Beneath The Pyramids

Exploring Egypt's lost underworld for the first time"--Cover

The first in a new trilogy by Christian Jacq, BENEATH THE PYRAMID is a gripping novel of suspense which takes place during the reign of Ramses the Great. A young, intelligent, incorruptible novice judge, Pazair, is called to Memphis to investigate the mysterious deaths of five guards standing watch over the sphinx at Giza. His inquiries unearth a plot to overthrow Ramses, and with the help of Souti, a former scribe, and the beautiful Nefertet, a young doctor, he sets out to discover the truth.

Book Excerpt: ...onument that the famed tomb of Perneb was found--more than four hundred miles north of the Theban rock valley where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe. The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over, filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else ever gave me.Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose actions seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the cramped interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl through Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we had made. Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by ce...

'It is a story full of drama, with the Nile, the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings as backdrop. That A World Beneath the Sands is also a subtle and stimulating study of the paradoxes of 19th-century colonialism is a bonus indeed.' – Tom Holland, Guardian What could be more exciting, more exotic or more intrepid than digging in the sands of Egypt in the hope of discovering golden treasures from the age of the pharaohs? Our fascination with ancient Egypt goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the heyday of Egyptology was undoubtedly the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This golden age of scholarship and adventure is neatly book-ended by two epoch-making events: Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later. In A World Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson tells the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt's ancient civilisation drove them to uncover its secrets. Champollion, Carter and Carnarvon are here, but so too are their lesser-known contemporaries, such as the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and the British aristocrat Lucie Duff-Gordon. Their work – and those of others like them – helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers, antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were part of a greater endeavour – to reveal a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.

Beneath the pyramids of Egypt lies a lost underworld of catacombs, hewn chambers, and cave tunnels. They are alluded to in ancient texts and Arab legends, but have been left unexplored until today. They have now been rediscovered and investigated for the first time by science and history writer Andrew Collins. What exactly does this subterranean realm tell us about the pyramids, their relationship to the stars, and the mythical origins of Egyptian civilization? Lavishly illustrated with color photos, this is a breathtaking personal journey of exploration and discovery.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Bestselling author Erich von Däniken shares the story of a 16-year-old grave-diver who discovered a mysterious labyrinth of the old kings under one of the pyramids of Saqqara. In this book, Erich von Däniken shares the story of his friend Adel H., an Egyptologist, who, as a 16-year-old boy, was trapped for days under the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. Based on his conversations with Adel H., he retells the boy’s search for a way out of the underground world, how the boy roamed passageways and chambers and saw what he calls “impossible” things of which the professional world is completely unaware. Adel experienced uncanny events, a mixture of spirit realm and reality, which is described here for the first time. “The story of Egypt,” Adel says, “has two sides—the official one and the unknown one.” It is secrets like the sights and events Adel experiences underground that von Däniken refers to throughout this book. Von Däniken shows that the Great Pyramid of Giza is nothing but a huge library created for the people of the future. He proves his claim through quotes from the few ancient works that still survive. Who actually had an interest for millennia in destroying knowledge/books? It’s not about a few thousand, but about millions of books. Von Däniken documents the fanatical destructive rage of the people and means: If we would only have one ten-thousandth of the former writings, human prehistory would have to be completely rewritten. And where are the lost labyrinths? The one of Crete and the gigantic labyrinth of Egypt, of which all ancient historians reported? Against the background of these revelations, von Däniken turns the spot on to another focus of his book. A paradigm shift in the question of extraterrestrial life: “The gods have already come back. They came down again. They are currently orbiting our planet!”

It isn't easy being a teenage pharaoh, having to deal with assassins, sphinxes, mad high priests, gods, sacred crocodiles and marching mummies. And all you really want is the chance to do something for young people and the inner cities.