Italian Researchers Now Claim Pyramids 38,000 Years Old, Submerged in Great Flood

​A couple of weeks ago, an Italian team claimed to find a massive set of underground structures far beneath the Giza pyramids, a claim quickly dismissed by archaeologists, who pointed out that the sensing technology used to identify the structures cannot, in fact, be used to identify objects so far beneath the surface. Now the same team, calling itself the Khafre Project, has fully embraced Graham Hancock’s Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and has gone all-in on bizarre claims that the pyramids were once submerged beneath Noah’s Flood.

​In an article in the Daily Mail, Armando Mei, one of the researchers, claimed that the stones of the Great Pyramid had been eroded by water and that the interior of the pyramid contains remnants of ocean salt. He further alleges that the discovery of the “city” and its pillars corresponds to Chapter 149 of the Book of the Dead, which he claimed depicts the building of the pyramids atop “Amenti” with its fourteen chambers.
 
Chapter 149 depicts fourteen underworld mounds with diagrams of their green and yellow divine inhabitants. The text accompanying the image of the mounds makes clear that this is a series of realms or residences of the gods, generally one per mound, with their offerings and retainers. The text associated with mound 11 (ch. 149 l) calls the entirety of the underworld a “city,” but there is no mention of pyramids. According to modern scholars, this chapter first appears in the Eighteenth Dynasty, c. 1500 BCE, a thousand years after the pyramids.
 
“Amenti,” or Imentet, for what it’s worth, is sometimes said to be the general name of the underworld in Egyptian mythology, but is more properly a divinity associated with the western desert who nourishes the dead on their journey through the underworld. Short version: “amenti” became the general term for the place where the sun set and thus the gate to the underworld and by synecdoche the underworld itself. Mei makes her into a city through the language of Chapter 149 section l (mound 11), which equates the underworld with a city.
 
“Of course, we must be certain,” Mei told the Mail, “but we believe this could be the case because the pyramids are located exactly where the texts say. The texts state that the pyramids were built on top of the city, sealing its entrance.”
 
They don’t. I have no idea where he got that from.
 
Mei also told the newspaper that the pyramids were first built 38,000 years ago before being flooded during the Younger Dryas comet impact of 10,500 BCE. He has been pushing the 36,400 BCE construction date for a decade, and I wrote about it back in 2015. As I explained at the time, Mei’s number is supposedly derived from stellar alignments and seems to reflect Late Antique and medieval legends. The claim Mei makes that Egyptian history goes back to around 36,500 BCE derives from the Old Egyptian Chronicle, a Late Antique Christian forgery, while the association of the Great Pyramid with that date comes from Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, who wrote in his Mir’at al-zaman sometime before 1256 CE that the pyramids had been built 36,000 years before Muhammad, based on an earlier text, Al-Istakhri’s Routes and Provinces from c. 950 CE, which had claimed that a Greek inscription on the Great Pyramid said it had been built when the Swooping Vulture was in the sign of Cancer. Even the claim that the pyramids were once flooded is a medieval Arabic legend. Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, in the book Remaining Signs of Past Centuries, c. 1030 CE, claimed that a waterline marking the height to which the floodwaters reached was still visible halfway up on the pyramid’s (now missing) casing stones.
 
There is, of course, no evidence for a global flood, nor that ocean water ever rose above the entrance to the Great Pyramid.
 
The story that Mei tells about vast prehistoric constructions, divine justice, floods and comets, and lost high technology is an almost point-for-point rehash of the Arabic pyramid myth found first in the Akhbar al-zaman (c. 1000 CE) and then in countless texts afterward. If you are a regular reader of my blog or my book Legends of the Pyramids, you already know that this was the so-called Hermetic history of Egypt, a set of legends that developed in Late Antiquity from scraps of Egyptian history, Greek Hermeticism, and Christian mysticism and was refashioned by Islamic writers in the early Middle Ages. (We don’t need to get into the two rival versions, a more supernatural one centered on Hermes Trismegistus and a sanitized version centered on the semi-fictional king Surid.) These legends, as I have long outlined, are the direct or indirect source for nearly all fringe ideas about the pyramids, from Victorian mystical speculations to Erich von Däniken’s ancient aliens to Graham Hancock’s quasi-Atlanteans. (All of those writers explicitly cited versions of the medieval Arabic pyramid myth as proof of their claims.)
 
The bottom line is that Mei’s narrative attempts to give a scientific gloss to a Late Antique story. Whether the Italian researchers are modeling their faulty conclusions on that medieval legend directly or have fooled themselves into imagining it true because of their deep stewing in the fringe texts like those of Graham Hancock that ultimately descend from it, we’re still stuck with a fictitious story rooted in an effort to marry the Bible to the pyramids it fails to mention.