Few Egyptologists argue with the accuracy of
the Great Pyramid's dimensions provided by Taylor, Petrie and Smyth (Scotland,
in fact, awarded Smyth a gold medal for his efforts). However, the implications
of their findings are largely ignored. In textbooks and scientific papers
the complexity of the Great Pyramid is routinely and grossly understated,
written off as the product of the egomaniacal Pharaoh's obsession with
perfection. Exactly how the pyramid's builders constructed it to such tight
tolerances, however, is never explained, for an "obsession with perfection"
does not translate into an ability to create perfection. The baffling precision
of the Great Pyramid is only magnified in light of the fact that accepted
timelines require an extremely low level of engineering sophistication
during the Pyramid Age. The wheel, for example, was not discovered by the
ancient Egyptians until 800 years after construction of the Khufu Pyramid.
Steel tools, too, are not thought to have been developed yet, leaving the
pyramid builders only soft copper implements with which to cut millions
of extremely hard granite and limestone blocks!
There are other, far more perplexing anomalies
that arise upon further examination of the Great Pyramid and artifacts
associated with the Pyramid Age. For instance, it was Flinders Petrie who
first noted that the precision contoured grooves in hieroglyphics found
carved on harder-than-iron diorite bowls were not scraped or gouged but
etched, probably with diamond-tipped implements. First-hand analysis of
similar hieroglyphics by Chris Dunn, an engineer and machinist with 35
years of manufacturing experience, confirmed that the grooves-some of which
run parallel to each other with only .030 inch of material between them-were
made with tools "capable of plowing cleanly through the granite without
splintering . . ."(1) The oft-cited "hardened copper" axes and small round
dolerite balls-with which mainstream scholars insist the Egyptians "bashed"
granite into complex shapes-are pitifully incapable of explaining these
observations.
It appears certain too that high-speed drills
or saws were used to cut the central "King's Chamber" sarcophagus
rock. Saw marks on the north end of the sarcophagus, Dunn reports, are
identical to saw marks seen on modern granite artifacts. Like Petrie before
him, Dunn concluded that spiral grooves left on cores removed from holes
drilled in granite necessitated an extremely high level of technology equivalent
to today's ultrasonic machining. Jeweled-drills and saws, of course, were
not in the Egyptian repertoire 4,600 years ago, nor was diamond, which
was unknown in Egypt at the time the Great Pyramid was allegedly built.
Further compounding the problem presented by
"too advanced" technology in ancient Egypt is the fact that,
like Egyptian and Sumerian civilization as a whole, the Pyramid Age had
no detectable developmental period. The Great Pyramid is the first pyramid
built in Egypt (aside from the enigmatic "stepped pyramid" at
Saqqara attributed to Third Dynasty King Djoser, which is unique in its
design, and not prototypical of the Great Pyramid). Yet the Great Pyramid
is far and away the most structurally sound, most enduring pyramid ever
built. Even the Khafre and Menkaure Pyramids that reside next to the Great
Pyramid are of significantly lower quality. Pyramids from even later dynasties
are nothing more than laughable copies of the three great pyramids; most
of them are in ruins, reduced to piles of rubble by exposure to 4,000 years
of desert winds. Again, this strange and wholly unexpected decline in quality
and complexity over time points to a legacy rather than a gradual evolutionary
progression.
Egyptologists seeking to explain the missing
developmental period and obvious decline in workmanship after the Great
Pyramid's construction point out that all civilizations rise and fall in
cycles (ancient Egypt was no exception). The Great Pyramid, they argue,
was simply a high point in the normal evolution of a pyramid building process
driven by trial and error. But to attribute the engineering genius preserved
in the Great Pyramid-which is, quantitatively and qualitatively, heads
and shoulders above the rest- to a "blip" on the timescale seems
a bit of a stretch. By analogy we might say that a Yugo manufacturer could
be expected to turn out an occasional Ferrari simply through trial and
error!
In light of the unparalleled precision of the
Khufu pyramid we might begin to question the true purpose of the Great
Pyramid. The conventional view is that the three great pyramids were tombs
for the deceased Pharaohs. But further investigation finds little to suggest
that pyramids were ever used as tombs. Of the nearly 100 known pyramids
built by 42 pharaohs, in fact, only the partial remains of eight pharaohs
have ever been found.(2) And in the three main pyramids on the Giza Plateau, none of the
kings for whom they were supposedly built were found in any of the pyramids.
(Bones were found in the Khafre pyramid, but they dated from the Christian
era, 2,500 years after the Pyramid Age.) Most remarkably, no markings were
found to designate the sarcophagi found in the Great Pyramid's King's Chamber
as Khufu's, even though later known tombs were covered with ritualistic
hieroglyphics. According to Smyth, an expert on Egyptian burial custom,
the use of the stone coffer in the King's Chamber for burial would have
required the engraving of the deceased's name, title, deeds, and history
inside and out.(3)
The evidence linking the three pharaohs to
the construction of the pyramids is dubious at best. That used to "prove"
Khufu built the Great Pyramid-quarry marks bearing Khufu's name-are attributed
by some to 19th century explorer Col. Howard Vyse, said to have forged
the name in an effort to save his expedition from the humiliation of making
no significant discoveries inside the pyramid. Other than these few marks,
the Great Pyramid is completely anonymous, a fact that is puzzling to orthodox
thinking. For why, if the Great Pyramid was the result of an egomaniacal
pharaoh, does it not proclaim to the world exactly who built it, why it
was built and when? Where are the copious decorations, the lengthy inscriptions
and the lavish praises to the king who directed the construction of the
most stunning architectural triumph of the ancient world? The Great Pyramid
is mentioned nowhere in any ancient text or painting: no one in the ancient
world seemed to know when it was built or why it exists.
Given the dearth of writing on the Great Pyramid,
and the fact that later pyramids were almost always covered with a cornucopia
of descriptive hieroglyphics, we might suspect that the Great Pyramid is
in a class of its own, perhaps completely unrelated, even antecedent to
Egyptian civilization itself. In fact, the only comprehensive effort to
date the Great Pyramid via scientific means, the Pyramids Carbon-dating
Project, directed by Dr. Mark Lehner, the Field Director for the American
Research Center in Egypt, gave dates for organic material embedded in ancient
mortar taken from the Great Pyramid of 3809 BC to 2869 BC, 200 to 1200
years too early in the accepted Fourth Dynasty timeline!(4)
There is in the end little reason to suspect
that Khufu was solely responsible for construction of the Great Pyramid,
though he may have played a part in its overall plan. First, the Khufu
pyramid represents a literal engineering impossibility given the tools
available during the Pyramid Age, even with the "unlimited money,
time and manpower" allocated Khufu by orthodox Egyptologists. The
traditional construction scenario given by archeologists-conservatively
estimated as 100,000 men working for 20 years, lifting and dragging granite
slabs on sand ramps-is simply not, and never was, feasible.
We know this because Hancock and Bauval, a
Belgian construction engineer, have determined that ten degrees is the
maximum gradient that could be used for ramps before they collapsed under
the weight of the granite blocks. To reach the top of the Great Pyramid
these hypothetical ramps would have had to be 4,800 feet long and composed
of stone (not sand) to prevent collapse. Thus the total material used to
construct these ramps would involve three times as much material as that
found in the pyramid itself! Were such massive ramps ever in place, we
see little evidence of them. In lieu of the gently sloping ramp scenario
the idea of spiral ramps has been offered, but circular ramps would be
physically incapable of reaching the top, creating hairpin corners and
awkwardly obstructing the pyramid, making it impossible to check tolerances.(5) According to Hancock
and Bauval, of the 30 or so theories invoked to explain the Great Pyramid's
construction (most involve ramps), none of them are valid. Why then has
the ramp theory, in all its various forms, gone unchallenged as the construction
method of choice among Egyptologists? Because Egyptologists are generally
archeologists or anthropologists, not engineers. Simply put, the ramp theory
sounds good, but that is no guarantee that it works in practice. Consider
these facts:
Since the Great Pyramid is composed of 2,200,000
blocks, given a work time of 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, workers
would have to place a block weighing 2.5 tons (on average) perfectly once
every five minutes to finish the monumental task in twenty years (not including
the time it took to gather the ramp material, build the mile long ramps,
and remove them). Egyptologists admit, however, that construction of the
monument was probably confined to the annual agricultural lay-off forced
by the Nile's rise-a period of only three months.(6) It is likely, too, that the pyramid builders
worked no more than 12 hours a day, considering the extremely dangerous
prospect of maneuvering massive granite slabs at night.
Given these more realistic constraints, in
order to finish within 20 years the builders had to position one massive
granite block every 36 seconds! Again, this estimate does not include the
time required to assemble and (against all logic) disassemble the supposed
ramps, nor does it allow for even modest errors in positioning-or dropping-of
blocks during construction. Even one such mishap could destroy large parts
of the pyramid, resulting in gross misalignments and setting back construction
for months. Thus, when we replace vague references to "unlimited manpower
and resources" with actual figures, orthodox Egyptology's "twenty
year project" turns into a fifty or one hundred year project. It is
curious that no mention of this mammoth, possibly century-long construction
feat was made in any texts of the period.
Ironically, recent attempts to reproduce miniature
versions of the Great Pyramid-one by the Japanese Nippon Corporation and
the other by PBS's NOVA-do not refute, but rather support, the contention
that the Khufu pyramid could not have been constructed using supposed Old
Kingdom methods. In both cases, the construction teams relied on modern
day equipment. Nippon, which originally planned to use only copper tools,
ropes and barges, eventually resorted to using a steamboat, a crane and
a helicopter to complete their project. Built from blocks 1/15 the size
of the largest Great Pyramid blocks, the Nippon pyramid stood about sixty
feet tall. When finished, the less impressive NOVA pyramid, which took
three weeks to build with steel tools and front-end loaders, stood a mere
twenty feet-1/24 the Great Pyramid's original height.(7) While these experiments do not prove
that the ancients had cranes and helicopters, they certainly suggest that
the engineering difficulties inherent in the Great Pyramid's construction
are severely under appreciated by orthodox Egyptology.
In a somewhat desperate attempt to provide
an alternate explanation for the Great Pyramid's construction, some researchers
have suggested that the blocks were poured and molded into position. Aside
from the obvious dilemma of how the ancient Egyptians were able to melt
and contain the molten granite, microfossils extracted from the granite
slabs refutes this idea. Under the microscope, fossils of organisms captured
in the rocks are complete, not deformed or broken, as would be expected
had they been liquefied and mixed during pouring.
How did the builders make the Great Pyramid?
We are really left with only one plausible alternative:
(continued in Chapter 7 of The Monkey and
the Tetrahedron...)
====== References=======
(1) Christopher Dunn, "An
Engineer in Egypt," Atlantis Rising 8 (1996): 59.
(2) J.P. Lepre, The Egyptian
Pyramids: A Comprehensive & Illustrated Reference, (London: McFarland
& Co., 1990), 269.
(3) C. Piazzi Smith, Our
Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, (Hudson, NY: Garber Communications
(Anthroposophic Press), 1980), 108.
(4) Venture Inward,
(Virginia Beach: Association for Research and Enlightenment), May-June
1986, p. 13.
(5) Peter Hodges and Julian
Keable, How the Pyramids Were Built (Shaftesbury: Element Books,
1989), 126, quoted in Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, 285.
(6) Hancock, Fingerprints
of the Gods, 284.
(7) Dunn, Christopher, The
Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt (Santa Fe: Bear &
Company, Inc., 1998), pp. 60-62.
