Page 139 of 368
136 must have been built by Chephren, because it is situated next to a causeway leading to the Second Pyramid. For a while it was believed that proof had been found in the smallest one of the three pyramids of Giza and the identity of the Pharaoh who had built it established. The credit for this was claimed by a Colonel Howard Vyse and his two assistants, who claimed to have discovered within the pyramid the coffin and mummified remains of the Pharaoh Menkara. The fact, however— known to scholars for some time now but for some reason still hardly publicized—is that neither the wooden coffin nor the skele- tal remains were authentic. Someone—undoubtedly that Colonel Vyse and his cronies—had brought into the pyramid a coffin dating from about 2.000 years after Menkara had lived, and bones from the even much later Christian times, and put the two together in an unabashed archaeological fraud. The current theories regarding the pyramids’ builders are an- chored to an even greater extent on the discovery of the name Khufu inscribed in hieroglyphics within a long-sealed compart- ment within the Great Pyramid and thus apparently establishing the identity of its builder. Unnoticed has gone the fact that the discov- erer of that inscription was the same Colonel Vyse and his assis- tants (the year was 1837). In The Stairway to Heaven we have put together substantial evidence to show that the inscription was a forg- ery, perpetrated by its e"discoverers.". At the end of 1983, a reader of that book came forward to provide us with family records showing that his great-grandfather, a master mason named Hum- phries Brewer, who was engaged by Vyse to help use gunpowder to blast his way inside the pyramid, was an eyewitness to the forg- ery and, having objected to the deed, was expelled from the site and forced to leave Egypt altogether! In The Stairway to Heaven we have shown that Khufu could not have been the builder of the Great Pyramid because he had already referred to it as existing in his time in a stela he had erected near the pyramids; even the Sphinx, supposedly erected by the next-after successor of Khufu, is mentioned in that inscription. Now we find that pictorial evidence from the time of the Pha- raohs of the very first dynasty—long before Khufu and his succes- sors—conclusively shows that these early kings had already witnessed the Giza marvels. We can clearly see the Sphinx both in depictions of the king's journey to the Afterlife (Fig. 38a) and in a scene of his investiture by "Ancient Ones" arriving in Egypt by boat (Fig. 38b). We also submit in evidence the well-known vic- shows THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN