Robert Bauval - Nabta Playa And The Origins of Egypt - Megalithomania Interview - Audio -

So this week we've got Robert Buval on the show who is the best-selling author of The Orion Mystery and many other books including The Egypt Code, The Secret Chamber and Master Game. His breakthroughs in alternative Egyptology have caused a storm in the academic world and uncovered lots of amazing secrets about the ancient Egyptians. His new book co-authored with Thomas Brothy is called Black Genesis, a subject he discussed at length at the Megalithomania conference. We'll be discussing this and many other things with Robert this afternoon and also you can check out his website at robertbuval.co.uk and so welcome to the show Robert, it's really good to have you on. Hi, how are you? It's a pleasure. And so I think one of the things you're most famous for really is the discovery of the Orion constellation and the way it kind of aligns with the three pyramids in Egypt. That's caused quite a sensation in the academic world and became like a worldwide bestseller, the book about it. So can you tell us maybe a little bit about what got you into the whole Egyptology story and how that discovery came around? Well as you know, I was born in Egypt which from very early days attracted me to the ancient civilization. But you know how they say, I mean you're never very involved with your own country until you get out of it. I know a lot of people who live in London and have never been to the Tower of London. So I had an interest of course, but my interest sharpened when I left Egypt and I studied engineering and through the engineering education I had construction engineering. And having come from Egypt I took an interest in the construction of the pyramids like most people did. And frankly I had no inkling at the time or I would never have dreamt that I would get that involved with Egyptology as I've been for the last 15 years. In extremely brief, in a nutshell story, because the story spans many years, but many many years after I left Egypt I took a job in Saudi Arabia and my mother was still living in Egypt. This was the early 1980s and I took a trip to Egypt. I used to take a trip nearly every year, but I took a trip to go and visit her and it was one of those occasions where I had to spend the night in Cairo. We lived in Alexandria on the coast, the Iranian coast, and I spent the night in Cairo and on the way down, I was driving on the way down, I decided to stop at the Cairo Museum. I had a camera with me. Very strange how things happen. I'd like to say something because I think it typifies the sort of thing that happened to me on that day. I kind of associate it always to the experience that Isaac Newton had. Although I don't compare myself to him, of course, but the experience of the apple falling on your head. I always say to my audience and my readers when I'm asked this question of how did you get into this? We all have a kind of apple hanging there above our heads, metaphorically, and of course things happen. It's very odd that you see something odd. You see an anomaly. You see an ancient site. It can be anything and a question arises. Some people pursue it and most of us don't. The comparison with Newton is that an apple fell on his head, of course, and apples have been falling for centuries and for millennia and not just apples but oranges and tomatoes and God knows what falls. But nobody asked the question. Nobody asked the question, why does it fall? This very simple question led him, of course, to discover the laws of gravity and the laws of mechanics. Hardly a couple of centuries later, we're landing on the moon and planning our first journey to the nearest planet, Mars, in a few years' time. So that, to me, is how one question can lead to other things. My question, my apple, was I stood in front of a photograph in the Cairo Museum and I was looking at an overhead image, an overhead photograph of the Giza necropolis, the Giza pyramids. In those days, I'm talking like the early 1980s when there was no satellite photography readily available, let alone Google Earth that we have today where you can scan the whole planet if you wish. It was a rather unusual thing to see and it hadn't occurred to me that I, in fact, had not seen an aerial photograph of the pyramid. I was intrigued. I looked at it and being a construction engineer and being particularly involved with surveying at the time, the question that struck in my mind is I was looking at three pyramids, two of equal size, clearly set on a diagonal. There was obviously a kind of arrangement, a kind of plan. But the third one was much smaller and offset from that alignment, from the diagonal alignment of the other two. And that was my question, why is it smaller and why is it offset? It's just one of those things. And it stuck in my mind and I snapped a photograph. I had an Olympus camera at the time and went back to Saudi Arabia after visiting my mother and had the photograph printed and distributed among my friends of mine who were all engineers and surveyors and architects. And they all had the same question. They weren't biased with Egyptology, had no idea about Egyptology, but they all asked the same question. They all said, well, it looks like we're looking at a plan here. But what does it mean? Why are two pyramids of the same size, almost the same size, aligned along a diagonal, but this third smaller one offset from this alignment to the left? And it was one of those nagging questions until, of course, it began to dawn on me that if we were going to find an answer to this anomaly, this question, I had to delve into the people who built these monuments, what they thought, what were their ideas. And of course, this led me to the pyramid texts. And I quickly realized that the pyramid texts are intensely astronomical. The monuments themselves, I don't want to go into too much discussion on this, but the monuments themselves are aligned in the cardinal direction with extreme precision. I knew that already. And these texts speak about the king wanting to go to the sky, particularly wanting to go to the stellar world and joining his ancestor, the god that created Egypt, the god of resurrection, the god Osiris in the sky. And this god was identified to the constellation of Orion. So I thought, well, maybe it has something to do with this. And the thought rested in my mind until one night I was in the desert with a friend of mine who was a navigator and actually pointed at this constellation. For those who do not know how it looks like, it's a very, very bright constellation. It's the most striking constellation in the sky. It's like a giant rectangle. And at the center of it are the famous belt stars. There's three stars that form the center of this constellation. And he pointed to these stars and said, here are the belt stars of Orion. And as you notice, they are in a row. They're in a line. And then in an afterthought, he said, well, the third smaller one at the top is offset to the left. And suddenly the penny dropped in my mind. I mean, that was it. I actually saw the map of the pyramids, the layout of the pyramids in those stars. And one thing led to another. I finally plucked enough courage and I wrote to various Egyptologists. And the late Professor Edwards, who was then curator of the Egyptian department at the British Museum, was very intrigued by this and pointed out to me that there was something else, that there was, in fact, inside the Great Pyramid, a shaft that pointed to Orion's belt at the time of the construction of the pyramid. So that really clinched it for me. Here we had it. The text indicated the stellar destiny of the king in those stars. There was a shaft inside the Great Pyramid pointing to those stars. And what added more cogency to all this was the fact that the pyramids on the ground were set in a position relative to the Nile in the same way that the stars of Orion's belt were set relative to the Milky Way. So you had a kind of stellar mirrored map in the sky of what was on the ground. I eventually published this in article form and it got published in a book form in 1994, the Orion Missile, as you mentioned earlier. And bang, suddenly I was thrown in the arena of Egyptology. It was backed by a BBC documentary, so the book really had a splash. It was the number one bestseller. And everything changed for me. I mean, it's a heavily debated theory, as you well know, but it's extremely popular and it's picking up momentum over the years. It's now become an extremely popular and well-established theory. So there you are. That's the story. That's fascinating because a lot of people since then have really been sort of noticing other alignments, other sites relating to Orion. There's recent research by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler that talk about Thornborough Hinges in Yorkshire aligned in the same way. There's even other people talking about the pyramids in China and even Teotihuacan in Mexico. So what do you think about this? Do you think that other ancient cultures were also sort of honoring Orion in the same way? It's not surprising. Like I said, it's an extremely striking correlation. But it is also positioned in the stellar landscape in such a way that you can use it for many things. Like I was saying earlier, it was used for navigation in recent times, in the last five, six centuries, because the belt of Orion actually rises due east. So it's a very convenient constellation to use for navigation. But it's extremely striking. And generally, it evokes the vision of a giant human being. The Greeks, for example, saw him as a hunter, as a giant man hunting. The Egyptians saw him as a giant striding man, which they identified to Osiris. So very often, ancient cultures see Orion as a kind of celestial father or celestial ancestor, as a giant figure of a man striding the sky. So it's not surprising to me that we have this common factor in many, many cultures. You mentioned Christopher Knight and Alec Butler. They're very close friends of mine, by the way. I see them very often. They come here to visit me in Spain on a regular basis. And yes, it's very impressive what they found, because it shows that there is something rather mysterious about these stars that changes now the whole perception as to how some people can see this correlation. Can I explain this? Yes, sure. Well, I know you follow this yourself, the recent cosmology that's going on in astrophysical circles and cosmological circles. Things have changed radically in the last 10-15 years. There was a time where, although theoretically we assumed that there are other planetary systems in our galaxies and in other galaxies, we had no evidence of this. But things have changed dramatically over the last few years. We now know, because of the Hubble telescope, that we have at least in a very small patch of our own galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies floating about with billions of stars within them. Well, within our galaxy, a very small patch has been scanned, and they found, in the last six-seven years, over 400 planets, which we call exoplanets, planets outside our solar systems. The conclusion is that within our galactic system alone, we might have billions of planets, which raises the expectation, of course, tremendously. Now what is very, very interesting is that our solar system, in fact probably our whole galactic system, is bred, if you like, by a nebula in the Orion constellation system. There is a kind of star nursery there that breeds stars. Our sun comes from there, and our planetary system, us, you, me, everything that is on this planet is made of star material, literally star stuff, that comes from some star that was nurtured, that was born in the Orion nebula. So to me, this is quite extraordinary, because we've arrived at this conclusion scientifically, and yet the ancient Egyptians and many ancient cultures had this very strong intuition that their origins, that their very existence, came from these stars. I don't want to get into the ET side of it. As you know, it's not my thing. I'm not advocating an extraterrestrial building of the pyramid. But what is intriguing to me is that it indicates, perhaps, that ancient cultures, particularly ancient Egyptians, had a way of knowing, had a system of knowledge to understand what we understand or are beginning to understand in our scientific way of trying to understand. And that, to me, is very, very interesting. It opens up a completely different approach to understanding ancient cultures. And that, to me, is the hunt. It's the hunt for this knowledge, the lost knowledge. I'm very interested in this, Robert, in the way that these sites are so revered, because even going back further in time to another site you've been researching called Nabta and other areas in southern Egypt, aren't they, again, related to or aligned to Orion as well? Absolutely. Let me just close this discussion we're having just before the break. There is a very stunning statement that was made by the cosmologist, the late cosmologist Carl Sagan, in his famous book Cosmos. He said, in a very simple term, what we are. He said, we are star stuff. And that, to me, is something absolutely extraordinary, because we are literally made of star stuff. And it's very obvious, or it's getting more and more obvious, that the knowledge of what we are, the knowledge of who we are, the knowledge of where we come from, indeed the knowledge of the cosmos, rests in our DNA systems. We have that knowledge within us. We've been exploring externally over the last 300-400 years, and I've come to conclusions that are the same as ancient cultures arrived at, but they were exploring internally. They had devised a system of understanding, perhaps through initiation, perhaps through different means that we haven't yet understood, of how to extract this information from within themselves. And the ancient texts are full of this. Now, having taken the origins of this, perhaps, all the way to cosmological origins, what I've been doing over the last year is trying to understand where the Egyptian civilization stems from. There's been a huge debate over the last few years, over the last several decades, as a matter of fact, as to where do the ancient Egyptians come from. And there are two schools of thought, bitterly opposed to each other. One that says it's a homegrown civilization. It just started in the Nile Valley sometime around the fourth millennium. What's intriguing about this is that anybody who delves into ancient Egypt studies will be intrigued by this, because it seems to have been born ready-made. For example, the Pyramid Age is at the very early stage of Egyptian civilization. And what we see there is an amazing technological evidence of construction, of technology, of astronomy, which is puzzling as to how it simply started without any precedence. So that's the one school of thought. The other school of thought is that it came from somewhere else. Now, there is the radical theories, talking about Atlantis and various other sources, even people like Danikin who suggested extraterrestrial origins and so forth. But it's much more closer to home. And in the last 30 years or so, we've realized that although it isn't a homegrown civilization, it is linked to a prehistoric culture, a black prehistoric culture that existed in the Eastern Sahara, what we call the Egyptian Sahara, the western side of the Nile, in the extreme southwest of Egypt. We've discovered in the last 30 years the presence of a lost culture. Much evidence has come to light in the last 30 years. But what I've been doing over the last three, four years with a colleague of mine, Tom Brophy, a physicist from the United States, is to examine the astronomical evidence that has stunned the world when it was discovered in the 1970s. A place called Napta Playa, which you rightly mentioned a bit earlier on. Napta Playa is a prehistoric site located roughly 100 kilometers west of Abu Simbel in the Egyptian Sahara. It was discovered in the 1970s, in 1974 to be precise, by a group of American anthropologists. They were puzzled by this site for two main reasons. One is that although there was a lot of evidence of human presence in Napta Playa, they didn't find any human remains. Let me explain how the site looks like. There is a conglomeration of structures. The most striking one is a kind of mini Stonehenge, a stone circle, which lies in the center of this complex. We call it the ceremonial complex. There are a whole series of complex structures made up of large boulders that have been grouped together. Some of them have projections of stones that would later—I'll come to that in a minute—would later be found to have astronomical alignments. Then there were what they call tumuli. These are very, very intriguing mounds looking like shallow eagles, if you like, made up of stone and gravel. They thought at first that these were tombs. They dug a few of them. There's about a dozen of them. They dug about three or four of them. They were totally surprised not to find human remains, but they found the remains of cows in some of them. All cows were buried there intact, clearly ceremonially buried with artifacts around them. In others, instead of finding cows, they found giant boulders, clearly that were put there by human beings. They were fashioned. One of them looks roughly like a cow, buried at three-meter depth. Totally mysterious. We still haven't figured out what exactly they were doing there. But having said this, it took them quite a long time to click to the fact that what they were looking at was an ancient astronomical site. This was realized in 1998 when they brought an astronomer, Kim Malvin from Boulder, Colorado, to the site. He very, very quickly realized that what he was looking at was an astronomical prehistoric site. It's very obvious once you have that eye for this kind of thing. You'll have to stop me if you want to stop me. Otherwise, I'll go on. There's one point that just comes up, actually. It's fascinating. Not only have you got stone circles, you've also got what is like tumuli or barrow mounds. It just seems like there's very distinct connections with Britain and Northern Europe, sort of megalithic tradition. What do you think? There are any connections at all with that part of Egypt? I'm beginning to think that there are. Let me just complete the story because you'll see that the evidence is beginning to become very intriguing here. Anyway, to conclude the Napta Playa story, Kim Malvin eventually published in the Nature Journal declaring that Napta Playa, because of carbon dating, of course, done there by the anthropologists, was the oldest astronomical site in the world. It's about 2,000 years old, if not more, than Stonehenge. The stone circle had solstitial alignments, solar alignments, which showed that not only they observed the celestial bodies, but they had a kind of calendar, which is stunning at this early stage. But what was much more stunning was that from one of the complex structures emanated stone alignments going about 500 metres or so, some of them going to the east and some of them going to the north. Amazingly, what was eventually worked out is that these alignments were pointing to star systems, which the Great Pyramid is aligned to. There are three major constellations that the Great Pyramid is aligned to. Orion constellation, as we've seen, there are shafts pointing to Orion's belt. There is a shaft pointing to the star Sirius, which is identified to Isis. Then there are two shafts going north, pointing to the circumpolar constellations, one of them being, of course, the Big Dipper, or Plough, as it's known in England. These were the stars that the ancient prehistoric people were using to align their monuments. So suddenly, what we thought was original to the ancient Egyptians was, in fact, not original to them, but was already applied by prehistoric people, only 100 kilometres away from the Nine Valleys, thousands of years before. So suddenly, everything changed. What we had there was a prehistoric culture that did exactly what the pharaohs did, but thousands of years before. So that's what Naplathia does. It gives us a kind of genesis that is much, much older than we thought we had in the Nine Valleys. Now, I'll go on to where those Naplathia people came from, but what was discovered not far from Naplathia, finally, was human remains. They found a burial site, which is clearly from the people who built Naplathia. They found 67 prehistoric tombs, and to the surprise of everybody, although the majority of skeletons they found were from Black African origins, they also found Mediterranean origins. And that changes the picture entirely, because where did these people come from? It seems to me now, as I talk to people like Christopher Knight and Alan Butler and a variety of others, that we might have had a megalithic culture spanning much of this globe that we've lost trace of. It seems too much of a coincidence to me, too much evidence is piling up. We have megalithic structures all along the Mediterranean belt, from Malta all the way to the islands of the Canaries, with very similar astronomy, with very similar megalithic structures. And, like you were pointing out, all the way to England and Scotland. So it looks like we're beginning to touch what is possibly a very ancient megalithic civilization that not only communicated with each other, but had this kind of language of the sky and a megalithic way of expressing itself. So I think this is probably the next phase of research that's going to take place among many who are in this business, like Knight and Butler and myself and various others. Yeah, because it appears that all around the world they were using the stars to kind of lay out these sites, but what do you feel was the primary purpose for using the stars? Was it navigation, mapping? I think they were, yes, I think you're absolutely right. If we take the people of the Sahara, the Napta people, if you like, some people call them the cattle people because of the cattle burials, and I'm beginning to call them the star people in my book Black Genesis, we call them the star people because it's very obvious that they were deeply into stellar observation, and not only just observing stars, but they were actually tracking stars, because this is what Napta Playa also gives us. They were tracking stars for thousands of years. We have the evidence of Napta Playa of star tracking, of tracking Orion's Bell, tracking Sirius, tracking the northern stars. Over thousands of years, this means that they were aware of the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes long, long, long before historians claim. We've always thought that the precession of the equinox was discovered by the Greeks in the first century BC, whereas here we have evidence of thousands of years before people doing that kind of astronomy in the Sahara. Now, what was happening? Well, from climatic studies, we have begun to understand that the Sahara, after the breaking of the last ice age, around 15,000 BC, up to 12,000 BC, was extremely fertile. The monsoon rains that still occur in central Africa used to reach that part of the Sahara. They don't anymore for the last 5,000 years, but they used to reach that part of the Sahara and drench the Sahara and form lakes. Napta Playa, in fact, was itself a lake, a temporary lake. The lake would last for about six, seven months. These people, prior to this wetting of the Sahara, were living in a very, very fertile Sahara. We know this from the evidence they left in other places. We have rock art in much further places that show us that the Sahara was extremely fertile. The fauna that we see in this rock art is fauna that does not exist there anymore, and we can only find it in central Africa. Elephants, giraffes, ostriches, hippopotamuses, and so forth, where much water is needed to sustain this fauna. So, clearly, the Sahara was very fertile. These people, although hunter-gatherers at one stage, when the Sahara began to slowly dry up, but still drenched with these rains that formed temporary lakes, they were obliged to do two things. One, to move around, and therefore they had to take their food, and therefore they domesticated cattle. They had to take their food with them. Their cattle became walking larders, if you like. And then they were obliged to learn how to navigate, to find where the lakes were, to even know the time of the rain. So they developed calendars, they developed navigation skills, thousands and thousands of years before we thought human beings had done so. And not surprising, other cultures, or maybe this knowledge spread around, what I think we have, hence why we're seeing megalithic sites with astronomical criteria, is that we probably had a civilisation, a lost civilisation, a megalithic civilisation, that charted the planet. And what we have, if you like, like Stonehenge and various henges around the British Isles in France, on the Mediterranean coastline, Mediterranean islands, and now in the Egyptian Sahara, going all the way to South Africa, as you know, are probably GPSs, if you like, ancient GPSs, marking the spots. So as you travel the globe, you could use these and know where you were, you could move around. They had a navigation system, it seems to be very obvious. And they probably communicated vast distances. I think this is what is probably emerging slowly, slowly. And this is what most researchers are in this field are beginning to sense. It's the ancient maps as well. There's so much evidence of extremely ancient maps. The Piri's Res maps, a famous one, where he assembled it from many other maps in the Great Library of Alexandria, and some of them must have been several thousand years old because they showed the outline of Antarctica. So do you think that this was part of the tradition you're talking about? Well, coming back to the pyramids, I mean, if you really look at the Giza, if my theory is correct, and it does look like it is, then what you have on the ground is literally a projection of a celestial map. Now, if you take that as representing the position of Orion's Belt on the ground, if you have a kind of GPS marker, then it's very intriguing that from that point, you can project other locations. And I've attempted to do this in the Egypt Code. My last book, the Egypt Code, I took this as a challenge and said, well, let's see, what were they doing? And it looks like, certainly in ancient Egypt, they were using the sky, partly because they had a vision, a kind of metaphysical vision that they could unite sky and ground, sort of as above, so below dictum, but also partly because they could create a landscape that not only they could use for moving around and navigating and knowing where they were, but they could create a kind of cosmological landscape, a kind of landscape that fits the way that human beings are supposed to think. You know, we tend to forget that we are cosmological beings. Our address is not just planet Earth. We live in a cosmos, and it's up there. It's there for us to see. You know, we have a celestial landscape up there, which we can look at it every night. It tells us time. It tells us location. It tells us seasons. And therefore, that landscape is, in a sense, part of our way of thinking. And we as moderns have stopped doing that, whereas the ancients were thinking in dualistic terms. They were thinking sky, ground all the time. And therefore, to me, it's a very interesting notion that prehistoric people not only thought in this way, but devised their landscape and their monuments so that it kind of locked sky and earth in a perpetual communication. It brought sky and earth in their daily life. And to me, this is something very, very interesting to study. I've been very intrigued by this because I realized that this is how I'm supposed to think. I'm supposed to think in cosmological terms rather than terrestrial terms. I belong to a cosmos that demands this kind of thinking. Those who are like me on a quest to know our origins, to know where we come from, where are our roots, Egypt provides this in a most magnificent way. Seventy-five percent of the world's antiquities are lodged in Egypt. The Nile Valley, which spans from the Mediterranean all the way to the Sudanese border, about a thousand kilometers of valley, of river, is literally filled with ancient sites. It's estimated that there were about 3,000 temples in ancient times. Many have disappeared, but many have survived. The famous Temple of Seti I and the famous Osirion, that's the megalithic sites of ancient Egypt. You mentioned the Assyrion, and I'm very interested in the way that that appears along with the Sphinx Temple as well, I believe, that they appear to be of a sort of different construction style, a much larger, much more sophisticated construction style. Some people suggest that they were from an earlier culture than the rest of Egypt. What do you make of that from your experiences and research? Well, the Osirion is strikingly different than all the temples that you will see in Upper Egypt. It is strikingly different from the New Kingdom Temple. This is what you see in Upper Egypt, New Kingdom and Late Period Temple. But it is extremely similar to the Temple of the Sphinx, the Valley Temple of the Sphinx. So clearly, some have suggested, like people like Robert Shalk and John West and a variety of others, that this Temple of the Osirion is not of the same age as the Temple of Seti I, which is adjacent to it. For two reasons. It's architecture that is similar to Old Kingdom architecture. It's total lack of inscriptions, which is puzzling because this is exactly what we have at Giza. No inscriptions at all, neither in the pyramids nor in the temples. And yet, the temples, the later temples, the New Kingdom temples are loaded with inscriptions. The Temple of Seti I, which you visit first at Abydos, is full of inscriptions, full of reliefs, marvellous, marvellous drawings. And yet, right behind it is this Osirion, supposedly built by Seti I, devoid of inscriptions and a totally different architecture. So really, I side along the controversial researchers that were looking at something very different here. And because of another thing, it is at a different level. It is set 15 metres lower than the other temple, clearly of an earlier period. So the conclusion, which is still not a smoking gun evidence, but enough for us to move in that direction, is that it is a temple belonging to a different era, an earlier phase. And I've begun to think, like Robert Chalk, the geologist, thinks that we have a megalithic phase in Egypt. Napta Playa is the early stage. The megalithic phase eventually came on the Nile Valley. Probably the Sphinx belongs to that megalithic era. The various temples that you will see at Giza are obviously of a different period. It strikes. You don't need to be a rocket engineer to realise that you're looking, when you look at the pyramids, you're looking at a different construction than these megalithic temples that are built with much larger stone, and speak about megaliths. Some of these temples have 100 tons blocks, and a few 200 ton blocks. This is a megalithic building, I can tell you. And you can see them, you can virtually go there and touch them. So that's the beauty about these visits. You're literally close up in person. And clearly they're much, much older and belong to what I would begin to call a megalithic phase. So yes, what you were saying is touching the cutting edge research on this. So we're going to have to round things up shortly, Robert, but I'm just very interested in this kind of age you're talking about here, because traditional Egyptology really just puts it back just like to around 2000 or so BC as the oldest sites in Egypt. I mean, about 3000 BC. Okay. So I mean, but they obviously seem a lot older than that, and the Nabta Playa has kind of proved that. Well, Nabta Playa is confirmed older, but there's no doubt about it. Nabta Playa, I mean, we're not the ones who dated it. The Egyptologists themselves dated it, and they came to at least 7000 BC, but they now believe that people were at Nabta Playa as early as 10,000, perhaps even 12,000 BC. So that's confirmed. There is no doubt about that. The rest, of course, is controversial, like the Osirian, the megalithic temples at Giza, but I think we'll come eventually. They're slowly coming around to this idea, which they screamed blue murder about 10, 15 years ago when we started talking about an earlier phase. They're all coming around to this now, slowly, slowly. That's good. That's fascinating, isn't it, really? Black Genesis is co-authored by myself and Thomas Brophy, Dr. Thomas Brophy, the physicist. It is a fascinating book. The title says it all, Black Genesis for the Egyptian civilization. Also, you've republished Talisman under a different name called The Master Game, and that's with Graham Hancock. It is important. We've realized that Talisman belongs to some other scheme. I won't talk much about it now, of course. We called it The Master Game. Well, thanks very much for joining us, Robert. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Robert's website is www.robertbouvald.co.uk. Thanks again for listening. Hopefully, we'll join you again next week. Please check in what we're doing on the various websites.