The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids

by Scott Creighton

The pyramid shape of the Ark may refer directly to Origen’s interpretation of the Ark. Again, according to Dilbeck, “Origen, an Egyptian Father of the Church, envisioned the Ark as a truncated pyramid with three decks . . . all of the earlier writers thought of it [the Ark] as pyramidal in shape. . . . Uccello’s Ark is also a pyramid.”23

  Figure 7.13. Paolo Uccello’s Flood and Waters Subsiding. Note the square lower bases of the pyramids with their slightly sloping sides.

  Figure 7.14. Boat pits beside Great Pyramid

  It seems quite clear then that among some early Christian scholars and artists there existed a tradition that the ark that had saved humanity from the biblical Flood took the form not of a giant, wooden boat, but of giant pyramids, although, it has to be said, the giant pyramids were themselves surrounded by boats set into giant boat pits (figure 7.14).

  Where would such an idea have come from? Perhaps these early writers and artists had access to ancient texts, now long since lost, that described the early, giant Egyptian pyramids in precisely such terms—as arks.

  8

  Flying Stones

  That something was lost from the time of the pyramid building age up to this present era is certain; otherwise, why is it that not a single scholar—whether associated with the field of physics, engineering, archaeology, Egyptology, mathematics, geometry or scores of others—can conclusively state exactly how the mighty pyramids were built?

  J. P. LEPRE, THE EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS

  While the primary focus of this book has concerned itself with the why question of the pyramids—why they were built—the other interrelated question that puzzles the minds of many is the how question: How exactly did the ancient Egyptians build these colossal structures, and how were they able to achieve the construction of so many (around sixteen) in such a relatively short period of time—around one hundred years?

  It is a question that has perplexed and befuddled the greatest minds in Egyptology (and beyond) for centuries: How did people, not long out of the Stone Age, manage to quarry, move, and lift millions of 2.5ton limestone blocks and numerous 70-ton granite blocks to heights of a little under five hundred feet to construct their pyramids? Suffice to say that there have been many proposals: some straightforward such as the conventional ramp theory (interior or exterior), and others that are rather more exotic such as some form of counterweight system or cast blocks, to the truly bizarre theories such as UFOs, sonic levitation devices, hydraulic locks, and the like.

  If, however, we approach the problem here on the premise that the ancient Egyptians believed that they had limited time (the Arab chronicles tell us three hundred years) in which to devise and implement a recovery plan for their kingdom before it would be decimated in a great deluge and drought, we can get a sense of the urgency with which the ancient Egyptians would likely have approached their Project Osiris.

  For such a project to succeed, for such a mighty endeavor, they would have had to mobilize the entire population over many generations. They would have had to succeed in doing things that no one in history had ever before achieved. This would have required the development of an infrastructure to manage and support the massive numbers of people involved in the project, to feed and house them, to attend to their injuries and other human needs. Skills and technologies in the cutting, transporting, lifting, and dressing of vast quantities of stone (limestone and granite) would have had to be developed.

  In short, this enterprise was for the ancient Egyptians of this remote period every bit as challenging and daunting as our own twentieth-century “space race” and President John F. Kennedy’s goal of placing a man on the moon (and maybe more so). As a result of Kennedy’s pledge, wider society would ultimately benefit and progress as a direct result of the various technologies that had to be invented in order for the moon mission to succeed. And the ancient Egyptians’ race to implement their Project Osiris would, for this age, produce many world firsts and remarkable feats of engineering, and they would achieve all of this because they simply had to; failure was not an option. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.

  One of the first decisions the ancient Egyptians would have been faced with in implementing their recovery project was deciding exactly what to build: What form should the recovery system—their arks—take? This decision would be governed primarily by two quite important requirements:

  The arks would have to be so large as to be visible for many miles in every direction, thus facilitating their relatively easy and quick discovery.

  The arks would have to be so strong and durable as to be able to withstand the tremendous forces of nature (the deluge) that the builders anticipated they would have to withstand.

  It would have been quickly realized that a pyramid was the only suitable structure they could build, because in ancient times without iron or steel a structure wider at the bottom and narrower at the top was the most stable structure that could have been built to a sufficient height to satisfy the requirement of high visibility from great distances. It would have been realized also that the planned pyramids would have to be constructed of stone since the mud-brick structures that had been built previously would simply be washed away in the anticipated deluge.

  Time was also a constraining factor; the recovery plan had to be implemented as quickly as possible. One of the things this time constraint would have an impact on would be the size of the stone blocks used to build the pyramids. If the blocks were made very small then this would require much more cutting and thereby would require much more time. So, to save time, it was necessary to keep the blocks fairly large. However, if the blocks were made too large then they would become too difficult or impossible to move and maneuver. In short, the blocks couldn’t be too small (as this would take too long to cut them) and neither could they be too large (as this would make them too difficult to move). So, in order to use average-size blocks weighing around 2.5 tons, a means had to be found that would allow the ancient Egyptians to quickly and easily lift and maneuver such heavy blocks.

  In this regard it stands to reason that the builders could only have developed a lifting technology that was wholly within their reach. We need not invoke or invite some exotic science into this particular question, of which there is little, if any, evidence. Whatever means the ancient Egyptians employed to move these heavy blocks should, in theory at least, have been entirely within their grasp, have left behind some physical evidence of its use, and perhaps even some written evidence.

  As far as conventional Egyptology is concerned the technology employed by the ancient builders to raise these heavy blocks was the ramp—massive ramps that would be built either straight onto the pyramid face or perhaps coiled around the pyramid slopes. However, the evidence for the use of such massive external ramps envisaged by Egyptologists is entirely threadbare, and depending on the particular ramp envisaged, such a technique would bring with it its own physical and logistical problems. And while there is indeed some evidence of ramps or dirt transport roads at a number of pyramid sites (mostly from later periods), these would appear only to have been for ancillary purposes such as hauling cut stone blocks out of the quarries and up to the base of the pyramid. There are no massive construction ramps still extant at any of the pyramids and little sign that any such massive ramps ever existed.

  The issue of building massive ramps in order to construct the pyramids also brings in the issue of time constraint into the equation. In the case of the early, giant pyramids this would have been a very considerable undertaking whereby the construction of the ramp itself would have been almost as massive a construction project as the building of the pyramid. In this regard, Lehner writes, “Given the fact that the stones of a giant pyramid like Khufu’s had to be raised as much as 146m (479 ft) from the ground, if a ramp was indeed used it would have been a colossal structure in its own right. According to some ideas about its shape, it would in fact have required as much or more material than the pyramid itself.”1

  If time was such a
constraint as seems likely, it would seem then that the ancient builders would have been required to become much more inventive, that, by necessity, they would have had to discover some other technology that would negate the necessity for the construction of massive, time-consuming ramps but, at the same time, enable the raising of these heavy blocks in a much easier and more time-efficient manner. They would have needed to discover a lifting technology that was scalable and was available to them almost from day one rather than expending many years and much effort building massive ramps and then rebuilding them as the pyramid gradually rose in height. But what lifting technology might they have discovered that would allow them to achieve all this that would be scalable and available to them virtually from day one?

  A clue to this might exist in one of the oldest legends that speak of how the ancient Egyptians (and other pyramid builders around the world) built their giant pyramids; these legends tell us that the builders “flew the stones into place.”

  Now, on the surface most of us would be inclined to immediately dismiss such a legend as entirely fanciful (if not downright ludicrous), and especially so when some individuals attempt to explain this legend by invoking the use of sonic levitation devices that somehow managed to neutralize gravitational forces, thereby rendering the great limestone and granite blocks entirely weightless.

  The fact is, however, that such exotic science has never been proved. No one in modern times has yet demonstrated that limestone and granite blocks can be rendered entirely weightless with such exotic techniques, and until someone can demonstrate how a seventy-ton granite block can be rendered entirely weightless using such a technique, then such notions must remain in the realm of fiction.

  But perhaps all is not lost. If there does exist an essence of truth to this ancient legend of the limestone and granite blocks being “flown into place” on the pyramid, then surely we must seek a much less exotic means of achieving such a feat. This, of course, implies that the ancient Egyptians perhaps discovered and applied another, less exotic (but easily accessible) technology that could have rendered these heavy blocks “weightless,” thus making “flying blocks” a possibility and thus perhaps explaining the legend of the “flying stones” that has come down to us.

  Such a technology that would have been at the disposal of the ancient Egyptian builders (were they only to have discovered it) is the power and application of thermodynamics. In short, might the ancient Egyptians have discovered the power of hot air contained in some form of envelope or balloon?

  Fanciful?

  Perhaps. The hot air balloon was, according to conventional historians, supposedly only invented in the eighteenth century CE, so to advocate such an extraordinary idea that so contradicts conventional thought surely requires that such a notion be backed up with some extraordinary evidence. However, while extraordinary evidence may be in absentia, before we dismiss the idea completely out of hand let us consider some potential evidence that could in fact lend support to such an extraordinary possibility.

  First of all, it is not at all difficult to observe how hot air produces “lift,” and we should realize that this phenomenon would have been as easy to observe by ancient people as it is for us to observe today. In the late eighteenth century the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph and Jacques, noticed how when they burned paper (which they manufactured) the ashes floated up into the air. What caused this? they wondered. The Montgolfier brothers believed that heat and smoke had some peculiar property that could lift things from the ground, and in making this very simple observation, the brothers applied their minds to find a means by which this hot air and smoke could somehow be captured and harnessed in order to lift themselves off the ground, to render themselves “weightless.” After some near misses with disaster, the Montgolfier brothers finally managed to create a hot air balloon that lifted a sheep, a duck, and a rooster into the air and landed them safely again after several minutes.

  Although this was apparently the first time that life-forms had taken to the skies by artificial means, the Montgolfier balloon was not the first use of the hot air balloon; they had been around for quite some time. In fact, as early as 220 CE, the Chinese military used such balloons as unmanned signaling devices in a way not too dissimilar to the way in which Native Americans used smoke signals.

  The Montgolfier balloon had been made from linen and paper, and to inflate it the brothers burned straw, chopped wood, and dried manure almost directly under the balloon’s opening. The purpose of the manure was to create lots of smoke, which would keep the flames low, thereby preventing the balloon itself from being engulfed in a ball of fire. So, with this innovative thinking, humankind had finally taken to the skies with the thermodynamic lifting power of the hot air balloon. But is it possible that the ancient Egyptians discovered such a technology thousands of years earlier? Could they have harnessed the thermodynamic lifting power of the hot air balloon 4,500 years ago (or longer) and employed it to lift their heavy pyramid blocks?

  If the ancient Egyptians could have observed how burning embers from a fire floated upward and wondered what caused this to happen, then it is conceivable that the same thought may have struck them as it did the Montgolfier brothers thousands of years later. And just as the first Montgolfier balloon was made of linen and paper, these just happen to be two materials that were invented by and easily available to the ancient Egyptians, as were ropes, sails, and fire. Egyptian papyrus (an early form of paper made from the pith of the Cyperus papyrus plant) was widely used in ancient Egypt and other Mediterranean cultures of the time.

  So, the ancient Egyptians certainly could easily have observed the lifting power of hot air, and they certainly had the materials with which they could have created a hot air balloon (or a form of it). But could such a primitive hot air balloon have been able to lift the heavy pyramid blocks?

  As previously mentioned, the average weight of a limestone block in the Great Pyramid is often quoted in academic literature as being around 2.5 tons. There are blocks in the Great Pyramid that are much heavier than this (some as much as 70 tons or so), but this figure of 2.5 tons is often quoted as the average block weight. Simple calculations show that a hot air balloon (at sea level) with a diameter of around 125 feet can lift about 6.39 tons, less the weight of the materials used for the balloon itself. Basic calculations using the type of linen material available in the Fourth Dynasty show that a linen balloon of 125 feet diameter would weigh somewhere between 750 and 1,000 pounds. Lifting at night or in the winter months when the air is much cooler would allow better thermodynamic lift than during the day or in the summer months when the ambient temperature would only be slightly less cooler than the air inside the balloon. Of course, the balloon itself would not necessarily have to take the form of a sphere or a bulb, like many modern balloons. Indeed, just about any shape of balloon could work so long as the volume of the balloon envelope was sufficient to capture enough hot air to provide the necessary lift.

  Thus we can see that the ancient Egyptians certainly could have observed the lifting power of hot air and that they had the ability and the materials to build hot air balloons, and we can calculate that such a balloon of around 125 feet in diameter, including the weight of the balloon itself and ropes and such, could feasibly lift two average limestone blocks. With the sides of the Great Pyramid being around 750 feet in length, then it would be feasible to have four lifting stations on each face of the pyramid, thus giving, in theory at least, sixteen balloons operating around the pyramid perimeter at any given time, each potentially raising two blocks with each lift. If we assume thirty minutes for each lift then in an eighteen-hour working day, a total of 1,152 stone blocks could theoretically have been raised per day. Although estimates vary, the Great Pyramid is believed to contain somewhere in the region of 2.5 million of these blocks, and as such it would take a little under six years (working every day) to raise this number of stone blocks. This is a little over a third of the time the historian Herodotus quotes for the constr
uction of the Great Pyramid—around twenty years.

  But how would the ancient Egyptians have gotten enough hot air into a linen-and-paper balloon to generate the required lift, and how could this have been done without the balloon material itself catching fire and going up in flames? The Montgolfier method of a fire directly under the balloon opening was very precarious and wasn’t without its disasters. There may be any number of ways that this could have been achieved, but I will outline here just one method that could have been used and of which there may actually be some physical evidence at the pyramid sites, which will be discussed shortly.

  Inflating the balloon with hot air could have been relatively simple through the use of a pair of large, deep stone pits connected near the bottom with a small, horizontal link tunnel; the two pits and the connecting link create a U shape. Let’s consider how this would work. At the bottom of the first pit a fire is made. Because the fire is in a pit around twenty to thirty feet deep, it is unaffected by the prevailing wind conditions above ground. The small, horizontal link tunnel connecting the first pit to the second pit provides a draft of air that feeds the fire in the first pit, thereby creating a convection current. The real benefit of this type of fire is that it is very efficient and burns very, very hot; is virtually smoke-free; and is entirely controllable. The stone pit being so deep means it is unlikely that the balloon material itself would ever catch fire. Even today small variants of these pit fires are still used around the world and are known as Dakota smokeless fire pits (figure 8.1).

  With the fire burning ferociously at the bottom of the left pit (figure 8.1), the opening of the balloon is laid over the mouth of this pit, perhaps with one side of the balloon raised slightly off the ground to allow the fire below to be fed with more fuel as and when required. Very quickly the deflated horizontal balloon will begin to fill with hot air and rise to the vertical. Also, if the balloon material is dyed black then this would help maintain the heat inside the balloon through absorption of solar radiation from the hot Egyptian sun, allowing the balloon to remain buoyant longer. Naturally, while being inflated the balloon would have to be anchored to the ground by a rope, just as a modern hot air balloon is.