The Orion correlation theory

What the evidence shows

Seen from above, the three main pyramids of Giza, built for the kings Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure in the 4th Dynasty (about the 26th century BCE), do not sit in one straight line. The smallest, Menkaure's, is offset to one side. The three stars of Orion's Belt are also slightly out of line, with the faintest one offset. That resemblance is real, and it is what first caught attention.

The people of Kemet also really did care about Orion. In the Pyramid Texts, carved inside royal pyramids from the end of the 5th Dynasty, the dead king is said to join the stars and to rise with Sah, the Kemetic name for the constellation we call Orion, which was linked with Ausar (Osiris). The narrow shafts that run from the chambers of the Great Pyramid have been studied for possible star targets since the 1960s (Magli).

Who says more, and why

Robert Bauval, a construction engineer born in Egypt, proposed in 1989, and with Adrian Gilbert in the bestselling book The Orion Mystery (1994), that the builders deliberately laid out the three pyramids as a copy of Orion's Belt on the ground, with the Nile standing for the Milky Way. In later books with the writer Graham Hancock, he argued that the layout matches the sky best around 10,500 BCE, when precession had carried Orion's Belt to its lowest point, and that the plan, if not the pyramids themselves, was conceived at that early date. The idea has been popular with readers who sense that the textbooks have underrated the builders of Kemet.

What critics say

• The angle does not match. The astronomer Anthony Fairall of the University of Cape Town (1999) and Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory (1997), each worked out how Orion's Belt sat in the sky of 10,500 BCE. The line of the pyramids runs about 38 degrees from north, while the Belt in that era lay close to 50 degrees. Fairall concluded that the astronomy gives very little support for dating the Giza plan to 10,500 BCE.
• The map must be turned upside down. Krupp pointed out that the kink in the line of pyramids bends the opposite way from the kink in Orion's Belt. To make them match, the map has to be flipped so that south is at the top, which Kemetic star maps do not do.
• The pyramids are not a single plan. Each pyramid was built for a different king over about three generations, and the smallest was added last. Archaeology at Giza, including the builders' town, the quarries and the tombs of the workers, dates the work to the 4th Dynasty.
• No text says it. Kemetic writings speak of the king joining Orion, but none describes arranging pyramids as a copy of the Belt.

Our assessment: debated. The Kemetic link to Orion in religious texts is documented, and the visual resemblance is real. Whether the pyramids were meant as a map of the Belt is argued between Bauval and his supporters on one side and astronomers and Egyptologists on the other. The strongest point against the 10,500 BCE date is the measured angle, which does not match. For what is actually known about how the builders used the stars, see Pyramid alignment to north.