Thank goodness I actually gave the book a try. It's incredibly well written, full of well-documented facts and packed with footnotes and pictures. Hancock and Bauval turn out not to be conspiracy cranks at all; they have found amazing evidence about the age and orientation of the Sphinx and the pyramids. The problem is that the evidence flies in the face of everything that Egyptologists want to believe.

I went on to read source material on the Sphinx and am now reading Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods" and am now more convinced than ever that Hancock and Bauval speak the truth.

Pseduo-scientists? Well, only if you think that you have to be a PhD to do painstaking research. Sometimes all it takes is a dediction to discovering the truth.


The missing Link in Ancient History   June 2, 2003
 43 out of 48 found this review helpful

Here is a revolution in Egyptology. The reviews I've read of this book, the ones who have dismissed it only prove how narrow-minded people can be, after being spoon-fed a certain history for all their lives. Hancock and Bauval capture, in comprehensive detail many of the riddles of the origin of the Sphinx and solve many of them. From other recent books, we know that the pyramids mirror the exact position of the constellation Orion in the skies as it was in about 10,500 b.c.,that they are aligned exactly north, and we also know that the Sphinx and the pyramids show signs of water damage in an area that has been arid according to scientists for at least 8,000 years. The question is this, what if the pyramids, and the Sphinx, were built by a civilization far older than Egypt, not 2500 b.c., but in 10,500 b.c.? Egyptologists and the narrow minded scoff at this, of course, because it would mean a radical rewriting of Egyptology, not to mention human history, but consider this: even the best archeology is just guesswork, no matter how educated the academic, no matter how logical the theory sounds. The bottom line is no one really knows why or when the pyramids were truly built, carbon-dating is inaccurate, and the Pyramids of Giza were built with more advanced design methods than any other pyramids in Egypt, not only the ones that came before, but after. In fact, some that came after are mere piles of rubble now on the sands. None of the bodies of the three pharoahs the pyramids were supposedly built for were ever found in any of them and Khufe himself, supposedly the builder of the Great Pyramid, said in his records that he only did repair work on it, was not the one to build it. History attributes the Pyramids to Khufe and his descendents, the pharoahs themselves do not. The three smaller pyramids to the side of the monument were the tombs Khufe actually built for himself and his family. In fact, Egyptian myths themselves attribute the Great Pyramid, not to any of their Pharoahs, but to the more advanced methods of their "Gods of Old." No other pyramids in Egypt, before and after, were built with the same design methods and scale of these three,and Egyptologists have long been baffled as to why the pyramid progression happened as it did. Who built them then? Frankly, I don't think it was aliens, but I don't agree with the traditional historical assumption either. Egyptian chronologies attribute the Age of the Gods, to about 10,500 b.c., the same time frame that Plato places for Atlantis in his dialogues. Now, before critics harp on any mention of Atlantis, accept that humanity has been around as we know it, for at least one hundred thousand years, and that civilization has only risen to it's current status in the last five thousand, and you can see we are missing more than a little of our history. Humanity has risen and fallen many times throughout the ages, with little that the generations before us built remaining. Accept that, and also that the whole of Egyptian civilization, it's pyramids and it's gods, are simply a copy of an earlier civilization, one with far more advanced methods, and all the mysteries, the inconsistencies of the other pyramids, all seem to fall neatly in place. Hancock's and Bauval's theories are as good as any of the others that have been accepted over the last two thousand years. And actually, no one can even say that they are really right or wrong, mostly because none of us were really there, and no one can say for sure.


Extraordinary, fascinating   March 18, 1999
 41 out of 41 found this review helpful

I am an avid reader of Scientific American--and this is an extraordinarily interesting book. Intelligently written, well-researched, each chapter presents new discoveries and surprises--some of which are astonishing for their implications.

Here, perhaps for the first time in a single reference, is a recounting of all the remarkable achievements of the pyramid builders with ample evidence to document just how fantastic those achievements were. The scientific community's notion of people putting 200 ton blocks of stone in place with precision by sliding them up long ramps of mud is preposterous--now here is the engineering to prove it.

The book argues that the pyramids were built by a much older civilization of great wisdom and practical knowledge.

The book also provides an intelligent account of the importance of eastern (Vedic) astrology in the spiritual journey of mankind, at least as accepted by the ancients.

One caveat: The book is an easy read--an exciting book--and I sent it to five friends, four of whom couldn't get through it. The fifth loved it. You will need to have an interest in the subject manner and scientific detail. This is not a book that replaces scientific reasoning with easily rebuked, flaky theories so popular with the Atlantis/Aliens crowd.


The Sphinx for people who don't care about the Sphinx   June 5, 1999
 33 out of 76 found this review helpful

After I first read this book, I was inclined to give Hancock and Bauval at least some benefit of the doubt. I believed that at minimum they had succeeded in raising some interesting questions that _might_ suggest an origin for the Great Sphinx some 3000-8000 years before most historians and archaeologists believe it was carved (about 2500 BCE). Hancock and Bauval tell an interesting yarn, with hints of lost civilizations of startling technological and scientific prowess, and of hidden chambers waiting beneath the sands of Giza for a daring Indiana Jones to unearth.

As I read more on the subject of the Sphinx, the pyramids and other great structures of antiquity, however, I am less inclined to view Hancock and Bauval as anything more than incompetent cranks. Their yarn is just that, a yarn and nothing more. Their edifice of "archaeo-astronomical" reasoning is built on extremely shaky grounds, and in arriving at 10,500 BCE as the date of the Sphinx's origin, and as the apex of some great lost civilization, they must ignore a truly enormous amount of careful scientific reasoning. The reader of this book will not be provided with any real feeling for the rationale behind the "conventional" Egyptological views, for if he/she was to have such an understanding, Hancock and Bauval would be revealed for the sad pseudoscientists they are. In point of fact, the polemic of "Message of the Sphinx" is less about a rational basis for reevaluating everything we know of ancient Egypt than it is a retrospective justification for the pre-formed idea that there must be a lost, highly advanced Atlantis-like civilization in the distant past. To Hancock and his ilk, the ends justify the means.

If read by itself, this book will doubtlessly persuade you that what the authors claim has some basis in fact, since it is written so one-sidedly and so deceptively. If you read this book, then, you owe it to yourself and to anyone you foist it on to also read Paul Jordan's recent "Riddles of the Sphinx," which provides a well-written counterpoint to the wild claims of Hancock and Bauval. If all you read is this book, and others by these authors, then you really aren't interested in the Sphinx at all.


Controversial and thought-provoking   February 9, 2000
 29 out of 29 found this review helpful

This is a controversial yet thought-provoking book in which the authors put forward a theory, based primarily on archeo-astronomy, which suggests that certain man-made structures at the Giza necropolis (e.g. the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the temples nearby) may have had their origin traced back to around 10,500BC, making them vastly more ancient than most orthodox Egyptologists would have us believe.

While it is difficult at this stage to prove conclusively whether or not such a provocative theory is correct (although, as this work has become a best-seller, it would hopefully lead to more transparency in future excavation work at Giza, which, after all, houses one of the greatest heritage of human civilisation), the arguments put forward in support of the authors' views are very interesting and, at times, even enlightening. In particular, with the aid of well-produced diagrams, the authors have successfully led the reader step by step through a historical and astronomical minefield towards the startling revelation that the heaven (as represented by the stars) and the earth (as represented by the mega-structures at Giza) actually mirrored each other to an astonishing extent in that mysterious early epoch and that such heaven-earth symmetry appears to be consistent with the ideas apparently expressed in certain ancient Egyptian texts, leaving the reader wondering whether it is all mere coincidence or whether there has indeed been some clever planning by our forebears which is now lost in the mist of time.

It is evident that the authors have put in much effort in explaining their propositions clearly from basic principles and thus knowledge in astronomy or Egyptololgy is not a prerequisite before one can follow their train of reasoning. Nevertheless, this is bascially a one-sided analysis where those who have opposed to the theory and some others in the orthodox academia are often portrayed as narrow-minded bigots or are having a secret agenda of their own. The style of writing is not that remarkable and there is a fair amount of repetition and some not too judiciously considered section divisions, which sometimes impede the flow of argument. Nevertheless, this is one of the books which have opened up an entirely new dimension in a much debated and researched field and those who like subject matters relating to mysteries of ancient civilisation will certainly find it indispensible. Personally, I would hope that, whatever the merits of the arguments contained therein, it will encourage everybody, including orthodox archeologists, to examine the Giza necropolis more thoroughly so that one day, we can unravel all the mysteries (if any) which the Sphinx has been guarding throughout the ages.