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Mercury, July/August 2001 Table of Contents

Image courtesy of E.C. Krupp/Griffith Observatory

A new theory suggests that the ancient Egyptians used two bright stars to find true north. If so, the great pyramids are younger than had been previously thought.

by Govert Schilling

Forty-five centuries ago, a mysterious ceremony was taking place on the west bank of the Nile. In the middle of the night, Egyptian priests and astrologers were anxiously awaiting the moment when two stars in the northern sky were positioned exactly above each other. Using a plumb line, mounted on a large wooden frame, they thought that these two stars enabled them to measure precisely the direction of true north. Thus the green light was given for the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

The Egyptian pyramids are among the most mysterious buildings in the world. It is beyond doubt that they are primarily royal tombs for the pharaohs. But there, the agreement among pyramidophiles comes to an end. Exactly how old the stone edifices are, how they were built (there are still unknown rooms, hallways, and shafts to be discovered), and what they tell us about the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians – these questions have been the subject of heated debate for many decades.

The first of the Seven Wonders of the World – and the only one of the seven that still remains – has inspired amateur archaeologists and aficionados alike for ages. The Great Pyramid (146 meters high and with a base circumference of almost a kilometer) has been the subject of so many nonsense publications that you could easily fill a bookcase with them. According to many of those theories, the pyramid builders possessed supernatural powers, they were endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacities, or they received help from extraterrestrials.

To the great chagrin of real Egyptologists, those pseudoscientific ideas always attract more attention than the serious research that is still being carried out on the pyramids. For example, a few years ago, Robert Bauval made a small fortune with his book The Orion Mystery, in which he exposed the close relation between the pyramids and the night sky. A British television documentary suggested that Bauval’s theories – including the idea that the positions of the pyramids reflected the shape of the constellation Orion – had to be taken very seriously.

Professional Egyptologists didn’t like it at all. The evidence was shaky, the positional accuracy was way off, and, last but not least, there were no indications whatsoever that the Egyptian pyramid builders were paying any attention to the starry heavens at all. Bauval was excommunicated, and the scientific suspicion against putative associations between stars and pyramids became greater than ever before.

A sensational article in the November 16, 2000 issue of the British scientific journal Nature may finally change that attitude. But the author, Kate Spence of Cambridge University, emphasizes that her theory has nothing to do with Bauval’s Orion mystery. "I have received a few very negative reactions," she says, "but many Egyptologists take my work seriously." Spence thinks she has found an answer to the question of how the Egyptians were able to align their pyramids so precisely with the north. At the same time, she succeeds in dating the constructions much more precisely than had been previously thought possible. Her theory revolves around two northern stars: Kochab in the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor) and Mizar in the Big Dipper (Ursa Major).