For years, the outdated dusty scholarship of mainstream Egyptology has made fun of the "pyramidiots" who saw all kinds of astronomical significance in the pyramids of Egypt. This book by Bauval and Gilbert suggests that the scholars were waving their scolding finger in the wrong direction.

It is high time that this backward and antiquated discipline start cleaning up its own house. Egyptian monuments and texts are replete with star imagery, yet, astronomical knowledge is not required to become an Egyptologist. Rather, too many theoretical linguists dominate the field and many of them spend a good deal of their professional life interpreting astronomical texts, in a subject matter in which they have no training, leading to predictably erroneous interpretations of ancient astronomical texts and monuments.

It is a unique situation in the world of learning that so-called experts have no training in one major aspect of the field of their alleged expertise.

Small wonder then that Bauval, a civil engineer, once again demonstrates that the major discoveries in this discipline may be made by open-minded outsiders not bound by outdated dogmas.

Bauval may not be right in his analysis that the Giza Pyramids represent the stars of Orion, but he is surely right that the pyramids relate to astronomy, as LexiLine has been advocating for years, and as recent - by now unavoidable - astronomical work on the Giza Pyramids at Cambridge University attests. So perhaps Bauval woke some sleepy scholars out of their lethargy, and that is most welcome.