The Hall of Records is a purported ancient library that is claimed to exist underground near the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. The concept originated with claims made by Edgar Cayce, an American who claimed to be clairvoyant. He said in the 1930s that the civilization of Atlantis was destroyed around 10,500 BC and that Atlantean refugees built the Hall of Records at Giza to preserve their knowledge. Cayce's assertions had many precursors, particularly the pseudoscientific theories about Atlantis that Ignatius Donnelly promulgated in the late 19th century and claims about hidden chambers under the Sphinx that were made by H. C. Randall-Stevens and Harvey Spencer Lewis in the years before Cayce described the Hall of Records.
In the 1990s, Cayce's claims about the Hall of Records became conflated with two other fringe hypotheses about the origin and age of the monuments at Giza: the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis and Orion correlation theory. Adherents of these ideas came to adopt Cayce's date of around 10,500 BC for the origin of the sphinx, and many hoped the Hall of Records would soon be discovered. Although the increased public attention to the site prompted the full exploration of a tomb known as the "water shaft" in 1999, nothing fitting Cayce's description has ever been found.
Origins
The belief in the Hall of Records has many precursors. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author in the first century AD, reported that the people who lived near the Giza Plateau in his time believed the Great Sphinx of Giza was hollow and contained the tomb of a king named "Harmais". Medieval Islamic legends asserted that there were subterranean passages beneath the pyramids there. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, who excavated at Giza in the early nineteenth century, believed a network of subterranean passages linked together all the Giza pyramids, and this claim, repeated by Richard William Howard Vyse in his book Operations Carried on the Pyramids at Gizeh in 1837, circulated widely in the nineteenth century.
The belief that ancient records were stored at Giza derives from medieval Islamic traditions about a legendary king of Egypt named Surid ibn Salhouk, which claim that Surid ruled Egypt before the biblical flood and built the Great Pyramid of Giza to preserve his society's knowledge in the event of the flood. The Surid legend was translated several times into European languages, beginning with translations in the seventeenth century by John Greaves and Pierre Vattier, and became a major influence on subsequent fringe beliefs about ancient Egypt.
Another precursor to the Hall of Records Ignatius Donnelly, whose 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World argued that the fictional civilization of Atlantis, as described by the Greek philosopher Plato, was a real place rather than Plato's invention. Donnelly argued that Atlantis influenced numerous civilizations around the world, including ancient Egypt, before being destroyed in a catastrophe that inspired the biblical flood myth. He cited the Surid legend as evidence that a pyramid-building civilization existed before the flood, and based on the chronology of Plato's story, he asserted that the sinking of Atlantis took place around 9600 BC and that Egyptian civilization must date back that far.
More immediate forerunners to the Hall of Records are the works of H. C. Randall-Stevens and Harvey Spencer Lewis in the 1930s. In his book A Voice Out of Egypt, published in 1935, Randall-Stevens asserted that the Egyptians built the Giza pyramids and sphinx after the destruction of Atlantis, and that beneath the Giza Plateau lay a complex of subterranean passages and temples where inductees into the Egyptians' mystical wisdom received instruction and underwent initiation. Lewis's 1936 book The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid makes similar claims, with a diagram of the purported passageways beneath the plateau that is nearly identical to that published by Randall-Stevens. Randall-Stevens claimed to be channeling his information from the spirits of Egyptian initiates, while Lewis said his claims were based on records from his esoteric organization, the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, which claims to have descended from an ancient Egyptian "mystery school". Both authors were probably imitating Masonic legends about the ancient origins of Masonic rites, with possible influence from the Islamic legends about the pyramids.
Cayce's claim
The first person to use the term "Hall of Records" was Edgar Cayce, a man who claimed to be clairvoyant and was an influential precursor of the New Age movement.