Area 51 by Robert Doherty Read Free Book Online

eighty acres, it was by far the largest stone building in the world.
    The smallest of the three was that of Menkaure, measuring over two hundred feet in altitude. The sides of all three were aligned with the four cardinal directions and they went from northeast to southwest, from largest to smallest.
    The Great Sphinx lay at the foot of the middle pyramid--far enough to the east to also be out in front of the Great Pyramid, off the Sphinx's left shoulder.

    The pyramids drew tourists and archeologists and scien tists and evoked awe among all. For the tourist the size and age were enough. For the scientist the exact engineering defied the technology of the time in which they were built.
    For the archaeologist not only was the architecture amazing, but there was the unsettling question of the purpose of the buildings. That was the question Nabinger had struggled with for years, not content with the answers offered up by his colleagues.
    They were commonly assumed to have been tombs for the pharaohs. But the problem with that theory was that the sarcophagus discovered inside of each of the pyramids had been found empty. For years that had been blamed on the plundering of grave robbers, until sarcophagi with the lids still on and the seals on those lids still intact were found, and they were empty also.
    The next best theory, and one that logically followed the previous one, was that perhaps the pyramids were cenotaphs, funeral memorials, and the bodies had secretly been buried elsewhere to prevent the graves from being plundered.
    A more recent theory took a totally different approach.

    There were those who postulated that, to the Egyptians, the finished pyramid was not so important as the process of building; that the purpose of their construction was a desire by ancient pharaohs to employ and draw together their people during the annual three months the Nile flooded and agricultural work came to a standstill. Idle hands led to idle minds that could possibly think thoughts the pharaohs would not have approved of. So, this theory went, the pharaohs placed ten-ton blocks of stones in those idle hands.
    Another theory favored by the more optimistic traditionalists was that the final resting place of the pharaohs in the pyramids had not been discovered yet. It was perhaps hidden deep in the bedrock underneath the massive stone structures.
    There were many theories, but none had yet been proven. It was a search to discover and prove the purpose of the pyramids that drew Peter Nabinger to them every year for six months. The leading Egyptian expert at the Brooklyn Museum, he had been coming here for twelve years.
    Nabinger's area of expertise was hieroglyphics: a form of writing using figures or objects to represent words or sounds. His philosophy was that the best way to understand the past was to read what people of the time had to say about their own existence, rather than what someone digging up ruins thousands of years later had to say.
    One thing Nabinger found most fascinating about the pyramids was that if they had not been there now, in the present, for everyone to see, it was doubtful anyone would believe they had ever existed, because of the almost total lack of reference to them in ancient Egyptian writings. It was almost as if Egyptian historians of years gone past had assumed everyone would know about the pyramids and therefore there was no need to talk about them. Or, Nabinger sometimes suspected, maybe even the people of the time of the pyramids' building weren't quite clued in themselves as to the reason they were being built. Or maybe, Nabinger also wondered, maybe it had been forbidden to write about them?
    This year he was trying something different, in addition to his main project of recording all the writing and drawings on the interior walls of the Great Pyramid. He was using the magnetic resonance imager, the MRIr to probe deep underneath the structures where the eye could not go and physical excavation was