MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT EGYPT

The Great Pyramid of Giza is perhaps the most amazing and mysterious structure ever built by man.

Consider.

• The Pyramid is 450 feet high (it was originally 481). It contains over 2.3 million blocks of limestone (however). Each block weighs an average of two and a half tons, Originally it was covered with an outer casing, with joints so precisely aligned that a razor blade could not fit between the stones.

• The inner chambers are lined with huge blocks of extremely hard, polished red granite, seamlessly fitted together. Some are over seventy tons - as heavy as a locomotive.

• Each side of the Great Pyramid is perfectly oriented with one of the cardinal points of the compass - north, south, east, and west.

• Each side is 756 feet long at the base. The maximum difference between the side lengths is only 8 inches - a degree of error that is (astonishingly) less than 0.1%. Horizontal cross sections of the Pyramid are near-perfect squares at every level. The vertical sloping angle of the sides is 51 degrees and 51 minutes. Each of the four 90-degree corner angles are accurate to better than 3.5 arc minutes.

• The Great Pyramid rests on a stone platform that is within an inch of being perfectly level across a diagonal base length of some 1,066 feet.

• Divide the perimeter of the base of the Pyramid by twice the height, and the result is almost exactly equal to 3.141 - the pervasive mathematical value known today as pi.

• The Great Pyramid rests at latitude 29° 58' 51" N, which is only 01' 09" (2,324 yards) south of exactly 30 degrees north latitude.

• It was the tallest structure on Earth for more than 43 centuries, only to be surpassed in height in the 1890s with the development of the modern skyscraper. To this day it is still the largest stone monument in the world.

• And not only is it the largest true pyramid ever built, but the Great Pyramid's compelling geometric form conceals a complex system of internal passages, chambers, air shafts, and other features found in no other pyramid.

All of this leaves us with a number of puzzling questions:

How did the Old Kingdom Egyptians quarry, dress, move and place this much stone? And of these massive sizes? How did they attain almost unbelievable precision? The geometric placement? And how did they do this with Copper Age equipment in 2540 BC? Over 4,500 years ago!

How was the Great Pyramid built? We're not even certain that WE could build it today!

Conventional Egyptology holds that, like the many smaller pyramids in the region, the Great Pyramid was built around 2551 to 2528 BC by the Ancient Egyptians. It was built on the west bank of the Nile as a tomb for their magnificent King Khufu, to launch him on his mystic journey into the afterlife.

Much scientific and historic evidence supports this. But not irrefutably. And while it may explain the when and the why, it still leaves the how unanswered.

Some of the earliest history of the Pyramid comes from the Greek traveler Herodotus of Halicanassus. He visited Egypt around 450 BC and included a description of the Great Pyramid in a history book he wrote.

Herodotus was told by his Egyptian guides that it took twenty years for a force of 100,000 oppressed slaves to build the pyramid. Stones were lifted into position by the use of immense machines. The purpose of the structure, according to Herodotus's sources, was as a tomb for the Pharaoh Khufu (whom the Greeks called Cheops). Herodotus claimed that the outer casing was covered with "writing" or "symbols" of a language unknown to the Egyptians.

We don't know how much of Herodotus' account we can trust. After all, he wrote 20 centuries after the Pyramid was built. One thing was certainly not true - that the builders were slaves. Archeologists have found the "work camps" of the builders, and they were well provided for.

It makes sense - every year the Nile flooded, and for a month or two there was nowhere to live and nothing to do until the waters receeded. So the pharaohs gave the people a home and a job.

Current theories center around huge canals, giant ramps, and/or counter-weighted cranes (huge versions of the waterdippers used even today on the Nile). But none of these offer a full explanation for this stupendous engineering feat.

New theories concerning the origin and purpose of the Great Pyramid have been proposed . . . astronomic observatories . . . a center of cult worship . . . geometric structures constructed by a long-gone, unknown civilization . . . even extraterrestrial-related theories have been proposed. But there is little evidence for any of these.

HOWEVER:
Many say that Khufu's Pyramid contains an estimated 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing on average about 2.5 tons. In the past, both professional and amateur theorists assume that the pyramids are composed of generic blocks of this weight. Next, they set about solving the problem of how the builders could have possibly raised and set so many huge blocks. But upon closer examination, few of these traditional assumptions are really valid. In fact, recent analysis has suggested that Khufu's Pyramid has far fewer large blocks than originally supposed, and those who maintain that the blocks are more or less uniformly 2.5 tons are simply wrong.

At first glance, the sides of the Giza Pyramids, stripped of most of their smooth outer casing during the Middle Ages, look like regular steps. These are actually the courses of backing stones, so called because they once filled in the space between the pyramid core and outer casing. However, a closer examination reveals that the steps are not at all regular. In fact, rather then regular, modular, squared blocks of stone neatly stocked, there is considerable "slop factor", even in the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Not only are the backing stones irregular, they are also progressively smaller toward the top. Behind the backing stones, the core stones are actually even more irregular. We know this because, in the 1830s, Howard Vyse blasted a hole in the center of the south side of Khufu's's Pyramid while looking for another entrance. This wound in the pyramid can still be seen today, and in it, we can see how the builders dumped great globs of mortar and stone rubble in wide spaces between the stones. Here, there are big blocks, small chunks of rock, wedge shaped pieces, oval and trapezoidal pieces, as well as smaller stone fragments jammed into spaces as wide as 8.5 in/22 cm between larger blocks.