Robert Bauval’s proposal that the three main pyramids at Giza are laid out to match the three stars of Orion’s Belt, with the offset of Menkaure’s pyramid reproducing the offset of Mintaka, and that the plan encodes the sky as it stood in 10,450 BC. First published in 1989 and set out with Adrian Gilbert in The Orion Mystery (1994). Astronomers have not accepted it. E. C. Krupp pointed out that the correlation only holds if the sky map is turned upside down with respect to the ground, and Anthony Fairall found the fit at the claimed date no better than the fit at the conventional one. The separate and better-received part of Bauval’s work concerns the southern shafts of the Great Pyramid, which do point close to Orion’s Belt and to Sirius for the epoch around 2500 BC.
The trough is flat
The site’s Precession and Orion Correlation bench reproduces both sides’ numbers, Bauval’s belt altitude at the precessional trough and Fairall’s fifty degrees against Petrie’s thirty-eight, and shows what appendix two of Origins of the Sphinx states in a box: the same fit holds from roughly 9500 to 11,500 BCE. Down in the trough the belt stays within a quarter of a degree of the bottom for about a thousand years, so the sky picks out an epoch rather than a date. That is a sharper objection than non-acceptance, because it applies even if the correlation is granted.
Connections
Robert Bauval · Precession of the Equinoxes · Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis · Graham Hancock · The Orion Mystery · Origins of the Sphinx · Great Sphinx · Flinders Petrie