Page 56 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2015

56 The Riddle of the Great Pyramid
Giza: The riddle of the
great pyramid
The two of the Pharaoh Cheops is the most
extraordinary sepulchre of all time. How was it
built and why? Does it have a further, more
secret purpose? What is significant about the
dimensions of the Great Pyramid?
The long inclined leading to the plateau
of Giza near Cairo, takes the visitor back almost
5000 years in history. At first, and from a
distance, that repair bids look like sharp-edged
mountains. As one approaches them they seem
out momentarily less impressive. But close two,
their size finally strikes home: they are huge.
Half the world is stone, the other half sky.
The largest is the Great Pyramid of King
Cheops - Cheops is the Greek form of Khufu,
the ruler’s Egyptian the name. The middle one
belongs to King Chepre, or Khafra, and is only
slightly smaller. The smallest is the tomb of
King Mycerinus , or Menkaure.
Tombs of the living the gods
Egypt came into being as a connected series of
settlements along the Nile Valley. These
eventually formed to kingdoms of Upper and
Lower Egypt, toward the head of the mouth of
the Nile respectively. Between 3100 and 2700
BC, the two kingdoms were made one under a
single king whose palace was at Heliopolis,
roughly where Cairo is today.
These Egyptian Kings font of
themselves as living gods who would one day
leave the earth to join the other gods, and
particularly the sun god, Ra, who journeyed
across the sky each day in his flaming ‘Boat of
Millions of Years’ and then voyaged through the
perilous darkness of the Underworld buying
night. In readiness for the afterlife, the king has stones and supervising their placement. Almost
built themselves dwellings on the edge of the
desert plateau, strategically placed between the
life-giving Nile and the western horizon where
the sun disappeared each night.
At first, these ‘houses of death’ were
actual palaces with public rooms and storage
chambers. All around where the smaller house-
tombs for the courtiers who would continue to
serve the king once they, too, had passed on.
But in the period after 2700 BC, King Zoser
built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara to the south of
Giza. Perhaps his first step-step pyramid
represented, literally, a staircase to the sky. The pyramids, the Great Pyramid has corridors and
following Kings developed the smooth-faced
shape that Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus
brought two full of grandeur. This, the great age
appear amid building, lasted throughout the Old
Kingdom (2700-2200 BC), and the Great
Pyramid was probably completed around 2500
BC.
And later eras, kings would plan great
temples, dig tombs in the Valley of the Kings
where Tutankhamun was buried, and pile up
smaller pyramids of mud bricks faced with
stone. But the Great Pyramid of Giza, Akhet
Khufu, ‘The Splendour of Khufu’, was the finest
of them all.
Extraordinary engineering
How did the ancient Egyptians managed to
assemble such a vast aggregation of blocks into
a building 5.3 hectares (13 acres) in the area,
possibly incorporating complex mathematical
formulations? Unlike many other aspects of
ancient Egyptian Society, there are no
contemporary records to help answer the
question.
The architects must have been well
versed in the study of science, for the
proportions and measurements of the pyramid
show astonishing accuracy. The four sides of
the pyramid or oriented toward the cardinal
points of the compass to within less than a 10th
of a degree. The lengths of the shortest and
longest sides differ by 20 cm (8 inches) in all.
The pavement around the Great Pyramid is level
II within less than 2.5 cm (1 inch). Such
precision must have been achieved with the
simplest of measuring rods and cords, aligned
by observations of the sun and stars, and perhaps
the use of water levels for setting horizontals.
But just how it was all brought together is still a
matter of conjecture.
All the stone for the core of the pier amid the Great Pyramid was intended to be. If it was
came out from the plateau of Giza itself: the
Sphinx, a representation of King Chephren, sits
in what was one of the lime stone quarries. The
fine facing stone of Tura limestone came from
quarries on the east bank of the Nile. Most of
this facing stone has long since been stripped
off, vanishing into other ancient projects,
probably including some of the building of
Cairo. Granite for chambers within the pyramid
itself came from Aswan, 800 km (500 mi)
farther up the Nile.
From start to finish, the Great Pyramid
probably took between 20 and 30 years to build.
During that time an estimated 4000 masons and
builders were continually at work, shaping
certainly, tens of thousands more came to join
them each year during the months when the Nile
flooded and work on the land was impossible.
As a result, huge numbers of people had to be
organized, fed and housed. Even strikes may
have occurred. Indeed, there is a report of
workers on later royal tombs laying down their
tools when the promised bread and onions did
not arrive.
Inside the Great Pyramid
Unlike any of the other ancient Egyptian
chambers within its structure. An entrance just
above the base in the centre of the north side
leads to a small passageway sloping down into a
chamber of rock beneath the pyramid. From this
passageway, another leads upward, first to a
small chamber, now called the Queen’s
Chamber, and then did to the Grand Gallery.
This is an internal sloping passageway 47.5 m
(156ft) long and 8.5 m (28ft) high. The Grand
Gallery in turn leads to the largest chamber, the
Kings Chamber, that contains a sarcophagus-
like coffer.
For 3000 years the inside of the pyramid
remained untouched. And when Abdullah al
Manum and his men discovered an entrance in
AD 820, they found the ascending passage had
been made impassable by large granite plugs.
After forcing their way around, they reached the
Kings Chamber only to find the king’s
sarcophagus empty.
To this day, no one knows for sure what
not a tomb to house the body of King Cheops,
what was that for? Who blocked the
passageway, how and why? Because such
questions seem impossible to answer with any
degree of certainty, all those inclined to mystical
speculation have tried their hand at explanation.
The Great Pyramid is, in a sense, monument to
the fact that any effect of bureaucracy could
flourish more than 4500 years ago.
Accountants, farmers, builders, politicians and
all kinds of practical people can look on the
Great Pyramid with just as much awe as
mystics. It is, after all, the only one of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World to survive to
present day. []