It is probably not a coincidence that the Seventh World Mummy Congress was convened at the University of San Diego, a short trip across town from the San Diego Museum of Man, where Mumab had just settled into his new home.  Mumab—short for Mummy of University of Maryland at Baltimore—has the distinction of being the first modern ancient mummy.  The inspiration for his creation came in the mid 90’s when mummy expert Dr. Bob Brier realized that the only way to know how ancient Egyptian mummies were made would be to mummify a human cadaver using the same tools and methods the Egyptians used.  And so he did.

In this article Em Hotep will look at the history of Mumab—how he was made, what was learned from him, and what he is up to now.

When you think of royal Egyptian mummies, the name Mumab probably does not come to mind.  And to be certain, Mumab did not begin as royalty, at least as far as we know.  When he first appears in our story he is simply the cadaver of a Baltimore man in his 70’s who had donated his body to science before passing away.  When he filled out his donor card he was probably unaware that he would ultimately become the first human being to receive a royal Egyptian mummification in over 2,000 years and the benchmark against which actual royal mummies would be compared.

Bob Brier (Courtesy of University of Richmond)

Mumab could not have been in better hands for his transformation.  Dr. Bob Brier, Senior Research Fellow at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, has an extensive history with mummies and the mummification process.  In addition to his work with ancient Egyptian mummies such as Tutankhamun and Ramesses II, Dr. Brier has conducted research on more recent quasi-royal mummies like Vladimir Lenin and Eva Perón.  If you want to make a modern mummy using ancient Egyptian methods, Dr. Brier is your best choice.

Dr. Brier’s research kept forcing him to confront the same problem—that the primary and secondary sources on how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead were incomplete, and in some cases, probably inaccurate.  Certain questions were simply not addressed, and certain answers seemed off the mark.  What really happens when you try to remove a human brain via the nostrils using a long metal hook?  As with any subject in science, the only real way to have a better understanding of how mummies were made was to test hypotheses and attempt to reproduce results.

Ronn Wade (Courtesy of CNN/Turner Broadcasting)

Mumab came into being during the early summer months of 1994 to do just that.  Dr. Brier partnered with Dr. Ronn Wade, Director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board and Director of the Anatomical Services Division at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and a huge supporting team of artists, scientists, and technicians, to faithfully reproduce an Egyptian mummification.  After replicating scores of ancient mortuary tools using authentic materials and designs, and gathering embalming materials from the same sources the ancients would have used, they were ready to begin.

In order to fully appreciate Mumab’s contribution to our knowledge of ancient Egyptian mummification we should first take a look at what we knew beforehand and how Dr. Brier’s work changed that.

Tombs and Mummies:  If you have one, you’ll want the other

Life goes on in the afterlife—wall painting from the Sixth Dynasty tomb of Metchetchi (Photo by Keith Payne)

Ancient Egyptians were incredible tomb builders.  From the simple shaft tombs to the Great Pyramid, when it came to the afterlife the Egyptians liked to be well prepared.  This might lead to the incorrect assumption that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death, but that was simply not the case.  They were obsessed with life, and they did not want it to end.  The Egyptian idea of the afterlife was a lot like mortal life, only better.  If you can imagine getting to retire while still in your prime, and never getting older, then you will have a pretty good idea of what the ancient Egyptians had in mind.

However, as is always the case with the hereafter, there were conditions attached.  Along with all of the normal expectations about living a just life, the ancient Egyptians believed that the preservation of the body was absolutely essential for passage into the afterlife.  Over time this led to the development of one of the most complex and ritualized religious systems in history, one which has left us some of the most beautiful sacred monuments and iconography ever created.  But even from the earliest days of predynastic Egypt, mummification was an established part of Egyptian religion.

Egyptian mummification was the process of preserving a body by completely drying it out before decomposition had a chance to take root.  Decomposition is caused by bacteria, and bacteria require moisture to thrive.  If you remove all of the moisture from a body before the bacteria has a chance to become established then you can prevent decomposition.  This is the same reason why salted meats and dried fruits and vegetables were so important prior to refrigeration—dehydration prevented spoilage and increased shelf life.  Drying out a human body can increase its shelf life by thousands of years.

Ginger—one of the more famous examples of a predynastic natural mummy

Dr. Brier believes that this connection between preservation of the body and the afterlife developed pretty early in Egyptian history, when the Egyptians realized that a body buried in the hot desert sands did not decay, and that it retained much of its physical characteristics.  Unlike a decayed body, a mummified body could be recognized as the person it once was, which suggested that something of the individual person could survive physical death.  This imperishability of the body therefore became associated with the perpetuation of the human spirit after death.

Recreation of a pre-dynastic sand burial in the Royal Ontario Museum (Photo by Keith Schengili-Roberts)

But there was a problem with sand burials.  While it’s true that the dehydrating effects of being buried in hot sand led to really effective mummifications, the body was also vulnerable to exposure.  Winds could uncover the mummified body which then allowed scavengers to damage or destroy it, defeating the whole purpose of mummification—to preserve the body intact.  Egypt was also subject to occasional flash flooding, which could not only carry the body away, it also reintroduced moisture and bacteria to the mummy.

So the Egyptians began thinking in terms of protection.  Obviously the body had to be interred someplace that would be safe from animals and the elements, but this presented its own difficulties.  A body placed inside a tomb without first being preserved would decay the same as one left out in the open.  Somehow they had to find a way to mummify the body before putting it into its tomb, but time was of the essence.  If the body was not dehydrated quickly enough, decomposition could begin.

One easy solution would have been to bury the body in a sand pit until it was mummified, then transfer the body to its permanent tomb.  But this still left the body unprotected during the sand burial, and when you are talking about the afterlife, you want to leave as little to chance as possible.  If you wanted to be absolutely certain that your body was preserved intact, then you wanted both a safe place for mummification and a safe place for interment.  Safe mummification meant drying the body out quickly, but without the benefit of the hot desert sands.

A natural mummy from El Museo de las Momias Guanajuato, Mexico (Photo by Tomas Castelazo)

Sand burials made natural mummification possible—mummification that occurred entirely without extra efforts being made to preserve the body.  But sand burials were too unpredictable.  Maybe the body would be preserved for the ages, but probably not.  This necessitated a new innovation—burying people inside tombs cut into the limestone bedrock.  But even in a tomb, an unpreserved body would still decay, so with the advent of the Age of the Tomb Builders we also have the beginning of artificial mummification, the process of drying and preserving the body under “laboratory conditions.”

For this reason it can be said that if you had a mummy then you also wanted a tomb, and vice versa.  Having a mummy meant that you would also want the protection afforded by a sealed tomb, otherwise your mummy would be subject to the animals and elements.  But simply putting a body in a tomb did not prevent decomposition, so the body had to be mummified first.  The two were sort of a package deal.

So, how were mummies made?

Mummy Making 101

While they may not have been obsessed with death, the ancient Egyptians were obsessive record keepers.  They wrote down everything, from transactions between merchants to poems and love letters.  But two things are conspicuously missing from the written record:  how to build pyramids and how to make mummies.  Bob Brier suggests that mummy making might have been kept mum because it was a trade secret, but we are not entirely without clues.

Huy's mummy workshop

One source of insight comes from the tomb of Huy, himself an embalmer.  As stated above, Egyptians believed the afterlife was sort of a better version of their mortal lives, and so they decorated their tombs with scenes from their daily lives, including both work and play.  Being an embalmer, Huy chose to illustrate his tomb with a scene from his mummy workshop.  Dr. Brier points out that while this scene does not show an actual mummification in progress, it does show some of the tools used, and from this we can get an idea of how Huy plied his trade.

Herodotus—early authority on mummification (Photo by Marsyas)

Another source is the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC and travelled to Egypt around 454 BC.  Although Herodotus did not witness a mummification first hand, he does seem to have found a chatty embalmer who confided in him three different methods which conveniently correspond with upper, middle, and lower class patrons.  Since the account of an upper class mummification was obviously the most complete (no cutting corners), that was the description most useful to Dr. Brier.

Based on sources such of these, a generally accepted, albeit incomplete, description of the process of royal mummification arose.  The reader should bear in mind that this description is concerned mostly with the practical concerns of mummification—how to dry out a body, and fast.  Mummification was also a very sacred ritual that involved processes that were of a strictly spiritual nature.  For a more complete account, the reader is referred to Dr. Brier’s book, Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art.

Replicas of the sort of hooks used to remove the brain and clean the cranial cavity (Photo courtesy of The Science Museum (UK) Science and Society Picture Library)

The embalming took place inside a sacred tent called the ibu, or, “Place of Purification.”  The body would have first been washed with palm wine and then rinsed with water.  Next, the brain would have been removed.  The ancient Egyptians did not see the brain as a vital organ—thought and emotion were believed to take place in the heart, so the brain was simply removed.  Long hooks were inserted through the nostrils and into the skull, where it was originally believed they were used to tear away the brain a piece at a time.  As we will learn a little later, this was probably not exactly how the hooks were used.

Egyptian priests used mixtures of palm wine and fragrent resins to cleanse and seal the body

Once the brain was removed, palm wine and resin were poured through the nostrils to rinse and purify the hollow skull.  This would have removed any remaining blood and brain matter, and the natural disinfecting properties of the wine and resin would have helped kill bacteria, further hampering decomposition.  As the wine evaporated the resin would gradually harden, effectively sealing the skull from within.  More resin would be added later.  Once the brain was removed, the embalmers would have then begun the removal of the internal organs.

Bronze embalming tools (Photo courtesy of The Science Museum (UK) Science and Society Picture Library)

Extraction of the internal organs was important because, being composed of very soft and moist tissues, they were prone to rapid decay.  Bear in mind that the goal of mummification was to preserve the body before decomposition set in, so the embalmers would have wanted to empty and purify the torso as soon and completely as possible.   A small incision would have been made on the left side of the body through which the organs were removed.

Herodotus speaks of the embalmers using a knife made of black stone, probably obsidian, to make this incision.  However, since copper and bronze cutting tools have been found with other embalming tools, it was assumed that the stone knife was probably used for ritual purposes.  But as we shall see, Mumab taught us that Herodotus was probably right about the stone knife being used to make the incision.

Weighing the heart against the feather of Ma’at—one of the trials of the afterlife (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Like any modern surgeon, the priest responsible for removing the organs through this small incision would have had nimble hands.  The heart was not removed because it was thought to be the center of human thought and emotion, and would be needed to pass the trials of judgment and enter the afterlife.  Other than the heart, everything else came out.  Once the organs were removed, the liver, intestines, stomach, and lungs were separated and readied for preservation.

The organs would have first been washed with palm wine and the aromatic resins of frankincense and myrrh.  In addition to the preservative qualities of these resins, Drs. Brier and Wade discovered that the frankincense and myrrh helped mask the rather unpleasant odors of working with a dead body.  As devout as the embalmer priests may have been, they were only human, and temperatures inside the ibu tent would have soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.   Any relief from the smell would have been welcomed.

Canopic jars of Sitwerut, wife of Horkherty (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Once they were cleansed, the liver, intestines, stomach, and lungs were packed with natron into four special vessels called canopic jars.  Canopic jars could be made of anything from pottery and limestone to more precious materials such as alabaster or even gold.  There were specific jars for each of the four organs, and their look and religious function evolved over time.

During the Old Kingdom Period canopic jars were plain-featured with unadorned lids.  Old Kingdom canopic jars were rarely inscribed in any sort of way.  During the Middle Kingdom Period inscribed canopic jars were more common, and the stoppers were shaped like human heads, presumably the deceased.  By the Late Period the jars were much more ritualized, with lids shaped like the heads of the Four Sons of Horus, the gods responsible for the protection of their respective organs.

With the brain removed and the viscera packed into their canopic jars, the embalmers were now ready to begin the preparation of the body itself.  First the inside of the torso would be cleansed with palm wine and fragrant resins to flush out any remaining soft tissues and blood.  Then the inside of the body was stuffed with small sacks of natron to absorb moisture from within, and the body itself would have been covered in a mound of natron to pull moisture out.

Natron with a bowl of sawdust, also often used in mummification

Natron is a naturally occurring mixture of sodium chloride (salt), sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and sodium carbonate decahydrate (ash soda).  Many of the rivers and lakes in Egypt’s delta had a high level of salinity, and when water from these sources evaporated they left deposits of natron on their banks.  One area had such an abundance of these salt lakes that it was named Wadi Natrun, the Valley of Natron.  Harvesting this valuable resource for the embalming industry would have undoubtedly been a lucrative business.

Bag of natron from Tutankhamun's embalming cache (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Natron is vital to mummification because it is the key to dehydrating the body fast enough to prevent decomposition.  Natron helps break down fats into oil and then absorbs these and other liquids from the body.  As the natron absorbed the bodily fluids it would harden into a crust which could then be removed.  Another chemical change that occurs with natron is that as it absorbs moisture it increases in alkalinity, which further helped with mummification by inhibiting the growth of bacteria.

Two of the unanswered questions about mummification, prior to Mumab, were A) how much natron did it take to mummify a human body, and B) how long did mummification take?  There were no real clues pertaining to the first question, but Herodotus contended that 70 days was the standard period for mummification.  After 40 days or so the sacks of natron would have been removed from the body cavity and then replaced with clean natron sacks, resin-soaked linen, aromatic herbs, and wood chips.

It was believed that after 40 days the body would have been finished drying.  The abdominal incision would have been sewn up, the skull stuffed with resin-soaked linen, and all other openings sealed.  Originally the organs would have been left in the canopic jars, but in later years the organs were removed, wrapped in resin-soaked linen, and sealed up inside the body

The body would have then been washed again with palm wine and anointed with resin and pleasant-smelling oils.  The body was now ready to be wrapped in linen, with resin applied to the bandaging to act as a glue and sealant.  The mummy might have had certain details and scriptures painted on it before being placed inside of one or more coffins and finally interred.

A fully wrapped and painted mummy, currently in the British Museum (Photo by Klafubra)

Opening of the mouth ceremony—preparing the body for the afterlife

In all, the “70 Day Rule” for mummification could be broken down into 15 days for cleansing and purification, 40 days for dehydration in natron, and then 15 days for wrapping and final rites.  This 70-day cycle also coincided with the 70 days the star Sirius spent “dying” as it made its journey across the night sky into the grave of the horizon.  Sirius, the “Dog Star,” was associated with Anubis, the god of mummification and the afterlife.

So now we will jump forward 2,000 years to Baltimore, 1994, where two mummy detectives were about to tackle some of mummification’s unanswered questions.

Mumab

Ronn Wade and Bob Brier

Sources such as Herodotus and tomb paintings, as well as the evidence of the mortuary tools themselves, gave a fairly good idea of how mummification was performed, but Egyptologists knew the picture was incomplete.  They knew, for example, that natron was the key to fast dehydration, but how much natron was required?  These were the types of questions that led Bob Brier to his epiphany—if he was really going to know how the ancients performed mummification, he would have to make one himself.  Dr. Brier decided to reverse engineer an ancient Egyptian mummy.

The potential benefits of doing an ancient Egyptian mummification under controlled conditions were huge.  Not only would it provide answers to questions like how much natron would be needed, it would allow Drs. Brier and Wade to test hypotheses such as whether or not an obsidian knife could have really been used to make the abdominal incision, or how effectively the brain could be removed by pulling it out with long hooks.

Dr. Tori Randall prepares a 550-year-old Peruvian child mummy for a CT scan for the San Diego Museum of Man. Mumab can serve as a point of comparison for actual ancient mummies (Photo by Official U.S. Navy Imagery)

Another advantage of Mumab was that he could serve as a sort of benchmark for mummy studies.  Unlike actual ancient mummies, Mumab’s embalmers knew all of his pre- and post-mortem conditions—how he died, how he was mummified, and how his body looked and behaved during each phase of his transformation.  Mumab would be the case study against which other mummies could be compared.

For the mummy to be an ideal benchmark, the donor had to be as average and unremarkable as possible.  He or she (it ended up being a he) would have to be similar in height and build to an average Egyptian, and he would need to have died of natural causes.  No major surgeries, as these would have produced “forensic artifacts” that one would not see in an ancient mummy.  No major diseases either, as these would have caused potentially unpredictable side effects and results from the mummification process, limiting his use as a benchmark.

As for the mummification itself, Drs. Brier and Wade would have to strictly follow what they knew of the ancient process.  All of the embalming tools would be expertly made replicas of the same tools the ancients used.  This meant recreating details even when the exact function was unknown.  The embalming board, for example, was depicted with what Dr. Brier describes as “railroad tie-like” horizontally-running slats that would have elevated the body several inches above the board.  At the time, the reason for these slats was unknown, but they were faithfully reproduced.

Linen from Tutankhamun’s embalming cache (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The ingredients would be, as much as possible, gathered from the same sources the ancient Egyptians would have used.  Four hundred pounds of natron were gathered from the Wadi Natrun.  Frankincense and myrrh were brought from Yemen, the same trade routes that supplied the ancient embalmers.  In some cases ingredients and materials had to be sought where available.  Palm wine, for instance, was acquired from Nigeria, and they had to go to Ireland to purchase 100 yards of pure, untreated linen.

The atmosphere and working conditions were also reproduced as accurately as possible.  For the embalming, Drs. Brier and Wade erected their own ibu tent inside a room at the University of Maryland Medical School.  The temperature inside the tent was kept at a constant 105 degrees Fahrenheit, with 22% humidity—the same conditions under which the ancient embalmers would have worked.  With the tools, ingredients, and working conditions reproduced as faithfully as possible, they were ready to begin.

So how exactly did this work? (National Geographic)

One of the first things Drs. Brier and Wade learned was that a brain cannot be pulled out of the skull through the nostrils by long hooks.  Brains are pretty mushy, so it was sort of like trying to pull soft tofu through the neck of a wine bottle with a fondue fork.  They discovered that the hooks were probably used to scramble the brain into a liquid that could then be poured out.  The barbed shape allowed pieces of linen to be inserted and then pulled back out, so the hooks were a kind of multi-purpose cranial cleaning tool.

Another thing Mumab taught us was that Herodotus was right about the stone knife.  Dr. Brier had enlisted a large team of specialists to make the tools he would need to assure they would be both authentic and of appropriate quality.  What he discovered in the ibu tent was that the obsidian knife worked considerably better than the copper and bronze knives.  In fact, obsidian is able to take an edge 1/6^th the thickness of a modern scalpel, and is used by some surgeons today.  Dr. Brier reported that the “stone knife” used by the ancient embalmers cut more cleanly and neatly than surgical steel.

Regarding the embalming board, they learned the purpose of the “railroad tie-like” slats.  During the drying out phase, when the body is covered with natron, it is just as important that it lies on top of a bed of natron as well.  Gravity pulls the moisture in a dead body downward.  If a body is left lying on its back, the fluids will pool in the parts that touch the ground—the upper back, buttocks, and backs of the legs.  This is why dead bodies appear heavily bruised on their downward facing side.

For this reason, there had to be a good quantity of natron beneath the dehydrating body.  But if you lay a body on top of a pile of something the consistency of table salt for forty days, you find that another effect of gravity is displacement.  The natron will gradually conform to the shape of the body as the heavier parts push it outward and away.  This results in thinner layers of natron where you need it the most—the upper back, buttocks, and the backs of the legs.

Mumab on his mortuary board

The horizontal slats on the surface of the embalming board created furrows into which the natron could be packed, and these troughs held the natron in place throughout the entire drying process.  Parts of the body that did not lie flat, such as the neck and the small of the back, could be situated over the slats (with natron beneath them as well, of course), so that as the body settled the lower parts would still be nestled in a thick bed of natron.  So the embalming board was specifically designed to allow the back of the body to dehydrate evenly.

Once the body was packed in natron it was time to close up the tent and wait.  Dr. Brier decided on a 35-day drying period.  At the end of the 35 days the tent was reopened and the natron was removed from the body.  The first thing the researchers noted was that after 35 days in natron the mummy looks pretty much the way it will thousands of years later.  So it is not the passage of time that gives mummies their characteristic withered look, it is the actual dehydrating process itself.

Another thing Dr. Brier noticed was that Mumab weighed more than expected.  The body weighed 180 lbs at the beginning of the drying process, and after 35 days he only weighed 60 lbs.  That was a significant loss, but it was still too heavy for a fully desiccated body.  Mumab was not done yet.  But there were no signs of decomposition either, and the presence of moisture in the larger muscles meant that the body was still a little flexible.

Wrapping Mumab

Dr. Brier had first thought that since the body had not completely dehydrated in the 35 day period that the experiment had failed, but he wanted to be certain, so he decided to put the mummy back into the ibu tent for another three months.  Rather than simply repacking the body in natron, the team decided to do a preliminary wrapping, which is when Dr. Brier began to suspect that the goal of the 35 day drying period may not have been total dehydration after all.  The flexibility provided by the remaining moisture made wrapping the mummy much easier than it would have been if it was completely dried out.

When the Egyptian priests applied the linen wrapping they didn’t simply roll the body up like a cocoon, they wrapped the limbs individually and a lot of attention was paid to detail and thoroughness.  Completely dried out bodies are very brittle, and the sort of jostling required by wrapping the body would make damage very likely.  But after the 35 day period (or 40, by Herodotus’ reckoning) the body was dry enough that it could receive a preliminary wrapping without having to worry about decomposition taking place under the bandages, but pliable enough that the body would not be damaged during this process.

Pliability also meant that the body could be posed during the preliminary wrapping.  This was important for royal mummies because the positioning of the arms denoted social rank.  Once the mummy was completely dried out this would have been impossible.  The arms would have simply broken.

Ptolemaic Period mummy on display at the Louvre,Département des Antiquités égyptiennes. This sort of intricate wrapping would have required constant manipulation of the body, including the limbs. Could this be done with a fully dehydrated body? (Photo by Dada)

So Mumab taught us that the 35 (or 40) day drying period in natron was not intended to completely dry the body out.  When the mummy is drying it is important to have as much of the skin as possible in direct contact with natron.  This means that posing the mummy in its final position during the 35 day period would probably not have been possible as this would have meant that part of the arms and torso would not have been exposed to the drying agent.

Mumab wrapped

Dr. Brier concluded that the 35 days in natron dehydrated the body just enough to stall decomposition until the total process was completed, but not so much that the body could not be posed and safely receive its preliminary wrapping.  When Mumab was finally taken out of the tent after the three month period, Dr. Brier’s conclusion was vindicated—the body now weighed about 38 lbs, so it was completely dehydrated, and there had been no decomposition.  The experiment was a success.

The final step was a complete set of CT scans of the mummy.  This was important for researchers who would come later to compare actual ancient mummies to Mumab.  The CT scans were a sort of road map of what a royal mummy could be expected to look like.  Also, one of Mumab’s feet was left unwrapped so that every couple of years a tissue sample could be taken to assure that all was well and there was still no decomposition.

Bob with Mumab (Courtesy of National Geographic)

Mumab filled a lot of the gaps in what we knew about ancient Egyptian mummification.  We now know how the brain was probably extracted—not piece by piece, but more like pouring gravy from a teapot.  We know that the sharpest tool in the embalmer’s kit was not made from copper or bronze, but from obsidian.  We know how the design of the embalming board assured even dehydration and prevented pockets of blood and fat from settling and putrefying.  And we know that the mummy was not removed from natron at 35-40 days because it was finished, but because it was ready for wrapping and posing.

Dr. Brier also learned how much natron it takes to mummify an average human being—400 lbs—which is a good thing, because that was all he had collected!

Mumab Today

After being stored at room temperature for sixteen years at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Mumab still shows no evidence of decay.  He made his West Coast debut on June 10, 2011, when he went on permanent loan to the San Diego Museum of Man Modern Day Mummy exhibition.  Although he takes center stage, he shares the spotlight with shrunken heads from Ecuador, a 1,800-year-old mummy from Denmark found in a bog with a noose around his neck, as well as other mummies from around the world.

The exhibition includes a lecture series covering subjects such as the role of MRI and CT scans in mummy forensics, funerary practices in American history, comparing Hollywood mummies to the real thing, and natural mummification in Southern California.  The exhibit also takes a look at the sort of difficulties mummy researchers might encounter while working in the field, such as what to do when a mummy cannot be moved due to technical, cultural, or ethical reasons.

Lemon Grove Girl and Infant—one of the ethical dilemmas mummy researchers face is what to do with stolen mummies (Photo by Superfem)

One example of an ethical dilemma comes from the SDMoM’s own collection.  Two of the mummies on display, those of a young woman and a baby, come with a troubling provenance.  Thought to be around 500 years old, the mummies were discovered in a cave in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1966 by two teenagers who then smuggled them illegally across the border and stored them in their garage, where they were left to be rediscovered by new owners.  Naturally, the police were called but, once murder is ruled out, what does one do with stolen mummies?

In this case the mummies were given to the SDMoM by the government of Mexico, but not all situations are as open and shut.  What if the mummies had been purchased from a private collection before their history was uncovered?  Reputations and careers have been damaged by circumstances such as these, and museums typically end up losing both the money invested and the mummies themselves, all because somebody somewhere along the chain of custody did not follow protocol.

Non-invasive methods such as this CT Scan of a Peruvian mummy allow for better analysis of mummies with minimal risk of damage (Photo by Official U.S. Navy Imagery)

By lending his star power to the SDMoM, Mumab is helping bring attention to these matters.  The ethical issues of properly handling and studying mummies were also the focus of this year’s World Mummy Congress, which is probably part of the reason why the attendants were treated to a fieldtrip to the SDMoM exhibition.  Advances in noninvasive analysis, such as CT and MRI scans, help address some of these concerns, but science can only go so far.  Mummies were once living human beings, and not all of them donated their bodies to science.

Mumab will continue to play his role as ambassador between ancient mummies and modern researchers in his new home at the San Diego Museum of Man.  As the tools and methods of mummy studies continue to evolve, Mumab will undoubtedly have more to teach us in the future.  And he will have plenty of time to do so.  Thanks to the expert treatment of Drs. Brier and Wade, Mumab can expect to be around for at least a few thousand years more.

Mumab at his new home (Courtesy of the San Diego Museum of Man)

To see more images of Mumab at the San Diego Museum of Man, as well as learn more about the Modern Day Mummy exhibition, be sure to read Modern Day Mummy—The San Diego Museum of Man Takes You From the Lab to the Field here on Em Hotep!

Bonus Video

If you would like to watch a full-length lecture by Dr. Bob Brier discussing Mumab, the following video has been provided to the public by the University of Richmond.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2011.  All rights reserved.

The following photographs and images are used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License and may be reused under the same provisions:  PredynasticBurial-ROM.png by Keith Schengili-Roberts; natural mummy from El Museo de las Momias Guanajuato, Mexico by Tomas Castelazo; AGMA_H~1.JPG by Marsyas; MiddleKingdomCanopicJar_RosicrucianEgyptianMuseum.png by Captmondo; painted Mummy_at_British_Museum by Klafubra; Egyptian_mummy_(Louvre).jpg by Dada.  The following photographs and images are used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 Generic License and may be reused under the same provisions:  WLANL_-_andrevanb_-_kist_uit_de_27-_31e_dynastie_(4).jpg by Andrevanb; Ginger predynastic natural mummy by Seriykotik1970; mummy CT scan from SDMoM by Official U.S. Navy Imagery; Lemon grove girl by Superfem; ct scan of peruvian mummy by Official U.S. Navy Imagery.  The following photographs and images are used in accordance with theCreative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 Generic License and may be reused under the same provisions:  Douamoutef.jpg ,  Dieu-Hapi.jpg ,  Amset.jpg , and  Kebehsenouf.jpg by Charly75.  The following images are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are used in accordance with their usage policies (all rights reserved):  h2_dapt_4.jpg, hb_1988_437_2.jpg, and hb_09_184_220.jpg.  The image “embalming table.png” from the British Museum is copyrighted by the Trustees of the British Museum and is used in accordance with their usage policies.  The following photos, images, and video clips are using in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of copyright law and are reproduced for the sole purpose of promoting discussion and are not used in any way that would inhibit the sale or trade of the originals:  Photo “Bob Brier” courtesy of the University of Richmond, all rights reserved; Photo “Ronn Wade” courtesy of CNN/Turner Broadcasting, all rights reserved; hommedia.png courtesy of The Science Museum (UK) Science and Society Picture Library, all rights reserved; 10284168.jpg courtesy of The Science Museum (UK) Science and Society Picture Library, all rights reserved; “ x-ray of mummy brain removal” from the video “Egypt: Secrets of the Pharaohs”, courtesy of National Geographic, all rights reserved;  “ Bob with Mumab” from the video “Egypt: Secrets of the Pharaohs”, courtesy of National Geographic, all rights reserved; “ronbob.jpg”, “Mumab on his mortuary board”, “wrapping Mumab”, “Mumab wrapped” courtesy of Cartage.org; video clip “embalming a mummy” from the video “Royal Mummy”, courtesy of National Geographic, all rights reserved; video clip “gathering ingredients for Mumab” from the video “Egypt: Secrets of the Pharaohs” courtesy of National Geographic, all rights reserved; video clip “dehydrating the body with natron” from the video “Egypt: Secrets of the Pharaohs” courtesy of National Geographic, all rights reserved.  The following photos and images are in the public domain:  “Huy’s workshop”; MALER_~1.JPG; BD_Hunefer_cropped_1.jpg by Jon Bodsworth; Sawdust_and_Natron_salt_for_mummification_39a798e19218ea60f039.jpg; Opening_of_the_mouth_ceremony.jpg.

These media are from the Khufu Reborn/Khufu Renaissance phase of Project Khufu, an international and interdisciplinary initiative to explain how the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu was built based on the theories and research of French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin.

Audio/Video

Sealing the King’s Chamber—animation uploaded by Marc Chartier (posted to YouTube February 09, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sealing the King’s Chamber Up Close—another animation of the sealing mechanism uploaded by Marc Chartier, focusing on the sealing blocks (posted to YouTube February 09, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Architects Find New Rooms in the Pyramid of Khufu—Indonesian coverage of Khufu Reborn, but the clips are fantastic (posted to YouTube February 04, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

An Architect Uncovers the Secrets of the Great Pyramid—Euronews’ coverage of Khufu Reborn, again in French but visually wonderful (posted to YouTube February 02, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Khufu Reborn coverage on France 3—French language, but excellent clips (posted to YouTube February 02, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Khufu Pyramid Secret Rooms—English-language coverage of Khufu Reborn from CCTV News (posted to YouTube January 29, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Websites and Journal Articles

• Talking Pyramids:  Two Secret Pyramid Chambers Revealed—by Vincent Brown (January 29, 2011)

Thursday was ‘D Day’ and Jean-Pierre and Dassault Systèmes ended all the intrigue and mystery with their spectacular 3D presentation of Episode 2 “Legacy of Khufu” at the La Géode conference in Paris.

• Talking Pyramids:  ‘Khufu Reborn’—Unveiling Secrets—by Vincent Brown (January 24, 2011)

In three days time Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes will be at a conference in La Géode to reveal ‘Khufu Reborn’, the sequel to Jean-Pierre’s internal spiral ramp theory.

News Stories

• NTD Television:  French Architect Discovers New Rooms in Ancient Khufu Pyramid—no author listed.  (January 28, 2011)

French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin unveiled in Paris on Thursday the existence of two hidden and so far unknown rooms in Egypt’s Great Pyramid.  No one had ever suspected the existence of any such rooms.  But in his many visits to Khufu’s king’s chamber, Houdin noticed that one stone element in the burial room was not supporting any weight and therefore had once been a passage.  According to funeral rites of ancient Egypt, kings would be buried with all their belongings in close proximity. In other pyramids these items are situated in a room adjacent to the burial room.

• Physorg:  Great Pyramid has two secret chambers—no author listed (January 27, 2011)

A French architect campaigning for a new exploration of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza said on Thursday that the edifice may contain two chambers housing funereal furniture.

These media are from the Khufu Revealed phase of Project Khufu, Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work up to and ending with the premier of Khufu Reborn in January 2011.

Audio/Video

National Geographic Expedition Week:  Unlocking the Great Pyramid—the NatGeo special on Jean-Pierre Houdin’s Khufu Revealed work, in its entirety!  (posted to YouTube March 17, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another Pyramid Fly Through—this one even better!  (posted to YouTube August 17, 2009)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jean-Pierre Houdin and Bob Brier Interviewed—Associated Press (posted to YouTube November 19, 2008)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Interview with Jean-Pierre Houdin—World News Australia (posted to YouTube November 13, 2008)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Great Pyramid Mystery Solved?—National Geographic short piece from their special on Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work, Unlocking the Great Pyramid (posted to YouTube October 31, 2008)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jean-Pierre Houdin and Mehdi Tayoubi Interviewed—Also French audio, but also worth viewing for the clips (posted to YouTube June 24, 2007)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jean-Pierre Houdin, Mehdi Tayoubi, Richard Breitner Interviewed—French audio, but the clips of the Dassault Systèmes animations make it worth viewing even if you don’t speak French (posted to YouTube June 24, 2007)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pyramid of Cheops by Jean-Pierre Houdin—Spanish-language coverage of Khufu Revealed, as always the visuals make viewing desirable even if you don’t speak the language (posted to YouTube April 3, 2007)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pyramid Fly Through–The Khufu Pyramid modeled by architect Jean-Pierre Houdin in Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Life.  (posted to YouTube April 01, 2007)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Websites and Journal Articles

• The Khufu Revealed/Kheops Révélé Official Page at Dassault Systèmes

The site dedicated to the first phase of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s internal ramp theory.  The site provides a good, basic explanation of the general concepts of the theory up to that point, with sections for explanations, clues/evidence, and a 3D demo that requires installation of Dassault Systèmes’ proprietary 3d viewer, 3DVIA, which can be downloaded from the site.

• Heritage Key:  Exclusive Interview: Jean-Pierre Houdin Defends His Internal Ramp Pyramid Theory—by Malcolm Jack (September 07, 2009)

The question of how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built is one of the most hotly-debated topics in ancient history. Maverick French architect and self-styled “Mr. Pyramid” Jean-Pierre Houdin is determined that he has the answer – the 4,569 year-old monument was, he argues, erected from the inside-out, using an internal ramp built into the fabric of the structure. Others are skeptical of his theory, but Houdin is certain he has the proof.

• Heritage Key:  Building the Great Pyramid of Giza:  Jean-Pierre Houdin’s Internal Ramp Theory—by Malcolm Jack (September 04, 2009)

We know lots about the Great Pyramid of Giza – it’s age (about 4,569 years), who it was built for (the Fourth Dynasty Egyptian King Khufu), who designed it (Khufu’s brother, the architect Hemienu) and even who rolled up their sleeves and did the work (tens of thousands of skilled labourers from across the kingdom, as opposed to slaves as was once believed). But ask a room full of experts how it was built, and you can expect a whole lot of head-scratching and beard-stroking, followed by heated argument and possibly some light fisticuffs.

• Talking Pyramids:  How Were the Egyptian Pyramids Built? Part 5:  Houdin’s Internal Ramp—by Vincent Brown (April 10, 2008)

French Architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has a revolutionary theory on how the pyramids were built.  He looked at the three main existing theories: the large long straight ramp used to drag the stone up on sleds or rolled on logs, the wooden ‘machines’ mentioned by Herodotus & the spiral ramp theory.

• Smithsonian:  Monumental Shift—by Diana Parsall (August 01, 2007)

In 1999, Henri Houdin, a retired French civil engineer, was watching a television documentary on the construction of Egypt’s ancient pyramids. He had supervised many dam and bridge projects, and much of what he saw on the show struck him as impractical. “It was the usual pyramid-building theories, but he wasn’t satisfied as an engineer,” says his son, Jean-Pierre, an independent architect. “He had a sparkle in the brain. ‘If I had to build one now, I would do it from the inside out.’

• Archaeology:  How to build a pyramid—by Bob Brier (Vol. 60 no. 3, May/June 2007)

Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains. An estimated 2 million stone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons went into its construction. When completed, the 481-foot-tall pyramid was the world’s tallest structure, a record it held for more than 3,800 years, when England’s Lincoln Cathedral surpassed it by a mere 44 feet.

News Stories

• National Geographic News:  Great Pyramid Mystery to be Solved by Hidden Room?—by Brian Handwerk (November 14, 2008)

A sealed space in Egypt’s Great Pyramid may help solve a centuries-old mystery: How did the ancient Egyptians move two million 2.5-ton blocks to build the ancient wonder?

• National Geographic Channel:  Unlocking the Great Pyramid—by Bob Brier (November 11, 2008)

It always surprises my students when I tell them we don’t know how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Dancing in their heads are Hollywood’s images of lots of guys hauling blocks up a huge ramp. The truth is, that simply won’t work. In order for the workers to pull the blocks, the ramp would have to have a gentle slope, but the pyramid is 480 feet high and that would mean that Hollywood’s ramp stretches for more than a mile. The ramp would be greater in volume than the pyramid! Also, archaeologists have never found the remains of such a ramp, and something that big doesn’t just disappear in the dry desert. So how the Great Pyramid was built is still one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of our time.

• Free Republic:  Egyptologists use high-tech software to analyze construction of the Great Pyramid—by Sumathi Reddy and Nia-Malika Henderson (October 21, 2008)

Using cutting edge technology, Egyptologist Bob Brier of the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University delved into the only standing wonder of the ancient world, the Great Pyramid, and uncovered the mystery behind cracks in the massive Egyptian structure, unearthing a new room along the way.

• USA Today:  Scientists Ramp up for pyramid theory—by Dan Vergano (May 16, 2007)

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the sole surviving member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stands today as the most massive puzzle in the history of civilization.

• National Geographic News:  Great Pyramid Built Inside Out, French Architect Says—by Dan Morrison (April 02, 2007)

Ancient Egyptians built the 480-foot-high (146-meter-high) Great Pyramid of Giza from the inside out, according to a French architect.  Based on eight years of study, Jean-Pierre Houdin has created a novel three-dimensional computer simulation to present his hypothesis. He says his findings solve the mystery of how the massive monument just outside Cairo was constructed.

• A VR Geek’s Blog:  The Pyramid and the biggest VR screen (March 31, 2007)

On Friday March 30th 2007, the biggest VR screen was inaugurated with a great event; A big show at La Géode (IMAX theater in Paris) to unveil the theory of Jean-Pierre Houdin about his theory on the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Kheops).

• BBC News:  “Mystery of Great Pyramid ‘solved’—no author listed (March 31, 2007)

A French architect claims to have solved the mystery of how Egypt’s Great Pyramid was built.  Jean-Pierre Houdin said the 4,500-year-old pyramid, just outside Cairo, was built using an inner ramp to lift the massive stones into place.

Methinks I will be successful…

Project Khufu Timeline

Jean-Pierre Houdin (Courtesy of National Geographic)

In its earliest years, the best theory of how the Great Pyramid was built was making its rounds within the innermost circles of Egyptology.  Only a few people were “in the know” well enough to appreciate what had been accomplished—a French Architect named Jean-Pierre Houdin had formulated a theory of how the Great Pyramid was built that took into account the tools and methods that we know the Egyptians had at the time, the challenges of the terrain, and the evidence, some of which had not yet been recognized as such.

The average person with only a casual interest in Egypt has not spent much time pondering how the Great Pyramid was built, and many unfortunately still assume that it was built by slaves (it wasn’t) working on a long ramp that went all the way to the top (it didn’t) which then somehow disappeared into the sands of the desert (it couldn’t).  We have Hollywood to thank for that.  Jean-Pierre presented the first comprehensive theory that actually did work, and with a little help from his friends, brought it to the general public in a way that not only made sense but was actually interesting.

La Géode, Paris (Photo by Suaudeau)

In March, 2007, Jean-Pierre premiered his work at La Géode in Paris, and did so in a way that transported viewers to the Giza Plateau of 4,500 years ago to see how the Great Pyramid could have been built.  Working with some of the brightest engineers and experts in industrial 3D imaging technology, courtesy of Dassault Systèmes, Jean-Pierre was able to immerse the audience into the world of the pyramid builders and show what the architecture and evidence tell us. For the first time he was able to present his theory and demonstrate its validity to people of all levels of experience and interest.

From 2007 to 2010 Jean-Pierre’s work continued to be presented three times a week at La Géode as Kheops 3D, a 3D stand-alone version of his March, 2007, presentation.  Powered by the same imaging technology Dassault Systèmes uses in everything from designing exotic race cars to aerospace and defense applications, Kheops 3D took even the most the abstract and technical aspects of Jean-Pierre’s work and literally rendered it into a purely visual experience that anyone can follow.

Bob Brier (Courtesy of National Geographic)

Meanwhile, support for Jean-Pierre continued to gain momentum within the world of Egyptologists.  Another of his earliest and most vocal supporters was the Egyptologist Dr. Bob Brier, most often associated with his work with mummies, but who has more recently been writing and lecturing about ancient Egyptian architecture.   Support is perhaps an understatement.  Dr. Brier not only made the necessary introductions between Jean-Pierre and some of the other luminaries of the Egyptological world, he co-wrote The Secret of the Great Pyramid with Jean-Pierre.

In 2008, while filming the documentary Khufu Revealed, Dr. Brier discovered a small room in an exposed niche in the north-east ridge of the Great Pyramid.  His attention was drawn to the niche in the first place because Jean-Pierre theorizes that such niches would have existed at the junction points where one stretch of the internal ramp gives way to another.  This particular niche is where Jean-Pierre calculated that a north-bound corridor would have connected to a west-bound corridor.  Dr. Brier’s observations were not entirely conclusive, but the discovery inspired Jean-Pierre and the team from Dassault Systèmes to redouble their work.  (For more details see Archaeology:  “Update—Return to the Great Pyramid” by Bob Brier)

Since then Project Khufu has been using cutting edge non-invasive methods and technology to survey, model, and analyze not just the Great Pyramid, but the entire plateau and other pyramids on the vast plain known as the Memphis Necropolis.  The results of their work, which includes a massive expansion of Jean-Pierre’s theories as well as an impressive new immersive 3D presentation, will premiere, again at La Géode, on January 27, 2011.

Dassault Systèmes and Why They Matter

At first glance it may seem that Dassault Systèmes’ involvement is primarily in creating the stunning 3D eye candy that brings Jean-Pierre’s ideas to life.  And at second glance a more astute observer might realize that Dassault Systèmes’s 3D rendering technology and engineering expertise provide a level of exactitude that goes well beyond the DIY modeling of most theories of the Great Pyramid.  But their importance to Jean-Pierre’s work goes even deeper than this.

Dassault Systèmes does not just provide 3D modeling of facilities and equipment, from the bird’s eye view of a manufacturing plant down to the smallest bolt in the most delicate machine in the site, they also perform virtual stress testing to predict what might happen elsewhere in the facility if that little bolt fails.  They can tell you the life expectancy of the machines and the products they will make.  They can tell you where the worker will have to stand to remain safe and avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.  In other words, they don’t just make pretty models, they know everything you can possibly know about the end result.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are plenty of firms that could have done attractive 3D imaging of Jean-Pierre’s ideas, but the significance of this marriage between the architect and the engineers is their ability to generate theories and then actually test them under laboratory conditions.  So the structures above the King’s Chamber in Khufu’s Pyramid are called the stress-relieving compartments.  Did they actually relieve stress?  Is there evidence?  Can you prove it?  What Dassault Systèmes brings to the table is the tools and the expertise to be able to say “Yes, yes, and yes…  Now let’s show you.”

Khufu Reborn

Khufu Reborn is the official launching of the next phase of Project Khufu, which will go beyond the Great Pyramid.  It is not just an update of Jean-Pierre’s theories, it is the next step in the evolution of a new way of looking at the architecture of ancient Egypt.  The project began not with Jean-Pierre, but with his father, Henri Houdin, also an architect, who asked himself, “If I were given the task of building the Great Pyramid, how would I do it?”  Henri ignored the theories that had gone before, which suffered from a tendency to gloss over details they could not explain.  How would an actual builder build this?

Mehdi Tayoubi (Courtesy of Gedeon/Dassault Systèmes)

This legacy has passed from father to son, and from architect to engineer.  With the involvement of Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner from Dassault Systèmes, the question continues to be how did the builders actually build this?  Jean-Pierre Houdin says he has figured it out, and the evidence certainly seems to back him up.  The team from Dassault Systèmes has put much effort into determining whether or not his theories could work and whether his interpretation of the evidence fits into the physical and technological world of Hemienu, Khufu’s Overseer of Royal Projects. 

Richard Breitner (Courtesy of Gedeon/Dassault Systèmes)

Khufu Reborn should provide more answers.  I will be there to cover the event, and will have plenty of opportunity to speak with Jean-Pierre about his work—past, present, and future.  I will also try to get some time with Mehdi Tayoubi.  If you have been following the Egyptological headlines you will know that Dassault Systèmes has also recently partnered with Peter Der Manuelian and the Giza Archives Project to form Giza 3D, and will also be contributing to the project based at Leeds University to explore the shafts in the Great Pyramid, the much-touted robot crawlers project!  Maybe I can learn more about this trend and the future of Dassault Systèmes’s involvement in Egyptology.

One thing we do know…  It all began with a French architect saying Aha!

Note:  I will try to get one more chapter of Hemienu to Houdin posted before leaving for Paris, but I can’t make any promises!  But I can promise I will finish the series, even if some of the concepts will be outdated.  I feel it is important to have the full evolution of Jean-Pierre’s work accessible for future analysis.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Photo “Cite_des_sciences_de_la_Villette_-_Panorama3” by Suaudeau is in the public domain.  Still images “Mehdi Tayoubi” and “Richard Breitner” are taken from the video “Kheops Revele”, copyright by Gedeon/Dassault Systemes, used with permission, all rights reserved.  Still photos “Bob Brier and Khufu”, “Jean-Pierre at work”, and the video clip “Analyzing the beams above the King’s Chamber” are taken from the National Geographic video “Unlocking the Great Pyramid,” copyright by National Geographic (orig. air: 11/16/2008), all rights reserved.  This video clip and the related still images are used in accordance with the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act.

The lectures will include an overview of the Franklin Institute exhibit, the origins of Egyptology as a discipline, and burial practices during the Ptolemainc Period.

For details, visit nj: Camden County College to host free lecture series on Cleopatra

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. Bob Brier, co-author with Jean-Pierre Houdin of “The Secret of the Great Pyramid”, will be delivering a free lecture, open to the public, at Poughkeepsie, NY, on January 27, 2010.

Dr. Bob “The Mummy” Brier, one of the top experts on Egyptian mummies in the world, will be speaking on January 27, 2010, at the Vassar Brothers Institute’s 2010 Science in Your Life lecture series.  Dr. Brier will be the first of three lecturers at the event, which will be held in the Our Lady of Lourdes High School Auditorium in Poughkeepsie, NY.  The subject of Dr. Brier’s lecture will be “The Secret of the Great Pyramid,” based on the book of the same name, and admission is free and open to the public.

Having established himself as the top guy on mummies, Dr. Brier has been branching out into Egyptian architecture in recent years.  In his lecture at Poughkeepsie Dr. Brier will be discussing the work of French architect, Jean-Pierre Houdin, whose work we are currently covering in a series here at Em Hotep, Hemienu to Houdin.  According to the source article (Poughkeepsiejournal.com:  “Save the Date for Science Lectures”), Dr. Brier states of M. Houdin’s work:

“After five years [of work], he came out with this radical new theory [about the Great Pyramid] that looks like its right. All the other theories of how it was built, we knew didn’t work; this one seems to work. It’s really a remarkable story. After he visited me in New York and I saw what he had I basically took a year off from the university just to help him. I wrote a book with him called ‘Secret of the Great Pyramid’.”

Dr. Brier has recently returned from a tour of Egypt, and Em Hotep will keep you informed of his lectures here in the States.  With regard to our own series on Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work, Hemienu to Houdin, I apologize for the delay—holidays intervened!  But I am back on track with it and I can absolutely promise that Part 2 will be online before Dr. Brier’s January 27 lecture.  Part 2 will cover the construction of the Great Pyramid up to the fiftieth course, which is where construction of the King’s Chamber begins. 

Topics of Part 2 will include the building materials of the Great Pyramid, the external and internal ramps, construction methods, and how the ramps were built.  Sources for the article will include not only Dr. Brier’s and M. Houdin’s book, but also personal correspondence with Jean-Pierre and a book about the subject that is not yet available in the U.S.  In fact, I have the only copy this side of the Atlantic!  Curious?  More details to come!

Part 3 of Hemienu to Houdin will cover the construction of the King’s Chamber and the remainder of the pyramid.  You will be surprised to see how the pyramid itself was transformed into a machine for the building of the King’s Chamber.  After that we will have a lengthy discussion with M. Houdin with possible hints about what he is working on now.  Stay tuned for details!

Meanwhile, if you haven’t picked it up yet, Dr. Brier’s and M. Houdin’s book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid, is available worldwide in various languages.  Here is a link to the English language paperback version to get you started.  And if you are anywhere near Poughkeepsie, please do yourself a favor and go see Dr. Brier’s lecture.  Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work continues to build momentum—go see for yourself why.

 Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photo “brier_headshot.jpg” courtesy of the C.W. Post Campus, Long Island University.  Graphic “pyramid to king’s chamber.png” courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes, all rights reserved.

So, what did the mummies have to say about living well?

3000 Mummies Agree:  Brush Your Teeth!

That winning smile—Many ancient Egyptians suffered from horrible tooth pain (Photo courtesy of Henry W. Schmitt)

The Swiss Mummy Project has found that about eighteen percent of the more than 3,000 mummies they examined lived miserable—and probably shorter—lives due to bad dental health.  A big part of the problem was stone-ground flour, which deposited sandy grit in their bread and weakened their tooth enamel.  Cavities, abscesses, and periodontal disease conspired against the smiles of royalty and commoners alike (Source:  MSNBC:  “Bad teeth tormented ancient Egyptians”).

Headed up by Dr. Frank Ruhli of the University of Zurich, The Swiss Mummy Project recently made headlines by mummifying a human leg using what they believe were the same processes used by the ancient embalmers.  Basing their work on that of Dr. Bob Brier and Dr. Ronald Wade, who mummified an entire human body in 1994, Dr. Ruhli seeks to apply the most current medical and scientific instruments to the task of prying away the mummies’ secrets.  As he explained to Discovery News back in October:

We are trying to improve on that important experiment using the most up-to-date methods, such as radiological technology, magnetic resonance imaging and computer tomography. It’s a unique project, the first of its kind.  (Source:  Discovery News: “Body Part Mummified With Ancient Egyptian Recipe”)

Dr. Frank Ruhli of the Swiss Mummy Project (right) prepares a mummy (center) for a CT scan. In this case it is a 1,000-year-old mummy from Peru, but the process is the same (Photo courtesy of Siemens AG)

The project has discovered a variety of ailments that plagued the ancient Egyptians, sometimes literally.  Seven of the mummies, for instance, showed signs of having contracted the most deadly species of malaria.  Infectious diseases were widespread.  But the ancient Egyptians also suffered from problems we normally associate with modernity.

Listen to Your Mummy:  Watch Your Fat Intake and Avoid Second Hand Smoke

In a separate study recently conducted by Siemens AG and the Mid-America Heart Institute, CT scans were conducted on 22 mummies from the Museum of Antiquities at Cairo.  The heart specialists were surprised to find that atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries—was observed in more than half of the mummies from which they were able to extract heart and circulatory tissue  (Source:  Discovery News: “Ancient Mummies Show Signs of Heart Disease”).  Dr. Ruhli’s numbers were considerably lower.  Out of a sample of 85 mummies, atherosclerosis was only found in four, but the Swiss team found another surprisingly modern problem in the sample.

Eleven cases exhibited signs of pulmonary diseases such as emphysema.  The source of their breathing problems:  air pollution.  “Interestingly, most pulmonary affections were related to the presence of anthracotic pigment [carbon] in the lungs,” Dr. Ruhli said.  “This suggests air pollution by smoke from fires or oil lamps” (Source).   

The mummy of Tao II—Care to take a stab at the cause of death? (Photo courtesy of G. Elliot Smith)

Bone trauma was also very common, the Swiss team discovered.  Specific examples include a fracture to the left middle finger of Ramesses II and axe and spear wounds to Tao II’s skull, one of the few cases where a very likely cause of death was determined.  For the most part, it was impossible to determine a cause of death because of the process of mummification itself.

Mummy’s Parting Wisdom:  Die Young and Leave an Attractive Corpse

The Natron 40-Day Weight Loss Program works every time! (Photo by Keith Schengili-Roberts)

Although Dr. Ruhli’s team was able to conclude that most of the mummies died between the ages of 20 and 40, the very process that preserved their bodies in such an uncorrupted state also destroyed much of the evidence.  As forensic anthropologist Gino Fornaciari put it:

The lack of information about the cause of death in Egyptian mummies can be explained by the embalming process itself, which removed the internal organs. Many diseases involving those organs could not be easily diagnosed.  (Source)

The study conducted by Siemens AG and the Mid-America Heart Institute ran into similar problems.  While they could find evidence of heart disease, they were unable to distinguish what role weight may have played in the cause of death (source).  Want to shed a lot of weight in a relatively short period of time?  Try packing yourself in 600lbs of natron for 30-40 days.  There is no accurate way to estimate how much a mummified person may have weighed while alive.

Dr. Ruhli and team examine the CT scan of a mummy (Photo courtesy of Siemens AG)

The Swiss Mummy Project’s work is on-going.  In addition to understanding the process of mummification and exploring the health problems of the ancient Egyptians, Dr. Ruhli hopes to arrive at a better understanding of disease in order to improve the quality of life for modern humanity.  The Mummy Project is also developing forensic tools and software which may have applications for the living.  After all, part of what we are seeking when we explore the ancients is a better understanding of ourselves.

See also

• Families and Frailties of the Eighteenth Dynasty
• The Mummies Gallery
• King Tut’s Feet Fatale: Did Frail Feet Fell the Famous Pharaoh?
• King Tut’s Death: Solved, Resolved, or Just Restated?
• The Swiss Mummy Project Wraps Up Current Experiment
• Zahi Hawass to Announce Results of DNA Tests this Fall

 Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

Photos “PN200805-02,” “PN200805-05,” and “PN200805-07” are Siemens press pictures and are provided courtesy of Siemens AG in accordance with this press copyright agreement; all rights reserved.  Photo “Mummy-UpperClassEgyptianMale-SaitePeriod RosicrucianMuseum” by Keith Schengili-Roberts is used in accordance with this Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license.  Photos “Mummy Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum” courtesy of Henry W. Schmitt, and “Sequenre tao” courtesy of G. Elliot Smith, are in the public domain.

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.

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. 

Source article:  Discovery News, Body Part Mummified With Egyptian Recipe

The good leg (the one that didn’t rot) was mummified using techniques that Egyptologists believe the ancient Egyptian priests used themselves.  The other leg, which served as a control subject, was dried out in an oven that reproduced the natural conditions of the Egyptian desert.  It didn’t last a week before decomposition set in. 

(Note to self—do not spend Thanksgiving at the University of Zurich this year.)

The Swiss Mummy Project’s experiment, which builds on the work done by American scientists Ronald Wade and Bob Brier back in 1994, utilized the same tools which the ancients themselves would have used.  The primary ingredient, natron, is a compound of four different kinds of salts—sodium chloride, sodium sulfate, sodium carbonate, and sodium bicarbonate—and is found in natural deposits along the banks of the Nile River.  Natron is a drying agent which also has natural antibacterial properties, which makes it perfect for preserving organic material.

The work conducted by Dr. Wade and Dr. Brier involved mummifying an entire human cadaver, but the Swiss project was more focused and didn’t require as much material. 

“We are trying to improve on that important experiment using the most up-to-date methods, such as radiological technology, magnetic resonance imaging and computer tomography. It’s a unique project, the first of its kind,” Ruhli told Discovery News.  (source)

Dr. Ruhli is also focusing on the effects of mummification on DNA, which could have important implications for the current efforts to trace Tutankhamun’s family tree, and ultimately map out the genealogy of the Eighteenth Dynasty.  The Egyptology community is currently awaiting word from Dr. Zahi Hawass of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities regarding DNA analysis conducted on a mummified fetus recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, and which could help in identifying the mummy of his wife, Ankhesenamun, his parents, even Queen Nefertiti  (For more details read Zahi Hawass to Announce Results of DNA Tests this Fall).

The work of the Swiss Mummy Project continues, as does the work of Mr. Mummies, Bob Brier.  Dr. Brier, incidentally, is also Jean-Pierre Houdin’s co-author with The Secret of the Great Pyramid (just released in paperback.  Jean-Pierre’s work is currently being explored here at Em Hotep!, with the long-awaited Hemienu to Houdin Part One due out in mere hours.  Really.  Honest.  Check back later today and see!

For the original Em Hotep! article on this project, read The Swiss Mummy Project Puts its Best Foot Forward.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.