Page 321 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

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, the effect was of intense and overwhelming
4
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 chocolate-
coloured granite containing peculiarly hard granules of feldspar, quartz
and mica, was the lidless coffer presumed to have been the sarcophagus
of Khufu. Its interior measurements were 6 feet 6.6 inches in length, 2
5
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 width an inch too wide, incidentally, for it
6
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. Such a precise
8
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.
Livio Catullo Stecchini in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 322. Stecchini gives slightly
8
more accurate measures than those of Petrie (quoted) for the internal and external
dimensions of the pyramid.

319