Page 315 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

All was confusion. All was paradox. All was mystery.

Instrument

The Grand Gallery had its mysteries too. Indeed it was among the most
mysterious of all the internal features of the Great Pyramid. Measuring 6
feet 9 inches wide at the floor, its walls rose vertically to a height of 7
feet 6 inches; above that level seven further courses of masonry (each
one projecting inwards some 3 inches beyond the course immediately
below it) carried the vault to its full height of 28 feet and its culminating
width of 3 feet 5 inches.
23
Remember that structurally the Gallery was required to support, for
ever, the multi-million ton weight of the upper three-quarters of the
largest and heaviest stone monument ever built on planet earth. Was it
not quite remarkable that a group of supposed ‘technological primitives’
had not only envisaged and designed such a feature but had completed it
successfully, more than 4500 years before our time?
Even if they had made the Gallery only 20 feet long, and had sought to
erect it on a level plane, the task would have been difficult enough—
indeed extraordinarily difficult. But they had opted to erect this
astonishing corbel vault at a slope of 26°, and to extend its length to a
staggering 153 feet. Moreover, they had made it with perfectly dressed
24
limestone megaliths throughout—huge, smoothly polished blocks carved
into sloping parallelograms and laid together so closely and with such
rigorous precision that the joints were almost invisible to the naked eye.
The pyramid builders had also included some interesting symmetries in
their work. For example, the culminating width of the Gallery at its apex
was 3 feet 5 inches while its width at the floor was 6 feet 9 inches. At the
exact centre of the floor, running the entire length of the Gallery—and
sandwiched between flat-topped masonry ramps each 1 foot 8 inches
wide—there was a sunken channel 2 feet deep and 3 feet 5 inches wide.
What could have been the purpose of this slot? And why had it been
necessary for it to mirror so precisely the width and form of the ceiling,
which also looked like a ‘slot’ sandwiched between the two upper courses
of masonry?
I knew that I was not the first person to have stood at the foot of the
Grand Gallery and to have been overtaken by the disorienting sense of
being ‘in the inside of some enormous instrument of some sort.’ Who
25
was to say that such intuitions were completely wrong? Or, for that
matter, that they were right? No record as to function remained, other
than in mystical and symbolic references in certain ancient Egyptian

Ibid., p. 93; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.
23
24 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 93.
25 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 115.

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