The purpose of these imaginary missives from the desk of the Overseer of All the King’s Works is to give the reader an idea of the amount of planning, materials, and manpower involved not only in building the Great Pyramid, but in preparation for the work itself.  There were mines and quarries to be opened, a fully functional workers’ city to be constructed, and an entire nation to be mobilized.

In many ways this is a re-introduction to the Hemienu to Houdin series, but it is also intended to be a stand-alone monologic narrative (fancy-speak for letters from just one person that tell a story) of how Hemienu initiated the project that would occupy all of Egypt for more than two decades.  Methods and materials, labor and logistics, tools and tasks, they are all here for your evaluation, along with a short annotated bibliography at the end.

Note:  The names used, with the exception of the Grand Vizier himself, are invented but not without some forethought (the Overseer of the Expedition to the Sinai to open the copper mines, for instance, is named Biah-Ahky, which translates to copper miner), and the titles and positions they hold do have their historical counterparts. 

Letter 1:  The Selection of the Building Site

From the Greatest of the Five of the House of Thoth, Chief Justice, Grand Vizier and Overseer of All the King’s Works, Hemienu, Holder of the King’s Seal, to the overseers, administrators, and nomarchs of the Two Lands:  Life, Prosperity, Health!

All of Upper and Lower Egypt Rejoice!  A place has been chosen for the pyramid complex of our pharaoh, Khufu, May He Live!  May He Prosper!  May He Be Healthy!  The pyramid where our king shall rest in body will be called Akhet Khufu—Khufu on the Horizon.

Hemienu and his entourage would have sailed the Nile in a more luxuriously appointed barge than this one, from the tomb of Vizier Mereruka, but the scale was probably about the same (Photo by Keith Payne)

Many of you have travelled with me the length of the Nile and have surveyed numerous sites, providing good counsel.  Many days and nights have we held court on the land and on my barge, and many passionate cases have been tendered.  Your service to our king will be remembered by all people, for all time.

I have decided against Saqqara and Dashur and have chosen instead the site in the north, at Rostau.  

I have good reasons for this choice.  First, there is a vast quantity of good yellow limestone there from which to build the inner structures of the pyramid and temples.  Second, there is a gentle slope which begins in the low area, suitable for a quay, and which connects the best location for the main quarry to the top of the plateau.  A donkey released at the summit will follow this same natural ramp down to an easy path to the Nile.  Donkeys have uncanny judgment in these matters and we should heed his guidance.

Of equal consideration are the plateau’s qualities of expanse and orientation.  It is an elevated plane with room enough for at least three, possibly more, large pyramids and numerous precincts for cemeteries.  Its elevation and orientation will make these monuments visible from Saqqara and Dashur and provide a desirable view when approached from the capital at Memphis.  In particular, I have decided upon the site that we identified as the lesser quarry, on the northeast extreme of the plateau.  This location is not the highest, but I have good reasons for this choice as well. 

The Pyramids of Abu Sir and Giza as viewed from Saqqara (Photo by Gaspa)

By constructing the first pyramid at the northeast corner, the natural ramp formed by the slope is left open to allow future building projects on the plateau.  Building on the highest point first would block access to the northeast corner.  To make the best use of the space, the plateau should be developed in the northeast first, with successive pharaohs building their pyramids along a southwest trajectory.  This will assure that the natural ramp remains open to future construction on the summit.

Building the pyramid within the lesser quarry is advantageous in other ways as well, not the least of which is 147 setat of limestone that needn’t be transported once cut.  Another advantage is the lay of the land, which slopes upward to the west.  When the outline of the pyramid is leveled, the elevated section inside the perimeter will be left intact.  By shaping this hill to fit within the construction, one tenth of the pyramid’s core will already be complete.

The main quarry at the bottom of the slope holds another 176 setat of good limestone, which together with the northeast quarry will provide more than enough blocks to construct the greatest pyramid complex ever built. 

All of Upper and Lower Egypt:  Unite for our pharaoh, Son of Re, Khufu, May He Live!  May He Prosper!  May He Be Healthy!

Letter 2:  Expedition to Open the Sinai Copper Mines

To Iahbty-Semyt, Administrator of the Eastern Desert, and to Biah-Ahky, Overseer of the Expedition to Sinai, Peace upon your goings!

There can be no doubt, Khufu on the Horizon is the greatest project ever undertaken by the people of Egypt, but this great work will require more resources than we have on hand.  There is enough copper for chisels and other tools to begin operations, but as work progresses we will have need of much more than we have now.  By way of investment, I have apportioned such supplies as you will require to lead a mining expedition to the Sinai.

Copper picks, saws, and drilling tubes have been made available, along with the powdered quartzite needed to make the drills and saws cut.  I call this an investment because these resources are in need all throughout Egypt as the great work begins.  In return, the pharaoh will need 840,000 deben of processed copper over the course of your operations.  Your work will be hard, but your afterlife will hold every luxury.

To avoid the transport of unnecessary waste materials, all smelting will take place at the mines.  You will be provided with mud brick to build the kilns and granite pounders for crushing the ore.  Moulds will be provided for pouring the copper into 50 deben ingots.  A supply train will make regular deliveries of wood for the kilns and will return with your finished ingots.

The number of donkeys and carts, baskets, and other equipment required has been left to your expert discretion, you need only inform the Overseer of Provisions of your needs.  A company of soldiers will be attached to your expedition to protect you in your journey, and will remain with you throughout operations to defend against the wild people of the desert.

The tools and methods used by these New Kingdom metal workers to smelt ore were largely the same as those used by Hemienu's workers (Graphic by Achille-Constant-Theodore Emile Prisse d'Avennes)

For this expedition you will select fifty of your best miners, no slaves or prisoners.  Your route will take you across the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea, where ships will bear you to the Sinai.  From there you will continue on donkey to the Plains of Markha and the mines at Wadi Maghara, where the greenest veins of ore—the easiest to smelt—are to be found. 

If in the course of your work turquoise is discovered and may be extracted with ease, please do so, but not at the expense of mining the ore.

In addition to reopening the copper mines at Wadi Maghara, you are to assemble missions to Sewew and the Faiyum to cull the dolerite which is abundant in those lands, and which is vital to the operation of the granite quarry at Aswan. 

It is imperative that your expeditions depart as soon as your equipment, supplies, and provisions may be gathered.  The quarries at Rostau and Tura require more copper as soon as you can deliver it, and the work at Aswan must not be delayed if the granite is to be delivered on schedule. 

May Isis watch over you.

Letter 3: Recruitment of the Unskilled and Semi-Skilled Labor Force

To Ahwet-Tepey, Administrator of the Corvée, Life and Peace!

An important task is given you, for you are my eyes and voice throughout the Two Lands.  You are to send recruiters to every nome, from Theb-Ka in the Delta to Ta-Seti at Aswan.  These recruiters will identify those men whose privilege will be to pay their bak debt working to raise Khufu on the Horizon from the Plateau of Rostau.  All the strongest men of the realm are summoned to pit their endurance and athleticism against one another for the glory of the king and the honor of their towns and families!

These recruiters will arrange the schedule of rotation and provide the men with their work assignments.  Men will be needed for the quarries at Aswan and Tura, as well as the main quarry at Rostau and the lesser quarry where the pyramid will be raised.  Men will also be needed to provide supporting services to the great work, both at home and in the quarries.

There will be jobs for hearty men of few skills who will work under direct supervision.  For these jobs select men who are stout of body and spirited in nature.  These men they will be working in teams with others from their families and villages, competing in their labor with men from all over Egypt for glory and honor.  Tell these men they will travel, gain experience and character, and will come to be all they are capable of being.  And they will eat better every day in service to the king than they do on festival days at home!

When selecting these men bear in mind the sort of labor they will be doing.  Their backs will move the levers that free the blocks in the quarries, pull the laden sleds, and load, unload, and arrange the great blocks of Khufu on the Horizon. Their arms will clear the debris and bust rocks for filler material.  They will grind gypsum and pour mortar.  Their legs will carry water for the work, wood for the fires, and tools to and from the sharpeners and the stonecutters.  They will work in quarries, on docks, and on the pyramid itself.

Teams from the corvée pulling a colossal statue on a great sled. Most of the stone moved throughout Giza would have been on much smaller sleds, but the granite beams quarried at Aswan would have been pulled on sleds not unlike this one (Drawn by Faucher-Gudin)

Of course, some men will need to remain behind on their farms to do their part for Khufu on the Horizon.  These men will till the earth, fish the Nile, and tend their flocks and herds as they have always done.  Their bak debt will be paid on hooves, in barrels, and in grain sacks.  Cattle and goats, and the drovers to deliver them.  Fish and fowl.  Emmer and Barley, garlic and leeks.  Onions, radishes, cucumbers, dates, honey, and figs.  Salt and herbs.  All for the glory of Egypt, all for the glory of the Pharaoh, all for the sake of Ma’at!

Your recruiters must also seek men with useful talents or the ability to learn quickly.  Unlike the unskilled men, who will be constantly told come here and go there, these men will have regular assignments such as positioning levers, rough shaping stone, and sharpening tools.  They will operate machines which have been designed to lift and turn the laden sleds.  They will cook the meals in the barracks and assist the bakers and brewers. 

A Young brewery worker from the Old Kingdom (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

These are coveted positions to which they will return for their season of bak labor year after year, with prospects for advancement.  They are opportunities to learn a trade, and a clever man may find himself apprenticed to a master.  For this reason your recruiters should know that bribes and nepotism will not be tolerated.  Any man who corrupts this great work will find himself and his family made destitute, his lands seized, and his place in the afterlife forfeit.

Your men need not worry about skilled artisans and craftsmen, as these will be recruited by their nomarchs and overseers.  Your recruiters need only concern themselves with mobilizing the main body of the corvée to the pharaoh’s service. 

Arrange shifts and rotations of the corvée, send the right workers where they are needed most, and coordinate with the Royal Treasury and the Overseer of Provisions to assure that the granaries and storehouses remain stocked.

It is important for your men to work with haste, but of especial importance that those who will be recruiting from Lower Egypt, particularly the nomes of Khensu, Ka-Khem, Heq-At, and lower Aneb-Hetch—those nomes closest to Rostau—immediately send workers to the plateau to begin construction of the city where the permanent residents and rotating labor force will dwell. 

This city will grow over time, but even in Year One there will be need for barracks, granaries, bakeries, breweries, and other facilities necessary to support the great work.

I wish you peace!  May you live, prosper, and be healthy!

Letter 4:  Recruitment of the Skilled Labor Force

To the Nomarchs and Overseers of Upper and Lower Egypt—Life, Prosperity, and Health!

Let word go out to all nomes and territories—men and women of wisdom and ability, your skills are required at the main site and in the quarries for Khufu on the Horizon! 

The mudbrick buildings and narrow streets of the workers’ city (Graphic courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

To all the nomarchs:  send proclamations throughout your domains saying that Pharaoh Khufu (May He Live!  May He Prosper!  May He be Healthy!) requires the immediate services of skilled tradesmen of all professions!

Potters, weavers, metallurgists and smiths, woodworkers, carpenters, drovers, millers, butchers, bakers, and brewers–come to Rostau to serve your bak debt.  If you choose to remain, opportunities abound for you to make your fortunes.  There will be commerce and industry the year round.

A worker’s city is to be constructed at Rostau straight away—barracks, administrative buildings, granaries, bakeries, breweries, work yards, smithies, and foundries.  There will be permanent dwellings for those who bring their families to settle, and your king encourages this heartily!  Already the workers gather to build this city, to labor in the quarry, and to cut the foundations for Khufu on the Horizon!  Those craftsmen and artisans who are first to arrive will have the most desirable jobs, the finest housing, the best in all things!

Mudbrick was used for the worker’s city because there was a need to build as quickly and cheaply as possible (Graphic by Achille-Constant-Theodore Emile Prisse d'Avennes)

To Sha-Asha, the Overseer of Craftsmen, there is immediate need at Rostau for journeymen of all professions—mudbrick makers, thatchers, carpenters, wood workers, potters, smiths, rope makers and weavers.  There is need in the quarries for men skilled in the working of copper and the making of tools.  Everywhere there is demand for basket makers.  There are ships to be built and sails to be made.  All sons and daughters of Egypt owe bak, but those who have a trade can truly better their lives.  

To Henem-Meha, Overseer of the King’s Quarries and Inspector of Masons, there is need at Rostau to build containment walls for the workers’ city, to construct a quay at the foot of the plateau, and to pave the access road from the quay to the northeast quarry.  There will also be need for a canal to be dug from the Nile to the quay, a distance of more than half an iter.  Plan for the canal to be at least 12,380 cubits in length and wide and deep enough to support a barge carrying granite beams equal in weight to well over 2 million deben of copper.

In addition, operations are to commence at the quarry at Tura, eight miles upstream from Rostau, from which the fine white limestone for the pyramid and temple facings will be cut and dressed.  Work is also to begin at the granite quarry at Aswan.

There is need in all places for surveyors, stone cutters, breakers and ledgemen, masons, dredgers, drillers, pounders, and grinders.  Your teams will be provided with related specialists, such as carpenters and smiths, as they require.  The unskilled and semi-skilled help are being dispatched.

To Qai-Sesh, Magistrate, Overseer of the Scribes, and Overseer of the Priests of Re, to you I bid Life, Prosperity, and Health!  In all work centers, but especially at Rostau, there is need of architects and master surveyors, engineers, overseers of labor, priests to advise and bless construction and to sanctify grounds, astrologers, lawyers, physicians and herbalists, counters and inspectors, logisticians, provisioners, and scribes of all varieties.

With all haste let word go out!  As the Nile rises in Akhet, let all Egypt rise to the great work of Khufu on the Horizon!  As the crops emerge in Peret, let the wise and skilled of Upper and Lower Egypt emerge and come forth to the pharaoh’s service!  As grain is harvested in Shemu, nomarchs and overseers:  gather the bounty of Egypt’s craftsmen, artisans, and experts in all things!

Letter Five:  The Opening of the Quarry at Tura

To Iner-Sedjenajeninmer, Quarry Master and Overseer of the Expedition at Tura, Long Life!

Soon the professional craftsmen, semi-skilled workmen, and main force of no less than 500 men will begin arriving at Tura for the commencement of work.  The luminous white limestone of Tura shines in the sun like the surface of the Nile, unlike the dull and course yellow limestone of Rostau. 

For this reason the Tura limestone will be the finished outer facing of Khufu on the Horizon, as well as the mortuary and valley temples, ka and queens’ pyramids, and the finished causeway.  All of Khufu’s (Life!  Prosperity!  Health!) pyramid complex will shine like a diadem on the brow of Isis!

But those who say take leisure, that the outer casing stones will not be needed until the core is erected, are in serious error and know nothing of what my father Snefru (May He Have Life in the East!) achieved.  If the outer surface of a smooth-sided pyramid is not laid first, the corners will not meet at the top.  Small errors at the beginning grow to colossal failures in the end.  The angle and its maintenance are determined by the surface, not the core.  For these reasons, the limestone of Tura will be needed before the first course of Khufu on the Horizon can be laid.

This copper adze would have been used in woodwork, but the copper chisels used in the quarries and at the pyramid site would have looked similar (Original photo by Jon Bodsworth)

This need is compounded by the qualities of the limestone of Tura.  The limestone you will be working with is soft when it is first quarried and cuts easily in straight lines.  This makes extraction, precise shaping, and polishing very easy. 

But as soon as the surfaces are exposed to the air they begin to calcify and form a hard shell.  This increases their durability, but means that all shaping and polishing must be completed at the quarry before they are ever shipped.  This means, of course, that some blocks will sustain damage in transport, but these can be easily patched and mortared.

Dressing the blocks will require a high degree of exactitude.  To finish the stone before the surface hardens the workers will need to move fast.  You will be provided with enough copper to assure that as each chisel dulls there will be another to replace it.  Runners will be in constant motion, carrying away dulled tools and returning with sharpened ones.  Each tool will have to be reheated to be sharpened, so other runners will keep the fire of the smithies stoked.  Coordination of your workforce will be essential.

Cubit measuring rods such as these from the Eighteenth Dynasty tomb of Aperia would have been common tools in the quarries and at the pyramid construction site (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

As the blocks are cut, they must each be lined up side by side exactly as they will be installed on the pyramid.  Once the face is cut to a perfect angle of 14/11 seked, the angle of the pyramid, it must be polished with quartzite powder.  To assure an ideal fit, a toothless copper saw with quartzite grit will need to be passed between each block to perfect their sides to their one another.  

Each block will be numbered to ensure that it is placed correctly when installed.  By installing the outer layer of Tura limestone first, the surveyors and architects will be able to observe that all the angles are correct, which if your work is exact, they will be.  With the facing stones in place, a supporting layer of well calibrated Rostau limestone forty cubits thick will be erected behind them.  The internal ramp will be built into this sturdy layer.  The rough core filling, as well as all chambers, passageways, and some machinery necessary for construction, will be contained behind the support layer.

Building from within—Workers lever one of the Tura limestone blocks into place. Also depicted is the 20 meter-thick layer of local limestone which supported the internal ramp. Some of the rough core is represented in the upper-right corner (Graphic courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

Course by course, this is how Khufu on the Horizon will come into being.  Iner-Sedjenajeninmer, you have been chosen to oversee the work at Tura because of your qualifications, and the pharaoh is counting on you.  As you cut, shape, and perfect each numbered course of blocks, you will be essentially building the pyramid first at Tura and then shipping it to Rostau.  The rest of the pyramid will be built within what you provide.  It is imperative that you know this.  Great will be your reward, and you will dwell with the pharaoh forever.  Friend of the King, go in peace!

Letter Six:  The Opening of the Quarry at Aswan

To Emratab-Neb, Quarry Master and Overseer of the Expedition to Aswan, Prosperity!

A workforce of no less than 500 men, including quarry workers, supportive staff, and all manner of experts has been dispatched to Aswan.  Although we will not have need for granite until Year Twelve, work must begin immediately.  The qualities of the stone and the logistics required to deliver it to Rostau will make your work slow and tedious and even more reliant on the seasons than other quarry work.  Rest assured, all of these difficulties have been resolved, but your mastery and patience will be demanded in equal measure.  The pharaoh asks much of you, and great will be the glory.

An Aswan granite quarry at the site of the Unfinished Obelisk (Photo by Joe Pyrek)

The granite you will be quarrying is too hard for chisels, so expect a minimum of copper to be rationed to your operation.  Instead you will be receiving large quantities of dolerite, which is harder than the granite of Aswan.  Wooden wedges driven into natural cracks and those opened with dolerite mallets can be soaked with water, causing them to expand and free the stone.  Once extracted, the granite can be shaped into great beams with dolerite pounders.

A spherical dolerite pounder left behind in the Great Pyramid. These pounders were harder than the Aswan granite, which couldn’t be shaped with copper tools (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Dolerite is being collected by missions dispatched to Sewew and the Faiyum for that purpose.   Additionally, teams have been sent forth to the cataracts, where the Nile gives up dolerite shaped into spheres.  These special pounders will allow your most expert stone cutters to shape the hard granite into the specific forms needed for the great work.

These great beams will weigh up to 2 million deben [around 60 tons], some of them possibly more.  They will be used to protect vulnerable chambers within the pyramid, to bear and direct the pressure of incredible amounts of weight, and to span wide reaches with minimal support, where limestone would crack under its own mass.  They will likewise be used for structural purposes in the temples connected to Khufu on the Horizon.

You will have to quarry, shape, and ship more than 118 million deben [3,500 tons, give or take] of granite from Aswan before this great work is done, more than has been used in the entirety of Egypt’s past.  The beams will make the twenty-day journey down the Nile on mighty barges.  An expedition has been sent to Lebanon to acquire cedar for the manufacture of these barges, and the Overseer of Shipwrights and Chandlers, who has already begun work on the lesser barges for the Tura limestone, has the plans for these vessels at the ready.

Along with the other experts being sent to Aswan, you will receive a team of dredgers who will oversee the digging of trenches in the flood lands during the season of Shemu, when the plains are dry.  These trenches will be deep enough to hold the barges so that their decks are level with the land.  As granite beams are completed they will be loaded onto great sleds, wood for which is also being procured from Lebanon, and these sleds will be towed onto the barges and left there.  When the plains flood in the season of Akhet, the barges will be lifted by the Nile and carried to Rostau on the rapid currents of the inundation.

Granite beams lined up on the King’s Chamber level of the pyramid (Graphic courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systems)

As you can see, you will need every day of the following twelve years to maintain the schedule required by the construction.  The quarrying will be slow, and the dressing of the stone many times more so.  Beams should be shipped in the Akhet immediately following their completion, to be stored on site at Rostau. 

The center of all this effort, the primary reason for the great work, is the 10 by 20 cubits chamber in which the king’s body will rest.  Everything else, from the bottom of the causeway to the tip of pyramidion, is there to physically and spiritually support that sacred space. 

The granite beams you will be sending to the plateau are what make this sacred space possible.  Without them, the great work will fail.  You labor for the king, for Ma’at, and for the glory of all Egypt. 

Cut-away view of the King’s Chamber with its granite support beams. The physics required in constructing the 10 by 20 cubits burial chamber with its flat ceiling guided nearly every other decision made by Hemienu (Graphic courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

Annotated Bibliography

• Brier, Bob, and Jean-Pierre Houdin. The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

In this paradigm-shifter, Jean-Pierre Houdin and Bob Brier introduce M. Houdin’s theories about the construction of the Great Pyramid.  Written for a general audience, but without skimming over details or dumbing down the material, The Secret of the Great Pyramid is a detailed explanation of the internal ramp theory and the physical and circumstantial evidence in support of it.

The Secret of the Great Pyramid accomplishes the delightful achievement of being a book that is equally at home in your Works Cited page and your beach bag.  But don’t confuse its mass appeal with being light on scholarship.  I do not use the words paradigm-shifter lightly–Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work takes us around the corner and into the next phase of understanding how the monuments of the Memphis Necropolis, from Saqqara to Giza, were constructed, and The Secret of the Great Pyramid is your introduction to the future of comprehending the past.  A strong endorsement, I know..  And I stand behind every word!

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  Pyramid site selection (pp. 58-78); details of the Tura limestone (pp. 67-72); the granite quarry at Aswan (pp. 67-69); the workers’ city (pp. 64-66); logistics (pp. 70-1); Sinai mining operations (pp. 71-2).

• Hitchins, Derek K.  The Pyramid Builder’s Handbook.  Self-published via Lulu, 2010.

In The Pyramid Builder’s Handbook, Derek K. Hitchins sets out to explain how these massive national building projects were carried out in terms of systems engineering.  Hitchins brings his experience as an engineer to the task of exploring the history of pyramid development, logistics, and how the process of problem resolution utilized existing technologies and methods as well as led to new ones.

Hitchins is effective in debunking the construction theories involving external ramps only (pp. 141-5), but does not address the possibility of an internal ramp, much less a combined solution of an internal and external ramp.  He favors what he calls “rocking methods” (pp. 146-48), which involves balancing the stones on two facing wedges and inserting planks beneath each wedge while the block is “rocked” onto the other, thus raising the stone step by step. 

While this method could certainly work in raising individual blocks, and was possibly used in certain applications, compared to the internal ramp theory it seems to this writer to be tedious and impractical.  Hitchins is an expert in systems engineering and the Gentle Reader is encouraged to evaluate his arguments for him/herself.  But in the writing of this article, The Pyramid Builder’s Handbook was most useful in describing the corvée and the division of labor.

The Pyramid Builder’s Handbook is well written and presented in a textbook-style, with ample photographs and illustrations.  The material can be fairly technical at times, and general readers may find it more useful as a reference work, as opposed to something you will read from cover to cover.  While I do not agree with all of Hitchins’ conclusions, I found the book to be incredibly informative and packed with useful data and information. 

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  The corvée and labor organization (pp. 9-12, 123-26. 138-41); logistics and feeding the workforce (pp. 117-21); Khufu’s Pyramid in general (pp. 39-45).

• Houdin, Jean-Pierre.  Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed.  Giza:  Abydos Pub., 2010.

In Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed, Jean-Pierre Houdin expands on the materiel introduced in The Secret of the Great Pyramid, going into much greater detail regarding how all of the elements of both his theory and the pyramid itself fit together into a cohesive whole.  While still a highly readable work, Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed delves further into Hemienu’s simple solutions for the complex problems posed by the Great Work of building Khufu on the Horizon. 

Nearly every page is beautifully illustrated by the aesthetically pleasing and intricately detailed computer graphics produced by M. Houdin and Dassault Systemes (some of which appear in this article), who have graciously supported Jean-Pierre in every aspect of his work.  Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed leaves—literally—no stone unturned in showing how the Great Pyramid was constructed using tools and techniques known to have been in use during the period in question.

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  Details of the Tura limestone (p. 17); tools and logistics (pp. 19-21); requirements for the King’s Chamber (pp. 29, 53); building from within (pp. 33-35); pyramid site selection (p. 43); the corvée and workers’ city (pp. 45-47).

• Lehner, Mark. The Complete Pyramids. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Mark Lehner’s magnum opus of all things pyramidical, The Complete Pyramids covers the history and development not only of the pyramids themselves, but of the people who have studied them.  From the first instance of stacking one mastaba on top of another to the pyramids of Late Antiquity, Lehner explicates the design, function, and evolution of these complex tombs and “resurrection machines.”

The Complete Pyramids predates the publication of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work by a couple of years, so the internal ramp theory gets a grand total of one paragraph (p. 216) and is limited to the theories proposed by Dieter Arnold.  However, for his detailed treatment of the individual pyramids, the people who built them, and the tools they used, Lehner’s Complete Pyramids is required reading for every Egyptologist, amateur and professional alike. 

Heavily illustrated and presented in textbook format, The Complete Pyramids is as accessible to laypersons as it is useful to experts, which is to say, very.  Again, I have to admit my biases in favor of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work as being the most thorough and up to date treatment of pyramid construction, but it is difficult to fully appreciate the achievements of the latter without understanding the historical and cultural context which Lehner gives to the subject. 

As always, the Gentle Reader is encouraged to explore these books first hand and with a joyous heart and an open mind reach his or her own conclusions—and reading The Complete Pyramids is a joy.

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  Khufu’s Pyramid in general (pp. 108-19); pyramid site selection (pp. 12-13); the Giza Plateau (pp. 106-07); logistics (pp. 202-05); quarries (pp. 206-07); tools (210-11); the corvée (pp. 224-25); the workers’ city (pp. 230-33, 238-39); feeding the workforce (236-37).

• Lehner, Mark.  Et al.  AERAgram:  The Official Newsletter of Ancient Egypt Research Associates.  Vol. 1-10.

The Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) is the organization founded in 1985 by Mark Lehner and Matthew McCauley for the purpose of funding and facilitating the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, and extension of Lehner’s work with the Great Sphinx.  AERA’s primary focus in the last decade has been the excavation and analysis of the pyramid workers’ city at Giza.

AERAgram is the newsletter and biannual report of the work at the site and has been extremely valuable in understanding the corvée and the bak system, as well as how the various social strata of the pyramid city worked and lived.  All ten volumes of AERAgram, which are available in pdf format from the official AERA website, were consulted in writing this article.

• Siliotti, Alberto. Guide to the Pyramids of Egypt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997.

Alberto Siliotti’s Guide to the Pyramids of Egypt is an excellent introductory-level encyclopedia of pyramids, with hundreds of photographs, maps, and diagrams.  Siliotti’s large-format book has entries on all of the major pyramids and necropolises, with details of the temples and complexes associated with them.

While the photography provides a veritable tour of the architecture and landscape, I found the site and structure maps especially useful.  While clearly an entry level book, its thoroughness and layout makes it a handy reference for Egypt aficionados of all varieties.  This is one of those coffee table books you often see on the bargain tables and in the remainder bins, and if you come across a copy you will not regret picking it up.

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  Khufu’s Pyramid in general (pp. 48-53); the Giza Plateau (pp. 46-7); tools and construction (pp. 40-4); workers’ city (p. 45).

• Wilkinson, A. H. Toby.  Early Dynastic Egypt.  New York:  Routledge, 1999.

Early Dynastic Egypt explores how government and the world’s first bureaucracy developed in the earliest phase of Old Kingdom Period of Egypt, from Dynasties Zero to Three.  In this heavily researched work (nearly every paragraph in this book has at least one citation!), author Toby A. H. Wilkinson delves into the subjects of administration, foreign relations, and the establishment of urban centers with the thoroughness of a master who knows his subject and sincerely wants you to know it as well.

Wilkinson provides individual mini-biographies for every Egyptian ruler from the unnamed kings of Dynasty 0 through to Huni and Qahedjet.  The section on the establishment of authority (pp. 92-279) explains in detail how the royal administration developed, from the petty nobility to the creation of the vizier, and the growth (by necessity) of a complex system of titles and functionaries. 

Although the timeframe of Early Dynastic Egypt (just barely) predates the subject of this article, it was an invaluable resource in understanding the foundations of the political system and hierarchy in which Hemienu operated and how it was vital to mobilizing the nation toward the singular goal of building Khufu’s Pyramid.   It has been stated that while the Egyptians built the pyramids, the pyramids built Egypt.  In other words, the national political system emerged from the process of organizing the great work of pyramid construction.  Toby Wilkinson shows that the roots of the nation-state of Egypt actually reach considerably further back than the Fourth Dynasty.

For this article the following sections were especially helpful:  Administration and royal titles (pp. 92-126); Sinai mining operations (pp. 121-22; 139-46); mines and quarries in general (144-45); development of the corvée (pp. 94-95, 120); the institution of the vizier (116-118); administration of royal building projects (pp. 113-14).

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Graphics “Workers’ city”, “Building from within”, Granite beams qued”, and “King’s chamber” by Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systems and are used with their kind permission—all rights reserved.  Graphic “Contour Map of the Giza Plateau” by Jean-Pierre Houdin/Albert Ranson is copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin and Albert Ranson and is used with their kind permission—all rights reserved.  Photographs “The Pyramids of Dashur and Giza as viewed from Saqqara” by Gaspa, and “Aswan granite quarry” by Joe Pyrek are used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.  Photographs  “Dolerite Sphere”, “Cubit measuring rods”, “Old kingdom figure showing beer making”, “Basalt drill core”, and “Copper adze” by Jon Bodsworth have been kindly released by Mr. Bodsworth to the public domain.  Drawings “Stone-cutters finishing the dressing of limestone blocks”, “Colossal statue being dragged on a sled”, and “Measuring wheat and depositing it in the granaries“ drawn by Faucher-Gudin (Maspero, Gaston. History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Vol. II, Part A. London: Grolier Society), courtesy of Project Gutenberg, and plates “Metal workers” and “Mudbrick makers”, by Achille-Constant-Theodore Emile Prisse d’Avennes (Atlas de I’Histoire de I’Art Egyptien, d’apres les monuments, depuis les temps les plus reculesjusqu’d la domination romains, 1877), are in the public domain as their copyrights have expired.

From scanning the landscape to crawling down into ancient tombs, you are there, dude.

Peter Der Manuelian is the Director of the Giza Archives Project, an international endeavor that combines the 45-year Harvard University—Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition (1902—1947) with ongoing archaeological projects in order to create a “central Giza repository for world scholarship.” 

Deterioration of tomb wall statues just from 1927 to present day (Courtesy of Boston MFA External Relations Department)

Prompted by the on-going deterioration of the art and monuments of the Giza Plateau, the Giza Archives Project seeks to preserve Egypt’s legacy by advancing scholarship through international cooperation, exploring new means of analysis and presentation, and using cutting-edge technology to bring the people, places, and artifacts of the Giza Plateau to all interested persons.   

Along with partners from Berkeley, Berlin, Cairo, Hildesheim, Leipzig, Philadelphia, Turin, and Vienna, Der Manuelian has been bringing the world’s finest museums and Egyptological work to classrooms, libraries, and desktops around the world.  But with the addition of Dassault Systèmes’ Mehdi Tayoubi, the Giza Archives Project takes you as close as you can possibly get to the plateau without actually being there.

Em Hotep readers may not be familiar with Tayoubi by name, but you are certainly familiar with his work.  Along with fellow Dassault Systèmes wizard Richard Breitner, Tayoubi helped bring Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work with Khufu’s Pyramid to three dimensions in Khufu Revealed.  Clips of Dassault’s renderings of Jean-Pierre’s work were featured in National Geographic’s Unlocking the Great Pyramid, and have been circulating around the internet for several years.

Now Tayoubi and Der Manuelian are teaming up to bring you Giza 3D, an immersive experience which brings the power of industrial 3D technology to the Giza Archives Project.  But this venture is more than just video game-style eye candy.  The Giza Archives Project is already the most exhaustive collection of information and images related to the Giza Plateau.  This new collaboration will combine Der Manuelian’s archaeological data with the same tools Dassault Systèmes employs to help built modern architectural and engineering wonders to create a virtual environment that transforms “old archives to real-time 3D.”

Speaking of the collaboration, its kinship to Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work, and the scope of the project, the Dassault Systèmes’ press release states:

This partnership is a logical continuation of projects initiated by Dassault Systèmes three years ago around the pyramid of Khufu. “The content of the Giza Archives Project is an important new resource in the field of Egyptology. Peter Der Manuelian follows in the footsteps of George Reisner, contributing daily with his team to ensure the digital preservation of Humanity’s historical heritage,” said Mehdi Tayoubi, Interactive Strategy Director at Dassault Systèmes. “We will imagine new forms of interactivity, collaboration and innovation around this data for the worlds of education, research and for the general public thanks to experiential 3D.”  (Source:  Dassault Systèmes and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Announce a Strategic Partnership in the Domains of 3D Archaeological Content)

And lest the reader think we have heard the last of Dassault Systèmes and Project Khufu, guess again.  Although everyone associated with the next chapter of Project Khufu is remaining tight-lipped for now, I have it on Very Good Authority that Project Khufu and Giza 3D are both advancing on their own parallel trajectories, and we will be hearing very exciting news about both in the coming months.

For more coverage, please visit my good friends Vincent Brown, “The 3D Giza Plateau & Virtual Archaeology,” and Marc Chartier, “Partenariat Dassault Systèmes/Museum of Fine Arts de Boston : quand la 3D revisite le plateau de Guizeh” (in French).

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photo of tomb wall statues courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Giza Archives General info Packet, which can be downloaded here.

Featuring Mark Lehner, Zahi Hawass, Rick Brown, Gunter Dreyer, Richard Redding, Rainer Stadelman, and Fathi Mohamed.

Riddles of the Sphinx primarily features Dr. Mark Lehner, but we also have significant face time with ancient tools specialist Rick Brown and informative snippets with Gunter Dryer, Richard Redding, Rainer Stadelman, and the obligatory sequences with Zahi Hawass.  It was written and produced by Gary Glassman of Providence Pictures for the PBS series NOVA (Original air date—January 19, 2010).

As the title suggests, the program addresses several timeless riddles of the Great Sphinx, namely, who built it, why, and how?

Who Built the Great Sphinx?

The question of who built the Great Sphinx is tackled by Rainer Stadelman, who makes the case for Pharaoh Khufu, and Mark Lehner, who makes a pretty convincing argument for Khufu’s son, Khafre.  Lehner points to the Sphinx’s location on the Giza Plateau.  Granted, it is located between the pyramids of both Khufu and Khafre, but Lehner explains that at the equinox the sun is aligned with the Sphinx, the Sphinx Temple, and Khafre’s Pyramid, which seems to associate these three monuments together.

Rainer Stadelman makes a much simpler, but nonetheless potent, argument:  the face of the Sphinx looks a lot more like Khufu than Khafre.  Incidentally, Em Hotep looks at this question in the article “The Great Sphinx: What We Know, What We Think We Know, What We Will Never Know”.  I have to admit, I didn’t get any further than Drs. Lehner and Stadelman in settling the question of who built the Sphinx, which isn’t too surprising!  But the face does seem to look an awful lot like Khufu.

One possibility the video does not address is that Khafre built the Sphinx, but may have attached his father’s face to it.  Some see this as a bit of a stretch, and Lehner’s geographic argument is pretty tight.  But there are geographic reasons for associating the Great Sphinx with Khufu as well, which are detailed in the Em Hotep article.

Why Was the Great Sphinx Built?

To explore why the Great Sphinx was built, the video first looks at what it represents.  We start with a trip to Abydos with Dr. Gunter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute.  Excavations of the tomb of Aha, the second pharaoh of the First Dynasty, revealed that along with human servants, lions were sacrificed and buried with the king.  This shows that even in the earliest days of Egyptian history, lions were associated with the monarch.

The video states that these leonean sacrifices are the first clue to the meaning of the Sphinx’s form.  The lion was a symbol of pharaonic power, but the Great Sphinx was also a god.  The Egyptians often depicted their gods as human/animal hybrids, but typically with human bodies and animal heads.  But the sphinx has the body of a lion, to represent power and ferocity, and the head of a man, to represent intelligence and good judgment.

Riddles of the Sphinx goes on to explain that by the Eighteenth Dynasty, after a thousand years of obscurity and neglect, the Sphinx was back in style.  After being rescued and restored by Pharaoh Thutmose IV the Sphinx becomes associated with the god Horemakhet (the video says Horus Akhet—same god), who is the personification of “Horus on the Horizon.”  The horizon is the gateway to the afterlife, and thus, the Sphinx is the guardian—and gatekeeper—of the afterlife.

Building on Lehner’s theory of who constructed the Sphinx, the video concludes that the reason for its construction was to assure Khafre’s passage into the afterlife.  Just as the sun aligns on the horizon with the Sphinx, its temple, and Khafre’s Pyramid during the equinox, the time of both rebirth and harvest, so the Sphinx as Horus on the Horizon guides the deceased Pharaoh into the hereafter.

But this is where I think the video glosses over some other possibilities.  A thousand years is a long time.  Egypt experienced a lot of development, along with a couple of Dark Ages, in the gulf between the Fourth Dynasty, when the Sphinx was presumably built, and the Eighteenth Dynasty, when it was clearly associated with Horemakhet. I don’t think the video makes a convincing case for the Eighteenth Dynasty interpretation of the Sphinx being a revival of the original beliefs and practices surrounding the Great Sphinx.

The Fourth Dynasty is silent with regard to the Great Sphinx.  There are no textual or graphic representations of what it meant or how it was revered within the Sphinx Temple, the pyramids, or on the Sphinx itself.  What we know comes from the time of Amenhotep IV, and may be more of a contemporary interpretation than an ancient revival. After all, everything Amenhotep IV knew of the Sphinx he learned in a mystical vision.

As with who built the Sphinx, the video does not really settle the question of why it was built either.

How Was the Great Sphinx Built?

The question of how the Great Sphinx was built takes up a generous portion of the video and is some of the most enjoyable viewing.  Operating on the philosophy that experience is the best teacher, the subjects of the video divide into two teams who attempt to reproduce various aspects of the building process. 

On one team we have Egyptologist Dr. Richard Redding of the University of Michigan working with local sculptor and stonemason, Fathi Mohamed.  Team One sets about sculpting a miniature sphinx from the same limestone that was used to construct the head of the original, which happens to also be the hardest layer of the strata from which the Sphinx was carved.  Redding and Mohamed use modern steel hand tools in their project.

On the other team, Mark Lehner joins Rick Brown, a specialist in ancient tools, who reproduces the pounders and copper chisels that would have been used by the original stonecutters.  For their project, Lehner decides to attempt to reproduce a scaled-down model of the Great Sphinx’s missing nose using only the tools employed by the Fourth Dynasty builders.  This idea turned out to be better on the strategic level than on the tactical level.  Implementation had… mixed results.

Right off the bat Mohamed and Redding discover that the hard limestone is bending their steel tools.  As for Lehner and Brown, their copper chisels are faring much more badly.  They find they can only get a few dozen strikes out of each chisel before it is fouled beyond use.  They discover very quickly that the process of reheating and reshaping the chisels back at the forge is at least as labor intensive as the actual stonecutting itself.

One of the unexpected joys of watching Riddles of the Sphinx was how surprisingly musical the hammering and pounding were.  Not the chisels so much, but the sound of the harder stone pounders striking the limestone was actually very resonate and pleasing to the ear.  Striking varying densities of stone would produce different tones, so one can only imagine what a symphony the workers must have produced.  It is something you have to hear to understand, and is one of the several reasons I recommend you check out this video for yourself.

The effects of the limestone on the tools themselves, however, was decidedly less pleasant, and by the end of the video Lehner and Brown are forced to resort to a pneumatic chisel and a circular saw designed to cut stone.  But even using modern power tools they find that the methods for cutting the stone are the same.  Parallel cuts are made in the stone, and then a chisel is used to remove the material between the cuts.

This method of carving away the limestone by making cuts and then chiseling away the material between is actually very similar to how the layers of surrounding strata were cleared from the Sphinx enclosure.  The video explains that the ancient workers started out by cutting a horseshoe-shaped trench around what would become the Sphinx enclosure.  Then parallel lines were cut into the plateau and blocks were cut away from the material between.

In working this way the stonecutters carved through the strata, downward and inward, until a large central block was isolated, from which the Great Sphinx itself was then carved.  The blocks that were removed in the process were carted off for other projects such as temple and pyramid building.  In fact, by matching layers of strata, Lehner seems to have demonstrated that the blocks which make up the Sphinx Temple were quarried from around the Sphinx itself.

Although we may not know who made the Sphinx or why, we have a pretty good idea of how.  And even though Lehner and Brown had to abandon their ancient-style tools, they were able to complete enough work with them to calculate how long the project would have taken.

They counted an average of about 200 strikes with the stone pounders per five minutes, and given a constant supply of replacement chisels, a worker could remove one cubic foot of stone in about 40 hours.  Lehner projects that it thus took about 1 million man-hours to carve the Great Sphinx, or three years for 100 men.  But that is only counting the stonecutters.  There were also the smiths who reworked the spent chisels, the people who gathered fire wood for the forges, the runners carrying tools, etc.  As we shall see in the in-progress Pyramid City series, entire towns emerged around these construction projects.

Redding and Mohamed were also successful in completing their miniature sphinx, but given that Lehner and Brown also ended up resorting to modern tools, I am not really sure of what Redding and Mohamed contributed to the program. 

Riddles Upon Riddles

There are other riddles addressed in the video as well.  For example, Dr. Zahi Hawass addresses another question people often ask about the Sphinx—If it was carved from one massive block, straight out of the living stone of the Giza Plateau, then why are there so many smaller blocks visible?  The answer is simple:  thousands of years of repair work by various cultures.  In addition to the original project by Thutmose IV, the Sphinx has undergone renovations right up to modern days.

Part of the problem in modern times is the pollution and vibrations caused by tourists, traffic, and near-by construction.  But the main destructive force, and one which has been in progress since the Sphinx was first built, is the process of rising ground water forcing residual salt up into the limestone.  The salt then dries and crystallizes, which is literally pushing the grains of limestone apart from within.

The effect is devastating.  In one particularly wince-worthy scene, Mark Lehner pulls a flake of limestone the size of his hand from the surface of the Sphinx and literally crumbles it to dust.  The effect of viewing this is akin to hearing fingernails on a chalkboard, but Lehner gets his point across—the Great Sphinx is in great peril.

(Author’s Rant:  If Albert Zink and Carsten Pusch can drill holes into royal mummies, and Mark Lehner can tear chunks from the Great Sphinx and crush them in his bare hands, then why is Jean-Pierre Houdin not allowed to, in effect, take high tech photographs of the Great Pyramid?  Is someone afraid that Houdin’s work might drill holes in, or crumble to dust, something more personal?  Hmmmm?)  

Riddles of the Sphinx, which I had the privilege of viewing in high definition, is beautifully filmed and edited.  In addition to the above-mentioned musical stones, there are many scenes which make its viewing well worth your time.  In one scene, for instance, we see Zahi Hawass walking down the back of the Sphinx toward its head.  This is an angle of the Sphinx we normally do not see, and it drives home how long and narrow the structure is.  The odd shape of the Sphinx—its long body and disproportionately small head—has spawned its own series of queries and riddles.

I highly encourage you, Gentle Reader, to check out Riddles of the Sphinx for yourself.  I am not convinced with all of the answers it proposes, but sometimes the fun is in not yet knowing.  I tend to enjoy journeys more than arrivals, myself.

Transcripts of the video are available here.

See Also

• The Great Sphinx: What We Know, What We Think We Know, What We Will Never Know

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Drawing “Stone-cutters finishing the dressing of limestone blocks” Drawn by Faucher-Gudin (Maspero, Gaston. History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Vol. II, Part A. London: Grolier Society) courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

If we can take physical samples from some of the most important and fragile “artifacts” in all of Egypt—royal mummies—then why can’t we allow Jean Pierre to conduct completely non-invasive work which may unravel one of humankind’s most abiding riddles:  How was the Great Pyramid built?

After receiving a copy of Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed, Jean-Pierre’s follow-up and supplement to his and Bob Brier’s bestselling book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, Mr. Rose found himself wondering why M. Houdin’s work has hit a snag at the administrative level.  Jean-Pierre’s request to have his internal ramp theory tested and opened to peer review has met with a suspicious amount of bureaucratic leg-dragging.

Mr. Rose correctly points out that all Jean-Pierre is requesting is an opportunity to spend about eighteen hours using infrared thermographic and similar technologies to test his theories.  The equipment would not come into actual physical contact with the pyramid—it wouldn’t need to.

It does seem as if a double standard is being applied in light of the cautious—but admittedly more intrusive—work recently completed on Eighteenth Dynasty royal mummies, including that of Tutankhamun.  “But surely, if we are comfortable with sampling the royal mummies for DNA, it should be possible to structure this research in a way that meets the permit criteria,” Mr. Rose suggests (Source:  Beyond Stone & Bone:  “Time for the Great Pyramid?”). 

Whether it ultimately proves to be correct or not, Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work is rock solid and based on science where he is a proven expert.  In addition to Bob “Mr. Mummy” Brier, Mark Rose adds his voice to Egyptologists of the caliber of Dieter Arnold and Rainer Stadelman in support of allowing Jean-Pierre to put his theories to the test.

Jean-Pierre Houdin signing autographs for Magdy El-Ghandour, Director of Foreign Missions for the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and Taha Abdallah, Dean of Shorouk University (Photo courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin)

The answer to Mr. Rose’s question is a resounding yes:  it is indeed time for the Great Pyramid. 

Dr. Hawass, tear down this wall!

See Also

• Hemienu to Houdin: Building A Great Pyramid – Introduction
• Hemienu to Houdin Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp, Straight or With a Twist?
• Jean-Pierre Houdin’s Work With the Great Pyramid of Khufu Subject of New Documentary

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photograph of Jean-Pierre Houdin used by permission.  All rights reserved.

Dr. Hawass’ statement that “These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves” (source) was widely repeated in the press under headlines announcing that the belief that slaves had built the pyramids could now be retired.  But Egyptologists have long known that the Slave Hypothesis was pure Hollywood. 

Along with Hawass, Egyptologist Mark Lehner began uncovering the truth of the pyramid builders more than 20 years ago.  Lehner was consumed with the question of where such a large workforce could have lived.  After conducting the first detailed “to scale” survey of the Giza Plateau, he narrowed his focus to the area around the enigmatic Wall of the Crow, a colossal wall with no apparent related structures.

Lehner hit pay dirt, and his dogged pursuit of these ancient builders led to the excavation of the very city where they lived and worked—a large complex of barracks and permanent housing, distribution centers, industrial sites, and scribal workshops.  The recently discovered tombs tell us something of the status of the workers, but the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders gives us the everyday details of their lives.

Most of Em Hotep’s readers will be familiar with Dr. Lehner and his work.  But if you are not, then his total absence from the recent news stories may have left you with an incomplete picture of just how strong the case against the Slavery Hypothesis really is.  In this three-part series we will take a look at what Lehner discovered about the pyramid builders.  We will examine the evidence that the workforce had a surprisingly modern division of labor, followed by a tour of the city itself.

The headlines said it all

“Egyptian Tomb Find Suggests Pyramid Builders Weren’t Slaves” (Bloomberg).  “Egypt tombs suggest free men built pyramids, not slaves” (BBC).  The Times Live snarkily distinguished that “Great pyramid builders were wage slaves.” And speaking with sonorous authority, Al-Ahram Weekly declared “Building on facts:  A new discovery at Giza plateau has finally debunked Herodotus’ assertion that the Pyramids were built by slaves.”

Some sources at least acknowledged that this news wasn’t so new after all.  Discover Magazine announced “Egypt Finds Tombs of Pyramid Builders, And More Evidence They Were Free Men.”  The Canadian Press stated “Egypt says newly discovered tombs provide more evidence slaves did not build pyramids.”  JWeekly.com summarized “Egypt unveils more proof that Jews did not build pyramids.”

The headlines said it all, but the articles, unfortunately, did not.    

Egyptologist Dr. Mark Lehner (Courtesy of PBS, from the documentary “This Old Pyramid”)

Thanks to an oversight, Mark Lehner’s name was excluded from the original press release and official blog report by Zahi Hawass regarding the recent discovery.  To be clear, Dr. Lehner was not directly involved in the discovery of the new tombs.  But to leave him out of any discussion of the debunking of the Slave Hypothesis is like a history of the Theory of Evolution that fails to mention Charles Darwin.

Tombs of the workers overlooking Pyramid City (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Fortunately Dr. Hawass has amended his blog entry to mention Dr. Lehner by name, but the presses have rolled on to new headlines.  Again to be clear, the importance of the tombs of the overseers cannot be overstated.  They provide corroborative evidence of how the labor was organized, and their proximity to the king’s final resting place removes any question of their status—they were not slaves.

But this discovery is hardly the straw that broke the Slave Hypothesis’ back, as suggested by the media coverage.  It could be argued that while the overseers themselves were not slaves, the laborers were.  After all, not all of the workers who toiled on the pyramids were buried in cemeteries surrounding the pharaohs.  A feasible alternative hypothesis is that this privilege was reserved for freemen, while the rest of the laborers were slaves.

To really know about the pyramid builders we have to look beyond where they were buried to where they lived.  Does the archaeological record point to the presence of a large slave population on the Giza Plateau? 

First let’s set the parameters of the discussion:  what constitutes slave labor and what does not?

The Slave Hypothesis

The Slave Hypothesis is actually pretty simple:  the pyramids and other structures were built by slaves, usually depicted as being Semitic.  This latter part is easily dismissed.  Semitic people do not begin to appear in Egypt in great numbers until the Middle Kingdom Period, particularly during the Twelfth Dynasty. Of this much we can be certain—whether the pyramids were built by slaves or freemen, they were not built by Israelites, or proto-Israelites, or anyone else connected with the Moses of the Bible.  It just didn’t happen.

We owe this myth in part to a loose reading of the Book of Exodus, which gives the account of Moses leading the Children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage.  Although there have been Semitic slaves and kings alike in Egypt (see the Hyksos Dynasty), there is no actual archaeological or historical evidence for the Exodus accounts, even when stripped of its more supernatural elements.

Charlton Heston as Moses

But the Exodus account doesn’t even name the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and makes no mention of the pyramids.  For this we can blame Hollywood.  Movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” burned the image of Hebrew slaves into the pop culture psyche.  In large part, the Slave Hypothesis is based on a Hollywood fiction.

So what about the first part of the Slave Hypothesis?  Could the pyramids have been built by slaves if we toss out the Moses part?

Slaves in Egypt

There were many forms of servitude in ancient Egypt, and to a certain extent everyone was owned by the Pharaoh.  As we shall see below, there was also a type of feudalism which bound all Egyptians to a debt of labor to their superiors.  But what about an army of whip-driven state-owned slaves, as often depicted dragging blocks up the pyramid ramps?

To be sure, there were slaves in ancient Egypt.  Most slaves were a product of warfare, with victorious Egyptian armies returning from foreign campaigns with hundreds, or even thousands, of slaves in tow.  Such human booty became the property of the pharaoh to use and distribute as he saw fit.

Some of the slaves would serve directly as a part of the king’s estate, while others would be distributed to temples and work camps.  The king might also grant slaves to individuals as rewards for service or loyalty.  Slave labor was considered to be a resource which, like any other, was sent where it was needed.

Nubian Slaves at Abu Simbel

Most of the slaves would have been civilians who were captured, but many would also have been soldiers who had surrendered.  Some of these individuals would have been highly skilled and their talents were put to use.  Slaves could be found performing service ranging from grunt labor to any vocation not restricted to freemen.

Not all slaves were foreigners.  An Egyptian who was caught in criminal activity could find himself, and his entire family, enslaved as punishment.  Egyptians could also sell themselves into slavery to settle a debt.  Others sold themselves simply to improve their lot in life, finding the life of a slave more stable and secure than trying to get by on their own.  

At least some slaves were clearly treated as property in ancient Egypt.  The pharaoh might grant slaves, land, and cattle to a temple or an individual.  Wealthy Egyptians also included slaves in transactions among themselves. These contracts seem to have been conducted between individuals or with the state, but there were no slave markets as we see in other times and places.

So the question is, how common were such slaves in the Old Kingdom Period?  Could the pharaoh have mobilized an army of slaves to build the monumental structures of the Giza Plateau?  Obviously there were huge workforces of some sort involved, and this undoubtedly involved servitude, but what was the nature of that service?  In his article Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Egypt, writer Jimmy Dunn observes:

For ancient Egypt, a better, or at least more precise definition of a slave might be a “person owned by a master, as was any other chattel, used as the master pleased, to the extent of being disposed of by inheritance, gift sale and so forth”. In reality, such slavery seems to have been fairly rare in Egypt prior to the Greek Period, progressing over time.

Dunn goes on to point out that huge slave populations do not really begin to appear in Egypt’s history until the great conquests of the New Kingdom Period.  As noted above, even when the pharaoh acquired slaves they tended to be distributed throughout the kingdom.  Egypt simply did not have the means to control a huge population of thousands of slaves in one location.

There were slave work camps, but these were smaller localized projects.  Slaves were used in the construction of some temples and other structures, but a project the scale of the Giza Pyramids required thousands of workers.  The archaeological evidence from the Giza Plateau simply does not support the notion of a slave camp of that size. 

But there were thousands of somebodies working on the plateau. 

The Bak Hypothesis

One way or another, pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure were able to mobilize huge workforces numbering in the thousands to build the pyramids.  At least 2,000 and as many as 4,000 workers were fed, housed, managed and motivated within an easy walk of these great monuments (the 10,000 figure postulated by Hawass in his blog post is generally considered to be way too high).  Regardless of how you cut it, these were clearly very expensive undertakings.  How could such a project be funded if not performed by slave labor?

One type of organizational structure that could generate a large free-but-obligated workforce would be feudalism.  In a feudal system everybody owes some sort of service to the social rank immediately above them.  Kings appoint nobles, nobles appoint vassals, vassals organize knights, knights build armies, and armies conscript soldiers.  By requiring goods and service in exchange for land, status, and other privileges, the king could mobilize his entire kingdom through delegation.

Lehner proposes that the pyramids, as well as other national construction projects, were organized the same way.  The Egyptian system of vassalage was called bak, and everybody owed bak to somebody above them (not to be confused with baksheesh, which is what tourists and travelers seem to owe to every Egyptian!). 

Priests owed bak.  Scribes owed bak.  Potters owed bak.  Farmers owed bak.  Through this system of obligatory servitude every citizen of the Old Kingdom could be called upon to do his or her shift of work on the pyramid projects.  Simply put, the Bak Hypothesis says that the pyramids were built by a rotating workforce of laborers who were serving their allotted shift to their lords.  (See Harvard Magazine:  “Who Built the Pyramids,” by Jonathan Shaw)

The bak system solves several problems involved in pyramid building.  First, it keeps the overhead low because the labor is essentially free.  Unskilled labor requires little training and the workers are interchangeable.  Similarly, skilled labor is easily rotated because the workers are assigned to duties that take best advantage of their skill set.  By obliging every citizen to invest their skills for a certain amount of time, a huge workforce of skilled and unskilled labor could be employed for very little cost.

Second, the bak system absorbs the cost of supplying the workforce.  Raw materials such as grain and livestock are supplied through taxes and bak, and the workforce required to turn them into hot meals is at least partly composed of citizens serving their bak debt.  We shall see in Part 2 that the Pyramid City included a permanent workforce who made their living off of the building projects.  But even their wages would have come from the bak supplied by others.

Third, the bak system of conscription was actually good for morale.  As we have seen in the wars of the last century, a drafted soldier may not like the idea of going to war, but the esprit de corps he forms with his fellow draftees compel him to give 100% to the effort.  Dr. Lehner and others have found archaeological evidence of this sort of camaraderie around the building projects of the Giza Plateau, which we will look at in Part 2.

So the Bak Hypothesis gives an alternate model of how the pyramids may have been built.  Unlike the Slavery Hypothesis, for which we have no archaeological evidence, Lehner has been able to paint a very detailed picture of the lives of the permanent and rotating citizens of the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.

In Part 2:  Pyramid City, Inc., we will look at the evidence for how the workforce was organized, and how the evidence supports Lehner’s hypothesis while contradicting the Slave Hypothesis.  We will close the series with Part 3:  A Guided Tour of the Pyramid City, a trip through the Great Western Gate of the Wall of the Crow for a street-level look at how the denizens of the Pyramid City worked and lived.

The Great Western Gate of the Wall of the Crow (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Note:  Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), the organization founded by Dr. Lehner to excavate and analyze the Pyramid City, refers to the site in its official literature as the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.  For the sake of brevity, these articles will simply refer to the site as the Pyramid City, but we are talking about the same place.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photograph “mark.png” from “This Old Pyramid,” courtesy of PBS.org, all rights reserved.  Photographs “plateau_14.png” and “plateau_16” by Jon Bodsworth, are copyright free.  Photograph “Nubian Slaves” is in the public domain and is copyright free.  Still from the movie “The Ten Commandments” courtesy of Paramount Pictures, all rights reserved.

The documentary is in French, but there are numerous segments with Jean-Pierre and Bob Brier that are in English, and the 3D animations, of which there are many, are just fantastic.  A good bit of Khéops Révélé can be viewed at this link to France 5.  I am not certain if it is the documentary in full, but there is plenty there worth viewing.  In addition to Khéops Révélé there are interactive 3D animations, driven by Dassault Systemes, with English versions.  But even the French segments of the documentary are so well produced that you will have very little trouble following the story.

As support for Houdin’s work continues to gain momentum it is hoped that pressure will continue to build for allowing him to put his theories to the test.  Thus far Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has resisted proposals for even the least invasive forms of analysis, such as infrared thermography.  General Secretary Zahi Hawass’ opinion has vacillated from open-minded support to dismissive.  Increased media attention, support from the professional community, and growing public attention will hopefully force an endgame to what is looking more and more like a case of suppression of a well-founded but contrary theory. 

The next installment of Hemienu to Houdin, Em Hotep!’s exclusive in-depth series exploring Jean-Pierre’s work, is nearing the rough-draft stage.  In Part Two we will be looking in detail at the internal ramp theory and Jean-Pierre’s solution to the perplexing problem of navigating those 2.5 ton blocks, on sleds, around sharp right angle turns.  Here is a hint:  Herodotus had part of the story.  Keep checking back with Em Hotep! for the rest!

Related Stories:

Hemienu to Houdin: Building A Great Pyramid – Introduction

Hemienu to Houdin Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp, Straight or With a Twist?

New Theory on the Great Pyramid

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

Graphic of the internal ramp inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu courtesy of Dassault Systemes.

We will also look at how the Great Sphinx’s significance in both religion and politics has changed over the many centuries of its known lifetime. From the ancient days of early Egypt, when little is really said about the Sphinx and its existence seems to be taken for granted, to the height of Egyptian culture, when the Sphinx was synonymous with the great solar deities and had the power to legitimize a king’s reign, the more we learn about the Sphinx, the more we know about Egypt.

What is an Egyptian Sphinx?

Most of the sphinxes in Egypt are statues with the body of a lion and the head of a royal person, such as a pharaoh or a queen. There are several levels to this symbolism. Most obvious is the combination of the power and ferocity of the lion combined with the intelligence and judgment of a human. On a deeper level, the lion is a cross-cultural symbol of royalty and is associated with the sun, which in its many forms, is the primary deity throughout most of ancient Egypt’s history. So the royal sphinxes of Egypt may be thought of as a symbol of the power and wisdom of the king, as well as his association with the eternal life-giving sun.

When most people think of a sphinx, they tend to envision the Great Sphinx of Giza, and not without good reason. The Great Sphinx is second only to the pyramids as a symbol of Egypt, and is among the largest, oldest, and most impressive monuments ever created. But sphinxes were fairly common in ancient Egypt, and a number of very remarkable examples have been recovered by archaeologists. They are usually associated with a particular temple or tomb where they stood as guardians.

The Sphinx of Queen Hatshepsut (Photo by Keith Payne)

The Greek Sphinx, Sphiggein (Photo by Rosemanios)

The word sphinx has two possible derivations. It is commonly thought of as having its roots in the Greek word sphiggein, which means “to draw tight,” and is often translated as “the strangler.” This name originally applied to a creature from Greek mythology, a winged lion with the head of a woman who set upon visitors to the ancient city of Thebes. Before gaining access to the city the unfortunate traveler had to answer a riddle, and if they failed, they were strangled to death.

More recently it has been speculated that the word sphinx is a mistranslation of an ancient Egyptian phrase. Susan Wise Bauer has suggested in The History of the Ancient World that the original may have been shesep ankh, which means “living image.”

A British Egyptologist and linguist named Alan Gardiner took this a step further with shesep ankh Atum, which means “the living image of [the sun god] Atum.” In Word and Image in Ancient Egypt , Sergei Ignatov points out that the word shesep specifically refers to a type of statuary “in which [the] spiritual essence of a human or deity is instilled.” Thus, a sphinx is a statue constructed to receive the essence of the person or being it represents.

The sphinx is thought to be an invention of the Fourth Dynasty, a period of ancient Egyptian history characterized by social stability, religious sophistication, and centralized political power. Many of Egypt’s greatest monuments were constructed during this period, including all three of the Giza Pyramids and, according to conventional Egyptology, the Great Sphinx itself.

The head from King Djedefre’s Sphinx (Photo by Neithsabes)

Of the two earliest sphinxes recovered so far, there is some disagreement as to which may be the oldest. According to many, the sphinx of Djedefre is the oldest known sphinx. Djedefre was one of Khufu’s sons who ruled Egypt for a few years prior to his more well-known brother, Khafre. However, some think that the sphinx of Queen Hetepheres II may predate that of Djedefre.

The Sphinx of Queen Hetepheres II (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Hetepheres II was a daughter of Khufu who married her brother, Djedefre, so it is very likely that their sphinxes were created within a few years of each other.

Arguing for Hetepheres II’s sphinx being first is the fact that before being married to Djedefre she was married to Kawab, the original heir to Khufu who died before assuming the throne. Thus, as the future queen her sphinx may have been constructed prior to Djedefre, who was not originally in line for the throne. Without a contemporary account detailing when each sphinx was made it is unlikely this question will ever be resolved.

Sphinxes are a particularly common sight around the temple complexes of Luxor and Karnak. More than 2,000 sphinxes bearing the head of the Thirtieth Dynasty King Nekhtnebef I originally lined the causeway connecting the Luxor and Karnak complexes, many of which still remain. Although most sphinxes have human heads, this is not always the case. The approach to the Great Temple of Amun at Karnak is lined on each side with 20 ram-headed sphinxes erected by the Nineteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II.

The Approach to the Great Temple of Amun located at Karnak, with its row of criosphinxes (Photo by Keith Payne)

Also called criosphinxes, these ram-headed sentinels guard the way to the First Pylon of Karnak, which marks the entrance to the Great Temple of Amun. An additional 52 criosphinxes are located in the courtyard within, with 19 situated along the northern colonnade and 33 along the south. A symbol of the god whose temple they protect, each ram-headed sphinx holds a statue of Ramesses II in Osiris form between their paws.

One of Karnak’s ram-headed criosphinxes, Ramesses II in Osiris form held protectively between his paws (Photo by Keith Payne)

Sphinxes were made of a variety of materials, most often limestone or granite, but other materials were used as well. A sphinx thought to depict Ptolemy XII, the father of famed Cleopatra VII, is made of diorite, a common material for royal statuary. The colossal sphinx that once guarded the Temple of Ptah at Mit Rahina was carved from a single 90-ton piece of alabaster.

The Alabaster Sphinx, guardian of the Temple of Ptah at Mit Rahina (Photo by Keith Payne)

At an impressive 26 feet long and 13 feet high, the Alabaster Sphinx is indeed quite large, but is a distant second to the largest sphinx in Egypt.

The Great Sphinx of Giza

The Great Sphinx of Giza is the oldest sculpted monument known, and at 240 feet long and 66 feet high it is certainly one of the largest. It is believed to date from between 2589 to 2532 BC, having been created sometime during the reigns of Khufu, Djedefre, or Khafre, although there are arguments for an earlier date. While most Egyptologists believe the Great Sphinx is strictly a creation of the early Fourth Dynasty, there are persistent and not altogether unreasonable theories that it may predate the pyramids, and may have even been why Khufu built his pyramid at Giza.

The Great Sphinx of Giza crouches behind the ruins of the Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple and before the Pyramid of Khafre (Photo by Keith Payne)

Located near Khafre’s valley temple, the Great Sphinx was sculpted from a limestone monolith that was first defined by a horseshoe-shaped trench that formed the borders of the Sphinx enclosure. Although the enclosure seems to have been planned around the monolith that was carved into the Sphinx, it also seems to be a byproduct of the quarrying which produced some of the surrounding temples and which contributed to the pyramids themselves. This is offered as an argument against an earlier dating of the Sphinx.

Over thousands of years the Great Sphinx has suffered indignities from man and nature alike. There is evidence that at some point the Sphinx’s head was used for target practice. The notorious air pollution of modern Cairo likewise exacts a constant toll. But the most damage has been caused by the corrosive effects of wind and water. The combination of groundwater and torrential rains, along with windborne sand and grit, have eroded the Sphinx and worn deep scars into its surface. Ironically, the accumulation of the very sand that has blasted away at the Sphinx may also be responsible for its protection.

The Great Sphinx, circa 1880 (‘Le Sphinx Armachis, Caire’ by Henri Bechard, courtesy of the National Media Museum)

Because the Sphinx enclosure forms a trough that is considerably lower than the surface of the plateau, sand tends to accumulate pretty easily around the Sphinx. The Sphinx has been buried and restored numerous times throughout history, with the most famous restoration having been that of Pharaoh Thutmose IV, who we will discuss in more detail below. The most recent major restoration was conducted by the French engineer Emile Baraize between 1925 and 1936, although restoration and conservation efforts continue to this day. The Great Sphinx is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which helps fund its maintenance. The most imminent modern peril is the rising of the water tables, a problem that is threatening structures all over Egypt.

Why Does the Head Look So Odd?

Many questions and speculations, ranging from far-flung to undeniably valid, involve the Sphinx’s head. Even in the company of other human-headed lions, there is just something out of place about the head of the Great Sphinx. It just doesn’t seem to really belong to the body on which it rests!

The most obvious difference is its condition. The head of the Sphinx, bullet wounds and missing nose aside, is clearly in much better shape than the rest of its body. While the face and the headdress are smooth, the rest of the body is worn down to the point where the varying levels of strata are clearly visible, with channels of erosion making much of the body look like a natural mesa.

The head of the Great Sphinx, which is carved from a harder layer of limestone than the body, shows much less erosion, but is that the only reason for its smoother appearance? (Photo by Keith Payne)

Part of this can be explained by the nature of the limestone itself. The limestone where the Sphinx is located grows softer and more porous the deeper you dig, with the head having been formed from the hard top layer that was used for exterior casing stones in the surrounding monuments. The body is cut from the lower quality layers making it more vulnerable to the elements. This is one explanation for the head being in better condition than the body, but there are other questions as well.

Shown from profile, the Sphinx’s head appears disproportionately tiny compared to the rest of its body (Photo by Keith Payne)

Another inconsistency between the head and the body is the size. The Sphinx’s head is proportionately much smaller than the rest of its body, which prior to erosion would have been even larger than it is now. A number of explanations for the unusually small head have been offered. One idea is that the builders ran out of usable stone and had to shape the head smaller than originally planned. This doesn’t seem to make sense, as the quality of the stone would have been apparent before the rest of the body was shaped. Why didn’t they scale the body down to match the head?

According to another theory, the Sphinx’s head seems disproportionately small in profile because it was actually intended to be viewed from the front. The smaller size is intended to produce a dramatic effect when properly viewed. By creating a tapered appearance from the front, the small head makes the Great Sphinx appear larger and more imposing when viewed from that perspective. But there are a couple of problems with this explanation as well.

First, when viewed from a distance this effect is lost. To get the tapering effect one has to be standing close enough to the Sphinx to be looking up, and both the head and the body must be visible. However, the body of the Sphinx is largely obscured from this perspective by the Temple of the Sphinx, which is located in front of the Sphinx itself. While the tapering effect can be somewhat observed from the temple that lies to the northeast, and certainly from the chapel that was built between its paws, both of these structures date from the Eighteenth Dynasty, more than a thousand years after the head is believed to have been sculpted.

The Great Sphinx as viewed from the ruins of the Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple (Photo by Keith Payne)

The second problem with this theory is that there are legitimate questions about whether the Great Sphinx was intended to be viewed from the front or the side. This is no trivial question, and is tied to who the face on the Sphinx was intended to represent. We will be discussing this in detail later in the article. But if it does so happen that the Sphinx was intended to be viewed in profile rather than from the front, then this brings us back to the question of why it is so small, which in turn brings us back to the question of its age.

One of the more controversial explanations for the small head posits that its current shape is not the original, and that the monument predates the Fourth Dynasty. According to this theory, the original head may have been simply the head of a lion, which would have been proportionate to the rest of the body, and that the human head is the result of modifications dating from the Fourth Dynasty. A more recent date for the current shape of the head may also help explain its finer condition than the rest of the body. These alterations may have been the result of a pharaoh, most likely Khufu or Khafre, usurping the colossal lion for their own purposes.

Alternately, the change may have been the result of a genuine effort to restore an earlier monument where the head had been damaged to the point where it was already out of proportion to the body. Rather than attempt to recreate a lion’s head, which would have been carved even smaller than the current human head in order to shape the snout, perhaps a decision was made to turn the lion into a royal sphinx. As we saw in the first section, the sphinx was already a statuary form in the Fourth Dynasty.

To piece together possible answers to these dilemmas we first have to formulate a reasonable theory about who the face represents, and that requires a better understanding of the lay of the land. To see the Great Sphinx in context we need an idea of what structures surround it, when they were built, and by whom.

The Great Sphinx Complex

Although we often think of the structures of the Giza Plateau in terms of individual monuments, temples, and tombs, it would be more accurate to think of the entire region from Saqqara in the south to the Giza Plateau in the north as one large necropolis made up of distinct but integrated complexes. Pyramids, for example, are but the centerpiece of mortuary complexes consisting of temples, monuments, family cemeteries, sometimes complete microcosmic models of the entire kingdom, all within an enclosure wall. Pyramid and tomb complexes combine to represent dynasties, and some areas serve to connect entire periods of Egypt’s long history.

The complex of the Great Sphinx is laid out in such a way that allows us to see how the Sphinx was viewed in the context of different epochs. Some of these periods are better understood than others due to more complete records and more easily interpreted archaeological discoveries. The role of the Great Sphinx as a god during the New Kingdom Period, for example, is well attested to. Less obvious is what the Sphinx represented to the Old Kingdom, where we have what was apparently a major temple dedicated to its service, but not a single tomb attributed to one of its priests.

The Old Kingdom Temple

The Old Kingdom Temple is situated directly in front of the Great Sphinx, although there is no direct passage leading from the temple to the Sphinx. The core of the Sphinx Temple was constructed of the same porous limestone as the body of the Sphinx and bears the same signs of erosion, which seems to indicate that they were both constructed at around the same time. The inside of the temple was originally lined with superior Tura limestone and pink granite imported from Aswan. The floor was paved with fine alabaster, and the temple’s overall construction closely resembles that of the valley and mortuary temples of Khafre.

The outside of the temple was partially faced with granite and it appears that it was originally intended to be entirely covered, leading to speculation that it may have never been completed, or possibly never even used. This, while a mystery by its own right, would at least explain why no priests’ tombs have been located, and why no Old Kingdom records of the temple’s use have been found. Most of its internal granite and finer limestone were stripped away long ago, exposing the soft core to erosion. There are no surviving inscriptions, if there ever were any.

The eastern wall of the Old Kingdom Temple of the Sphinx, which lies just to the east of the Sphinx itself (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

The Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple was built with a north-south orientation with two entrances—each with its own chapel—on the eastern face. The entrances and their chapels may have represented Upper and Lower Egypt. The temple proper, which has east, west, and central sanctuaries, is thought to have been associated with the sun god as he made his daily transition. In the morning the Sphinx and his temple would face Khepri, the rising sun. At noon they would be under Re at his zenith. In the evening the Sphinx in its enclosure and the temple before it would lie in the shadows cast by Atum at his setting.

The Solar Temples of Re built by the kings of the Fifth Dynasty appear to have been modeled after the Sphinx Temple. There was a center court that was open to the sky, and the face of the Sphinx was visible to devotees. The court was ringed with rectangular columns, and there are indentations in the floor before these columns that suggest statuary would have once lined the court. Covered sanctuaries are located in the east and west sections of the temple, within their own colonnades.

Indentations in the alabaster floor of the Sphinx Temple where cult statues would have once stood (Photo by Daniel Mayer)

The similarities between the Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple and Khafre’s adjacent valley temple cannot be denied. The core masonry of Khafre’s valley temple appears to be made of the same limestone as the Sphinx Temple and the body of the Sphinx itself. Like the Sphinx Temple, the valley temple was dressed with higher quality limestone and pink Aswan granite, and has similar rectangular pillars unadorned with inscriptions. The floors of both temples were paved with alabaster and even posses the same square indentations for cult statues. (For more read Khafre’s Valley Temple.)

A good case is made for Khafre being the pharaoh who had the Great Sphinx and its Old Kingdom Temple constructed. But there are other contenders, and before we can fully consider all the evidence we need to leap forward a millennium to the next major phase of construction—and reconstruction—in the complex of the Great Sphinx.

The Dream of Thutmose IV

The Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt is full of intrigue, high drama, and famous pharaohs. Hatshepsut, Akhenaton, Tutankhamun.. Their stories have filled books and made careers. Amidst these larger than life personalities we have Thutmose IV, a pharaoh who was probably not intended to be king, but who wrote his own romance and crafted his story with the skill of a Hollywood promoter.

Thutmose IV (Photo by Siren)

Once upon a time, as the story goes, a young prince named Thutmose IV, son of Amenhotep II, was hunting on the Giza Plateau. Finding himself tired and in need of a nap, the prince sought shelter in the shade of the head of the Great Sphinx, which had become buried up to its neck in the drifting sand. As he dozed, the sun god Horemakhet came to Thutmose and promised him that if he would clear away the accumulated sand and restore the Sphinx to his former glory, then he would become the next pharaoh. This was good news indeed for, while he may have been a royal prince, Thutmose was not next in line to become king.

A reproduction of the Dream Stela of Thutmose IV, the original remains in the votive chapel between the Great Sphinx’s paws (Photo by Capt. Mondo)

Thutmose IV did his part by clearing out the Sphinx enclosure and making various repairs and restorations, including a small open chapel between the Great Sphinx’s paws, and a large memorial stela that detailed the dream and the pact formed between the prince and Horemakhet. For his part, Horemakhet kept his promise and Thutmose IV became the next pharaoh after Amenhotep II.  

The Great Sphinx as Horemakhet, Validator of Thutmose IV

By the Eighteenth Dynasty the Great Sphinx had become associated with the sun god Horemakhet, which means “Horus in the horizon.” At least as early as the time of Thutmose I the area around the Sphinx was a hive of activity. Royalty and commoners alike made pilgrimages from all over Egypt to pay homage at the pyramid complexes of Khufu and Khafre and to make offerings to Horemakhet.

In the first year of his reign Amenhotep II constructed a temple dedicated to Horemakhet just to the north of the Old Kingdom temple on a small bluff overlooking the Sphinx enclosure. Although this was the primary New Kingdom temple dedicated to the Great Sphinx as Horemakhet, Amenhotep II built numerous terraces, chapels, and related facilities around the Sphinx dedicated to the sun god as well as the cults of royal ancestors. It might be fair to say that Thutmose IV’s clearing of the enclosure and restoration work on the Sphinx was an extension and continuation of the building projects already instituted by his father.

The Great Sphinx as viewed from behind the New Kingdom Temple of Horemakhet built by Amenhotep II during the Eighteenth Dynasty (Photo by Francesco Gasparetti)

When viewed in the context of his political circumstances, Thutmose IV’s civic improvements, and indeed, the story on the Dream Stela itself, seem to have more to do with propaganda than piety. Thutmose was not the heir apparent, and the destruction of memorial stelae erected by his brothers in their father’s Sphinx temple suggests his ascension was not without conflict. Evoking not only the blessing of Horemakhet, but a prophetic covenant with the sun god of the Sphinx would have helped legitimize his reign in the eyes of the people.

Thutmose IV’s construction program may have served as a grand diversion from the political turmoil associated with his ascension to the throne. But whatever the Dream Stela may or may not tell us of Thutmose IV’s rise to power, it is thought by some to contain a clue as to who built the Great Sphinx.

Who Built the Sphinx?

Egyptologists traditionally attribute the construction of the Great Sphinx to Pharaoh Khafre. Along with the above cited similarities between the Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple and the valley temple of Khafre, the Sphinx’s location in relation to Khafre’s pyramid complex is taken by some to suggest the Sphinx was intended to be a part of that complex. The valley temple and the Sphinx Temple are parallel to each other, with Khafre’s causeway angling past the Sphinx to his mortuary temple. The Great Sphinx’s location in front of Khafre’s Pyramid as it rises from the high point of the plateau certainly seems to have been planned for maximum effect.

The Dream Stela is considered significant to this question because part of Khafre’s name seems to be written on it, although the section is damaged, so we can’t be 100% certain. And even if it is Khafre’s name, it does not appear in a context that suggests the Sphinx’s construction is being attributed to him. It would seem that the evidence of the Dream Stela is inconclusive at best.

In addition, another tablet called the Amenhotep II Stela has been recovered from the Sphinx enclosure that dates from the same time, but lists both Khafre and Khufu, also without attributing the Sphinx to either of them. This raises the question of whether Khufu’s name may also have originally appeared on the Dream Stela in the section near Khafre’s name that has been damaged. Having these kings mentioned on a couple of stelae so clearly associated with the Sphinx without attributing the Sphinx’s construction to either of them seems odd, as if its existence during their time was a given.

Yet another argument in support of the Sphinx having been built by Khafre comes from Dr. Zahi Hawass. Hawass suggests that a drainage ditch leading from Khafre’s causeway empties into the Sphinx enclosure, something the builders would never have done if the Sphinx had already been there. Thus, the Sphinx must have been built after the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.

But geologist Colin Reader has pointed out that the proposed drainage ditch does not actually extend all the way to the enclosure, falling some 35 meters short, and excavations have failed to indicate any evidence that the ditch ever extended beyond that point (source: Khufu Knew the Sphinx). Reader proposes that the “ditch” may actually be a boundary marker, citing more likely catchment areas for water runoff.

Rainer Stadelman, formerly of the German Archaeological Institute, has offered several reasons for thinking the Great Sphinx predates Khafre. One observation he made is that the earliest New Kingdom depictions of the Sphinx seem to associate it with Khufu’s Pyramid rather than Khafre’s. Stadelman also points to the fact that the Sphinx enclosure was quarried by Khufu’s builders as well as Khafre’s. Why would they have left the limestone outcropping from which the Sphinx is carved for Khafre to develop rather than either excavating it for building materials or creating the Sphinx themselves? Bear in mind that the section of hard limestone from the top layer that was left in place for the head suggests that a monolithic sculpture was planned from the very beginning of quarrying in the area.

The front-on view from the east, seems to associate the Sphinx with Khafre’s Pyramid complex (Photo by Keith Payne)

And let us now return the question of which angle is the Great Sphinx to be viewed from. As mentioned before, if viewed from the front (the east) then the Pyramid of Khafre does indeed frame the Sphinx in a most impressive manner. But Egyptian art, from hieroglyphics to frescos, depicts its subjects in profile. When the Great Sphinx is approached from the south, the direction of the ancient city of Memphis rather than from the much later city of Cairo, it appears in profile with Khufu’s Pyramid behind it. The presence of the Sphinx’s tail on the south side further seems to indicate that its builder intended it to be viewed from that perspective.

The profile view from the south, which shows the most detail, including the tail, seems to associate the Sphinx with Khufu’s Pyramid complex (Photo by Hedwig Storch)

This also brings us full circle to the question of the Sphinx’s smallish head, made all the more conspicuous when viewed in profile. Is it possible that the Great Sphinx was indeed originally a regal lion, a solar god from the Early Dynastic Period, possibly the First or Second Dynasty? Rather than having been constructed by Khafre or Khufu, perhaps its presence was the reason Khufu broke with tradition and built his pyramid at Giza rather than the southern part of the necropolis. And perhaps his desire for his pyramid to appear behind the Sphinx in profile may have led to his decision to build his pyramid where he did, rather than the higher, seemingly more ideal location used later by his son, Khafre.

So whose face appears on the Great Sphinx, and why did it replace the original head? The reason is uncertain and may have been, as suggested previously, due to damage rendered to the head that made restoring it as a lion impossible without throwing it even more out of proportion. But it has been suggested by some (and rejected by others) that the broad, flat face and the square chin seem to favor Khufu more than Khafre.

The Great Sphinx’s Beard – An Eighteenth Dynasty addition, or an Old Kingdom artifact that was updated (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

It has also been pointed out that, unlike both the Sphinx and Khufu, Khafre was always depicted with a beard. A beard for the Great Sphinx has been discovered, but its style is more indicative of the Eighteenth Dynasty, leading some to believe that it is an attachable beard created for the Sphinx sometime around the reign of Thutmose IV. However, Dr. Zahi Hawass and Dr. Mark Lehner have found evidence suggesting the beard comes from the same layer of strata as the head, and that rather than having been created in the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was coifed (re-sculpted) to match the prevailing style. But then again, the bearded statues of Khafre all have the beard attached solidly from the chin to the neck, whereas the Sphinx’s beard appears to be detachable. Etc!

These arguments could be hashed and rehashed until we wear a hole in the floor as deep as the Sphinx enclosure. The simple truth is we do not know, and will likely never know, who built the Sphinx, when it was built, what it originally may or may not have looked like, and whose face now adorns it, sans a nose. But we will never stop trying to figure it out, nor should we.

Modern Conservation Efforts

Rising water tables is a problem that is popping up all over Egypt, and the appearance of pools of standing water around the Old Kingdom Sphinx Temple and southeast of the Sphinx enclosure made it obvious that radical measures were called for. In 2008 Cairo University’s Engineering Center for Archaeology and Environment drilled four holes beneath the Sphinx that enabled them to lower cameras and other equipment into Giza’s subterranean world.

They discovered that the ground water had risen to just over fifty feet above sea level. The decision was made to place eight pumping stations around the Sphinx complex, which remove about 7,000 cubic meters of water every day. The pools of water have mostly disappeared, and Cairo University, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and geologists, Egyptologists, and scientists of all walks continue to search for a more permanent solution than pumping out the ground water as it seeps in.

The Great Sphinx and its related complex continue to draw thousands of visitors every day from all corners of the Earth. It is one of the world’s perennial sources of ancient information, mystical inspiration, and curious speculation. Like many of Egypt’s treasures, its ability to tease with occasional revelations while still maintaining a storehouse of unanswered mysteries is what holds our attention century after century.

The Great Sphinx will always withhold some of his secrets for himself (Photo by Keith Payne)

See Also

• Riddles of the Sphinx:  Video Review 

Additional Online Resources

Egyptian Monuments

The Sphinx, by Su Bayfield

Talking Pyramids

Riddle of the Sphinx, by Vincent Brown

Photo of the Week – Sphinx, by Vincent Brown

Tour Egypt

The Great Sphinx of Giza- an Introduction, by Allen Wilson

The Old and New Kingdom Sphinx Temples at Giza, by Allen Wilson

Heritage Key

Drilling Under the Sphinx: A Heritage Key Video About Keeping Your Paws Dry, by Keith Payne

Zahi Hawass’ Blog

Sphinx Scientific Update Report, by Zahi Hawass

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009. All rights reserved.

Photographs “Sphinx MET 11.185.jpg,” by Rosemanios, “Louvre 032007 19” by Neithsabes (Sebi), “Le Sphinx Armachis, Caire” from National Media Museum, “Giza_Plateau_-_Great_Sphinx_temple-_area_where_ statues_used_to_be” by Daniel Mayer, “ThoutmôsisIVLouvre” by Siren, “ReproductionOfDreamSteleOfThutmoseIV RosicrucianEgyptianMuseum” by Capt. Mondo, “Giza sfinge e piramidi” by Francesco Gasparetti, courtesy of Gaspa, “Great Sphinx of Giza 0912” by Hedwig Storch are provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of those files under the conditions that you appropriately attribute them, and that you distribute them only under a license identical to this one. Official license Photographs “07_sphinx_front,” “Beard_of_the_sphinx,” and “Sphinx of Hetepheres II – fourth dynasty of Egypt” are provided courtesy of Jon Bodsworth.

But a French architect by the name of Jean-Pierre Houdin may be changing that.  He has put forth the first comprehensive explanation of how the Great Pyramid was built that stands the tests of physics and common sense, and his work continues to gain support from prominent architects, engineers, and Egyptologists. 

Jean-Pierre has kindly agreed to work with Em Hotep! to put his theory into terms that are accessible to those of us who may not be professional architects or engineers, but who may be amateur and professional Egyptologists of varying degrees.  In Part One we take a close look at the evolution of ramp theories, how they work and fail to work, and what was involved with building the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient World.

Hemienu—the architect and builder of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Photo by Einsamer Schütze)

In the Introduction to Hemienu to Houdin:  Building a Great Pyramid we met the primary characters of our story.  Hemienu, who was vizier and Master of Works for Pharaoh Khufu, and who designed, planned, and built the Great Pyramid.  Henri Houdin, a French engineer who became enthralled with Khufu’s Pyramid and took up the task of reverse engineering its construction.  And the protagonist of our tale, Jean-Pierre Houdin, Henri’s architect son and heir to the Great Work of figuring out how Hemienu accomplished one of the greatest architectural and engineering feats of human history.

We traced out a short biography of these three master builders and examined how the times they lived in, the circumstances of history, and even their family lives drove them toward their respective quests.  We were also introduced to some of the shortcomings of the many theories that have been offered by others regarding how the Great Pyramid was constructed, and touched on insights that set this father and son team on the trail of Hemienu’s secrets.   

I also proposed an outline and timetable for how I wanted to approach this project, namely, that this series of articles would be posted over the course of several weeks, and that Part One would get into the specifics of Jean-Pierre’s internal ramp, and Part Two would look at how he proposes the interior architecture of Khufu’s Pyramid was planned and carried out.  Now, more than a month later, it is obvious that the timetable is out the window, and for that I apologize.

But after much correspondence with M. Houdin, I have decided that this subject deserves more than just a rush-through.  There are numerous short introductions available online and in print that can give you the basics of Jean-Pierre’s work, and for the full treatment you really must read his and Bob Brier’s book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, which has just become available in paperback.  As for Em Hotep!, my goal is to provide news and reference articles about Egyptology for “the Curious Layperson and the Budding Scholar,” and that means being both comprehensive and comprehendible. 

So Part One:  How Do You Prefer Your Ramp? is going to be a detailed look at the primary theories that have preceded Jean-Pierre and exactly why they simply cannot work.  This will lay a good foundation for Part Two, which will deal with Jean-Pierre’s innovations on the various ramp theories, and as you will soon see, foundations are very important with this topic!

The entrance to Khufu’s Pyramid, with the Thieves’ Entrance in the lower right corner. The people entering the Thieves’ Entrance give an indication of the size of the blocks involved. Note the large blocks and beams of the Main Entrance—there are larger blocks deeper within and much higher up. (Photo by Keith Payne)

The first section of this article will deal with the straight ramp theories, which really serve as a sort of negative benchmark against which all others are measured.  This may sound a bit harsh, but an understanding of what these theories attempt to accomplish and why they fail is vital to following their evolution and how each theory moves us closer to the answer.  In order to make 100% certain I got this rather important aspect of our discussion right, the first section takes the form of a dialogue with Jean-Pierre.

The next section will take a look at external spiraling ramp theories.  These theories suggest that the Great Pyramid was constructed by use of a ramp that corkscrews up the outside surface.  They resolve a number of the problems that make the straight ramp theories impossible, but leave several major issues unresolved, and come with their own set of issues.

The third section will take a closer look at Henri Houdin’s eureka moment—Hemienu constructed the Great Pyramid by building from the inside out, and he accomplished this by using internal ramps.  Henri’s epiphany resolved nearly all of the remaining problems with the previous theories, but as his son realized, a couple of snags remained. 

The External Straight Ramp:  A Dialogue with Jean-Pierre Houdin

Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt

The straight ramp theory was first worked out by Ludwig Borchardt and completed by Jean-Philippe Lauer.  The basic idea was that a straight ramp constructed of mudbrick and filler would be used to haul the blocks into place.  As each level of the pyramid is completed, work on the pyramid stops so the ramp can be built up to the next level.  The base had to be fairly wide, about 50 meters, so that its top surface would still be both wide enough and stable enough as it rises.  Keep in mind that as the pyramid grows narrower, so must the ramp.

As the ramp reaches the 35 meter level, where construction on the King’s Chamber begins, Lauer believed his and Borchardt’s ramp would be short enough and shallow enough in terms of its slope to enable men to pull the large blocks, some of them weighing in excess of 60 tons, up to the construction site of the King’s Chamber where machines using sacks of sand for counterweights and smaller ramps cut into the core masonry to maneuver the huge blocks and stone beams into place.

For the top of the pyramid, Lauer’s ramp would increase in gradient as the width decreased.  He believed that blocks weighing a ton could still be moved to a height of 112 meters on a 14 degree incline, and that the last stretch could be as steep as 18 degrees to reach the final 146 meters.  Lauer postulates that to compensate for the very steep gradients smaller blocks would be used to complete the pyramid.

Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer

A couple of problems present themselves right away with the Borchardt-Lauer ramp.  First, contrary to Lauer’s assumption, the blocks do not grow progressively smaller higher up the pyramid.  The thickness of layers continues to alternate pretty much from the bottom to the top, and blocks weighing as much as 2.5 tons are used at least as high as 90 meters. 

Then there is the pyramidion.  The pyramidion was the capstone of the pyramid, a sort of small solid pyramid itself.  Constructed of limestone and covered in electrum, the pyramidion would have weighed at the very least 5.5 tons, and possibly as much as fifteen tons!  Plus, although the top layers of stone are now missing, as is the pyramidion itself, they would have been especially thick to support the pyramidion.  Several layers of smaller blocks would have been crushed over time.  It is simply implausible that a 5.5-15 ton pyramidion, plus its supporting masonry, could have been moved up an 18 percent incline.

Jean-Pierre:   In fact human strength falls very quickly above 10% grade.  You must keep an optimum ratio of force-to-grade: 7-8% grade is the highest figure to consider.

So forget the gradually increasing incline.  To build the pyramid using a straight ramp you have to maintain a 7-8% grade from bottom to top.  In The Secret of the Great Pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin and Bob Brier talk about the straight ramp being a mile long.  But in order for the ramp to reach the top of the pyramid, about 146 meters, while maintaining a 7-8% grade, it seems the ramp would have to be even longer.

Jean-Pierre:  Discussions of a straight external ramp always talk about reaching the summit.  That is wrong.  No ramp can go above the 130-135 meter level—the ramp would be wider than the pyramid.  So to reach a level of 130-135 meters at a 7% grade, a frontal ramp has to be 1,860 meters long, about 1.15 miles.  To build the same ramp with an 8% grade it would be 1,625 meters long, about one mile, which is why I always talk about a mile long ramp.

This means that, in order to maintain a manageable 8% slope, the straight external ramp has to be about a mile long, and comes about eleven meters (about 36 feet) short of the estimated apex of the pyramid.  So, where could Hemienu have built such a ramp? 

The terrain has a lot to say about that.  The Great Pyramid was built on a bluff, and there is a steep drop to the north, so no ramp there.  To the east and west there are cemeteries contemporary with the pyramid, so no ramps there either.  That leaves the south, which is far from ideal for such a construction. 

Jean Pierre:  Absolutely.  A single frontal ramp has to be perpendicular to the south face of the pyramid which puts it cutting through the quarry before filling the wadi on the other side!  The topography speaks for itself.

So the ramp would not only overshoot the quarry, it would have to account for the rise and fall of the terrain, which would mean filling in the wadi, a sort of canyon made by a dry river bed, which would add even more material and labor to the ramp project.  Keep in mind that the further you have to build the ramp downward to account for the dip created by the wadi the wider the base has to be in that section.

The Straight Ramp—Ninth Wonder of the Ancient World? Not only would it have been as large a project as the pyramid itself, where did it go? (Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes)

Everywhere you look in the Great Pyramid you see signs not only of Hemienu’s architectural genius, but of the economy of his methods.  Nothing is wasted in terms of time or materials.  A ramp that requires the workers to drag the blocks in the opposite direction of the pyramid before mounting the ramp just doesn’t seem to make sense.

The volume of material and man-hours required in making such a ramp raise their own set of questions.  Building a mile-long ramp that reaches 135 meters on its high end would require a huge amount of material and labor even if it was built on a flat surface, which it wasn’t.  And where did all the millions of tons of stone go? 

When you account for the terrain you are talking about a project similar in scope to the pyramid itself, just to build the ramp.  Even allowing for filler material, a significant portion of such a ramp would have to be solid masonry.  Remember, some of the blocks it would have to support weighed more than sixty tons.  Think about it.  If the ramp was, say, two-thirds the mass of the pyramid, then where would you dispose of two-thirds of the Great Pyramid, without a trace?

Another nagging problem with all external ramp theories, from Lauer onward, is the notion of stopping work on the pyramid while constructing the next layer of the ramp.  Hemienu built the Great Pyramid in about 21-23 years.  This task simply could not be accomplished in the time frame if practically all work on the pyramid had to stop every time the ramp had to be raised another level. 

Jean-Pierre:  Nor was it.  Up to now, “rampists” have always talked about a ramp being raised and lengthened as the pyramid rises, which means that you have to stop the construction to enlarge the ramp. My theory, which you will see does include an external ramp along with an internal ramp, is the first to describe an external ramp that is being built as the pyramid rises.

 The ramp was built at its maximum length, about a quarter of a mile, but with two parts, or lanes, built horizontally, layer by layer, following a 7-8% slope.  While one lane is used to pull the blocks, the other is raised by 2 layers to be ready for the next step.  The ramp is always rising with the pyramid and so there is no need for work on the pyramid to stop.

Lastly, with regard to the “rampists” theories, there is the issue of logistics.  The higher you go, the less workspace you have on both the ramp and the top surface of the pyramid.  And the logistics involved with moving the 60 ton blocks to the top of the King’s Chamber and maneuvering them into place..

Jean Pierre:  On a 7% grade ramp, 600 men are needed to pull a 60 ton block.  Can you imagine 600 guys?  With six hauling lines, that gives a 100 meter-long line for each..  It is impossible to coordinate such numbers.  And at the 60+ meters level you have only 50 meters of work space left on the north side to work around the King’s Chamber.

A single straight mile-long ramp just seems to create more problems than it solves.  Not only would it have required as much work and material as the pyramid itself, there is no evidence for such a huge ramp.  Where did it go?  And how was the pyramid completed in time if work had to stop in order to build up the ramp at each level.  Jean-Pierre’s two-lane ramp works fine up to the level of the King’s Chamber, but what about twice that height, about 135 meters?  The ramp would be far too narrow at that height.

Perhaps a straight ramp may have worked on other pyramids, but Hemienu wasn’t building just any pyramid.  He knew he was facing multiple challenges that would require complex answers, all of which had to be worked out before hand.

The External Spiraling Ramp:  The Corkscrew Solution

For several very good reasons the long, straight ramp theory doesn’t seem to work.  One can imagine that Hemienu might have figured this out pretty quickly.  A fast survey of the landscape, lining up the only feasible approach for the ramp to the pyramid’s south face, calculating the amount of material it would take to keep the grade constant even as the ramp spans the wadi, the ratio of the width of the base to the width of the top, the length of the ramp—It would have been obvious from the outset to Hemienu that the long single ramp wouldn’t work.

It was probably an early lunch for Hemienu and his crew after a morning walk around the building site, checking surveying points, taking mental notes.  As the architect and his crew sat around the table sipping karkade and brainstorming while the servants cleared the tableware, someone might have proposed what seemed to be the perfect solution.

“Think about a length of papyrus,” he might have said.  “Stretched out it would cover this entire table, and spill over each end.  But if you roll it up, it can fit into your robe.  What if we fold the ramp to fit into the usable terrain and onto the surface of the pyramid itself?”

Hemienu would have pondered this idea.  With his chin resting in his palm, he probably considered the advantages.  What problems would a spiraling ramp address?

Advantages

Several advantages of a spiraling ramp are immediately apparent.  Terrain is no longer an issue, as the terrain would be the pyramid itself.  Using the surface of the pyramid to support the ramp would mean a constant 7-8% grade could be easily maintained and the supporting surface would be a constant—no wadi to span and no 50-meter wide base to support a ramp 135 meters high.  As it winds up the pyramid, the ramp itself would maintain a fairly regular height, except at the top, where it would actually grow shorter.  This would also reduce the amount of material and man-hours required to build the ramp.

Hemienu’s assistant would have been pleased with his epiphany.  The problem of the ramp, which was turning into as large a project as the pyramid itself, had been solved.  Perhaps Vizier Hemienu, Master of Works for Pharaoh Khufu, would honor him with a memorial stela praising his genius?  But his exaltation would have been short lived.  

“What about the blocks for the King’s Chamber?” the Master Architect would have asked.  “How do we navigate those, or any of the other blocks, for that matter, around the corners of your folded papyrus?”

The Spiraling Collapse of the Corkscrew Theory

Hemienu would have seen right away that for all its advantages, and there were admittedly several, there were also some flaws with the spiraling ramp, and they were deal breakers.  The most obvious, and perhaps most vexing, would be how to handle the corners.  The most common blocks used in the building of the pyramid weighed 1.5 to 2.5 tons and were moved on a type of sled.  Wheels would not work because they would have sunk in the sand, and besides, there is no evidence of the wheel in use in Egypt this early.  So turning the sled 90 degrees to face the next course of the ramp at the corners was an issue—simply spinning it on its rails would have destroyed the sleds.

There is also the issue of time.  Keep in mind that every time you stop the production line to reorient a sled at the corner, the entire chain below you has to stop as well.  Hemienu is believed to have completed the pyramid in about 21-23 years, which means that a block was being put into place during every minute of construction.  How were the workers moving the sleds around in less than one minute on the tight corners of the corkscrew ramp?  

Even if the problem of orienting the standard blocks at the corners of an external winding ramp was solved, there was still the problem of the huge blocks used to construct the King’ Chamber.  The largest of these slabs weighed in excess of 60 tons and were over eight meters (a little over 26 feet) in length. 

If you can picture trying to maneuver such a block around a corner, even if there was someplace where the workmen could stand while pushing/pulling (which there would not be), at around 45 degrees into the turn the full weight of these blocks would be balanced entirely on the corner of the ramp.  Given that the corner of the ramp, obviously, would be built on the corner of the pyramid, we are talking about a tiny segment of the ramp pressed between a wedge below (the edge of the pyramid) and 60 tons of weight from above!  This isn’t a model for supporting a weight, it’s a model for splitting something in half!

Another issue Hemienu would have realized was that you just wouldn’t be able to build a winding ramp against the surface of the pyramid that would be stable enough.  Again, ignoring the problem of the 60 ton blocks, if you were to build a ramp wide enough and sturdy enough to move the average block up the pyramid, then the external ramp would obscure the corners of the pyramid, and that is another big problem.

The Narrow External Spiral Ramp—while the sight lines remain visible in this model, there is simply no way to secure such a ramp to the surface of the pyramid with any stability. (Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes)

In order to ensure that the four corners of the pyramid were rising at the same constant angle, Hemienu would have needed to take regular measurements.  If the slope of one side of the pyramid was off by as much as a fraction of a degree, then the shape of the entire pyramid would be off and the four edges would not meet at a single point at the top.   In order to make these exact measurements the corners and edges of the pyramid had to be visible, and a sturdy ramp corkscrewing around the pyramid would make this impossible. 

The Wide External Spiral Ramp—this is how a stable external ramp would have appeared, but there is no way to survey the sides of the pyramid and control its shape during construction. (Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes)

It seems that for every problem the external corkscrew ramp solves, another is uncovered.  You can’t build a ramp that allows the corners to be surveyed that will also be stable enough to bear the load of the blocks.  Such a ramp would entail trying to build a pyramid consisting of four perfectly equal triangles, with exactly the same slope on each side, without being able to survey the slopes and angles as construction proceeds.   If you build a ramp narrow enough to allow the measurements to be made, then it will be too unstable for the 1.5 to 2.5 ton blocks.  Keep in mind that at any given time there will be multiple blocks on each stretch of the ramp.

The external corkscrew ramp could not work, not for the standard blocks, and certainly not for the huge blocks required for building the King’s Chamber, or for that matter, the Queen’s Chamber.  Of course, other models have been offered—multiple ramps, zigzagging ramps, and some ramps that seem to have leapt from an M. C. Escher drawing.  But down through the ages the long single ramp and the external spiral ramp have stood the test of time.

And failed the tests of physics and engineering.

The Internal Spiraling Ramp:  Now We’re Getting Somewhere!

As we learned in the Introduction, the question of how the Great Pyramid was built caught the attention of an engineer named Henri Houdin back in 1999 after he viewed a television program called The Mystery of the Pyramid.  Henri was one of the many French youth who inherited a post-WWII France, with all of the reconstruction that went with it.  Soon after receiving his Ph. D. from École des Arts et Metiers, 24-year-old Henri found himself in charge of rebuilding the Conflans Bridge outside of Paris (Brier and Houdin, pp. 2, 38).  The year was 1947, and a long and impressive career lay before young Henri.

In 1999, Henri was retired, but far from tired.  He needed something to occupy his mind, which was as sharp and hungry for activity as ever.  He approached the problem of Khufu’s Pyramid the same way he approached any other engineering problem he had ever taken on—How do I build this? 

The advantages of the spiraling ramp still held true.  A workable ramp that would maintain a 7-8% grade would have to be around a mile long, and the only way to do that with the terrain where Hemienu built the Great Pyramid was by wrapping the ramp around the pyramid itself.  Multiple straight ramps would not work because the only side where a straight ramp could be built was on the southern side, and the terrain there only allowed for one ramp to approach the pyramid.

Making use of the artificial terrain of the pyramid itself would have the benefit of a regular surface free of obstacles, if there was only some way to construct a sturdy enough ramp that would also leave the site lines visible for surveying.  So how would the engineer Henri Houdin build this?

Henri’s epiphany came as he pondered how he would deliver the building materials to the worksites.  In this sense, the worksites are different from the construction site.  The construction site was the entire project, but the construction site was made up of many worksites that were all over the structure, and many of which were in constant movement as the pyramid rose.  Henri’s epiphany was that if he were to build the pyramid using the tools available at the time he would build it from the inside out, and the ramp would likewise be located on the inside.

An internal ramp would retain all of the benefits of the corkscrew ramp while solving many of the problems.  The pyramid would not only be the building surface, it would be the ramp itself.  The sight lines would remain visible because the ramp would be concealed within the pyramid.  This meant that there would be no need to trade off between visibility and stability, which became doubly moot because the ramp would be as sturdy as the pyramid itself.

This solution also was in keeping with the economy Hemienu expressed throughout the rest of the pyramid.  There was no wasted material—the material would already be in place.  No wasted man-hours because virtually every block put in place for the ramp would have been required in the construction of the pyramid anyway.  And there would be no need to explain why there are no ruins of the ramp, or how its materials were disposed of.  The ramp is still there, within the core of the pyramid.

Henri Houdin’s first drawing of this ramp looks even more like a corkscrew than the external corkscrew model did.  The external spiral ramp models follow the contour of the pyramid and are square in shape, with right-angle turns at the corners.  Henri’s first model was a curving spiral that started on the eastern corner of the southern face and curled its way up at an 8% grade. 

Henri revised his model to include four separate ramps, one entering on each face of the pyramid.  Each of these ramps would reach a different level of the pyramid, but also allowed for multiple ramps to be in use at different levels.  For instance, at the lowest levels, where most of the work took place and most of the material had to be transported, there would be four ramps in use at the same time.  As each ramp reached its maximum height, and thus usability, the pyramid also became smaller requiring less material and labor.

The idea of building the pyramid from the inside out by using four spiraling internal ramps answered more problems than any model proposed so far.  Perhaps most importantly Henri had put the train on the right track by moving the works inside.  Building the pyramid layer by layer by use of an external ramp alone might make good sense to a layperson, but an engineer knows that the inner structures within the core of the pyramid would not only have to come first, but would dictate how the rest of the pyramid would have to be constructed. 

Henri had shared his ideas with his architect son, Jean-Pierre, who had taken up the task with a relish of his own.  But Jean-Pierre Houdin brought the skills of a seasoned architect to the table, and he saw problems even the engineer had missed.  Obviously the ramp would have to be inside the pyramid, that much had been settled.  But the circular spiral simply couldn’t work.

The 1.5 to 2.5 ton blocks had to be pulled by teams of men, and this cannot be done from around a curve.  The men would have to be standing in a straight line in order to effectively pull the lines connected to the sleds, and the constant curve would place uneven pressure on the sleds that would lead to a rapid breakdown.

Henri’s model also left the problem of the large 60+ ton blocks unresolved.  Even ignoring the weight, the length of these blocks would preclude them from fitting into the circular internal ramps.  Jean-Pierre knew that he was back to a square spiraling ramp, which brought him back to the question of how to navigate the right angles.  There was really only one answer—the sleds would have to be lifted and turned 90 degrees at each corner.  Easier said than done.

And what about the masonry of the King’s Chamber?  No internal ramp could manage that.  Henri had set the train on the right track, but now it was up to Jean-Pierre to move it forward.  A straight ramp, perhaps one that was an internal/external combination, could reach the King’s Chamber worksite with a 7-8% grade, and would still be short enough to fit into the terrain.  But would it be long enough to accommodate enough men to pull the 60+ ton blocks?  Probably not.  And even if the blocks could be hauled to the worksite, how would they be maneuvered into place?

Jean-Pierre Houdin signs copies of his first book about The Great Pyramid for Magdy El-Ghandour, Director for the foreign missions at the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Taha Abdallah, Dean of Shorouk University. (Photo courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin)

Jean-Pierre knew that the solution had to involve both an internal and an external ramp, and both straight and spiraling ramps, but how?  How were the blocks turned at the corners?  How were the giant slabs of the King’s Chamber pulled up the straight ramp and fitted into place with such precision? 

In Hemienu to Houdin:  Part Two we will get into the details of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory starting with his own ramp theory, and how it answers all of the above questions, and more.

Photograph ”Statue-of-Hemiun.jpg” by Einsamer Schütze is provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons  and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of those files under the conditions that you appropriately attribute them, and that you distribute them only under a license identical to this one. Official license.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

Our master builders have different goals, however.  The first, Hemienu, was determined to build the greatest pyramid ever, and the second, Jean-Pierre Houdin, was equally determined to figure out how he did it.

Jean-Pierre Houdin and Bob Brier wrote a book—The Secret of the Great Pyramid—about this very subject in 2008 and the paperback edition is due to hit bookstores October 6, 2009.  Ahead of the paperback, Em Hotep!  is providing you with a multi-part primer to Houdin’s work, to be followed with an interview with the man himself.

But first, who are these two architects?

Hemienu, son of Nefermaat—or Snefru

Hemienu: Vizier, Master of Works, and architect of the Great Pyramid (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Although the Great Pyramid bears the name of Pharaoh Khufu, Hemienu was the genius behind its construction.  It was no coincidence that Hemienu should be selected for the job, and his pedigree would have well prepared him for the task.  What we don’t know from primary sources we may infer from what we do know about his probable history, and history in general.

There are two main theories regarding Hemienu’s childhood.  According to one theory he was the son of Pharaoh Snefru’s vizier, Nefermaat.  Vizier Nefermaat also bore the title “King’s Eldest Son,” which taken literally would have made Hemienu Snefru’s grandson.  As the positions of Vizier and Master of Works usually went hand-in-hand, it is believed that Nefermaat probably designed and built Snefru’s pyramids, including the Red Pyramid, the first true pyramid

If Nefermaat was Hemienu’s father, it is not difficult to imagine the two of them visiting building sites together, the youngster rapt with his father’s instructions to the workers, his discussions of geography and topography as he surveyed locations, and geological reports delivered from distant provinces.  He would have witnessed firsthand the difficult and painful lessons of the failures of the collapsed pyramid at Meidum and the second guessing that led to the oddly shaped Bent Pyramid at Dashur.

Pharaoh Snefru (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The other theory is that Hemienu was the son of Snefru, the pharaoh himself.  As a son of the pharaoh, Hemienu would have had an elite education leaving him well versed in the principles of mathematics and astronomy, and with an appreciation for the importance of architecture in religion.  His days at the court would have familiarized him with the intricacies of leadership and logistics.

While Hemienu, as the son of Pharaoh Snefru, may not have visited the building sites of the pyramids (although he very well may have), he would have been privy to the discussions of their construction.  We may safely assume this from the fact that regardless of who his father may have been, he eventually became vizier and Master of Works himself for his brother—or uncle—Khufu.  And as such, he showed clear signs of having learned from, and improved upon, the methods used by pyramid builders who preceded him.

The Pyramid Age had been ushered in by Imhotep, the vizier and master architect of Pharaoh Djoser.  Imhotep invented the pyramid, and while the form he designed may have changed, his template for pyramids and the complexes associated with them would set the standard for centuries to follow.  Before Imhotep, pharaohs and other nobles were buried under mastabas, rectangular stone buildings that contained mortuary shrines to the deceased and often symbolically mirrored the homes they occupied in life.

Imhotep conceived of a burial monument consisting of a number of mastabas stacked on top of each other, growing smaller as they rose.  His invention was the Step Pyramid, and he arrived at it through a process of modification and experimentation.  Like a Third Dynasty Einstein, Imhotep started with the idea of a pyramid and by devising, testing, and refining his idea, he achieved what had never been done before.

Hemienu, on the other hand, was more like Michelangelo.  He knew exactly what he wanted from the beginning, and by precisely executing his vision he achieved what has never been done since.  He had a plan which underwent very little modification, nor could it have.  Hemienu understood how every layer had to look and function—from the underground provisional tomb to the pyramidion—before he began digging.

Jean-Pierre Houdin, son of Henri

Jean-Pierre Houdin (center) - An architectural solution to an architectural question (courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin)

Jean-Pierre Houdin also grew up among the construction of great monuments.  His father, Henri Houdin, was part of the generation of French children born after WWI whose lives would be shaped by the events of WWII.  At the end of the war, he earned a Ph.D. in engineering from Paris’s presti-gious École des Arts et Metiers.  With more than 7,000 bridges to be rebuilt, young engineers were given tremendous responsibilities. Thus in 1947 24-year-old Henri Houdin was placed in charge of rebuilding the Conflans Bridge outside of Paris (Brier and Houdin, pp. 2, 38).

Jean-Pierre was born in 1951, the younger of two sons, and spent much of his childhood playing at construction sites with his brother, Bernard.  Henri had been assigned to the Ivory Coast, a French protectorate, where he was instrumental in the rebuilding of that country, and family outings often consisted of picnics at construction sites (Brier and Houdin, pp. 38-40). 

It was thus no surprise when Jean-Pierre decided to become an architect.  He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1970 for that purpose where, as part of his final year studies, Jean-Pierre designed a solar house that would be considered cutting edge green technology today.  The year was 1976.

Henri Houdin first became intrigued with the construction of the Great Pyramid in 1998, when he viewed a television program on the subject, The Mystery of the Pyramid.  He watched with interest as the theories of construction were spelled out, but his instinct told him that the conventional theories didn’t quite add up.  They were illogical to the trained eye of an experienced master builder and were neither based on true civil engineering techniques nor masonry processes.

The engineer immediately spotted two misconceptions. The first was that blocks were always depicted being delivered to the site from the base to the top from the outside. The second misconception was that the pyramid facing was shown being installed at the end of the process, from top to base, with no means of controlling the shape of the monument. Henri didn’t see how that could be possible.  He then had an ingenious idea: if he would have to build a pyramid, he would build it from the inside.

Henri Houdin now had a project to keep him busy in his retirement, and he tackled the quandary with relish.  How would he, as an engineer, build the pyramid?  He worked and reworked his ideas, and in 1999 went so far as to publish his theory in the journal of the French National Society of Engineers and Scientists (Brier and Houdin, p. 126).

Henri discussed his newfound passion often with Jean-Pierre, but just as the engineer had seen flaws in the approach of the non-engineers, the architect son began to notice things his engineer father had missed.  For instance, Henri had envisioned an internal ramp spiraling up the inside of the pyramid in a circular fashion.  Jean-Pierre knew that it would be impossible to move heavy blocks in a circular pattern—there is no efficient way to push or pull such weights around a constant curve. 

Jean-Pierre also knew that there was no way the internal ramp could accommodate some of the larger blocks used in the construction of the King’s Chamber (Brier and Houdin, p. 126).  Somehow Hemienu had found a way to move granite slabs, some of which weighed more than sixty tons, to a height of nearly 200 feet and maneuver them into exactly the right place. 

So the architect stepped in where the engineer left off.  How had Hemienu done it?  Or more to the point, how was Jean-Pierre going to do it?  How do you reverse engineer a five and a half million ton pyramid?

Synthesis

About a hundred feet to the east of the Great Pyramid, cut into the limestone bedrock, is a sixty-foot trench first surveyed in the 1880’s by Sir William M. Flinders Petrie.  The trench contains, rendered in 3D, an exact model of the descending and ascending passages of the pyramid, around which the rest would be designed.  Although the halls are much shorter, they are the exact dimensions of the real thing, a veritable walk-in blueprint, right down to the narrowing of the ascending passageway to allow blocks to be wedged in (Brier and Houdin, pp. 114-17).

As it turns out, Jean-Pierre Houdin would approach the problem in exactly the same way Hemienu did.  Thinking like his architect predecessor, Jean-Pierre used architectural software to produce the first true 3D model of the pyramid since Hemienu.  Other models had been made of the pyramid, to be sure, but Jean-Pierre was able to use specialized computer imagery that allowed him to turn the pyramid in any direction, to see the interior through its external skin, and to virtually travel through its passages just as Hemienu did in his 3D model.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu - Does a mile-long ramp lie hidden within? (Photo by Keith Payne)

Jean-Pierre’s life experience as the son of an engineer, his professional training and experience as an architect, and his technological savvy made him an ideal person to reexamine the question of how Khufu’s Pyramid was conceived, planned, and ultimately built.  His zeal would bring him to the attention of Dassault Systèmes, the world leader in 3D imaging, where he would assemble a dream team of modern pyramid builders and gain the resources to give his project the attention it deserves.

Hemienu to Houdin—Building a Great Pyramid

Over the next few weeks Em Hotep! will take you inside Jean-Pierre Houdin’s ideas, explore his vision, and evaluate his conclusions.  The first part will be an examination of the internal ramp theory.  What are the shortcomings of the traditional theories and how does his internal ramp resolve these issues?  Then we will go into the core of the pyramid itself and explore Houdin’s explanations of some of the pyramid’s abiding enigmas, such as the purpose of the Grand Gallery, and how those titanic granite blocks were put into place.  Finally, we will end with an exclusive interview with Jean Pierre Houdin himself to get clarification and find out where he will take us next.

Jean-Pierre Houdin’s mind is in perpetual motion, and describing Khufu’s Pyramid as his passion is actually an understatement—it is his magnum opus, his mission.  With his and Bob Brier’s book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, just going into paperback in October, you can rest assured his work has continued.  In addition to the coming interview, he just might provide some clarification as we explore his theory.  Who knows what new insights may arise?

Next Part: 

Hemienu to Houdin Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp, Straight or With a Twist?

Work Cited:  Brier, Bob and Jean-Pierre Houdin.  The Secret of the Great Pyramid.  New York:  Smithsonian, 2008.

Photographs ”Statue-of-Hemiun.jpg” by Einsamer Schütze and “Snofru Eg Mus Kairo 2002.png” are provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons  and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of those files under the conditions that you appropriately attribute them, and that you distribute them only under a license identical to this one. Official license.  Both photographs of Jean-Pierre Houdin are courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin, all rights reserved. 

ALL OTHER photographs and text are copyright (c) 2009 by Keith Payne, all rights reserved.

The theory accounts for some anomalies in a microgravemetric survey couducted by French researchers in the 1980′s, and includes his trip up the side of the pyramid to explore the “niche”.  He discovered an unexplored chamber right where you would expect one if his theory of an internal ramp was correct…

Archaeology was kind enough to put the entire article online.  Read it here -  Update: Return to the Great Pyramid.