Guardian of the ancient mysteries, the keeper of secrets ... For thousands of years the Great Sphinx of Egypt has gazed towards the east, his eyes focussed on eternity, reading a message in the stars that mankind has long forgotten. And today, as our civilisation stands poised at the end of a great cycle, it is a message that beckons insistently to be understood.

All the clues are in place. Geology and archaeo-astronomy have already indicated that the lion-bodied sphinx may be vastly older than Egyptologists currently believe, dating not from 2500 BC, but from 10,500 BC - the beginning of the astrological Age of Leo. We now know, too, that the three pyramids of Giza, standing on high ground half a mile to the west of the Sphinx, are not merely the tombs of megalomaniac Pharaohs but form a precise map of the three stars of Orion's belt in 15 million tons of solid stone.

So is somebody trying to tell us something? And, if so, what?

In Keeper of Genesis/Message of the Sphinx, Robert Bauval (author of the Orion Mystery) and Graham Hancock (author of Fingerprints of the Gods) present a tour de force of historical and scientific detective work, using sophisticated computer simulations of the ancient skies to crack the millennial code that the monuments transcribe, and set out a startling new theory concerning the enigmatic Pyramid Texts and other archaic Egyptian scriptures.

These texts serve as an ingenious treasure trail and, as the authors reveal in their shattering conclusion, a covert treasure hunt has been underway for the last twenty years at the Pyramids and the Sphinx - a hunt bringing together senior Egyptologists, high government officials, wealthy funders, and a strange esoteric organisation lurking behind the scenes.

What are they looking for? What is contained in the rectangular chamber that seismic surveys have located in the bedrock far below the paws of the Sphinx? What lies behind the mysterious door discovered at the end of a previously unexplored shaft deep inside the Great Pyramid? And does mankind have a rendezvous with destiny - a rendezvous not in the future, but in the distant past, at a precise place and time?

The secrets can be kept no longer ...

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