Archive 2806

Vyse Assistant J.R. Hill Now Implicated in the Deception

By Scott Creighton

As a consequence of that investigation further questions arose concerning the facsimile drawings of the cartouche that Vyse had commissioned by one of his assistants, J.R. Hill.  In these facsimile drawings we found further evidence of Vyse’s fakery.The Lie of the LandscapesIt may seem a small point, but we have noticed that the orientation of all three Khufu cartouches which appear in Vyse’s written journal representing the find in Campbell’s Chamber is horizontal, which begs the question: why should this be when the actual cartouche in Campbell’s Chamber is vertically oriented (i.e., at 90° to Vyse’s drawings)?So the question must be asked: given the other examples in his journal, why then did Vyse suddenly decide to draw the three Khufu cartouches we find in his diary some 90° from how this cartouche actually appears in the chamber? Are we detecting here, perhaps, a clue as to how Vyse first saw the Khufu cartouche and, thus, why it takes this orientation in his written journal? Did Vyse simply copy what he had found elsewhere into Campbell’s Chamber and then, without thinking through the implications, rotate the original by 90 degrees, placing the glyph vertically in the chamber creating a contradiction with his horizontal journal entries? During some other unrelated research in 2013, I had been sent copies of three of Mr. Hill’s facsimile drawings by Dr. Patricia Usick of the British Museum. In studying these, I felt there was something odd about them but, at the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. In April, 2014, after our discoveries in Vyse’s journals, I contacted Dr. Usick, asking if she could send me scanned copies of Mr. Hill’s other drawings (28 in all) in order to be able to test my argument. Unfortunately, Dr. Usick explained to me, there were no digital scans or photos of the other Hill facsimiles and the only way I would be able to see them would be to arrange an appointment with her at the British Museum, which I duly did.With only 28 drawings to photograph this would prove a much easier task than did the 600 pages of Vyse’s diary photographed the previous month. When I was able, finally, to view Hill’s drawings, my suspicions were confirmed. They told their own story but cast further light on Vyse’s diary entries—corroborating that the Khufu cartouche we find today in Campbell’s Chamber had been copied from an original external source which had been oriented horizontally when Vyse and Hill first copied it.When we had finished our work and were checking the drawings on our laptops against the plan drawings of the hieroglyphs in the various chambers made by Mr. Perring (see Vyse, “Operations,” Vol. 1, p.279. & p.285), the picture was completed, and I realized what had been nagging in my mind for so long. Both drawings representing the Khufu cartouche in Campbells’ Chamber that Hill and his crew had made (which I had seen the year before) had the wrong orientation (relative to Hill’s signature on the facsimile).(It should be noted here that we could crosscheck only 18 of the 28 facsimiles because Mr. Hill had drawn some glyphs that Mr. Perring had missed and vice versa, so they could not be compared. A few others we were able to compare with recent photos made by Dr. Colette Dowell and Dr. Robert Schoch.)If Hill had made this facsimile from the vertically aligned hieroglyphs in Campbell’s Chamber, as is believed, then by following the normal convention he employed with every other facsimile drawing we were able to check, he should have signed his Khufu facsimile as shown in our mock-up facsimile.It seems somewhat ironic that Mr. Hill’s signature placed on his facsimile drawings is used to vouch for the authenticity of the hieroglyphs in these chambers, and yet it is his signature that has tripped him up, laying bare the truth of these markings in Campbell’s Chamber.© 2014, Scott Creighton. The above has been prepared by the author for Atlantis Rising and is based on a chapter from his forthcoming book, The Secret Chamber of Osiris (Bear & Co., Jan. 2015).

• The mock-up facsimile drawing shows how Hill should have signed this particular drawing (as well as the crew name drawing) were he to have observed these drawings vertically in Campbell’s Chamber and were he to have remained consistent with all the other facsimiles he made and signed from this and the other chambers. That Hill did not follow his own convention strongly suggests that this drawing had originally been copied from some source outside of Campbell’s Chamber, where he did, in fact, follow his normal convention. He signed the drawing horizontally because that was the original orientation of this particular cartouche. That Hill then, rather stupidly it seems, decided to rotate his already signed drawing 90 degrees to copy it into the Great Pyramid has, I believe, proved to be his undoing, in that it resulted in the very obvious discrepancy we find today. Had Mr. Hill simply copied this drawing into the chamber horizontally then his deception might have gone entirely unnoticed.
• Strangely, both of these facsimile drawings were signed by Mr. Hill (the only witness) suggesting that he had been secretly copying them from an original and unknown source where the hieroglyphs had been oriented horizontally, thereby providing corroboration for the argument that the cartouche and crew name facsimiles had come from some other place where the source had been oriented differently (horizontally) than the vertical image we actually find in Campbell’s Chamber. This evidence confirms, I believe, that Hill copied his Khufu drawing, not from Campbell’s Chamber but from somewhere else where it had been presented horizontally. Why else would he forsake his habitual practice of correctly orienting his drawings?
• In other words, in all properly comparable examples which we studied, Hill’s drawings of the glyphs in the various chambers had the correct orientation relative to the witness signatures, except for the two drawings of the Khufu cartouche from Campbell’s Chamber—the two facsimiles which contained the very hieroglyphs which I suspected that Vyse had faked. (See Atlantis Rising #106, “Crime in the Great Pyramid.”)
• But how could we possibly know this? The realization occurred when Louise picked up one of Mr. Hill’s drawings and was uncertain which way it should be oriented for me properly to photograph it (i.e., with the correct orientation of the hieroglyphs). The hieroglyphs on this particular drawing were oriented 90º to the signatures of the various witnesses. I explained that many of the hieroglyphs in the chambers were, in fact, upside-down or rotated at 90º. The signatures of the witnesses, though, make clear the intended orientation of the hieroglyphs (i.e., the signatures of the witnesses should always be right-side-up (like north on a compass) which will then correctly align the hieroglyphs as they would have appeared to an observer standing in the chamber. So we carried on, carefully photographing each of Mr. Hill’s facsimiles, ensuring the signatures (our compass) on the facsimiles were right-side-up.
• On a beautiful day in May, my wife Louise and I set off for the British Museum in London. We met Dr. Usick at the museum’s information desk, and she promptly took us via some tortuous passages to her department’s study room.
• Hill’s Orientations
• Admittedly, this particular line of reasoning may seem somewhat obscure, but, remarkably, we find that the pattern is emulated in the facsimile drawings of Vyse’s assistant, J.R. Hill.
• When we examine Vyse’s entire journal, we learn that he has drawn other hieroglyphs which are oriented correctly, just as he would have observed them in the various chambers—sometimes upright, sometimes upside-down (rotated 180°), and sometimes sideways (rotated 90°). Using these drawings as the frame of reference (head to the top of chamber, feet to bottom), we are presented with evidence revealing how Vyse, instinctively, drew the glyphs that he observed in the chambers, and their specific orientation relative to the axis of his body—in short, he drew what was in front of him. What he saw and maintained in his journal drawings was the actual orientation of what he observed.
• This piece of evidence comes from something that is so obvious, no one ever actually notices it or, if they do, think it has little relevance.
• The long-simmering debate surrounding quarry marks found in the Great Pyramid in 1837 by British explorer Colonel Howard-Vyse and his team, was returned to a full boil in June, 2014, when we reported (in Atlantis Rising #106) damning new evidence taken directly from Vyse’s handwritten journal. The Colonel’s own notes establish a powerful case that—in a bid to connect the Great Pyramid to Khufu, a fourth dynasty Pharaoh of ancient Egypt—fraud had been perpetrated. The famous Khufu cartouche, on which mainstream Egyptology relies to date the Pyramid, is, clearly, at least partly, a forgery and the notion that the Great Pyramid is no older than 4,600 years has been thrown into doubt.
• More Evidence Uncovered in Howard-Vyse Pyramid Fraud