Secrets of the Great Pyramid after a few days of scuba diving along the Red Sea coast of Egypt in early 1985, two French architects went on an excursion to see the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. As they examined the huge structure, they noted several things that simply did not make sense to them. Some of the pyramid's immense stone blocks, for example, are stacked vertically, rather than staggered in their usual pattern. And in certain parts of the pyramid, curious roughhewn stones crop up during polished limestone. Like generations of pyramid visitors before them, the two Frenchmen, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goldin were captivated by the great monument. And like so many others, they believed that they could penetrate its mysteries.
The structural anomalies, the architects deduced, were clues to hidden, previously unknown rooms within the pyramid. They speculated that one such secret chamber might even contain the remains of the Pharaoh Cheops himself, thus resolving one of the pyramid's eternal questions: Where is the body it was presumably built to entomb' Dormion and Goidin had considerable technological advantages over previous pyramid detectives. After several exploratory visits to the stone hallways, they returned in August of 1 986 with a microgravimetry, a sophisticated instrument capable of registering density voids, or cavities, within the pyramid.
And behind the walls of a corridor leading to the room known as the Queen's Chamber, the device detected the voids predicted by the architects. Encouraged, the two men got permission from Egyptian authorities to drill into the ancient limestone walls in search of the pyramid's secrets. For days, the architects and their colleagues worked in the cramped passages of the pyramid, their drills chewing through more than two yards of rock in three different places. But all they uncovered were pockets of fine, crystalline sand: The micro gravimeter, it seemed, could indicate the presence of voids in the pyramid but could not pinpoint their precise location.
The secret chambers, if they exist, remained hidden. The Great Pyramid had thwarted yet another attempt in the long, frustrating, and fascinating quest to unravel its abiding riddles. Since the time of the classical Greeks, people have gazed at this sole survivor of the ancient world's seven wonders and asked questions they could not answer. Why was it built? If it was a tomb, as conventional wisdom has generally supposed, why were no symbols or possessions of royalty- much less a royal corpse— ever found? If it was not a tomb, what was it? And how was it built? How, given the building techniques of the day, could one explain the astonishing precision of its construction, its near-perfect alignment to the points of the compass, the exquisite accuracy of its masonry.
If the pyramid's design incorporates advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge, as many investigators believe, how did its builders acquire such wisdom so far in advance of other civilizations' Could the enigmatic structure even harbor some sort of mystical powers beyond the realm of conventional science? More than a few archeologists, astronomers, religious scholars, and amateur pyramid enthusiasts have argued such questions through the centuries. While archeologists focus on the structure purely as a historical artifact, other investigators have usually fallen into three schools of thought. The first, and most common, holds that the pyramid represents a universal system of measurement, that its very dimensions embody archetypal measures of length and even time.
A splinter group of nineteenth-century pyramid students founded the second school, focusing on the structure's extraordinary properties as a gigantic sundial and an astronomical observatory. This so-called archeoastronomy made a strong case that the pyramid builders, whoever they were, had an awareness of astronomy and the earth's dimensions far superior to anything previously imagined. As the fascination with the pyramid continued into the twentieth century, a third and far more speculative school arose, concentrating on the pyramid shape itself and its alleged physical effects on both living things and inanimate objects.
These researchers claimed that the pyramid shape could somehow help plants grow, keep food fresh longer, and even sharpen dull razor blades. Still, others have accounted for the mathematical wisdom the structure supposedly embodies by imagining that its builders came from lost Atlantis, or even from another planet, or from both. The pyramid itself maintains a stubborn silence. It has never been completely explored nor completely explained.
The pyramid of Cheops rises in its enigmatic majesty from the rocky Giza plateau ten miles west of Cairo. Glimpsed through the branches of the acacia, eucalyptus, and tamarind trees that line the boulevard leading to the plateau, it vaults up from a wind-scraped flat on the edge of the Libyan Desert with dramatic suddenness, a breathtaking mountain of sand-colored stone looming above the lush palm groves of the nearby Nile. Caravan travelers approaching from the desert in ages past saw it for days before they reached it, a tiny triangle on the horizon bulking ever larger in its symmetrical perfection. Close up, its grandeur is overpowering.
Numbers can only suggest its immensity-a ground area of 1 3. 1 acre, the edifice itself composed of some 2.3 million limestone blocks averaging two and a half tons each. The structure contains enough stone to build a wall of foot-square cubes two-thirds of the way around the globe at the equator, 16,600 miles. The Great Pyramid and the two others that stand near it on the plateau-attributed to Cheops'simmediatesuccessors- were erected during the period of Egyptian history known as the Fourth Dynasty, between 2613 and 2494 b c Egyptologists believe that Cheops (as the Greeks knew him; his Egyptian name was Khufu) ordered the immense building raised as a tomb and monument to himself.
Its outer shell was originally composed of highly polished limestone blocks fitted together with painstaking precision, but these casing stones were stripped off in the fourteenth century and used in the construction of Cairo. At some point in history, the original capstone, forming the top thirty-one feet of the pyramid, was also removed. Egyptologists have drawn on their knowledge of Egyptian religion to explain the significance of the pyramid shape, contending that it could have related to sun worship. The angled walls, they say, resemble the outspread rays of the sun descending earthward from a cloud, and the pyramid thus represents a stairway to the heavens.
Some students of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, such as the modern occultist writer Manly P. Hall, even maintain that the pyramid provided more than a merely figurative passage to celestial realms. According to Hall, the building was a secret temple where the elect underwent a mystic ritual transforming them into gods. The initiates would lie for three days and nights within the pyramid while there too- the soul or essence— left their bodies and entered ' 'the spiritual spheres of space. " In the process, the candidates "achieved actual immortality" and became godlike.
More down-to-earth questions surround the issue of how, in an age without pulleys or the wheel, the massive pyramid was built. But archeologists have guessed at a general scenario: The builders somehow leveled the site and then aligned the sides of the building by making repeated observations of circumpolar stars to determine true directions. At quarries a few miles away, masons cut the limestone with stone hammers and copper chisels. Crews consisting of hundreds of workers then dragged the blocks to the site; granite used in some parts of the interior was ferried down the Nile from a site about 400 miles distant and hauled up a causeway from the river.
To pull the multitone blocks up the sides of the rising pyramid, they may have used a spiraling earthen ramp, although some experts believe they levered the stone upward on planks and wooden runners. The blocks were then fitted together with hairline precision, displaying an accuracy of engineering that impresses even present-day builders. Many observers have doubted that so massive a structure as the Great Pyramid— a miracle of engineering, a prodigy of decades of backbreaking labor under the blazing sun could have been intended merely for the housing of one royal mummy. Alternate explanations have flourished since the pre-Christian era.
The Roman historian Julius Honorius declared that the pyramids were storehouses for grain. (Another early writer opined that the structures were extinct volcanoes.) The Arabs who ruled Egypt for centuries thought that they were repositories of ancient knowledge, built by earlier rulers who feared a catastrophe, perhaps the flood; local folktales claimed that the Great Pyramid incorporated both a guide to the stars and a prophecy of the future. Superstition trailed legend: Ghosts patrolled the corridors, the Arabs said, as did a naked woman with unsightly teeth who seduced trespassers and drove them mad.
The Greek historian Herodotus was the first visitor to gather and record information about the Great Pyramid in a systematic way. Herodotus visited Giza in the fifth-century bc, when the structure was already 2,000 years old and wrote a description of its construction based on his conversations with local Egyptians. Unable to go inside the edifice (its end- 48 trance was hidden), he accepted his informants' claim that the pyramid was a tomb built to the tyrannical Khufu. The king's burial vault, they said, lay underground. One hundred thousand men labored on the pyramid, according to Herodotus, with fresh crews thrown onto the project every three months.
They built the causeway from the river to the plateau in ten years; the pyramid itself took another twenty years to complete. Engineers lifted the gigantic stones up the sides of the structure step by step using "machines formed of short wooden planks" on each step. Herodotus did not elaborate on how these machines worked. He was also told that outer casing stones were installed from the top-down after the interior core was in place. These glistening, highly polished stones were covered with inscriptions- later lost when the blocks were carted off to Cairo.
Herodotus was interested in the Great Pyramid primarily as an engineering project. But the next pyramid explorer known to history had a somewhat different perspective on the structure and introduced what was to become an abiding theme of pyramid studies: the quest for the mathematical wisdom possessed by the ancients. The ninth-century Arab caliph Abdullah Al-Ma mun was a young ruler with a scientific turn of mind and a special interest in astronomy.
He dreamed of mapping the world and charting the heavens, and he turned his attention to the pyramid when he learned that its secret chambers reportedly contained highly accurate maps and tables executed by the pyramid builders in addition, and perhaps of more interest to the caliph's fellow explorers, great treasure was said to be hidden somewhere within. Arab historians later told the dramatic tale of how the caliph and his team of architects, builders, and stonemasons set to work in ad 820.
Unable to find an entrance to the inscrutable structure, they launched a frontal attack, heating the limestone blocks with fire and then dousing them with cold vinegar until they cracked. After burrowing through 100 feet of rock this way, the explorers finally reached a narrow, four-foot-high passageway that climbed steeply upward. At its upper end, they found the pyramid's original entrance, forty-nine feet above the ground, blocked and hidden by a pivoting stone door.
Turning around, the explorers followed the passageway downward. After crawling on their hands and knees through the inky darkness, they were chagrined to find only an unfinished, empty chamber. If secret writings or a king's ransom were to be found in the pyramid, it would be elsewhere. The excitement was rekindled, however, when Al Mamun's men returned to the passageway and discovered what looked like another corridor sloping upward.
Unfortunately, its entrance was filled by a large granite plug, obviously placed there deliberately. The granite was impervious to their hammers and chisels, but the determined Arabs found that they could chip through the softer limestone blocks around it. As soon as they did, though, they found another granite obstacle and then several more. Someone had been determined to bar intruders from the pyramid's inner sanctum After laboriously hacking their way around the series of plugs, the explorers emerged into a low-ceilinged corridor that slanted upward until it intersected a level passageway.
This led them to an eighteen-foot-square, twenty-foot-high gabled room that would later become known as the Queen's Chamber (because of the Arab custom of burying women in tombs with gabled roofs). No queen was in evidence, however; this chamber, too, was empty.
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