Podcaster: Lucas Livingston
Title: Orion Mystery – The Pyramid Star Chart
Organization: Ancient Art Podcast
Links: http://www.ancientartpodcast.org/
video: http://www.ancientartpodcast.org/36
Description: Lucas Livingston of the Ancient Art Podcast exposes the Orion Mystery (a.k.a. the Orion Correlation Theory), the belief that the Ancient Egyptians were mapping out the heavens on earth. Do the pyramids of Giza correspond to the belt of the constellation Orion? Were hollow shafts in the Great Pyramid of Khufu designed to point to certain celestial bodies? Did generation after generation of pyramid-building Pharaoh follow a grand master plan for placing heaven on earth? Get out your tinfoil hats, because we’re in for a ride!
Bio: Lucas Livingston is the creator and host of the Ancient Art Podcast and museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where you’ll frequently find him giving tours in the museum galleries. He’s recently taken up the enjoyable hobby of homebrewing, which you can read all about in his Homebrew Blog. His secret crime-fighting alter ego is a computer geek while moonlighting as tech support for friends and family. Lastly, he currently finds himself having accidentally started a collection of hairless pets, which he sometimes regrets, but then always comes around.
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Transcript:
Orion Mystery – The Pyramid Star Chart
Hey friends. Lucas Livingston here from the Ancient Art Podcast coming back at ya with another cosmic collision of antiquity and astronomy.
As an historian of the ancient world and an armchair science enthusiast, I spend my fair share of time trying to dispel the many popular misconceptions about ancient art, culture, and science. And when it comes to ancient Egyptian civilization, there are enough fantastical conspiracies theories to fill the pyramids of Giza twice over, so much so that I published a series on the Top 10 Ancient Egyptian Myths & Misconceptions. You’ll find that over at http://ancientartpodcast.org/.
One of the more contagious theories about the pyramids is the Orion Mystery. In 1994, construction engineer Robert Bauval and publishing consultant Adrian Gilbert published a bestselling book call The Orion Mystery. Bauval went on to co-author later spinoffs with Graham Hancock. The major thesis of The Orion Mystery or the so-called “Orion Correlation Theory” suggests that the pyramids of Giza were constructed to match up with the stars that form the belt of the constellation Orion. In the cover art for this episode, you’ll see a photograph of the stars juxtaposed with an aerial shot of the pyramids of Giza. Notice how Menkaura’s pyramid is smaller and a bit offset, just like the slightly-dimmer third star in Orion’s belt? It’s actually a surprisingly close match. Without supporting evidence, though, we need to remind ourselves of the scientific aphorism that correlation does not equal causation.
The Orion Mystery also suggests that shafts within the Great Pyramid of Khufu were designed to point to certain celestial bodies. Within the Great Pyramid, there are these hollow shafts that ascend at sharp angles from two rooms deep within, which we commonly and misleadingly call the “King’s Chamber” and the “Queen’s Chamber.” Misleading because no queen was ever buried in the pyramid. The King’s Chamber was Khufu’s burial chamber. His large stone sarcophagus is still in there today. As for the queens, they and other members of the royal family were buried in many tombs and small pyramids surrounding the three big pyramids at Giza. For what it’s worth, for you astronomy buffs, those small surrounding pyramids are called satellite pyramids.
But anyway, back to the shafts within the Great Pyramid. If you were to extend these shafts out into the sky like spotlights, they say in the Orion Mystery that the southern shaft in the King’s Chamber would point to Orion and the northern shaft to what would have been the pole star of the mid-third millennium BC (the time of the pyramids), and the southern shaft in the Queen’s Chamber would point to the star Sirius, while its northern shaft to the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor.
All four of those celestial bodies had specific significance to the Ancient Egyptians. In Ancient Egyptian astronomy, there’s evidence to support that the constellation we know today as Orion was known to the Egyptians as Osiris, or actually called “Sah,” “the glorious soul of Osiris.” [1] The star Sirius was equated with Isis and was also very important to the Egyptian calendrical system. [2] If you’re interested in hearing more about the significance of Sirius to the ancient Egyptians, check out episode 8 of my Ancient Art Podcast about cicada insects in art. You’ll find that at http://ancientartpodcast.org/8. And the Little Dipper looks remarkably similar to the Egyptian adze used in the Opening of the Mouth funeral ceremony. You often see that tool in papyrus images of the Book of the Dead where a priest holds it up to the mouth of the deceased. Of course, you know it’s really a bear, the Little Dipper. “Ursa Minor” = “Smaller Bear.” Sometimes a little Latin doesn’t hurt.
Egyptologists have lain out plenty of arguments against the Egyptians having deliberately attempted to map out the heavens on Earth, but the whole thing’s actually kinda neat. I think it’d be pretty cool if this were conclusively true, but as soon as you get past the three pyramids of Giza, things quickly unravel.
The Orion Correlation Theory expands beyond the three pyramids of Giza (Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure), saying that other pyramids were mapped out to the rest of the constellation of Orion. But under just a cursory scrutiny, it seems as though the authors simply picked almost random features of the ancient landscape to unconvincingly match up to the celestial bodies.
They also often shoehorn their interpretations of the archaeology and ancient texts to fit their pet theory. Of course, that’s nothing new. Isn’t just about everybody a little bit guilty of that sometimes? Some naysayers argue that Osiris or “Sah” was only later-on equated with the whole constellation Orion, whereas at the time of the pyramids, the Egyptians equated Osiris with only one star, Rigel, one of Orion’s feet. And that makes more sense, since the Pyramid Texts often refer to Osiris as to the “Toe-star.” [3] So, in the age of the pyramids they already saw the constellation as a humanoid, but only Rigel, the toe, was associated with Osiris. Osiris aside, though, the Pyramid Texts also say that the king will “reach the sky as Orion” and his soul will be as “effective as Sothis,” Sothis being the Greek pronunciation of the Egyptian name for Sirius, or “Sopdet.” [4] As you may imagine, it’s pretty tough to draw conclusive facts from the Pyramid Texts.
What really breaks the dam, though, is that the whole Orion Correlation Theory assumes that the Egyptians had a grand master plan spanning many generations of pyramid-building Pharaohs, which would have had to have begun even before the Giza pyramids. Why would Khufu’s father Sneferu have chosen to build his pyramids elsewhere nearby, leaving the supposedly choicest spots of Orion’s belt to his successors? In short, there was nothing special about the belt of Orion to the builders of the pyramids.
And even if there actually were some hard evidence to support the Orion Correlation Theory, the authors, unfortunately, didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Riding on the success of The Orion Mystery, Bauval and Hancock jump on the bandwagon of a plethora of other phenomenal theories in Fingerprints of the Gods: that the Sphinx is supposedly thousands of years older than Egyptian civilization; that the Great Pyramid served as a mathematical scale model of the Earth; and that there was some sort of lost pre-historic civilization that was wiped out, whose few survivors were dispersed across the world and sewed the seeds for many of the world’s ancient cultures, from the Olmecs to the Egyptians … ah, yes, the ever-so-wonderful Atlantis theory.
Of course, if you’re a believer or a conspiracy theorist, nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise. So we’ll just have to agree to disagree and move on.
Thanks for tuning in. For an image gallery and full video version of this discussion check out http://ancientartpodcast.org/36. If you dig the Ancient Art Podcast, be sure to “like” us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/ancientartpodcast and subscribe to the podcast at http://ancientartpodcast.org/. You can also follow me on Twitter @lucaslivingston. You can email your questions and comments to me at info@ancientartpodcast.org or use the online form at http://feedback.ancientartpodcast.org. Thanks again and see you next time.
©2014 Lucas Livingston, ancientartpodcast.org
Footnotes:
[1] Shaw, Ian and Paul Nicholson. “Sah.” The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995. Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. University of California Press, 1975, p. 45.
[2] Lichtheim, vol. 1, p. 35, note 4.
[3] Legon, John A.R. “The Orion Correlation and Air-Shaft Theories.” Discussions in Egyptology 33 (1995), 45-56. Accessed January 21, 2011.
[4] “Sah” and “Sothis” in Wilkinson, Richard H. “The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.” Thames & Hudson, 2003.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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