[RightWhale]

Somewhere on the internet is a set of 3-D AutoCAD drawings of the Great Pyramid. You can change your perspective until you can sight right along the star shafts; it becomes clear that nothing can be sighted through the crooked star shafts, although when the pyramid was in construction and only half complete the shafts might have been straight enough to allow sighting through them.

[SunkenCiv]

vannrox: YES. Of course. The earlier alignment was based on an inncorrect date of construction, and did not take into account earth pole shifts and axis reorientations.

I'd agree that the Sphinx (and at least one of the Giza temples) isn't per se of 4th Dynasty date, but I don't accept the claims of Predynastic origin of the Giza pyramids. There used to be painted plastered coatings on the interior walls of the Khufu pyramid, with scenes and texts from his reign, the last surviving of which were recorded over a hundred years ago. They have since turned to dust, like so much of the ancient Egyptian art.

The inscription found by Vyse is not a fake (one of the many unfounded claims by Bauval and others; I think Hancock has repudiated that claim) and reads, "How mighty is the Great White Crown of Khufu gang?" ("the Great White Crown of Khufu Gang" was one of the construction crews' nickname).

There's no ancient inscription anywhere which says, hey, the pyramid has these cool alignments, so looking for alignments doesn't make a great deal of sense. That doesn't stop people from looking though, which another example of how so-called archaeoastronomy is mostly modern day phrenology. For example:

Dating of Black Sea Flood
Michael Manneville
September 21, 2000 19:04:47 EDT

My own hunch is that a very small dislocation of the axis occured duiring this time, contributing about half of the total error in the alignment of the Great Pyramid (two arcminutes out of 4 arcminutes, the remainder of the error can be attributed to annual creep in the average location of the pole). At the moment this is way beyond my hard correlations, so consider this highly speculative.

Some still accept that alignments exist; when shown that they don't, then they must have been ruined by some kind of physical change to the Earth.

Now, I'm probably lumped into the loony bin by some, because I'm a catastrophist (specifically, a secular catastrophist), and the Great Pyramid was shaken during or shortly after its construction. The corbels over the Grand Gallery are hanging on by a fraction of an inch on one end. Also at that time, the first of the tunnels was dug from the top of the Grand Gallery into the bottommost relieving chamber over the King's Chamber, in order (apparently) to inspect for damage without disturbing the burial chamber.

But even that bias mitigates against Giza pyramid star alignments' being anything but a modern invention.

RightWhale: Somewhere on the internet is a set of 3-D AutoCAD drawings of the Great Pyramid. You can change your perspective until you can sight right along the star shafts; it becomes clear that nothing can be sighted through the crooked star shafts, although when the pyramid was in construction and only half complete the shafts might have been straight enough to allow sighting through them.

One of the "Queen's Chamber" shafts is straight; one has an obtuse bend in it to (if memory serves) avoid hitting the Grand Gallery. However, neither of them opened into the "Queen's Chamber" when the pyramid was built -- those holes were dug in the past hundred years or so. And the top ends are capped not only by the upper layer of stones, but (in one case) by a stone door of sorts. It doesn't sound like they're star shafts in the first place. Perhaps they were vents to relieve the humidity (the pyramid absorbs water, even without tourists' exhale, which could be the reason the plaster decorations crumbled off), a phenomenon discovered during construction.

One recent thing from Schoch that I found interesting is the idea that the well chamber, which was dug into the bedrock, was constructed as a burial chamber at an earlier time, but sometime post-Sneferu the site was appropriated by Khufu.

Exploring the Great Pyramid
by Dr. Robert M. Schoch
2005

Carved in the bedrock underlying the Great Pyramid, this room looks truly chaotic. Huge chunks of rock emerge from the floor, and there is also a strange "well" or "pit" on one end. Many traditional Egyptologists consider the Subterranean Chamber unfinished or abandoned. But why an unfinished chamber in what is arguably the most precisely aligned and built structure in the entire world? ...a suggestion made by Robert Bauval, one I had independently been thinking about too. Perhaps the Subterranean Chamber, and the natural rock mound in which it is found - - a rock mound that is now covered over by and enclosed in the Great Pyramid - - is much older than the Great Pyramid itself? Was it considered sacred for thousands of years before the Great Pyramid was actually built?