Misrepresentation
It is never pleasant to accuse someone of deliberate lying. I believe that most people are honest (if, occasionally, misguided) and do not knowingly fill books with falsehoods when making extraordinary claims. Graham Hancock is on record as comparing his method with that of a legal brief: he presents the evidence that puts his client (in other words, his hypothesis of a forgotten ancient civilisation) in the best possible light and his adversary (academic orthodoxy) in the worst, whilst ignoring that which has the reverse effect. This is not the methodology of academia; indeed, it can be regarded as an attempt to appeal to the reader in the way that a talented barrister appeals to the jury. However, there is certain amount of selective acceptance of evidence that verges on dishonesty. The case of the &lasuo;pharaoh’s forged signature’ is an excellent example of this approach.
Over the main chamber in the Great
Pyramid at Giza (known for centuries as the ‘King’s
Chamber’), a small space above the ceiling was discovered
by the British Consul in Algiers, Nathaniel Davison (1703?-1783),
on 8 July 1765. In May 1837, Colonel Richard William Howard-Vyse
(1784-1853) and John Shea Perring (1813-1869) discovered that it
was possible to pass a reed through a crack in the ceiling of what
had become known as Davison’s Chamber and set about
dynamiting their way upwards, a procedure that would make any
modern archaeologist shudder. Four more chambers were discovered
in this way, the uppermost with a pitched ceiling. The most
significant discovery was that in the four uppermost chambers,
painted marks could be seen on several of the blocks. These were
the only traces of ancient writing in the pyramid and,
significantly, they had not been accessible since the chambers
were built. Most excitingly, they gave a royal name – Khwfw
or Khnwm-khwfw (hieroglyphs do not show the vowels, but the name
is conventionally transcribed into our alphabet as Khufu). This
was a name found in various ancient lists of kings and corresponds
to the fourth dynasty Σύφις (Sūphis)
of the historian Manetho (late fourth to early third century BCE),
who he says ‘reared the greatest pyramid, which Herodotus
says was reared by Cheops’. This seemed to confirm what had
been believed about the pyramid for at least 2400 years.
However, claims have been made, notably
by Zecharia Sitchin, that the painted marks were forged. In 1983,
Sitchin alleged that Vyse and his foreman, J R Hill, crept into
the chambers at night and daubed the painted texts. These claims
have been effectively debunked and Egyptologists have long accepted
the marks as genuine. Nevertheless, although Graham Hancock does
not state that the marks were forged by Richard Howard-Vyse, in
Fingerprints of the Gods, he refers to ‘a certain
smell’ hanging over Vyse’s testimony and calls the
quarry marks ‘dubious’. It was necessary for him to
remove the attribution of the Great Pyramid to a fourth-dynasty
pharaoh if he was to prove that it was built c 10,500
BC, as he attempted in Fingerprints of the Gods. In
Keeper of Genesis, published in 1996, he repeats
Sitchin’s unfounded claim that the Kh symbol (a circle
containing several horizontal lines) is miswritten as a R‘
symbol (a circle with a dot in the centre), a mistake no ancient
Egyptian would have made; photographs clearly show that the claim
is false. In 1998, he withdrew the claim, admitting that the
evidence demonstrated that the pyramid was built by Khufu c
2500 BC. His current position is now that although the pyramid
dates from the middle of the third millennium BC, its design is
eight thousand years older (and he hints that some of the
rock-cut parts of the structure may be that old). This is
disingenuous stuff indeed!
This rather sorry tale is merely an illustration: it would be possible to list numerous cases of writers misrepresenting evidence they could easily have checked more thoroughly. Instead of doing original research, most ‘fringe’ writers often build on the claims of their precursors, giving earlier hypotheses as facts or repeating their statements without checking them. These are exactly the techniques used by the writers who developed the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, as shown by Lawrence Kusche. It is a phenomenon we will encounter many times on this website.