The Hall of Records is a chamber of lost knowledge that the American psychic Edgar Cayce said survivors of Atlantis sealed near the Great Sphinx of Giza, with an entrance by the Sphinx's right paw. Cayce described it in trance readings in the 1930s and 1940s, and his followers came to expect it to be opened by 1998. Decades of geophysical surveys have recorded cavities and anomalies under the Sphinx, but no chamber of records has been found or opened.
The idea matters because it sits where three arguments meet: the age of the Sphinx, the possibility of a civilisation before the pharaohs, and the survey data both sides quote. Most retellings blur what Cayce said, what the instruments detected and what was dug up. This guide separates the three, then sets out how Billy Carson reads the evidence.
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What did Edgar Cayce say about the Hall of Records?
Cayce said that records of Atlantis and of early Egypt were placed in a sealed hall near the Sphinx, to be opened only when "the time has been fulfilled." Cayce (1877–1945) gave thousands of trance readings, and in 1931 founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) in Virginia Beach to preserve and study them. He said the information came from the Akashic records, a concept explored in the Akashic Records explained.
The key passage is reading 378-16, given in October 1933. It describes a line of shadow or light falling "between the paws of the Sphinx," which was "later set as the sentinel or guard," and a sealed room "which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx's paw (right paw) until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man's experience." Other readings filled in the picture. Reading 2012-1, from September 1939, speaks of the way "that leadeth from the Sphinx to the hall of records, in the Egyptian land," and others place the hall between the Sphinx and the river, or describe a passage running from the Sphinx toward a pyramid.
In the wider Cayce story, the records belong to an era around 10,500 BCE, when refugees from a sinking Atlantis joined a priest Cayce called Ra-Ta in Egypt. Cayce named three repositories in all: one in Atlantis itself, near Bimini, one in Egypt and one in the Yucatán. His Atlantis drew on Plato's account in the Timaeus and Critias and on nineteenth-century writers such as Ignatius Donnelly, background covered in Atlantis explained.
Where does the 1998 date come from?
Reading 378-16 itself gives no year. The 1998 deadline that became attached to the Hall of Records comes from Cayce's broader prophetic readings, which pointed to 1998 for major earth changes and for a spiritual return, and from followers who read the "time fulfilled" passage in that light. The year passed without a hall being opened, and the date quietly fell away.
The ARE's influence on the search is real. The Egyptologist Mark Lehner first came to Giza through it, and his 1974 book The Egyptian Heritage was based on the Cayce readings. Lehner went on to map the Sphinx stone by stone and became a leading voice for the conventional date.
What did the scans under the Sphinx actually find?
The surveys found anomalies, places where the rock behaves differently from its surroundings, but every one tested proved to be a natural fissure or cavity. Three campaigns account for most of what is quoted.
SRI International in the 1970s
Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) worked at Giza in the 1970s with Ain Shams University in Cairo, with geophysicist Lambert Dolphin leading on the SRI side. Their 1977 report covered resistivity, magnetometry and other remote-sensing methods. The team recorded an anomaly behind the Sphinx's rear paws that could possibly be a tunnel, and two more deep in the bedrock in front of the paws. In 1978, with the cooperation of the ARE, test holes were drilled and examined with a downhole camera. They found natural fissures in the rock and no chambers.
The 1991 seismic survey
In 1991, Boston University geologist Robert Schoch and geophysicist Thomas Dobecki ran a seismic refraction survey around the Sphinx as part of Schoch's study of its weathering. Joseph Schor attended as an observer for the ARE. Dobecki identified a rectangular feature in the bedrock beneath the front paws and suggested it might be a man-made chamber. The survey's main aim was to measure weathering depth below the enclosure floor for Schoch's case for an older Sphinx, set out in how old the Sphinx is and what lies beneath it. The rectangular reading has never been excavated, so its nature is still unknown.
The Schor Foundation and Florida State University
Beginning in 1996, Joseph Schor's foundation and Florida State University sponsored a further survey, licensed by Egypt's antiquities council, using seismic equipment and ground-penetrating radar to look for cavities around the Sphinx and the pyramids. In 1998 a test drilling near the Great Pyramid reached only a natural cavity, and the council then refused permission to drill elsewhere. Supporters read that refusal as obstruction; the authorities saw a speculative project that had already been tested.
What tunnels are known to exist under the Sphinx?
A handful of short passages exist in and around the Sphinx, and all have been explored and found to be dead ends. Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass documented them.
The best known is the Perring hole. In 1837, Colonel Howard Vyse had the engineer John Shae Perring bore into the Sphinx's back just behind the head; the rods stuck at a depth of about 27 feet. The hole was cleared in 1978, and the rubble inside included a fragment of the Sphinx's nemes headdress. Vyse's diary also records boring near the tail, and in 1980 a passage at the rump, often called the Sphinx passage, was reopened after elderly workmen remembered it. It climbs a short way and then descends about five metres into the bedrock, ending at the water table in modern fill.
Émile Baraize capped a shallow shaft in the top of the head with a trapdoor in 1926 and sealed a natural fissure through the waist with iron bars and cement. None leads anywhere.
Nearby, the Osiris Shaft beneath Khafre's causeway drops through the bedrock to chambers with sarcophagi and groundwater at the lowest level. Hawass's team cleared it in 1999; it is tied to the cult of Osiris and dates long after the pyramids. For a full tour of what is known to lie under the plateau, see the Giza Plateau explained.
What about the 2025 Khafre radar claims?
In March 2025, Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi and Armando Mei announced at a press conference in Italy that satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) had revealed eight cylindrical shafts descending more than 600 metres beneath the pyramid of Khafre, with large chambers deeper still.
The reception from specialists was hostile. The work was released to the press and as a preprint, not through a peer-reviewed journal, and no independent team has reproduced it. Zahi Hawass called the claims baseless. Ground-penetrating radar specialist Lawrence Conyers of the University of Denver said satellite radar cannot resolve structures at those depths. X-band radar penetrates dry sand and rock by metres at most, so the case rests on inferring deep structure from tiny vibrations recorded in the signal, a method that has not been validated to that depth.
Billy Carson's live coverage of the announcement, and his answers to the critics, are set out in the underground city beneath the pyramids.
How did the Hall of Records spread beyond Cayce?
The idea travelled through two main channels: the esoteric literature of the 1930s and the alternative-history bestsellers of the 1990s.
The first is Maurice Doreal's The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, published in 1939, six years after reading 378-16. Doreal's text tells of Thoth, an Atlantean priest-king who survives the fall of Atlantis and founds a colony in Khem, its name for Egypt. Its second tablet describes the Halls of Amenti, a realm beneath the earth where the Children of Light dwell, with an entrance associated with the Great Pyramid, and Doreal wrote that the tablets themselves had been returned beneath the Great Pyramid.
The second channel is Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) argued for a lost civilisation, and in Keeper of Genesis (1996), published in the United States as The Message of the Sphinx, Hancock and Bauval proposed that the Giza monuments encode a date around 10,500 BCE and that a Hall of Records might be located by treating the plateau as a template. Their books brought the Cayce material to a mass audience just as the 1998 deadline approached.
What does mainstream Egyptology say?
Mainstream Egyptology holds that no Hall of Records has been found, that the anomalies under the Sphinx are best explained as natural features of the limestone until excavation shows otherwise, and that the Sphinx was carved for Khafre around 2558–2532 BCE.
The Giza plateau is cut from layered Mokattam limestone, which is riddled with natural fissures, solution cavities and softer beds, exactly the features that produce resistivity and seismic anomalies. Every anomaly tested by drilling, at the Sphinx in 1978 and near the Great Pyramid in 1998, proved natural. The known tunnels are shallow, explained and empty. Zahi Hawass, who directed Giza's antiquities through these decades, has consistently rejected the Hall of Records idea, and archaeologists add that no settlement, workshop or tool kit from a civilisation thousands of years older than Khafre has been found at Giza.
What remains genuinely open is narrow: the rectangular seismic feature under the front paws has not been drilled, so no one can say from direct inspection what it is.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson holds that the Hall of Records is real. In his reading, it belongs to the same underground world that Doreal's Emerald Tablets call the Halls of Amenti: chambers built by Thoth and an Atlantean team beneath Giza to preserve their knowledge after a great flood. He reads the tablets as engineering history, and his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets includes a rendering of columns running deep under the plateau, which he says he drew from the tablets and from ancient writers such as Herodotus, who reported underground works at Giza.
That is why Carson treated the 2025 Khafre radar announcement as vindication rather than news. He discussed the scans directly with Filippo Biondi on the podcast episode Secrets Beneath Giza and the Lost Sphinx, arguing that the method reads tiny surface vibrations rather than looking directly into the rock. He dates the complex, like the Sphinx, to tens of thousands of years ago.
Carson has also explored the idea that others went looking before the archaeologists did. In a long conversation with Templar researcher Timothy Hogan, covered in the Emerald Tablets and the Knights Templar, Hogan argued that a Hall of Records lies beneath the Sphinx's right paw and that early Templar excavations at Giza found something there.
The evidence status should be stated plainly. Carson's position is an interpretation built on Doreal's text, which has no known ancient manuscript, and on radar claims that have not passed peer review. There is no documentary record of Templar digs at Giza. No excavation has yet produced a chamber, a record or an artefact matching the Hall of Records. Carson's case is that the surveys point to spaces nobody has been permitted to open; the mainstream reply is that every space opened so far was natural.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy Carson's 4BK TV series Egyptian Mystery School explores Giza, the Sphinx and the temple symbolism behind the Hall of Records legend. For the 2025 scans, read his Khafre radar coverage, then hear his conversation with Filippo Biondi on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast. Every guide on the pyramids, the gods and the dynasties is gathered in the Ancient Egypt topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Hall of Records real?
No Hall of Records has been found. Edgar Cayce described it in readings from the 1930s and 1940s, and surveys since the 1970s have recorded anomalies under the Sphinx, but every one tested by drilling proved to be a natural fissure or cavity. Billy Carson believes it exists but has not been opened.
Where is the Hall of Records supposed to be?
Cayce placed it near the Great Sphinx of Giza, with an entrance connected to the Sphinx's right paw, in reading 378-16 from October 1933. Other readings locate it between the Sphinx and the river or along a passage toward a pyramid.
Did Edgar Cayce say the Hall of Records would open in 1998?
His key reading on the hall gives no year, only that it would open when "the time has been fulfilled." The 1998 date came from linking that passage to his other prophecies about changes around 1998, and his followers widely expected the opening by then. Nothing was found.
What is under the Sphinx's paws?
A 1991 seismic survey by Thomas Dobecki and Robert Schoch detected a rectangular feature in the bedrock beneath the front paws, which Dobecki suggested could be a man-made chamber. It has never been drilled or excavated. Most specialists expect a natural cavity, common in Giza's limestone.
What did Zahi Hawass say about the Hall of Records?
Hawass, who directed antiquities at Giza for decades, has consistently rejected the idea and documented the known Sphinx tunnels as dead ends. In 2025 he called the Khafre radar claims baseless.
Sources and further reading
- Edgar Cayce readings 378-16 (1933) and 2012-1 (1939), Association for Research and Enlightenment archive.
- Lambert T. Dolphin, A. H. Moussa et al., Applications of Modern Sensing Techniques to Egyptology (SRI International, 1977).
- Mark Lehner, The Egyptian Heritage: Based on the Edgar Cayce Readings (A.R.E. Press, 1974).
- Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (Thames & Hudson, 2017).
- Robert M. Schoch with Robert Aquinas McNally, Voices of the Rocks (Harmony Books, 1999).
- Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, Keeper of Genesis (1996), published in the US as The Message of the Sphinx.
- Maurice Doreal, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean (Brotherhood of the White Temple, 1939).
- Billy Carson, Compendium of the Emerald Tablets (4biddenknowledge Inc., 2019).
