Page 279 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

steeper than this by any normal means. If a lesser gradient had been
11
chosen, the ramp would have had to be even more absurdly and
disproportionately massive.
The problem was that mile-long ramps reaching a height of 480 feet
could not have been made out of ‘bricks and earth’ as Edwards and other
Egyptologists supposed. On the contrary, modern builders and architects
had proved that such ramps would have caved in under their own weight
if they had consisted of any material less costly and less stable than the
limestone ashlars of the Pyramid itself.
12
Since this obviously made no sense (besides, where had the 8 million
cubic metres of surplus blocks been taken after completion of the work?),
other Egyptologists had proposed the use of spiral ramps made of mud
brick and attached to the sides of the Pyramid. These would certainly
have required less material to build, but they would also have failed to
reach the top. They would have presented deadly and perhaps
13
insurmountable problems to the teams of men attempting to drag the big
blocks of stone around their hairpin corners. And they would have
crumbled under constant use. Most problematic of all, such ramps would
have cloaked the whole pyramid, thus making it impossible for the
architects to check the accuracy of the setting-out during building.
14
But the pyramid builders had checked the accuracy of the setting out,
and they had got it right, because the apex of the pyramid was poised
exactly over the centre of the base, its angles and its corners were true,
each block was in the correct place, and each course had been laid down
level—in near-perfect symmetry and with near-perfect alignment to the
cardinal points. Then, as though to demonstrate that such tours-de-force
of technique were mere trifles, the ancient master-builders had gone on
to play some clever mathematical games with the monument’s
dimensions, presenting us, for example, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-
three, with an accurate use of the transcendental number pi in the ratio
of its height to its base perimeter. For some reason, too, it had taken
15
their fancy to place the Great Pyramid almost exactly on the 30th parallel
at latitude 29° 58’ 51”. This, as a former astronomer royal of Scotland
once observed, was ‘a sensible defalcation from 30°’, but not necessarily
in error:

For if the original designer had wished that men should see with their body, rather
than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at
an altitude before them of 30°, he would have had to take account of the refraction
of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at

11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 Ibid., p. 13.
13 Ibid., p. 125-6. Failure to reach the top would be because spiral ramps and linked
scaffolds overlap and exceed the space available long before arrival at the summit.
Ibid., p. 126.
14
15 See Chapter Twenty-three; The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 219; Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p.
139.

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