The Pyramid Age shows in great detail how the Great Pyramid, as well as the other monuments of the period, were built immediately after a natural catastrophe during which the earth was darkened by volcanic dust, and the forces of nature unleashed with devastating effect. The pyramids were raised as a symbol of the sun’s “rebirth” after the days of darkness and to thank the gods for deliverance.
The catastrophe recalled in the Pyramid Texts was one and the same as that described in the Book of Exodus. Conventional scholarship holds however that the pyramids were raised a thousand years before the Exodus. The Pyramid Age looks in detail at the question of chronology, and explains how scholarly error added well over a thousand years to the length of Egypt’s history. Dynasties which reigned contemporaneously were placed in sequence, whilst others were actually duplicated. So, for example, the last of the Pyramid Age dynasties, the Sixth, whose most important pharaohs were named Pepi I and Pepi II, was identical to the Fifteenth (Hyksos) Dynasty, whose two most important kings were Apepi I and Apepi II. When the phantom centuries are removed, the astonishing architectural and technological achievements of the pyramid-builders become a little more understandable: these monuments were not raised in the remote antiquity of the third millennium BC, but in the early first millennium. And they were raised by artisans who had a working knowledge of iron and Pythagorean-style mathematics.