THE HISTORY CHANNEL – Sunday 14 September, 9.30pm
Much has been written on ‘how’ the Egyptians might have aligned their monuments with such high precision, but the question that has always remained unanswered is ‘why’. Why did the ancients put so much emphasis on astronomical alignments? This film attempts to answer these questions and decode the puzzle of the Egypt’s great monuments. Challenging the suggestion that ‘tombs are for dead pharaohs’, author Robert Bauval, Alexandria engineer and renowned expert on ancient Egypt has contested the world of Egyptology and led it in new directions. This intriguing film reveals the key to ancient Egypt’s great pyramids and temples in a magical ‘grand unified plan’ that was written in the stars. Bauval’s investigation in the secrets of ancient kings and priests is a major breakthrough in this line of historical research and shows, using the latest astronomy computer software and the latest archaeological and Egyptological findings, that the whole landscape of ancient Egypt with all its major pyramid sites, sun-temples and religious centres was developed in accordance to an ambitious long-term plan to turn Egypt into a ‘Celestial Kingdom’ where time would cyclically recur and the cosmic order obeyed. It leads him to a daring proposal about the core of ancient Egypt’s being regarding the time it began in what the Egyptians called the “time of the gods”. This, Bauval proposes will again draw worldwide attention and, without doubt, be hotly debated for years to come.