by Colin Wilson
So the Great Pyramid remained a mystery consisting of many small mysteries. Why, for example, had the Queen’s Chamber been left unfinished, as the rough state of its floor suggested? And why were its walls covered in crystallised salt? And, if the pharaoh had changed his mind and decided that he would prefer a larger chamber built on a higher level, why did he not place the King’s Chamber directly above the Queen’s Chamber? The latter is placed symmetrically in the centre of
Cross-section of the Great Pyramid of Giza
the Pyramid, where you might expect a burial chamber to be; the King’s Chamber is located slightly beyond this meridian.
One theory that seems to fit these facts is based on the speculations of Professor I. E. S. Edwards, one of the British Museum’s foremost authorities on the pyramids. Around 2,500 BC, the pharaoh Cheops (Khufu) decided to build himself a tomb that should be impregnable to thieves. Having surveyed the subterranean chamber his workmen had hacked out of the rock, he felt it was too stuffy and depressing and decided to build himself a pyramid, like his father and grandfather. The Queen’s Chamber was a deliberate red herring, to persuade any robbers who had penetrated that far that there was nothing for them to steal. Such robbers would only carry torches or candles, and would probably not notice that another passage ran above their heads.
At that point, his obsession about tomb robbers developed into paranoia, and he decided to have the ascending passage blocked with the granite plugs to make quite sure that no robbers could get that far. But the plugs needed to be slid into place. For that reason, the floor of the Grand Gallery was made smooth, so they could be stored there and slid down. At the top of the Grand Gallery he placed another obstacle in the form of a tall stone, and on its other side was the antechamber and the King’s Chamber, which he had chosen for his tomb. He had his sarcophagus placed ready, but at this point he realised that it would be virtually impossible to carry the coffin up to the chamber – the granite plugs and the tall stone blocked the way.
The only solution was to slide the granite plugs into place there and then and to leave the Great Pyramid unfinished until after his death, when his coffin could be brought into the King’s Chamber from above. But that would entail leaving the Great Pyramid open until he died. In the meantime, any number of thieves could creep in by night and explore its secrets.
At which point, I suggest, Cheops gave up in disgust. The Great Pyramid itself, he decided, should become a gigantic red herring, to divert tomb robbers from his true resting place. And to this day we have no idea of where his body lies…
Why did he order the ‘well’ to be dug, then blocked up with rubble? Perhaps because, just before the Great Pyramid was completed, he had a sudden pang of regret at the thought that he would never again look upon his magnificent handiwork, and left this hidden entrance…
One objection to this theory is the matter of why he ordered his workmen to construct so many puzzling anomalies. Why are there slots cut into the walls of the antechamber, as if to hold three massive ‘portcullis’ stones, when no such stones are to be found? Why is there a niche in the wall of the Queen’s Chamber that is slightly off-centre? Why does a 2-foot step suddenly appear in the passage to the Queen’s Chamber? Why do ‘air vents’ out of the Queen’s Chamber fail to reach the outside and were not even taken through the walls of the Chamber? There are, of course, ‘air vents’ out of the King’s Chamber – but what is the purpose of air vents in a tomb? And why did the builders decide to build the thirty-sixth course of far larger blocks than the other courses – surely it would have made sense to place the largest at the bottom?
Above all there is the mystery of the Grand Gallery. Why, when most of the passages in the Great Pyramid are so low that it is necessary to stoop (or even crawl), did the pharaoh order his workmen to build a passageway 7 feet wide, 28 feet high and 157 feet long? Why does it narrow to half its width by the time it reaches the ceiling? And why is the ceiling not flat, like most of the ceilings in the Great Pyramid, but made of overlapping blocks, as if designed as steps for a man who could walk upside down? And why is there a raised ramp on either side of the upward slope, making it a sunken channel? And why are there square holes cut on the wall side of the ramp, making it look – from above – like a piece of cinema film?
The answer, clearly, is God only knows. Common sense seems to afford no clues to the answers. And therein lies the merit of J Charles Piazzi Smyth. He at least made the world aware that the Great Pyramid is a giant enigma.
Regrettably, his efforts were in some respects too successful. A Scotsman named Robert Menzies took their theories to a logical extreme. If God was the author of the Great Pyramid as well as of the Bible, then it should obviously be regarded as a book in stone; all that remained was to decipher its message, which must be conveyed in terms of measurements. The way from the entrance to the three chambers must be a symbolic journey through time, probably with pyramid inches representing years, including all the great events of the world’s history, among them the flood, the Exodus, the Crucifixion and the Second Coming. The beginning of the Grand Gallery marked the birth of Christ, and, counting back from there, it could easily be verified that the world had been created in 4,004 BC, just as Archbishop Ussher had declared in 1650.
Smyth had worked out that the Pole Star, which was then Alpha Draconis, had shone straight through the entrance and down the descending passage when the Great Pyramid was build in 2,100 BC (missing the actual date by about four centuries). Menzies declared that there should be some indication on the walls of the Descending Passage marking the year, and was delighted when Smyth told him of two scored lines on either side of the passage at the spot that marked 2,100 BC – and so was confirmed in his peculiar form of insanity.
Within a decade or so, the Great Pyramid became the happy hunting ground of religious cranks all over the world. In Boston, a society was formed to alter modern measuring units to those used by the Pyramid’s builders, and was supported by President Garfield. In England, a book called Miracle in Stone (1877)2 by Joseph Seiss became a bestseller. A preacher named Charles Taze Russell became a convert, and founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the basis of Pyramid prophecies, in 1891 announcing that the Battle of Armageddon would occur in 1914 and that all Jehovah’s Witnesses would thereafter live forever on a ‘paradise earth’. When 1914 failed to bring the end of the world, thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses left the movement in disillusionment, and Russell had difficulty convincing those that remained that Christ had returned, but invisibly. When Russell died in 1916, his successor ‘Judge’ Rutherford decided to discard pyramidology; he explained that Russell had been deluded by Satan, realising the danger of setting a definite date for the end of the world when his own choice, 1925, passed without incident.
The beliefs of an early pyramidologist, John Taylor, that the British were the ten lost tribes of Israel led to another highly successful movement, the British Israelites, whose Bible was a vast work by David Davidson called The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message (1924),3 which announced that the ‘final tribulation’ of the Anglo-Saxon race would last from 1928 to 1936, and that Armageddon would occur in 1953.
According to the British Israelites, another date that would be of immense significance to the world was 16 September 1936. The only newsworthy item that day was that the Duke of Windsor told his prime minister that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson, an interesting but not world-shaking event.
A few ‘pyramidiots’ (as a modern writer has called them) were perhaps a small price to pay for the tremendous impetus given to the study of the pyramids by Taylor and Smyth. They had made a very serious point: the mathematical and technological knowledge revealed by the Great Pyramid seems far too sophisticated for ‘primitives’ who tilled their fields with pointed sticks. If Taylor and Smyth had lived a century later, they might well have preferred the ‘ancient astronaut’ alternative to the idea that the Great Pyramid’s builders worked under the direct guidance of God. Anyone who fi
nds either view unacceptable must be driven to the only other conclusion: that the Egyptians knew far more than historians supposed.
John West expressed the problem in Serpent in the Sky, summarising the views of Schwaller de Lubicz:
Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order of refinement and sophistication than modern scholars will acknowledge. The whole of Egyptian civilisation was based upon a complete and precise understanding of universal laws… Moreover, every aspect of Egyptian knowledge seems to have been complete at the very beginning. The sciences, artistic and architectural techniques and the hieroglyphic system show virtually no sign of a period of ‘development’; indeed, many of the achievements of the earlier dynasties were never surpassed or even equalled later on.4
West argues that it would have been virtually impossible for Egypt to have reached such a degree of sophistication in a mere 500 years – the time Egyptian civilisation is supposed to have been founded. It is rather, West says, as if the first motor car had been a modern Rolls-Royce.
Scholars in the ancient world should have realised that the builders of the Great Pyramid knew far more than ‘primitives’ were supposed to know – at least, after Agatharchides of Cnidus revealed that the base of the Great Pyramid is a known percentage of the earth’s circumference. But at that time no one knew if this calculation was correct; in fact, no one was interested, for most people thought the earth was flat. By the time of Charles Piazzi Smyth, everyone knew the earth was round, so his revelation that the Egyptians knew the value of pi left Victorian scientists in little doubt that the Egyptians had achieved a sophisticated level of mathematics.
The Great Pyramid continues to offer unsolved mysteries. One modern student, Christopher P. Dunn, consulted a manager of the Indiana Limestone Institute about how long it would take their thirty-three quarries to cut and deliver around 2.5 million blocks, each weighing between 6 and 30 tons, and was told that, using modern rock-cutting machinery, it would take twenty-seven years. But no one has worked out how the builders moved these blocks up a 52-degree slope. Herodotus says that they had a machine made of short wooden planks to lift the blocks, but since the flat top of the ‘step’ is often as little as 6 inches wide this is not practicable. A better suggestion is that they built a gently sloping ramp and heaved the blocks up it with ropes, which would have worked well for the lower courses, but as the Great Pyramid got higher the ramp would have to become longer and steeper and of sufficiently solid construction not to collapse under its own weight. It would need to be about a mile long, and would require as much stone as the structure itself. A modern builder would need a crane more than 500 feet high, with a boom of 400 feet – there is no crane of that size in the world today, and one certainly did not exist in ancient Egypt.
Another problem is the time factor. Herodotus was told that the Great Pyramid took twenty years to build, which would have involved placing about 340 blocks in position every day, an impossible task without heavy lifting machinery. A more reasonable estimate would be thirty-four blocks a day, but this would mean that it took 200 years to build.
Christopher P. Dunn, the British toolmaker and engineer already mentioned, has examined the Great Pyramid from the engineering point of view. His study led him to conclude – in an article called ‘Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt’ – that the Egyptian pyramids and temples ‘reveal glimpses of a civilisation that was technically more advanced than is generally believed’. Examining blocks that had been hollowed out with some kind of drill in the Valley Temple, in front of the Sphinx, he noted that the marks left in the hole showed that it was cutting into the rock at a rate of one-tenth of an inch for every revolution of the drill, and he concludes that this could not be achieved by hand. A hole drilled into a rock made of quartz and feldspar provided another strange observation. The drill had cut faster through the quartz than the feldspar, even though quartz is harder than feldspar. Dunn points out that modern ultrasonic machining depends on vibration, like the chisel of a pneumatic drill, which vibrates up and down. An ultrasonic drill vibrates tens of thousands of times faster. Quartz crystals, which can be used to produce ultrasonic sound, also respond to ultrasonic vibrations, which would enable an ultrasonic drill to cut through them faster. Does this suggest that there were ultrasonic drills in ancient Egypt?
The notion sounds ridiculous, yet the mystery of the Great Pyramid led Sir Flinders Petrie, the grand old man of Egyptology, to suggest an idea almost as strange. In his standard work The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883),5 he casually threw off the suggestion that the sarcophagus, whose external volume is precisely twice that of its internal volume, was cut with an 8-foot saw that was made of bronze with diamonds in the cutting edge. No such saws, of course, have ever been found; neither have the drills that Petrie thought were used to hollow out the sarcophagus.
Christopher Dunn’s close study of the Pyramid made him aware that its precision seems almost superhuman. He asked an engineer who worked at stone cutting in the quarries of Indiana what tolerances they worked to (i.e., how much inaccuracy did they allow themselves). He was told ‘pretty close’, which was defined as ‘a quarter of an inch’. When told that the blocks of the Great Pyramid were cut to 0.01 tolerance, the stonecutter was incredulous.6
In a TV programme Dunn produced a device used by engineers to test that a metal surface has been machined to a thousandth of an inch, and applied it to the sacred stone called the Benben, in the Cairo Museum. He shone a powerful torch on one side of the metal, and looked on the other side to see if any gleam of light showed through. There was none whatever.
Petrie’s examination of the casing stones of the Great Pyramid showed that they had been cut according to highly accurate engineering tolerances. But why should the Pyramid’s builders have worked to machine-shop tolerances rather than those of a construction site, as you would expect? And even more baffling: how? What tools were used to cut granite or limestone with such precision? This is the kind of precision we would expect of an optician, but not a builder.
In trying to fashion a theory that might explain the purpose of the Great Pyramid, Dunn was struck by a comment made by Colonel Howard-Vyse, one of the early explorers who had discovered four of the five ‘relieving chambers’ above the King’s Chamber. Howard-Vyse had noted that when he stood in the King’s Chamber, he was able to hear people speaking in the subterranean chamber, indicating that the acoustics of the Great Pyramid are as perfect as those of a concert hall.
TV producer Boris Said – who, together with John West, made the documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx – had said in the promotion material of another documentary:
Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in chambers above the King’s Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction. The notes from an F sharp chord… according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley’s tests show that these frequencies are present in the King’s Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 12/ Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the neck of a bottle.7
He went on to mention that a producer of Native American sacred flutes, created to ‘serenade’ Mother Earth, tunes them to the key of F sharp.
This notion that Egyptian pyramids – and temples – are tuned to sound has become increasingly widespread. In November 1998 I joined a trip to Egypt organised by Robert Bauval in which John West acted as tour guide. Together with a number of other writers – among them Robert Temple, Michael Baigent, Yuri Stoyanov and Ralph Ellis – we looked at many Egyptian temples, including Ka
rnak and Luxor, Dendera, Edfu and the Oseirion at Abydos. Again and again we noted their acoustic properties as members of the group intoned notes in closed chambers, or even in doorways. It was as if the stone was a giant tuning fork.
In 1998 scientists at Southampton University discovered that the stones of Stonehenge also have acoustic properties and would have acted as gigantic amplifiers for drums during festivals, their flat surfaces accumulating and then deflecting sound over a wide area.
It was in the immense Temple of Horus, at Edfu, midway between Luxor and Aswan, that my attention was drawn to the importance of sound. An Egyptian historian named Emil Shaker showed me some hieroglyphics on the wall close to the sanctuary, pointing out how they specified the number of times the temple ritual had to be performed. In this case it was three. He explained: ‘It is no use performing the ritual two or four times. It will not work. If it says three times, it means three times.’ This ritual, like all religious rituals, involves chanting a hymn to the sun and presenting the god with offerings.
I asked, ‘But what does the ritual actually do?’
‘It activates the temple.’
‘You mean like switching on a light?’ I said, giving voice to the first image that came into my head.
‘Exactly like switching on a light,’ said Emil.
I found this notion fascinating – a ritual involving chanting could ‘activate’ a temple. Emil made it sound as if it was as automatic as switching on a light, or going through a certain sequence of actions to send an email.
According to my guidebook, John West’s Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt,8 the Edfu temple was built over a period of 200 years, between 257 and 57 BC, but part of it dated back to the pyramid age. It is built, of course, on ‘hallowed ground’.