which led them to believe that the Great Pyramid was built before the flood, as a repository for scientific knowledge.

Still another theory was that a civilization in North Africa known as Khemtians some 10,000 years ago had contact with star people that may have been involved in the construction, or at least the method of doing the construction. For me with a civil engineering background, it’s hard to envision how the construction could have been accomplished with the tools we believe were available to them at the time, and the technology that would have been involved.

Today with the use of computers and soft ware it’s possible to track the stars of the heavens back thousands of years to determine there location on particular ancient dates. Many of those locations do in fact align with certain structures in Egypt, such as the three Pyramids of Giza being in the same alignment as the 3 stars of Orion’s belt, the fact that the Sphinx faces exactly toward the eastern sunrise at certain times of the year, and that the shafts of the Kings and Queens chamber align perfectly with certain stars, and other astronomical occurrences in the sky. As an example, during the summer solstice, (the longest day of the year), and the winter solstice, (the shortest day of the year), at Giza the sun rises about 28 degrees south of due east and 28 degrees north during those two times of the year, thus being an equinoctial marker when the Sphinx faces perfectly to the east at sunrise during the spring equinox.

Pyramid with casing stones

The technology side of how the Pyramids were built is to me, some of the most amazing information to come forward thus far. Fourteenth century Arab commentators tell us the Great Pyramid and the second one were both covered with smoothly-polished Tura limestone that glowed in the Egyptian sun, and were shaken loose by an earth quake in 1301 AD, and most then used to build mosques and temples. Only the second Pyramid still has any of the limestone casing stones at the top. Those casing stones consisted of an estimated 22 acres of 8-foot thick blocks, each weighing about 16 tons, and so closely joined that they appeared to be a single slab from top to bottom. As determined in 1881 by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, the mean thickness of the joints is 0.020 of an inch giving a variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and a true square but 0.01 of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face.

The mathematical value of pi (3.14), was supposedly discovered by the Greeks in the 3rd century BC, however when one takes the designed height of the Great Pyramid (481.3949 feet), it bears the same relationship to its base perimeter (3023.16 feet), as does the circumference of a circle to its radius. That relationship is:

2 pi (481.3949 feet) x 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16 feet

There is also a direct relationship between the dimension of the Pyramid and the dimension of the earth using a scale of 1 : 43,200. These relationships are not speculation, but rather measurable facts.

The accuracy of the Pyramid’s base between the longest and shortest side is less than 8 inches, considering each side is 755 feet.

The Great Pyramid

I have for years wondered about the stability of the Pyramid with the massive weight of the stones not causing it to recede into the sand. In Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval’s book, “The Message of the Sphinx”, they point out that it was not built on perfectly flat ground, as might be expected by the accuracy of the dimensions revealed, but with a massive natural mound, or hill, left exactly in the middle of the site on which the Great Pyramid was erected. The mound is estimated to be almost 30 feet high, and located dead center over the base, which probably accounts for its stability over thousands of years.

It’s now believed that the Sphinx is much older than the 4500-year age assigned to it by Egyptologists, some thinking as far back as the last Ice Age in a range of 15,000 BC and 5000 BC.

Have the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx given us some message about a past civilization that we don’t yet understand, not unlike the possibility of a message from extraterrestrials would or have given us perhaps about the future. Both seem to be a possibility. Perhaps there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how old or futuristic use. That common language is science and mathematics, since the laws of nature are the same everywhere based on our limited knowledge today.

It appears the 3 Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, as well as some other monuments located on the Giza Plateau are giving us a view of the sky as much as 10,500 years ago. Carbon dating of mortar from the Great Pyramid with organic fiber obtained in 1986 was tested at Southern Methodist University, and others at laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, revealing dates of 3809 BC to 2869 BC, some 400 years prior to the Fourth Dynasty.

Can we draw any conclusions today? Various theories must continue to be pursued and some day, hopefully the truth will be known.

. . . More