heavy and domineering one), but it was also completely devoid of
decorative features and of anything (figures of deities, reliefs of liturgical
texts, and so on) which might be suggestive of worship or religion. The
primary impression it conveyed was one of strict functionalism and
purposefulness—as though it had been built to do a job. At the same
time I was aware of its focused solemnity of style and gravity of manner,
which seemed to demand nothing less than serious and complete
attention.
By now I had climbed steadily through about half the length of the
Gallery. Ahead of me, and behind, shadows and light played tricks amid
the looming stone walls. Pausing, I turned my head, looking upwards
through the gloom towards the vaulted ceiling which supported the
crushing weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
It suddenly hit me how dauntingly and disturbingly old it was, and how
completely my life at this moment depended on the skills of the ancient
builders. The hefty blocks that spanned the distant ceiling were examples
of those skills—every one of them laid at a slightly steeper gradient than
that of the Gallery. As the great archaeologist and surveyor Flinders Petrie
had observed, this had been done
in order that the lower edge of each stone should hitch like a pawl into a ratchet
cut into the top of the walls; hence no stone can press on the one below it, so as
to cause a cumulative pressure all down the roof; and each stone is separately
upheld by the side walls which it lies across.27
And this was the work of a people whose civilization had only recently
emerged from neolithic hunter-gathering?
I began to walk up the Gallery again, using the 2-foot-deep central
flooring slot. A modern wooden covering fitted with helpful slats and side
railings made the ascent relatively easy. In antiquity, however, the floor
had been smoothly polished limestone, which, at a gradient of 26°, must
have been almost impossible to climb.
How had it been done? Had it been done at all?
26 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 281, Utt. 667A.
27 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.
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Looming ahead at the end of the Grand Gallery was the dark opening to
the King’s Chamber beckoning each and every inquiring pilgrim into the
heart of the enigma.
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Chapter 38
Interactive Three-Dimensional Game
Reaching the top of the Grand Gallery, I clambered over a chunky granite
step about three feet high. I remembered that it lay, like the roof of the
Queen’s Chamber, exactly along the east-west axis of the Great Pyramid,
And therefore marked the point of transition between the northern and
southern halves of the monument.1 Somewhat like an altar in appearance,
the step also provided a solid horizontal platform immediately in front of
the low square tunnel that served as the entrance to the King’s Chamber.
Pausing for a moment, I looked back down the Gallery, taking in once
again its lack of decoration, its lack of religious iconography, and its
absolute lack of any of the recognizable symbolism normally associated
with the archaic belief system of the Ancient Egyptians. All that registered
upon the eye, along the entire 153-foot length of this magnificent
geometrical cavity, was its disinterested regularity and its stark machinelike simplicity.
Looking up, I could just make out the opening of a dark aperture,
chiselled into the top of the eastern wall above my head. Nobody knew
when or by whom this foreboding hole had been cut, or how deep it had
originally penetrated. It led to the first of the five relieving chambers
above the King’s Chamber and had been extended in 1837 when Howard
Vyse had used it to break through to the remaining four. Looking down
again, I could just make out the point at the bottom of the Gallery’s
western wall where the near-vertical well-shaft began its precipitous 160
foot descent through the core of the pyramid to join the descending
corridor far below ground-level.
have been required? At first sight it didn’t make sense. But then nothing
about the Great Pyramid did make much sense, unless you were prepared
to devote a great deal of attention to it. In unpredictable ways, when you
did that, it would from time to time reward you.
If you were sufficiently numerate, for example, as we have seen, it
would respond to your basic inquiries into its height and base perimeter
by ‘printing out’ the value of pi. And if you were prepared to investigate
further, as we shall see, it would download other useful mathematical
tidbits, each a little more complex and abstruse that its predecessor.
There was a programmed feel about this whole process, as though it
had been carefully prearranged. Not for the first time, I found myself
willing to consider the possibility that the pyramid might have been
1 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 25.
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designed as a gigantic challenge or learning machine—or, better still, as
an interactive three-dimensional puzzle set down in the desert for
humanity to solve.
Antechamber
Just over 3 feet 6 inches high, the entry passage to the lung’s Chamber
required all humans of normal stature to stoop. About four feet farther
on, however, I reached the ‘Antechamber’, where the roof level rose
suddenly to 12 feet above the floor. The east and west walls of the
Antechamber were composed of red granite, into which were cut four
opposing pairs of wide parallel slots, assumed by Egyptologists to have
held thick portcullis slabs.2 Three of these pairs of slots extended all the
way to the floor, and were empty. The fourth (the northernmost) had
been cut down only as far as the roof level of the entry passage (that is, 3
feet 6 inches above floor level) and still contained a hulking sheet of
granite, perhaps nine inches thick and six feet high. There was a
horizontal space of only 21 inches between this suspended stone
portcullis and the northern end of the entry passage from which I had
just emerged. There was also a gap of a little over 4 feet deep between
the top of the portcullis and the ceiling. Whatever function it was
designed to serve it was hard to agree with the Egyptologists that this
peculiar structure could have been intended to deny access to tomb
robbers.
2 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 94.
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The antechamber.
Genuinely puzzled, I ducked under it and then stood up again in the
southern portion of the Antechamber, which was some 10 feet long and
maintained the same roof height of 12 feet. Though much worn, the
grooves for the three further ‘portcullis’ slabs were still visible in the
eastern and western walls. There was no sign of the slabs themselves
and, indeed, it was difficult to see how such cumbersome pieces of stone
could have been installed in so severely constricted a working space.
I remembered that Flinders Petrie, who had systematically surveyed the
entire Giza necropolis in the late nineteenth century, had commented on
a similar puzzle in the Second Pyramid: ‘The granite portcullis in the
lower passage shows great skill in moving masses, as it would need 40 or
60 men to lift it; yet it has been moved, and raised into place, in a narrow
passage, where only a few men could possibly reach it.’3 Exactly the same
observations applied to the portcullis slabs of the Great Pyramid. If they
were portcullis slabs—gateways capable of being raised and lowered.
The problem was that the physics of raising and lowering them required
they be shorter than the full height of the Antechamber, so that they
could be drawn into the roof space to allow the entry and exit of
legitimate individuals prior to the closure of the tomb. This meant, of
course, that when the bottom edges of the slabs were lowered to the
floor to block the Antechamber at that level, an equal and opposite space
would have opened up between the top edges of the slabs and the
ceiling, through which any enterprising tomb-robber would certainly have
been able to climb.
3 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 36.
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The Antechamber clearly qualified as another of the pyramid’s many
thought-provoking paradoxes, in which complexity of structure was
combined with apparent pointlessness of function.
An exit tunnel, the same height and width as the entrance tunnel and
lined with solid red granite, led off from the Antechamber’s southern wall
(also made of granite but incorporating a 12-inch thick limestone layer at
its very top). After about a further 9 feet the tunnel debouched into the
King’s Chamber, a massive sombre red room made entirely of granite,
which radiated an atmosphere of prodigious energy and power.
Stone enigmas
I moved into the centre of the King’s Chamber, the lung axis of which
was perfectly oriented east to west while the short axis was equally
perfectly oriented north to south. The room was exactly 19 feet 1 inch in
height and formed a precise two-by-one rectangle measuring 34 feet 4
inches long by 17 feet 2 inches wide. With a floor consisting of 15
massive granite paving stones, and walls composed of 100 gigantic
granite blocks, each weighing 70 tons or more and laid in five courses,
and with a ceiling spanned by nine further granite blocks each weighing
approximately 50 tons,4 the effect was of intense and overwhelming
compression.
At the Chamber’s western end was the object which, if the
Egyptologists were to be believed, the entire Great Pyramid, had been
built to house. That object, carved out of one piece of dark chocolatecoloured granite containing peculiarly hard granules of feldspar, quartz
and mica, was the lidless coffer presumed to have been the sarcophagus
of Khufu.5 Its interior measurements were 6 feet 6.6 inches in length, 2
feet 10.42 inches in depth, and 2 feet 2.81 inches in width. Its exterior
measurements were 7 feet 5.62 inches in length, 3 feet 5.31 inches in
depth, and 3 feet 2.5 inches in width6 an inch too wide, incidentally, for it
to have been carried up through the lower (and now plugged) entrance to
the ascending corridor.7
Some routine mathematical games were built into the dimensions of the
sarcophagus. For example, it had an internal volume of 1166.4 litres and
an external volume of exactly twice that, 2332.8 litres.8 Such a precise
coincidence could not have been arrived at accidentally: the walls of the
coffer had been cut to machine-age tolerances by craftsmen of enormous
4 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5; The Great Pyramid: Your Personal Guide, p. 64.
5 The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 94-5.
6 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 30.
7 Ibid., p. 95.
8 Livio Catullo Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 322. Stecchini gives slightly
more accurate measures than those of Petrie (quoted) for the internal and external
dimensions of the pyramid.
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skill and experience. It seemed, moreover, as Flinders Petrie admitted
with some puzzlement after completing his painstaking survey of the
Great Pyramid, that these craftsmen had access to tools ‘such as we
ourselves have only now reinvented ...’9
Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that
it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight
saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he
could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the
hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made
of even harder jewels: ‘The character of the work would certainly seem to
point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations
of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this
conclusion ...’10
An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the
sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it
from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must
have:
adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving
the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation;
thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out
large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from 1/4 inch to
5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick ...11
Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever
been found by Egyptologists.12 The visible evidence of the kinds of
drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer
that such instruments must have existed. He became especially
interested in this and extended his study to include not only the King’s
Chamber sarcophagus but many other granite artefacts and granite ‘drill
cores’ which he collected at Giza. The deeper his research, however, the
more puzzling the stone-cutting technology of the Ancient Egyptians
became:
The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws
pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a
ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills cutting in granite. On the granite core
No 7 the spiral of the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a rate of
ploughing out which is astonishing ... These rapid spiral grooves cannot be
ascribed to anything but the descent of the drill into the granite under enormous
pressure ...13
Wasn’t it peculiar that at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more
than 4500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded
9 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 103.
10 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p.
74.
11 Ibid., p. 76.
12 Ibid., p. 78.
13 Ibid.
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like industrial-age drills packing a ton or more of punch and capable of
slicing through hard stones like hot knives through butter?
Petrie could come up with no explanation for this conundrum. Nor was
he able to explain the kind of instrument used to cut hieroglyphs into a
number of diorite bowls with Fourth Dynasty inscriptions which he found
at Giza: ‘The hieroglyphs are incised with a very free-cutting point; they
are not scraped or ground out, but are ploughed through the diorite, with
rough edges to the line ...’14
This bothered the logical Petrie because he knew that diorite was one of
the hardest stones on earth, far harder even than iron.15 Yet here it was in
Ancient Egypt being cut with incredible power and precision by some as
yet unidentified graving tool:
As the lines are only 1/150 inch wide it is evident that the cutting point must have
been much harder than quartz; and tough enough not to splinter when so fine an
edge was being employed, probably only 1/200 inch wide. Parallel lines are graved
only 1/30 inch apart from centre to centre.16
In other words, he was envisaging an instrument with a needle-sharp
point of exceptional, unprecedented hardness capable of penetrating and
furrowing diorite with ease, and capable also of withstanding the
enormous pressures required throughout the operation. What sort of
instrument was that? By what means would the pressure have been
applied? How could sufficient accuracy have been maintained to scour
parallel lines at intervals of just 1/30-inch?
At least it was possible to conjure a mental picture of the circular drills
with jewelled teeth which Petrie supposed must have been used to hollow
out the lung’s Chamber sarcophagus. I found, however, that it was not so
easy to do the same for the unknown instrument capable of incising
hieroglyphs into diorite at 2500 BC, at any rate not without assuming the
existence of a far higher level of technology than Egyptologists were
prepared to consider.
Nor was it just a few hieroglyphs or a few diorite bowls. During my
travels in Egypt I had examined many stone vessels—dating back in some