Hall of Records

The Hall of Records is a purported ancient library that is claimed to exist underground near the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. The concept originated with claims made by Edgar Cayce, an American who claimed to be clairvoyant. He said in the 1930s that the civilization of Atlantis was destroyed around 10,500 BC and that Atlantean refugees built the Hall of Records at Giza to preserve their knowledge. Cayce's assertions had many precursors, particularly the pseudoscientific theories about Atlantis that Ignatius Donnelly promulgated in the late 19th century and claims about hidden chambers under the Sphinx that were made by H. C. Randall-Stevens and Harvey Spencer Lewis in the years before Cayce described the Hall of Records.

For other uses, see Hall of Records (disambiguation).

In the 1990s, Cayce's claims about the Hall of Records became conflated with two other fringe hypotheses about the origin and age of the monuments at Giza: the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis and Orion correlation theory. Adherents of these ideas came to adopt Cayce's date of around 10,500 BC for the origin of the sphinx, and many hoped the Hall of Records would soon be discovered. Although the increased public attention to the site prompted the full exploration of a tomb known as the "water shaft" in 1999, nothing fitting Cayce's description has ever been found.

Origins

The belief in the Hall of Records has many precursors. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author in the first century AD, reported that the people who lived near the Giza Plateau in his time believed the Great Sphinx of Giza was hollow and contained the tomb of a king named "Harmais". Medieval Islamic legends asserted that there were subterranean passages beneath the pyramids there. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, who excavated at Giza in the early nineteenth century, believed a network of subterranean passages linked together all the Giza pyramids, and this claim, repeated by Richard William Howard Vyse in his book Operations Carried on the Pyramids at Gizeh in 1837, circulated widely in the nineteenth century.[1]

The belief that ancient records were stored at Giza derives from medieval Islamic traditions[2] about a legendary king of Egypt named Surid ibn Salhouk, which claim that Surid ruled Egypt before the biblical flood and built the Great Pyramid of Giza to preserve his society's knowledge in the event of the flood.[3] The Surid legend was translated several times into European languages, beginning with translations in the seventeenth century by John Greaves and Pierre Vattier, and became a major influence on subsequent fringe beliefs about ancient Egypt.[4]

Another precursor to the Hall of Records Ignatius Donnelly, whose 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World argued that the fictional civilization of Atlantis, as described by the Greek philosopher Plato, was a real place rather than Plato's invention.[5] Donnelly argued that Atlantis influenced numerous civilizations around the world, including ancient Egypt, before being destroyed in a catastrophe that inspired the biblical flood myth. He cited the Surid legend as evidence that a pyramid-building civilization existed before the flood, and based on the chronology of Plato's story, he asserted that the sinking of Atlantis took place around 9600 BC and that Egyptian civilization must date back that far.[6]

More immediate forerunners to the Hall of Records are the works of H. C. Randall-Stevens and Harvey Spencer Lewis in the 1930s.[7] In his book A Voice Out of Egypt, published in 1935,[8] Randall-Stevens asserted that the Egyptians built the Giza pyramids and sphinx after the destruction of Atlantis, and that beneath the Giza Plateau lay a complex of subterranean passages and temples where inductees into the Egyptians' mystical wisdom received instruction and underwent initiation.[9] Lewis's 1936 book The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid makes similar claims, with a diagram of the purported passageways beneath the plateau that is nearly identical to that published by Randall-Stevens.[10] Randall-Stevens claimed to be channeling his information from the spirits of Egyptian initiates,[9] while Lewis said his claims were based on records from his esoteric organization, the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, which claims to have descended from an ancient Egyptian "mystery school".[11] Both authors were probably imitating Masonic legends about the ancient origins of Masonic rites, with possible influence from the Islamic legends about the pyramids.[8]

Cayce's claim
Edgar Cayce, c. 1910

The first person to use the term "Hall of Records" was Edgar Cayce,[12] a man who claimed to be clairvoyant and was an influential precursor of the New Age movement.[13]

Cayce's "readings", or statements made while in a trance, described Atlantis in detail.[12] Cayce's readings often drew upon preexisting esoteric literature, sometimes citing such literature by name.[14] His characterization of Atlantis owed much to Ignatius Donnelly,[15] and his description of the Hall of Records closely resembled the subterranean chambers described by Randall-Stevens and by Lewis and may have been derived from their works.[7]

In 1933 Cayce claimed that Egypt was one of three sites where repositories of Atlantean records were stored (the two others being at the site of Bimini in the Bahamas and in the Yucatan Peninsula),[16] and in 1939 he specifically used the term "Hall of Records".[7] He said the pyramids and sphinx at Giza were built after the destruction of Atlantis, which took place around 10,500 BC, and that the Hall of Records lay somewhere between the sphinx and the Nile River, with an entrance near the Sphinx's right paw.[17] He implied that the hall was pyramid-shaped[18][19] and contained texts in both Atlantean and Egyptian writing systems.[18] He also implied that the hall would be discovered during a period of dramatic changes in the world; Cayce's adherents have connected this claim with other readings in which he prophesied massive upheaval in the year between 1958 and 1998.[20]

Influence
Further information: Sphinx water erosion hypothesis and Orion correlation theory

The Association for Research and Enlightenment, which Cayce founded, has periodically supported investigations at the Giza Plateau in hopes of finding the Hall of Records. In 1978, the ARE cooperated with SRI International in an effort to detect possible chambers in the bedrock beneath the Sphinx; none were found.[21] In 1991, the ARE sent one of its members, Joseph Schor, as an official observer on a geological survey of the Sphinx's environs, led by Robert Schoch, in an effort to test Schoch's hypothesis that the Sphinx was eroded by water and thus several millennia older than its conventional date.[22] One of the survey's participants, the geophysicist Thomas Dobecki, argued that seismography showed a possibly man-made chamber under the Sphinx's right paw. These claims were incorporated in the 1993 television documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx, which also mentioned Cayce's prediction about the Hall of Records.[23] Shortly afterward, the authors Adrian Gilbert and Robert Bauval put forward the Orion correlation theory, which argues that the monuments at Giza were arranged according to stellar alignments from several thousand years before the conventional date of their construction.[24]

In 1995, the author Graham Hancock published Fingerprints of the Gods, in which he drew together the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis and the Orion correlation theory to argue that the Giza monuments were built by or under the influence of a lost civilization that was remembered in legend as Atlantis.[25] Hancock, Bauval, and John Anthony West, who had initially convinced Schoch to study the erosion of the Sphinx, all advocated these claims and attracted wide publicity.[26]

Although Schoch argued that the Sphinx dated to 7000 to 5000 BC, and the stellar alignments proposed by the Orion correlation theory could relate to a wide range of dates as far back as 12,500 BC, West, Bauval, and Hancock all came to support a date of 10,500 BC for the Sphinx, under the influence of Cayce's prediction.[27][28] Hancock and Bauval also implied that future finds at Giza could have a transformative impact on the world, reminiscent of Cayce's claim that the discovery of the hall would coincide with other dramatic changes. They connected these transformative events with the impending beginning of the third millennium and with the astrological Age of Aquarius.[29]

As further investigations at Giza produced no sign of the Hall of Records, those who hoped to find it focused their attention on the "water shaft", a subterranean tomb from the Late Period (c. 664–332 BC), which they argued might be connected to the hall. The shaft was first recorded by the Egyptologist Selim Hassan in the 1930s but could not be fully explored because it was flooded. Spurred by the public interest, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass had the water pumped out and fully explored the chamber in 1999.[30][31] Enthusiasm over the Hall of Records waned toward the end of the 1990s as the predicted window of time for its discovery passed, and as mainstream academic criticisms of the claims about Giza came to be more widely aired.[32]

Nothing matching Cayce's description has ever been found.[19] The author Jason Colavito writes that beliefs about the Hall of Records are motivated by "the idea that seeking out physical evidence of Atlantis or some other lost civilization would somehow prove that the spiritual values embodied by occult and New Age groups were objectively true… The search for the Hall of Records became a cudgel to be used against doubt, since the possibility that physical proof could be found removed the temptation to question the otherwise outlandish claims believers were asked to accept."[33]

References

Citations
  1. Colavito 2021, pp. 202–203.
  2. Fritze 2016, p. 263.
  3. Colavito 2021, pp. 83–84.
  4. Colavito 2021, pp. 114, 120, 127–128.
  5. Picknett & Prince 2003, pp. 179–180.
  6. Colavito 2021, pp. 152–155.
  7. Colavito 2021, pp. 201–202.
  8. Colavito 2021, p. 202.
  9. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 249–250.
  10. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 236–237.
  11. Colavito 2021, pp. 200, 202.
  12. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 180.
  13. Fritze 2016, pp. 261–263.
  14. Colavito 2021, p. 201.
  15. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 179.
  16. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 244–245.
  17. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 244–247.
  18. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, p. 246.
  19. Feder 2020, p. 189.
  20. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 256–258.
  21. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 282–284.
  22. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 182.
  23. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 365–366.
  24. Picknett & Prince 2003, pp. 183–186.
  25. Picknett & Prince 2003, pp. 184–185.
  26. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 186.
  27. Lawton & Ogilvie-Herald 2001, pp. 355–357.
  28. Picknett & Prince 2003, pp. 182–184.
  29. Picknett & Prince 2003, pp. 186–187.
  30. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 189.
  31. Lehner & Hawass 2017, pp. 517–518.
  32. Picknett & Prince 2003, p. 190.
  33. Colavito 2021, p. 204.

Works cited
  • Colavito, Jason (2021). The Legends of the Pyramids: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt. Red Lightning Books. ISBN 978-1-68435-148-0.
  • Feder, Kenneth L. (2020). Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, Tenth Edition. ISBN 978-0-19-009641-0.
  • Fritze, Ronald H. (2016). Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-78023-639-1.
  • Lawton, Ian; Ogilvie-Herald, Chris (2001). Giza: The Truth. The People, Politics, and History behind the World's Most Famous Archaeological Site. Invisible Cities Press. ISBN 978-1-931229-13-5.
  • Lehner, Mark; Hawass, Zahi (2017). Giza and the Pyramids: The Definitive History. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-42569-6.
  • Picknett, Lynn; Prince, Clive (2003). "Alternative Egypts". In MacDonald, Sally; Rice, Michael (eds.). Consuming Ancient Egypt. UCL Press. ISBN 978-1-84472-003-3.

Further reading
  • Garrett G. Fagan, "Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public". Routledge (UK), 2006. 417 pages. ISBN 0-415-30592-6
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