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)

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

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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.

This is the seventh article in a series based on Marc Chartier’s discussions with Jean-Pierre Houdin following the premier of Khufu Reborn, the long awaited revelation of the second chapter of Project Khufu.  These articles are provided in English to Em Hotep via special arrangement with Marc Chartier/Pyramidales, Jean-Pierre Houdin and the Project Khufu team at Dassault Systèmes.

• March 30, 2007: Khufu Revealed.

• January 27, 2011: Khufu Reborn (aka Khufu Renaissance).

Two dates that, for the architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, punctuate some twelve years of research into the “why” and particularly the “how” of Egypt’s pyramids. Two highlights punctuating the development of a “theory”, the foundations of which date back to 1999, when Jean-Pierre’s father, Henri Houdin, an engineer, had an intuition that something was wrong with the “standardized” presentation of the Great Pyramid’s construction. Hence the idea of the internal ramp, which subsequently fit the developments we know about.

In an exclusive interview given to Pyramidales, Jean-Pierre Houdin presented the main themes of Khufu Reborn, which is his new interpretation of the internal structures and the environment of the Pyramid of Khufu.

Various articles in this blog have already been devoted to this subject: the antechambers, the King’s Chamber, the “Noble Circuit”, the layout of the Giza Plateau, etc.

The entrance to the pyramid has also been re-interpreted by Jean Pierre Houdin, who offers the following details to Pyramidales’ readers.

The scaffold leading to the entrance of the pyramid

We are (approximately) in the year 2550 BC. King Khufu, Pharaoh and sovereign ruler of Egypt, is dead. Long live the King!

His body is transported in his Solar Boat as far as the Lower Temple at Giza, where priests must undertake the mummification, a ritual lasting seventy days.

The Pharaoh is then ready for his great voyage to the Eternal Stars, traveling along his pyramid’s the Royal Way, built for this one occasion of the solemn funeral.

The funeral procession begins by going up the Royal Causeway that connects the Valley Temple to the High Temple, at the foot of the pyramid’s east face. “There,” comments Jean-Pierre Houdin, “the priests perform the mouth-opening ceremony to give the King the use of his senses. He thus recovers his speech and can appear before Osiris for the weighing of the souls. Nothing reproachable coming to light during his confession, he is ready for eternity in the hereafter.”

As the sun sets, the procession reaches the entrance to the Pharaoh’s last resting place – “his” pyramid – more than seventeen meters above the ground on the north facade. To do this, the procession uses wooden scaffolding, built many years before, giving access to the monument’s interior. It then gets ready to enter the bowels of the monument to reach the King’s Chamber, where the bulky granite sarcophagus was put in place, as a result of its size, at the time this chamber was constructed.

The “Service Circuit” and the “Noble Circuit”

According to Jean-Pierre Houdin, the funeral procession will indeed enter through the mouth of the descending corridor in the north face but, contrary to common belief, will leave this passage a few meters further on, ignoring the entire route following on from it – the ascending corridor (to which we now add the detail “No. 1”), the Grand Gallery, the portcullis chamber and the access corridor (to which we also add the detail “No. 1”) to the King’s Chamber – a route that visitors from all over the world have followed since tourism and curiosity have existed, to take the tunnel dug in the north-south axis when caliph Al-Ma’mun broke into the pyramid in AD 820.

The tourist route will not be followed for good reason: it was blocked in several places. It was used as a “service circuit” throughout the period of constructing the King’s Chamber and the strange structure above it. At the end of this construction phase, having no further use, it was abandoned to the silence of the stones until rediscovered by “visitors”, well intentioned or otherwise, who would never have imagined that this was not the real route for the royal funeral.

According to Jean-Pierre Houdin’s proposals, the procession will follow what we will call an “alternative route”, but which in reality, to use the architect’s phrase, is the “Noble Circuit”, as designed and constructed just for the day of the solemn royal funeral ceremony.

A consequence of this configuration, unknown to this day: to give access not only to the “service circuit” but also and especially to the “Noble Circuit”, the original entrance to the Great Pyramid has to incorporate this dual function, supposed to remain secret so as to give no clue to those who might desecrate the royal sepulcher, into its very structure. Proof of this is that caliph Al-Ma’mun and his soldier-sappers did not succeed in detecting the real entrance to the monument, but undertook digging to a lower level to end up on… the “service circuit”!

Clues present

With the exception of Al-Ma’mun’s breach, which is like a wart on the north face of the pyramid, even if very useful today for tourist access, and given the fact that this pyramid has been deprived of its Tura limestone facing blocks for several centuries, what clues reveal the real entrance to the “Noble Circuit”?

Jean-Pierre Houdin lists them as follows:

• The Tura limestone rafters above the original entrance are too large for the roof of the descending corridor (two cubits, or 1.05 m, wide) and, in addition, much too high in relation to it.

• By measuring the existing oblique abutments, we can see on site that there are six pairs of rafters missing from the lower part and three missing from the upper part: the lower series having covered a void, while the upper series constituted an overlapping roof, extending a second void “that the Egyptian builders,” says Jean-Pierre Houdin, “thrifty in time and materials, had to have had a very good reason to build. The present large hole did not exist at the time. Everything visible today was immersed in the mass of stonework and recessed about ten meters behind the original north face. Much closer to the facade, a first room (where the current hole is) was located just above the descending corridor, and a vertical access shaft, centered on the room, linked these two structures directly. The rest of the descending corridor is taken to have been used by the funeral procession, but in reality it was only used by workers during the construction of the pyramid.”

• 

  Arrow : higher density area

  Jean-Pierre Houdin continues: “Micro-gravimetric measurements made 25 years ago detected an anomaly, namely the presence of a zone of very high density beneath the north face of the pyramid, in a precise continuation of the entrance rafters. This is located to the east of the north-south axis, so aligned with the known corridors in the pyramid. Furthermore, this high-density zone ended directly in line with the second section of the hypothetical internal ramp.¹
• The grooved block inserted beneath the first row of rafters, and previously stored at the back of the second room, has visibly been pushed from inside, traces of mortar protruding under the right rafter. In front of this block, we can see that the limestone floor has been pointed with plaster and given a surfaced and perfectly flat finish;
• the grooved block does not go as far as the point of the opening; a triangle 40 centimeters high has been filled with stonework centered on the ridge of the rafters.

The Greek geographer Strabo (first century BC) wrote of this stone: “At a certain height on one of its sides there is a stone that can be removed, which, once removed, allows us to see the entrance to a tortuous gallery or hypogeum, leading to the tomb.”² Hence its current name of “Strabo’s stone”.

A single entrance opening onto two rooms

“Faced with these observations, I had the proof,” Jean-Pierre Houdin goes on, “that other rafters had been installed to a much reduced distance from the face, in front of the currently visible rafters. From then on it was obvious that in the area of the present gaping hole, there had been two rooms, one in front of Strabo’s stone, the other behind this stone, slightly higher up.

“Then I understood that the Egyptians, being the very great architects they were, had designed a single entrance to serve several corridors at once. This entrance could lead to any chamber in the monument, so being used for Khufu’s funeral and, at quite another moment, for access to the site during the pyramid’s construction.

“The two rooms under the rafters enabled a direct connection to be made to the descending corridor, connecting it to a second series of corridors that led to the Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber without passing through the Grand Gallery.”

Due to the complexity of its configuration, the original entrance to the pyramid is therefore characterized by a clever multiplication of uses: it gives access, via the descending corridor, to the “service circuit” (of no further use at the end of the construction phase), and it opens onto the “Noble Circuit”, which immediately includes two separate routes: one, horizontal, towards the Queen’s Chamber (we should not forget that this chamber was intended to receive the king’s sepulcher in the event of his untimely demise); the other, ascending, as the first part of the journey leading to the King’s Chamber.

The function of the two successive rooms was to begin the “Noble Circuit” (the “Royal Way”) deep within the mass of the pyramid (the back of the second room is about 16 meters from the facade). In contrast to those in all previous pyramids, the King’s Chamber is very high within the mass of the pyramid. Consequently there is no longer any question of providing access to it by means of a descending passage emerging practically perpendicular to the façade. Rather, an initial ascending passage (more or less parallel to this facade, arriving tangentially and not at right-angles: a “whistle” configuration, hard to implement), then a horizontal corridor (no. 2) leading to the two antechambers. Moreover, the passage of the internal ramp in this zone would have resulted in the intersecting the ascending corridor no. 2 that serves as point of departure for the funereal “Noble Circuit” to the King’s Chamber. The simplest and most economical solution was to push the beginning of this corridor further back into the mass, the two horizontal entrance rooms serving as connecting and displacing modules.

At the same starting point, a shaft is connected to the neighboring internal ramp, for the evacuation of the last workers: “At the end of Khufu’s funeral,” says Jean-Pierre Houdin,

…and after having sealed the pyramid at several “sensitive” points (chamber, antechambers, access corridor, entrance room), the workers are thought to have left the funeral circuit via the internal ramp, getting back to it through a connecting shaft dug just behind the second entrance room, at the starting point for the second ascending corridor. The designers had previously simulated this set up in the mock-up of the construction site dug out of the bedrock about 50 meters east of the pyramid.

The priests and other officials for the funeral ceremony had previously left the pyramid as they had entered, taking exactly the same route, as befit their positions.

Footnotes

¹ The internal ramp represented one of the major elements of Khufu Revealed. Obviously it is still present in Khufu Renaissance, but with variants that will be covered in a future article in Pyramidales.

² the precise translation of the Greek text, as confirmed by Ian Lawton, for example, the author of Giza, the Truth, in a letter sent to Jean-Pierre Houdin, is indeed “leading to the tomb” (and not “leading to the foundations”). Which is what was suggested by Amédée Tardieu: “At a certain height on one of its sides there is a stone that can be removed, which, once removed, allows us to see the entrance to a tortuous gallery or hypogeum, leading to the tomb.”

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

The burial room of Pharaoh Khufu required that his Overseer of Royal Projects, the great architect and engineer Hemienu, transport massive beams of granite, some of which weighed in excess of 60 tons, more than 60 meters above the pyramid’s foundation.  With each successive course of blocks his workspace became more confined, the uphill drag became longer, and the placement became more precise.  Where did the energy required for this undertaking come from?

In Phase One we looked at how two thirds of the pyramid and all of its internal structures below the King’s Chamber were constructed with a ramp that reached less than one third of its height.  In Phase Two we will look at how the King’s Chamber and its related architecture were built using this same ramp, as well as some innovations in design and methodology that included scaffolding, an elevator, and a powerful tractor, all of which were integrated into the architecture itself, and all of which used tools and principles known to be in existence during Hemienu’s time.

We will devote this current article to explaining exactly what it was Hemienu was building in Phase Two.

During Phase Two Hemienu was entirely concerned with the construction of the King’s Chamber, and perhaps it is best to forget for the moment about the rest of the pyramid.  The Great Pyramid at that point was a massive 43 meter high platform that provided both the foundation for and the machinery involved in building a smaller pyramid, which in turn served the dual purpose of support and scaffolding for the burial chamber and its related architecture.  In Phase Two, the superstructure we will be referring to is not the Great Pyramid itself, but this mini-pyramid being constructed on its fiftieth course.

But we will also be taking a much more detailed look at the Grand Gallery and its related architecture.  If the Great Pyramid was a machine of construction during Phase Two, then the Grand Gallery and the Ascending Corridor housed its engine.  Phase One was a saga of architecture, geometry, and logistics.  Phase Two is a tale of men and machines—elevators, counterweights, ballasts, even trolley tracks.  And yes, ramps.

The megalithic beams used in the King’s Chamber and the Relieving Compartments were first pulled up the external ramp and stored on a reinforced staging area.  This was accomplished with the help of a counterweight system in the Grand Gallery.  Then a mini-pyramid was built as the King’s Chamber went up.  This structure served as both the support for the King’s Chamber architecture and the scaffolding for the project.  A freight elevator, also powered by the counterweight system, was incorporated into this mini-pyramid, all of which would disappear into the core of the Great Pyramid in Phase Three.

Like Phase One, Phase Two can be divided into three sections—the worksite formed by the fiftieth course of the pyramid and how the external ramp functioned during this phase, how the counterweight system worked, and then finally the King’s Chamber.  But in order to fully appreciate how the worksite was organized, how the mini-pyramid was constructed, and how the counterweight system worked, it is best to start with a detailed description of the King’s Chamber and its related architecture.

Hemienu to Houdin Phase Two will thus be divided along these lines:  Part A—The King’s Chamber; Part B—The Grand Gallery and Counterweight System; and Part C—How It All Came Together.

The King’s Chamber… Or is it?  

Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, as far as we know the King’s Chamber was intended to be Pharaoh Khufu’s final resting place, which (obviously) is why it is called the King’s Chamber.  While there are those who believe that Khufu’s actual burial room lies yet undiscovered within the Great Pyramid, there is some fairly good circumstantial evidence that the King’s Chamber was intended to be the focal piece of the whole ensemble.  To begin with, it contains a sarcophagus…  generally considered a pretty reliable clue that a room might be a burial chamber.

[Anecdotal Exception:  I once knew a police detective who kept a coffin in his living room.  When I asked him why, he said because the neighbors complained about it being on his porch.  True story.]

The King’s Chamber and the sarcophagus – usually, but not always, a good sign that someone was interred (Photo by Keith Payne)

But there are other reasons as well.  Structurally speaking, it is the center of the design.  This does not mean that it is literally in the physical center of the pyramid.  Instead, it means that everything below, beneath, and around the King’s Chamber was designed to support a 20×10 cubit room with a flat ceiling, exactly where it is located.  Everything else, from the materials used in its construction to its exact positioning, was geared toward achieving this goal.  Hemienu would accomplish this using tried and true methods and innovations that expanded on these techniques.

As we will see throughout our explication of Phase Two, the Grand Gallery exists as it does and where it does in order to build the King’s Chamber.  When compared with the external ramp and the elevation of the Relieving Compartments, every detail from the length and height of the Grand Gallery to the positioning of the Great Step was determined by the dimensions of the King’s Chamber and the gabled ceiling of the structure above it.  So if there is an even more regal tomb in the pyramid—we’ll call it the Emperor’s Chamber—then where is it and how was it built?

One possibility is that it could be to the south of the Queen’s Chamber, but again, where?  In order to stay on the north/south axis it would have to be lower than the southern “air shafts” (intercom channels) leading out of the King’s and Queen’s chambers, which would situate it lower than both, which is not a very stately location for an Emperor.  Royal burial chambers in the large-scale pyramids prior to Khufu (Djoser’s Step Pyramid is an exception, but a lot of changes followed Djoser) were higher than other chambers and antechambers, and Khafre would likewise follow suit. 

At this point one might rightly observe that Pharaoh Menkaure, who came after Khafre, located his final burial chamber lower than an earlier burial room.  Both of these tombs were cut into the bedrock, which could explain the deviation.  While it is true that changes in a pyramid that is already under construction are risky, one safe place to make changes is in the bedrock.  Unlike a pyramid, which becomes smaller as it rises, making alterations difficult, changing the layout of the understructure in the bedrock was comparatively simple and safe.

The point being that when construction is progressing downward, as it would be in the bedrock, rather than upward, as it would be in the superstructure, Menkaure could feasibly have decided to make an even more impressive burial room deeper than the other chamber.  I am not arguing that this is the “exception that proves the rule,” but I am saying that once the pyramid was underway the only safe place to make a large change in plan was deeper into the ground (parallel excavation would have undermined more of the superstructure), and the promise of a better tomb may have outweighed tradition.

Nothing discovered so far suggests that a larger, more impressive burial chamber was excavated in the bedrock beneath the Great Pyramid, and there is no evidence of a larger tomb in the superstructure beneath the King’s Chamber.  There is evidence of additional plans in the Subterranean Chamber, such as the so-called well-shaft and the southern extension, but whatever their intended purpose may have been, they were abandoned, most likely when the Queen’s Chamber was completed and there was no longer a use for the chamber as a provisional tomb. 

Although Menkaure’s pyramid shows that tradition is not always a hard and fast rule, it does not seem likely that Khufu would have settled for a burial chamber that was both lower and smaller than the King’s Chamber.  The man who commissioned the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World does not strike me as a man prone to compromises.  So what about beside or above the King’s Chamber?

It is not likely that an Emperor’s Chamber could exist parallel to the King’s Chamber because if it were centered along the north-south axis (as everything else is) then one or both of the southern intercom channels would pass through it.  This same problem exists for several meters higher than the floor-level of the King’s Chamber.  In fact, an Emperor’s Chamber would have to be higher than the gabled ceiling of the Relieving Compartments, otherwise the rafters would be directing the pressure from the masonry into the hollow space of the Emperor’s Chamber, leading to a collapse of both.

Building an Emperor’s Chamber above the rafters brings us back to the problems of Phase One—how do you deliver the megalithic beams that high?  Building a higher room would require another set of Relieving Compartments for a flat ceiling, or at least another set of rafters if it had a gabled ceiling.  Recall that Hemienu went to great lengths to avoid corbelling everywhere but the Grand Gallery, and both a flat and gabled ceiling would require the transport of beams that would be too large for the internal ramp, requiring a longer and higher external ramp, a problem we already examined at length.

Building an Emperor’s Chamber—a burial room at least as impressive as the King’s Chamber, only higher—would not only have required a bigger external ramp, it would have required a second counterweight system, which means a second Grand Gallery and a second Ascending Passageway are likewise hidden somewhere in the considerably more restricted space of the top half of the Great Pyramid.  Otherwise there would be no way to raise the massive beams required for its construction.  A cursory glance at the inner workings of Khufu’s Pyramid in profile shows the impossibility of this.

So to return to the question, was the King’s Chamber intended as the final resting place for Pharaoh Khufu, or is there an even better Emperor’s Chamber that lies undiscovered, the answer seems to be the former:  the room that contains the sarcophagus was indeed the king’s burial room.  The Emperor, it would seem, has neither clothes nor a tomb.

But in the final analysis, the question is largely academic.  If a secret room containing Khufu’s mummy is discovered tomorrow it will have no bearing on the question of how the King’s Chamber was built.  It may offer new questions and potentially a few answers, but it would not change a single aspect of what we do know about the King’s Chamber and its architecture, and what was required in its construction.  So let’s take a look at what we do know for certain—dimensions and materials.  We will start with what is inside the King’s Chamber—the sarcophagus.

The Sarcophagus of Pharaoh Khufu

Just as the King’s Chamber is the focal point of the Great Pyramid, the sarcophagus is the focal point of the King’s Chamber.  And likewise, just as the King’s Chamber is not the physical center of the pyramid, the sarcophagus is not in the physical center of the King’s Chamber—both are precisely aligned, but with a larger scheme in mind. 

The sarcophagus is oriented north to south close to the west wall of the burial room, with the eastern side of the sarcophagus situated along the north-south axis of the pyramid.  It was meticulously hollowed out from a single block of red Aswan granite.

One of the pinion holes in the sarcophagus' western edge that probably held a lid in place—tubular drills were slow, but precise (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Spiral markings inside the box and pinion holes on the western lip indicate the use of drills.  We know that copper tubular bow-drills were used during this period, and the markings suggest drills and saws were used for precision and dolerite pounders to wear away the bulk.  Rather than teeth, the copper tools would have used an abrasive grit to cut, much like sand paper.  It would have been a long and tedious process, taking no less than 28,000 hours to complete (Brier and Houdin, pp. 199-200; Stocks, pp. 918-22).

The fitting groove for the sarcophagus lid (Photo by Andrew Currie)

The sarcophagus measures 2.28 meters long, .98 meters wide, and 1.05 meters in height.  The inner dimensions are 1.98 meters long, .67 meters wide, and .87 meters deep, and it weighs around 3.75 tons.  It is a simple box with no ornamentation or markings.  There is no lid, although the pinion holes and an inner groove on the upper edges suggest it was fitted for one.  Where the lid is now is anybody’s guess.  It is estimated that it would have weighed around two tons and is an unlikely object for theft, but never underestimate the determination of souvenir takers.

Thieves and vandals ancient and not so much (Photo by Keith Payne)

The southeastern corner of the sarcophagus has been broken away, which may have been done by thieves who either used the hole to reach inside and grab the treasures within, or may have provided a leverage point for prying the lid off.  But analysis of the breakage is made difficult by the fact that visitors (vandals) have chipped away at it over the years in order to have their own little piece.  For some, nothing says veneration like wanton destruction.  Perhaps the lid suffered a similar fate? 

An unlikely fit—entrance to the King’s Chamber. Note the northern intercom shaft in the wall (Photo by John and Morton Edgar)

The sarcophagus is too large to fit through the entrance to the King’s Chamber, and so it would have been installed during construction.  No mummy was discovered in the sarcophagus, which adds to speculation about the purpose of the King’s Chamber (not to mention the pyramid itself) and about the existence of an undiscovered Emperor’s Chamber. 

Khufu’s mummy either remains interred, was misplaced or destroyed, or lies unidentified in a museum or private collection.  Or he could be propped up in a curio show next to a stuffed two-headed calf… believe it or not, there is precedence.

The King’s Chamber

Floor to ceiling red granite—the King’s Chamber (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

The King’s Chamber measures 20 cubits (10.47m) east to west and 10 cubits (5.23m) north to south.  It has a flat ceiling that is a little over 11 cubits (5.84m) above the floor.  As with the sarcophagus, the King’s Chamber is completely unadorned and without inscriptions.  Also like the sarcophagus, the floor, walls, and ceiling are all constructed of the red granite quarried from Aswan. 

This granite is much heavier and sturdier than the nummulitic limestone that comprises the bulk of the pyramid, and served both visual and structural purposes.  The floor and walls are made of around 120 granite blocks of various sizes, and the ceiling is made of nine granite beams.

The ceiling is significant in a couple of ways.  For one, it is located at one third the vertical height of the Great Pyramid, which may have been for both structural and symbolic reasons.  Second, and more importantly, it is flat.  This is unusual in that other pyramid burial chambers are either corbelled or, in the case of the Queen’s Chamber, have a gabled ceiling. 

Corbelling in Snefru’s burial chamber in the Red Pyramid (Photo by Hajor)

Corbelling is a roof-building strategy that involves inching each layer of blocks slightly inward until the walls come to a peak.  Long blocks of limestone are too weak to span wide spaces, so corbelling bridged these gaps a little at a time, with most of the block sandwiched between the layers above and below and only a small part extended into unsupported space. 

Corbelled structures are sometimes called ”false arches” because, unlike an arch, the blocks are not supported by leaning in on one another.  The structure relies on the downward pressure of the superstructure from which it protrudes.  The main burial chamber of the Red Pyramid is a classic example of corbelled walls.

Corbelling also distributes the weight above the chamber over a wider space.  In a flat ceiling all of the weight bears straight down over the entire surface.  This means that even using a more sturdy material than limestone would not be enough to construct Khufu’s flat ceiling, there had to be a way to distribute the pressure outward and away from the ceiling, which is where the Relieving Compartments come in. 

The Relieving Compartments

Beneath the rafters (Photo by Adam Rutherford)

The Relieving Compartments are five short chambers stacked one on top of the other between the King’s Chamber ceiling and the top gable.  Like the King’s Chamber itself, the ceilings of the Relieving Compartments were made of the megalithic beams of granite supported by limestone blocks. The granite ceiling beams, each weighing between 27 and 63 tons, are arranged side by side at each level, north to south, and the limestone supports are arranged east to west between the ceilings.  The granite beams are finished on the bottoms (the compartment ceilings) but left rough on the top (the floors).

In all, there are five granite ceilings:  the King’s Chamber located at the 48.8 meter level; the first Relieving Compartment ceiling at 51.9 meters; the second Relieving Compartment ceiling at 54.6 meters; the third Relieving Compartment ceiling at 57.5 meters; the fourth Relieving Compartment ceiling at 60 meters.  Above this are the 22 limestone rafters that form the gabled roof.  Total materials for the Relieving Compartments:  43 granite beams weighing 27-63 tons each, 22 limestone rafters weighing 28-45 tons each, and the limestone supports between the ceiling layers.

The gabled ceiling of the Relieving Compartments provides further clues to Hemienu’s planning and foresight.  Before the Great Pyramid, the Red Pyramid of Snefru represented the crowning accomplishment in pyramid technology.  Hemienu knew that the ceiling of Snefru’s corbelled burial chamber successfully supported 83 meters of masonry above it.  We know by comparing other examples that the distance between the floor of the King’s Chamber and the gabled roof is about the same as it would have been if it had been corbelled, and the gabled roof, like the Red Pyramid, supports about 83 meters of masonry.  Again, methods tried and true.

The third relieving compartment, called “Nelson’s Chamber,” has the clearest hieroglyphic inscriptions (Photo by Adam Rutherford)

The relieving Compartments are the only place within the Great Pyramid where any sort of markings or inscriptions have been found, and even these appear to have been quarry markings or “graffiti” left by the pyramid builders.  Two of these markings are cartouches of Pharaoh Khufu, the only actual written evidence that the Great Pyramid was build for him.  Some of the markings continue along surfaces now covered by other blocks, evidence that these inscriptions occurred before construction was complete.  

Sketches of the hieroglyphic graffiti found in the Relieving Compartments

This completes our description of the King’s Chamber, its only contents, and the Relieving Compartments above it.  In Phase 2, Part B:  The Grand Gallery and Counterweight System, we will look at Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory of how the Grand Gallery once housed a counterweight system that helped power the huge sleds that brought the megalithic beams up to the 43 meter-high worksite, and the lift that delivered them to their final locations in the architecture. 

Related Articles

• Introduction:  Building a Great Pyramid
• Part One:  How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?  Straight or With a Twist
• Building the Great Pyramid Year One:  Six Letters from Hemienu
• Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part A—One Third of a Ramp, Two Thirds of a Pyramid
• Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part B—Alternating Lanes and Building from the Inside Out
• Hemienu to Houdin:  Phase One, Part C—The Inner Workings of the Great Pyramid of Khufu

Works Cited

• Brier, Bob, and Jean-Pierre Houdin. The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Print.
• Stocks, Denys A. “Stone Sarcophagus Manufacture in Ancient Egypt.” Antiquity 73.282 (1999): 918-22. Print.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Graphic images “King’s Chamber” and “Khufu staging area” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes, and are used with their permission, all rights reserved.  Graphics “south of QC”, “in the substructure”, “beside or above”, “pyramid profile cutaway”, “ceilings diagram”, “khufu and red pyramid”, are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin, and are used with his permission, all rights reserved.  Photos “Khufu King’s Chamber 01” and “Khufu sarcophagus 01” are copyrighted by Keith Payne, 1997-2011, all rights reserved.  Photos “great_pyramid_37” and “great_pyramid_34” are by Jon Bodsworth, who has released them to the public domain.  Photos and images “Image-Great_Pyramid_Edgar.jpg”, “09_edgar.jpg”, and “08_edgar.jpg” by John and Morton Edgar are in the public domain.  Photo “Inside Cheops III” by Andrew Currie is used in accordance with the Creative Commons 2.0 license.  Photo “Egypt_Dashur_RedPyramid_02” by Hajor, and image “Kheops-chambre-roi.jpg” by Franck Monnier are used in accordance with the Creative Commons 2.5 license.  Photos “Campbell’s Chamber” and “Nelson’s Chamber” by Adam Rutherford are in the public domain.  Photos and images “art – relieving chambers”, “art – north south axis”, “Menkaure inner works”, “Piazzi-plate_14.jpg”, and “relieving compartments graffiti” are in the public domain.

In preparation for what Jean-Pierre Houdin calls “Episode 2,” a comprehensive update and expansion of his work with the Great Pyramid in particular and the funerary architecture of the Pyramid Age of the Old Kingdom in general, Em Hotep has embarked on this mission to lay out his theory to-date in a simple but detailed format that will allow the specialist and layperson alike to evaluate the theory as well as mark its progress in Episode 2. 

In Phase One, Parts A and B, we looked at Jean-Pierre’s detailed explanation of how Hemienu could have built two thirds of the Great Pyramid with an external ramp that only reached one third of the pyramid’s final height, and how this ramp could have used an alternating-lanes strategy to avoid work stoppages, even while the ramp was built up from layer to layer.  Now we will lay the foundation—literally and figuratively—for Phase B by looking at how Hemienu designed the floor plan of the Great Pyramid on the vertical rather than horizontal plane. 

Hemienu to Houdin presents the opening statement and theories.  Soon the counselor himself will present the evidence and closing arguments.  My goal is to provide the transcript for the deliberations of you, the jury.

The Layout:  A Vertical, Rather Than Horizontal, Design

With conventional architectural designs, we are accustomed to seeing floor plans that are laid out on the horizontal plane.  Interconnected rooms are arranged on the same level, joined by doorways or horizontal corridors.  If there are other levels, then these too are arranged in horizontal space, with stairs, ramps, or elevators connecting the levels.  This is true of the majority of architecture in ancient Egypt as well.  But with the Great Pyramid things are a little different. 

Looking at the shape of a mastaba it’s easy to see how they evolved into the pyramidal form (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Although pyramids are the most celebrated funerary structures from the Old Kingdom Period, most people who could afford a luxurious send-off were interred in, or more accurately, under, a mastaba.  Mastabas are flat-roofed rectangular brick buildings with walls that lean slightly inward. 

They sit atop one or more vertical shafts cut into the bedrock that lead to subterranean burial chambers.  By the Fourth Dynasty, the peak of the Pyramid Age, mastabas could be rather elaborate in design.  (For a good example, albeit from the Sixth Dynasty, check out An Egyptian Bourgeoisie: The Tomb of Vizier Mereruka)

The Step Pyramid of Djoser (Photo by Keith Payne)

It is easy to see the genesis of the pyramidal shape in the tapered form of the mastaba.  In fact, the earliest pyramid that we know of, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, began as a large mastaba and ended as five additional mastabas stacked on top of the first, with each level smaller than the previous.  Another innovation is that the burial chamber moved progressively higher as pyramids evolved—from underground, to ground level, to suspended above ground level within the core. 

Khufu’s pyramid has three different burial chambers at three different levels.  Hemienu had his reasons for situating these burial chambers at different levels, not to mention at different phases of construction, and we will get into these details a little later in this article.  But their arrangement within the pyramid’s structure—the need to have them at different levels, but with similar alignment and orientation—is part of why the floor plan of the Great Pyramid is designed on the vertical, rather than horizontal, plane.

Convention during this period dictated that royal burial chambers should lie to the south of the pyramid’s east/west axis.  As shown in the illustration, the burial chambers in the Meidum, Bent, and Red Pyramids are all constructed south of the east/west axis, opposite the entrance.  In Khufu’s pyramid the King’s and Subterranean Chambers both lie to the south, and the Queen’s Chamber straddles the east/west axis perfectly. 

In the case of the Queen’s Chamber, the intent may have been for the sarcophagus to be placed in the southern half of the room, had it been used for the pharaoh’s interment.  Such exact placement has precedence within the Great Pyramid, as the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber is arranged with its eastern side perfectly aligned with the north/south axis.  But even without knowing the exact reasons why, we do know that the three chambers are clustered around the midpoint of the pyramid at different levels, and the straight approach from the northern entrance makes for an easy vertical arrangement. 

One way of thinking about the inner structures is to consider that movement progresses from north to south.  The Entrance is on the northern face.  From there one progresses southward via the Descending Corridor.  At 28.2 meters inside, the Ascending Corridor branches up and continues southward from the Descending Corridor, which continues its own southerly journey to the Subterranean Chamber.  The Ascending Corridor ends at the base of the Grand Gallery, with a Horizontal Corridor leading off to the Queen’s Chamber.  Both the Grand Gallery and the Horizontal Corridor continue southward.  The King’s Chamber is the highest and southernmost known internal structure.

The vertical arrangement of the internal structures also had practical benefits.  Recall that most of the pyramid—the core—is made up of rough-cut blocks, filler chips, and gypsum mortar.  These blocks are made of the same locally quarried nummulitic limestone as the backing layer, but are not as precisely calibrated and were not suitable as a foundation for the inner structures.  The burial chambers, and especially the earth-rattling counterweight system that would be housed in the Grand Gallery, required a solid foundation of the same well-cut masonry that makes up the backing layer.

These more precisely-cut blocks were expensive in terms of the time it took to shape them and the materials expending in doing so.  Each well-cut block required more copper chisels, more runners to carry the dulled chisels from the worksite to the sharpeners, more wood (a rarity in the desert) to keep the smith’s fires burning, and most of all, more time.  Nothing in the Great Work of Khufu’s Pyramid could be wasted, especially time, so ideally the inner structures needed to be squeezed into as small a footprint as possible—the smaller the footprint, the less expensive the foundation. 

For all of these reasons it made sense to design the inner workings of the Great Pyramid on the vertical rather than horizontal plane.  Rather than rooms located on the same level and connected by horizontal passageways, Hemienu stood the floor plan on its edge.  The rooms would be aligned vertically on different levels, connected mostly by sloping corridors.  This vertical structure could rest on a shared foundation that was a simple north-to-south strip of pavement.

Before we continue on to our description of the individual elements of the inner workings of the Great Pyramid, let’s first address why Hemienu might have constructed three burial chambers, and why they couldn’t have been built on more or less the same level within the pyramid.

In the Event of Untimely Death:  The Provisional Burial Chambers

Putting aside all symbolism, and ignoring Hemienu’s personal ambitions, the Great Pyramid was ultimately built for one purpose only:  a final resting place for the body of Pharaoh Khufu.  Everything about how the pyramid was planned and executed revolved around the final burial room known as the King’s Chamber, and its unique flat ceiling.  But the King’s Chamber would not be complete until Year 15 of construction.  What if the King, gods forbid, died before that?

Hemienu had planned for such a contingency.  The Great Pyramid was designed from the outset to have three burial chambers:  the King’s Chamber and two provisional tombs.  The first provisional tomb was the Subterranean Chamber, which would serve as the royal tomb if Khufu had died during the first ten years of construction.  The second provisional tomb was the so-called Queen’s Chamber, which would have held the pharaoh’s body if he died during years ten through fifteen.  After Year 15 the King’s Chamber would be Khufu’s final resting place.

It has been argued in the past that the three different burial chambers suggest that Hemienu had altered his plan as he progressed, originally intending the Subterranean Chamber to be the tomb, then deciding to locate the burial room at the higher location of the Queen’s Chamber, then ultimately deciding to build a third, final burial room—the King’s Chamber.  However, the precision with which the King’s Chamber was located argues against this and in favor of a single, complete building plan from the very beginning.

The Great Step at the top of the Grand Gallery—its top surface is at the 43-meter level, and its face is aligned perfectly on the east/west vertical axis (Photo by Bulle Plexiglass)

We will be expanding on the evidence for Hemienu’s fore planning when we cover Phase Two, but for now consider that the placement of the “Great Step” at the top of the Grand Gallery exactly on the east/west axis, and the ceiling of the King’s Chamber exactly at the one third height of the finished pyramid, could only have been achieved with comprehensive planning. 

The length and height of the Grand Gallery are not arbitrary, as we shall see, and to know in advance where the Great Step would be located meant that Hemienu knew exactly where, and at what slope, to begin the Ascending Corridor.

For these reasons alone we can be certain that the Great Pyramid was planned with three different burial chambers from the outset.  The idea of Hemienu making radical alterations, such as adding entire rooms and corridors after construction had begun, simply does not reconcile with the exactitude of the finished product.    Planning for temporary burial chambers seems to be more in the character of Hemienu from what we can deduce from the meticulous planning which must have gone into each phase of construction.  We will now look more closely at the individual elements of the inner structure.

The Descending Corridor

Work on the Descending Corridor would have begun in the very earliest stages of pyramid construction, while the foundations were still being leveled.  It started as a passageway cut downward into the bedrock, .96 meters (3.1 feet) high and 1.04 meters (3.4 feet) wide, descending southward at a 26.5 degree angle.  Work on the Descending Corridor would have continued while the first courses of the pyramid were being laid, with the corridor being extended upward into the new masonry toward the future Entrance in the northern face of the pyramid.

Looking up the Descending Corridor toward the Entrance (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

The bottom of the Descending Corridor at the point where it levels off (Photo by John & Morton Edgar)

Rather than the rough-cut blocks of the core, the masonry into which the Descending Corridor was extended was the well-calibrated blocks of the foundation being laid for the rest of the internal structures.  This may have contributed to the precision with which the Descending Corridor was constructed—Jean Pierre has noted that it is the most precisely cut structure within the pyramid, never deviating more than a quarter of an inch its entire run.

Once finished, the Descending Corridor passed downward from the Entrance through the masonry for 28.8 meters, continued through the bedrock for another 30.3 meters before leveling off at a depth of 30 vertical meters below ground.  After a short (8.9 meters) horizontal stretch the Descending Corridor ended at the Subterranean Chamber, for a total run of about 68 meters.

The Subterranean Chamber

Thirty meters below the base of the pyramid, the Subterranean Chamber was the first of the two provisional tombs, and is where the body of Khufu would have been interred if he had died during the first ten years of construction.  Fortunately, Khufu never had use for it, and the incomplete state of the walls and floor suggest that Hemienu considered the king to be in good enough health to move on.  Besides, the chamber was far enough along that if Khufu had died it could have been finished during the time that it took to mummify his body.

The eastern wall of the Subterranean Chamber with the entrance in the northern wall visible—the squatting fellow to the left (Photo by John & Morton Edgar, courtesy of Jon Bodsworth)

The Subterranean Chamber has irregular dimensions, but measures roughly 8 by 13 meters, with a height of about 3.1 meters, and is oriented east to west, with the northern wall aligned on the east/west axis.  The chamber also contains an unfinished “well shaft” and what appears to be an unfinished continuation of the horizontal section of the Descending Corridor exiting through the south wall.  The purpose of the pit and the southern extension are unknown, however, it is worth observing that if Hemienu did make alterations to his plan, the subterranean section—not being part of the pyramid’s superstructure—was the only safe place to do so.

The Entrance

The double-gabled Entrance (Photo by Keith Payne)

Located at the opposite end of the Descending Corridor, the Entrance is pretty self explanatory—it was the original means of entrance into the Great Pyramid.  The Entrance is located seventeen meters above the base and is centered 6.82 meters east of the north/south axis.  This 6.82-meter offset has to do with the need to align the Grand Gallery with the eastern half of the King’s Chamber. 

We will sort out these details when we cover Phase Two, but the simple explanation is that the heavy beams of Aswan granite were unloaded on the eastern side then positioned to the west.

Speaking of heavy beams, the Entrance is supported by four 20-ton blocks of Tura limestone that would have been the first heavy test of the external ramp.  These huge blocks are situated in two pairs, one on top of the other, with the paired blocks resting against each other at a 120 degree angle.  The effect is an impressive double gable that has become one of the iconic images of the Great Pyramid.  These megalithic blocks are the same that are used to form the arched ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber and the roof of the relieving compartments above the King’s Chamber.

The Ascending Corridor

The junction where the Ascending Corridor branches up from the Descending Corridor (Photo by John & Morton Edgar)

The Ascending Corridor begins as an upward branch of the Descending Corridor at about 28 meters in from the Entrance.  This cramped passageway starts literally as a hole in the ceiling of the Descending Corridor, and shares the same dimensions (.96 by 1.04 meters) and slope (26.5 degrees).  At about 39 meters in length, the bottom of the Ascending Corridor is currently plugged by three large granite blocks, each 1.5 meters long.

We will be revisiting the Ascending Corridor when we cover Phase Two.  Jean-Pierre Houdin theorizes that this passage originally housed a ballast roller that was part of the counterweight machinery of the Grand Gallery, the floor of which is a continuation of the slope of the Ascending Corridor.  Like the Descending Corridor, the Ascending Corridor is housed in the strip of well-calibrated masonry that forms the interior foundation.  It is in perfect vertical alignment with the Entrance, sharing the same 6.82 meter offset.

The Queen’s Chamber

The entrance under the Grand Gallery to the Horizontal Corridor that leads to the Queen’s Chamber (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

By Jean-Pierre’s analysis, the pyramid should have reached a height of 21 vertical meters around Year 8 of construction, which was an important milestone.  At this elevation the Ascending Corridor came to an end and the Grand Gallery began.  Also at this junction a horizontal passageway was constructed leading to the south.  With a length of 21 meters, this Horizontal Corridor led to the second provisional tomb, the misnamed “Queen’s Chamber.”  This was to be the temporary resting place of Khufu’s body, if needed, from Years 10 through 15.

Unlike the King’s and Subterranean Chambers, the Queen’s Chamber is longer from north to south, 5.75 meters, than it is east to west, 5.23 meters.  This may give the initial impression that, unlike the other burial chambers, the Queen’s Chamber is oriented north to south rather than east to west.  But the innovative ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber, a sort of trial run for the roof of the relieving compartments above the King’s Chamber, puts this notion to rest.

Unlike the corbelled ceilings of previous pyramid burial rooms, the ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber is formed by six arching pairs of 20-ton rafters of Tura limestone identical to the gables above the Entrance.  Leaning in at 120 degrees to rest against each other, these beams form a peaked ceiling 4.6 meters above the floor of the Queen’s Chamber. 

This apex not only runs east to west, it perfectly straddles the east/west axis of the pyramid, leaving no doubt that the Queen’s Chamber, like the King’s and Subterranean, is oriented east to west.

As mentioned above, the arching ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber probably served as a proving ground for Hemienu, as he would later use the same structure atop the relieving compartments of the final burial room.  The King’s Chamber is unique in that it has a flat ceiling, an innovation with possibly aesthetic and/or symbolic significance, but which required a good deal of compensation elsewhere in the pyramid’s structure.  In order for the King’s Chamber to have a flat ceiling, Hemienu needed to divert the weight above it elsewhere, and these powerful gabled ceilings were a key part of the solution.

Of course, the reinforcement of the narrow internal foundation was also an important factor in the stability of the inner structures, and like the rest of the Great Pyramid’s “plumbing,” the Queens Chamber was aligned along this runway of masonry. 

The corbelled niche inside the Queen’s Chamber (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

There are other elements of the Queen’s Chamber which may have served structural or symbolic purposes, or possibly both.  Situated in the eastern wall is a corbelled niche nearly as tall as the room itself which Mark Lehner believes may have once held a statue of Khufu, making the Queen’s Chamber a serdab (Lehner, Mark. The Complete Pyramids. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997, pp. 111-12). 

This theory, however, is not incompatible with the idea of a provisional burial chamber.  There is no reason why the room could not have been designed as a serdab, but used as a tomb if the king died during this time. 

Another interesting feature is the so-called air-shafts, two diagonal shafts leading out of the Queen’s Chamber through the north and south walls.  Jean-Pierre theorizes that these shafts were an intercom system that allowed the foremen working on the north side of the pyramid to communicate with those on the south side. 

This would have been particularly useful during Phase Two, when the noise level from the counterweight system and the need to coordinate would have been at their highest.  The fact that these shafts terminate at the same level that Phase Two ended seems rather telling. 

By Year 9 of construction the ceiling of the Queen’s Chamber was in place, with the tip of the rafters reaching about 24 meters above the base of the pyramid.  Although it was not used as a provisional tomb—Long Live the King!—the walls are even more polished than those of the King’s Chamber, which would have maximized the acoustics for the intercom system.  Meanwhile, even as the Queen’s Chamber was being constructed, the rest of the pyramid continued to rise, including the Grand Gallery, which also had its base at the 21 meter level.

The Grand Gallery

So to recap, by Year 10 there were three completed passageways.  One was the Descending Corridor leading from the Entrance down to the Subterranean Chamber, the first provisional tomb.  The second was the Ascending Corridor, branching up from the Descending Corridor and ending at the 21-meter level.  The third was the horizontal passageway that led due south from the top of the Ascending Corridor to the Queen’s Chamber, the second provisional tomb.  The junction at the 21-meter level is where the Ascending Corridor transitions into the Grand Gallery. 

Visualizing the junction at the top of the Ascending Corridor can be tricky business, as the Horizontal Corridor leading to the Queen’s Chamber is at the top of the Ascending Corridor and essentially tunnels under the Grand Gallery. 

The floor of the Ascending Corridor resumes at the same 26.5 degree incline opposite the gap formed by the beginning of the Horizontal Corridor.  This gap is flanked by two elevated sides, or “benches,” that run nearly the entire length of the Grand Gallery from the base to the top. 

The Grand Gallery—note the notches cut into the raised benches (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

In total, the Grand Gallery is about 46 meters long and 8.6 meters high from floor to ceiling, with a total vertical height of 17.35 meters from the bottom (above the gap that allows access to the Horizontal Corridor) to the top of the Great Step.  The base width (including the benches) is 2.06 meters. 

The walls are corbelled with seven tiers, extending inward about 7.6 centimeters at each tier, giving the ceiling a width of 1.04 meters.  The benches are each about 51 centimeters wide and about 61 centimeters high, squeezing the floor of the Grand Gallery into a trench about 1.06 meters wide.

Looking up (south) from the base of the Grand Gallery—the regularity of the notches and the dimensions of the corridor are just a couple of the many clues suggestive of some sort of large mechanism (Photo by John & Morton Edgar)

 There are enigmatic particulars about the Grand Gallery, not the least of which are its unusual dimensions and topography, which suggest a purpose beyond a simple passageway. 

Mechanical details, such as the regular notches that run the length of the benches and the unusual wear pattern of the Great Step (now mortared over) provide clues that some sort of large-scale kinetic activity once took place in the Grand Gallery. 

The solid base provided by the internal foundation indicates that Hemienu planned for heavy bodies in motion.  Like the external ramp, the Grand Gallery was designed with durability in mind.

A close-up of one of the notches that score the benches along the Grand Gallery and the interesting wear pattern on the Great Step before it was “repaired” (Photos by Jon Bodsworth and John & Morton Edgar)

We will explore Jean-Pierre Houdin’s explanations for these details and a great many others as we unfold the mysteries of Phase Two:  the construction of the King’s Chamber.  With the external ramp completed and the fiftieth course of the Great Pyramid leveled off at a clean 43 meters, Hemienu was ready to plug the external ramp into its battery—the counterweight trolley that thundered along its tracks in the Grand Gallery.  This ancient machine, fully integrated into the structure of the pyramid itself, provided the extra muscle required to haul the great beams of granite into place above the King’s Chamber.

Related Articles

• Introduction:  Building a Great Pyramid
• Part One:  How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?  Straight or With a Twist
• Building the Great Pyramid Year One:  Six Letters from Hemienu
• Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part A—One Third of a Ramp, Two Thirds of a Pyramid
• Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part B—Alternating Lanes and Building from the Inside Out

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photographs “Mastaba-faraoun-3”, “descending corridor looking up toward original entrance”, “Entrance to Horizontal Corridor”, “Looking into the ascending corridor from the GG”, “the GG”, “slot in the bench of the GG”, “niche inside the QC”, and “Ceiling of the Queens Chamber” by Jon Bodsworth have been released into the public domain.  Photographs “East wall of the subterranean chamber”, “where the descending corridor levels off”, “junction of the ascending and descending corridors”,  “doorway of the Horizontal Passage in the north wall of the Queen’s Chamber”, “sketch of QC”, “GG from the base showing benches”, and “eroded great step” by John & Morton Edgar are in the public domain and are provided courtesy of Jon Bodsworth.  Graphics “burial chamber offsets”, “inner works layout”, “internal foundation”, “the goal”, “three burial chambers”, “completion of the subterranean chamber”, “intercom system”, “completion of the grand gallery”, and “phase one complete” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin and are used with his permission, all rights reserved.

In Phase One, Part B, we will be taking a detailed look at how the alternating lanes functioned, and how Jean-Pierre thinks Hemienu would have changed his strategy once the ramp became too narrow to accommodate two lanes, while still maintaining uninterrupted work from level to level.  We will examine what “building from the inside out” means and why it is the only way Jean-Pierre believes the Great Pyramid could have been constructed.  Again, our goal is a clear and visual understanding of Jean-Pierre’s theory in preparation for the coming update and expansion based on his more recent work.

To facilitate our visual understanding of Jean-Pierre’s work we will be constructing a model of the construction of the first three levels of the pyramid, as well as a jump ahead to level 35.  But when looking at our model it is important to understand that, like many of the graphics in Phase One, Part A, our model is not to scale.  To be specific, it is a small model with large parts. 

Rather than a scale depiction of the actual pyramid, our pyramid will be used to demonstrate concepts and methods.  So while some objects, such as the facing blocks, are shown larger than they would actually appear, some areas, such as the core, are shown in much smaller perspective than they would appear in relation to the whole. 

Building a Great Pyramid—It’s not mere child’s play! (delightful photo by Ed Yourdon)

Our model will also differ from the actual pyramid in that the internal structures are not depicted.  The bottom third of the Great Pyramid contains the entrance, two provisional burial chambers, the Grand Gallery, and all connecting passageways.  We will get into the details of these structures in Phase One, Part C, but in our model pyramid we are focusing on the basic concepts of how the general structure was built according to Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory.  

We should also clarify some of the terminology we will be using.  As in Phase One, Part A, the words level and layer will have specific technical meanings.  But as we get into the minutia of the levels of the pyramid, the layers of the ramp, and the facing and backing stones, it will be more important than ever to understand these distinctions, so let’s review:

When referring to the horizontal courses of blocks that make up the pyramid, we will use level, as in level one of the pyramid, or, construction of the King’s Chamber began at the fiftieth level.  The word course may also be used to refer to pyramid levels, but the word layer will never be used to describe a level/course of the pyramid.

When referring to layers of the ramp, the word layer will be used.  For example, we may refer to the first layer of Lane A, or we might say both lanes are of equal height at layer thirty-five.  The word tier may also be used in reference to layers of the ramp, but the word level will never be used to describe a layer/tier of the ramp.

With this in mind, a helpful equation to remember is:  The ramp at layer X is used to build pyramid level X + 1.  Thus, layer five (X = 5) of the ramp would be used to build level six (X + 1) of the pyramid.  

When referring to the layer of facing blocks or the 20-meter thick backing layer between the facing blocks and the core, the word layer will be used, but always with the facing or backing qualifiers.  In other words, when layer refers to facing and backing layers on the pyramid, the context will always make it clear that we are not talking about layers of the ramp.

Before going on to our model we will first take a look at what “building from the inside out” means within the context of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory. 

Building from the Inside Out

Another key concept of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory of how the Great Pyramid was constructed is “building from the inside out.”  Broadly speaking, this refers to the process of transporting materials within the perimeter of the pyramid and building inward from the surface to the core.  If you read Six Letters from Hemienu then you know that the pyramid was built in layers (in this case, we are obviously not talking about the layers of the ramp!).  When you are installing layers of blocks from the surface toward the center, you have to push them into place from behind, thus, building from the inside out. 

Building from the inside out—Pyramid workers installing backing stones behind the facing stones (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

So why does Jean-Pierre propose that Hemienu built the pyramid inward from the surface to the core? Why not build the layers by laying blocks at the far (northern) end and keep laying them row after row until the southern edge was reached?  Or why not start in the center of the level and work outward, like laying floor tiles?  Aren’t most theories a variation on these two themes? 

Yes, most theories incorporate one of these strategies, which is part of the reason why most theories can’t work.

The problem with building a pyramidal shape, a geometric form wherein four sides of a square are extended upward and inward so as to arrive at a perfect apex, is that if the angle of anything is off, the entire shape fails.  Jean-Pierre identified five parameters that Hemienu would have needed to keep under constant control to assure a true pyramid:  the faces, the edges, the diagonals (corner to opposite corner), the north/south axis, and the east/west axis.  The rudder by which he navigated these parameters was the level-by-level installation of the pyramid’s smooth facing blocks.

As described in Six Letters from Hemienu, the fine white limestone used to cover the outside of the pyramid had qualities that required it to be completely finished where it was quarried at Tura.  The limestone was easy to extract and work with, but as soon as the air hit it, it began to calcify and harden.  For this reason the masons had to immediately cut, shape, and polish the limestone on-site.  Once it reached Giza it could be patched or repaired if it had sustained light damage, but it couldn’t be reshaped.  It either fit, or it didn’t—no alterations!

Some of the few remaining Tura limestone facing blocks at the base of Khufu’s Pyramid (Photo courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin)

As part of the finishing process, each facing stone was placed next to the stones that would surround it on the pyramid and then further shaped for a precise fit.  In this manner, every course of facing blocks was first preassembled at Tura and numbered for reassembly prior to transport.  In essence, level-by-level the entire shell of the pyramid was built onsite at Tura and then shipped off to the worksite.  It is easy to overlook the implications of this prefabrication of the pyramid’s surface. 

The shape of the prefabricated facing blocks formed the mould into which the rest of the pyramid would be poured, and which controlled all five of the parameters.  The outward slope of each block controlled the shape of the face, the angles of the cornerstones assured the edges, and the degree to which the entire assemblage was squared established the diagonals and axes.  This is why the facing blocks were the rudder that steered the construction—the stonecutters at Tura were not just quarrying blocks, they were creating the pieces of a 3D jigsaw puzzle that gave the pyramid its perfect shape.

The fact that the facing blocks were prefabricated and had to be inserted into specific locations is also why they had to be installed first.  Theories that depict the facing blocks being installed last could not have worked because the facing blocks could not be reshaped to fit the backing layer, the backing layer had to be custom made to fit behind the facing blocks.  So the facing blocks had to be levered into place first, then came  an immediate backing layer of custom-fit local limestone followed by the 20-meter thick layer of mass produced and well-cut two-ton backing stones, also locally quarried.

No Climbing! The well-calibrated backing layer (Photo by Jay Bergeson)

It is this well-calibrated layer of backing stones that greet us from the pyramid’s face today.  The gleaming Tura limestone that once covered the pyramid in a smooth layer from the foundation to the apex has disappeared, having been stripped away centuries ago for other uses.  The yellow-brown limestone of the blocks we see now may not be as aesthetically appealing as the facing blocks must have been, but it has some excellent qualities of its own. 

Nummulitic limestone quarried from the Giza Plateau

The Giza Plateau is made up of a kind of limestone called nummulitic, so-called because of the fossilized shells of ancient marine life called nummulites frozen within it.  These small coin-shaped (Latin nummulus = “little coins”) life forms were the largest single-celled organisms ever to exist (Source:  “Pyramids, forams, and Red Sea reefs:  Field notes from Lorraine Casazza”).  This peculiar biological quality makes them extremely durable as fossils, and this makes the limestone in which they are encased very dense and capable of supporting an enormous amount of weight—such as a pyramid.

Hemienu knew that the durable limestone from the local quarry was perfect for building the inner part of the pyramid, but it was not suitable for the smooth surface.  The nummulitic fossils are much like gravel in modern concrete—they add hardness and strength.  But this compound also makes the local limestone ill-suited for creating the perfectly smooth surfaces that were needed to maintain the constant angle of the pyramid’s faces and edges.  The easily worked Tura limestone was necessary for these precise shapes.  Thus, the selection of the Tura limestone was both cosmetic and functional.

A view of Khufu’s Pyramid from the quarry from which its blocks were culled, now known as the Central Mastaba Field (Photo by John Bodsworth)

So the nummulitic limestone native to the Giza Plateau wasn’t good for facing blocks, but the large, precisely cut blocks of the pyramid’s current surface made an ideal supporting layer that could bear the weight above it for, obviously, a very long time.  And as with the facing blocks, these two-ton blocks had to be transported with the perimeter of the level under construction and shoved into place from behind. 

Another way in which Jean-Pierre’s theory varies from many of the others is in his rejection of the idea that, behind the facing blocks, the pyramid was constructed mostly of these well-calibrated blocks.  Structurally speaking, the supporting layer of well-cut two-ton backing stones only needed to be about 20 meters thick (thus the oft-cited 20-meter thick backing layer!).  Most of the core of the pyramid could be made of much more roughly cut limestone blocks.

A depiction of the different types of pyramid blocks—the facing, backing, and core (By Charles Piazzi Smyth, courtesy of Jon Bodsworth)

In fact, Jean-Pierre believes about seventy percent of the Great Pyramid’s total mass consists of hastily quarried rough nummulitic blocks packed in with limestone chips and gypsum mortar.  The result was a cruder but much quicker building process, and one which was perfectly suited to Hemienu’s needs.  Khufu’s Master Builder was also a master of striking a balance between speed and precision.  Never settle for less than needed, never do more than required.

The well-shaped blocks of local limestone formed the backing layer as well as a central reinforced foundation that served to support all the internal structures (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin)

There are, of course, undoubtedly parts of the core that are more carefully designed than the rest.  The internal structures would have required a solid foundation and Jean-Pierre contends that there would have been a section of the core near the southern face that would have been more solid in order to support the large granite slabs while they were being stored during construction of the King’s Chamber.  Both of these reinforced areas would have been formed by the well-calibrated blocks used in the backing layer.  But for the most part the interior of the pyramid is rough core. 

By the way, if the above process sounds familiar that is because it was foreshadowed in Phase One, Part A, when we discussed how the external ramp was constructed.  The outer sides and central lane were constructed of the same well-calibrated blocks as the pyramid’s backing layer, the core of the side lanes was made the same way as the core of the pyramid, and the smooth final surface of the central lane was paved with the same Tura limestone as the pyramid’s face.  Another of Hemienu’s axioms seems to have been when you find something that works keep doing it until it doesn’t work anymore.

So now that we have had this primer in how to build the pyramid from the inside out, and what to build it out of, let’s take a look at the model to see the whole scheme in action.

The First Two Levels

Figure 01 represents the very first stage of constructing the pyramid.  The corner facing blocks would have been installed and then teams of workers would extend these “walls” along the perimeter, meeting somewhere near the center of each face.  This image also depicts the facing blocks where the junction between the ramp and the pyramid would meet.  This line of blocks would be among the first installed on any level (from the fiftieth down) because they form the backing for the ramp and establish the height for that layer.

Facing blocks arriving from Tura at the quay, the artificial harbor, at the foot of the Giza Plateau (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

More of the facing blocks are now in place as the “shell” for the first level continues to be installed.  Construction of Lane A has also begun.  Starting at the junction of the ramp and the pyramid’s face, this horizontal tier would have been built toward the southwestern slope.   Building from the pyramid toward the slope was a means for controlling the height of the ramp’s horizontal layers—if the ramp builders started at the foot and built toward the pyramid it would have been difficult to maintain the correct height for the junction.  By starting at the pyramid the correct height is set from the beginning.

In Figure 03 we see that the facing and backing layers have been nearly completed, with the perimeter left open in the southeast to allow building materials to be transported within.  About a third of the core has been filled in as well.  We will take a more detailed look at the interior when we cover “building from the inside out.”  Meanwhile, Lane A continues to be extended toward the southwestern slope.  Recall that there will be no inclining foot for the first six layers of the ramp—they will simply be horizontal tiers extending straight across to the slope where the plateau rises toward the southwest.

The first course of the pyramid is now finished.  In a more literal depiction you would see that much of the western interior would actually be filled with a seven-meter high mound of limestone that was left in place to save time and effort.  After all, why excavate the natural limestone just to replace it with limestone blocks?  Another example of how Hemienu shaped the terrain to his advantage, this hill would have filled much of the core for the first six levels.  In fact, this hill forms about one tenth of the total core of the pyramid.

These long blocks at the base of the pyramid are in reality an exposed section of the limestone hill Hemienu shaped but left intact inside the perimeter of the western part of the pyramid (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Figure 05 shows the beginning of the second pyramid level, as well as the beginning of the first layer of Lane B.  Work on Lane B would in no way impede the pyramid workers because Lane A provides clear access to level two.  The genius of the alternating-lanes ramp is that it always delivers unobstructed passage to the worksite without any interruptions in the building of the pyramid.  When the builders are finished with the pyramid level they are working on, the ramp to the next layer is waiting for them.  The key to a project as large as the Great Pyramid is always staying a step ahead of the next stage of work.

In Figure 06 the first layer of Lane B is now finished.  Although not fully depicted in the graphic, both lanes extend from the face of the pyramid across the terrain to the incline formed by the southwestern slope.  Both lanes now form a single horizontal tier the same height as pyramid level one, but the workers would still only be using Lane A to transport blocks because construction would immediately begin on the second layer of Lane B.  All of the level two facing blocks (except the gate at the junction) are shown in place, along with a large part of the 20-meter thick backing layer. 

Installing the facing blocks at the junction between the ramp and the pyramid—the next layer of the ramp will rest against these blocks (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

Here the second layer of Lane B is being constructed in preparation for building the third level of the pyramid.  Keep in mind that the ramp at layer X is used to build pyramid level X + 1.  In other words, Lane B at layer two (X=2) will be used to build pyramid level 3 (X +1).  Layer two of Lane B is at the same height as the level two facing blocks, and will maintain this height all the way across to the southwestern slope.  Most of the 20-meter thick backing layer is shown in place, and the filling of the core is underway.

In Figure 08 we see that the second level of the pyramid is nearly complete—all that remains is to “plug the gate.”  The builders would continue filling the core with rough-cut blocks and limestone chips until they came to the threshold where the smoother blocks of the backing layer should resume.  Once the gate in the backing layer was plugged, the builders would install the last section of facing blocks for this level, which would close the junction between Lane A and pyramid level two.  The builders would now switch to Lane B and work on level three of the pyramid would begin.

Facing blocks and backing blocks from a different perspective (Photo by Ian McKellar)

Building Level Three from the Inside Out

In Figure 09 we resume with the second level of the pyramid completely finished.  Lane A, which is still at layer one, comes to a dead end against the facing blocks of level two and will now have to be raised two layers in preparation for building pyramid level four.  But level four is still a little while in the future.  The current project is pyramid level three, and Lane B (which is at layer two) is ready for action.  So to summarize, Lane B is the active lane in the construction of pyramid level three, while Lane A will be elevated in preparation for building pyramid level four.

Figure 10 shows the beginning of work on Lane A, with the second horizontal layer being built on top of the first.  The facing blocks that will form the junction between the pyramid and the third layer of Lane A are already in place, along with the level three cornerstones.  At this point teams of workers will have been assigned the sections of facing blocks they will be responsible for installing.  Competition would be on the rise as the team leaders (and their bosses!) would undoubtedly have placed wagers on who would finish their section first.  Perhaps scores from this phase of level two will now be settled.

The installation of the facing blocks for level three continues.  Although not depicted in Figure 11, there would have been multiple sites along the perimeter where the builders would be levering blocks into place.  Lanes A and B are shown at equal height, but the workers would only be using Lane B to transport building materials.  Even if the second layer of Lane A was complete, there would be no time to make use of it before work began on layer three.  Besides, the gap at the junction was only wide enough to accommodate traffic from a single lane. 

But the ramp’s design assured that a single lane would always be sufficient for the job at hand.  The ramp was very wide at these lower levels, with the side lanes being 35 to 40 meters in width.  This would have accommodated many sled teams on the ramp at once.  Although the ramp will grow narrower with each layer, successive levels of the pyramid are also getting smaller, so while the number of workers able to fit on the ramp shrinks with each layer, the rate of work remains fairly consistent—it takes fewer workers at each level to keep up the pace.

Figure 12 shows the third layer of Lane A under construction, its top flush with the top of the level three facing blocks.  With the exception of the junction, the entire facing layer of Tura limestone has been installed, and the workers have begun work on the corners of the 20-meter thick backing layer.  Although most of the pyramid’s mass consists of the rough-cut stones that fill the core, this supporting layer of precisely-cut two-ton blocks forms the true skeleton of the Great Pyramid that has enabled it to withstand the millennia, resisting everything from earthquakes to cannon fire.

Lane A is flush with the top of the facing blocks in preparation for building the next pyramid level (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

Figure 13 depicts the construction of the 20-meter thick backing layer in progress, with a little over half of the 2-ton blocks in place.  As stated above with regard to the installation of the facing blocks, there would actually have been numerous teams along the perimeter installing sections of backing stones, with block-laden sleds being rushed from the quarry to these points of labor.  Graffiti discovered within the pyramid and other structures indicates that the competitiveness of these teams generated an esprit de corps that is wholly incompatible with the notion that the pyramid was built by slave labor.

Sled teams hastily depart from the main quarry to finish their sections before their rivals (Image courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systemes)

With the exception of the gate at the junction of Lane B, the entire level three backing layer is now complete, along with about half of the core.  The quarrying and installation of the core material went more quickly because it did not have to be cut as precisely as the blocks that constitute the backing layer.  Rough cut stones, still weighing an average of two tons each, were shoved into place as tightly as possible.  Chips of limestone would have been poured into the cracks between the rough blocks and then pounded into tight, dense filler, supplemented with gypsum mortar.  

Figure 15 shows the core of level three completed, along with the junction now sealed off by the backing layer.  In reality, the core would not have been leveled off quite as neatly with the facing blocks and backing layer as depicted here.  Jean-Pierre theorizes that the core was not always perfectly flush at each level, but was instead periodically leveled off as needed.  The first such leveling occurred at level 23 (about 20 meters), which is the base of the Queen’s Chamber.  Another occurred at level 37 (about 32 meters), and a third at level fifty (43 meters), where the external ramp ends and Phase 2 begins.

And another level is complete!  Figure 16 is now an inverse image of Figure 09, only one level taller.  Now it is Lane B that comes to a dead end against the facing blocks of level three, and Lane A that is ready for action.  The pyramid builders would now switch lanes again as work on elevating Lane B would commence and teams dragging sleds loaded with the gleaming Tura facing blocks would begin racing up Lane A to start construction of pyramid level four. 

We have examined how the external ramp was used in the construction of the first three levels of the Great Pyramid, but now it is time to turn our attention to a required change in strategy.  Once the ramp reached layer 35 it was too narrow to continue the two lane strategy.  Hemienu knew he would have to start building the ramp with a single lane, but how could he do this without resorting to the go/stop strategy?  How could he avoid work stoppages with a single lane ramp? 

Fortunately, just as the ramp was getting narrower, each new section was also getting shorter and each level of the pyramid smaller.  This gave Hemienu a little extra time at each level to invest in the pyramid itself, and Jean-Pierre proposes he made good use of it.  Of course, being a Master Planner, this extra time was not simply good fortune, Hemienu would have had foreseen this potential bottleneck and planned for it from the very beginning.

This aerial shot of the causeway to Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri provides a neat depiction of what Hemienu’s external ramp may have looked like, albeit much smaller! (Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg)

The Ramp at Layer 35—a Combined Solution

In Figure 17 we resume our tale with level 35 of the pyramid complete.  Lane A is at layer 35 and is ready for use in building pyramid level 36.  Lane B is at layer 34 and comes to a dead end against the facing blocks of pyramid level 35.  Recall that one of the advantages of a ramp of horizontal tiers is that, unlike diagonal tiers, there is less to build with each successive layer.  As the layers stack higher, the sloping foot gets closer to the pyramid and the horizontal layers get shorter.  So raising Lane B to layer 35 will take considerably less time than in previous layers.  Hemienu was counting on this in his design.

As the ramp grew taller it became narrower—fortunately so did the pyramid! (Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg)

Figure 18 shows all of the level 36 facing blocks installed, but note that the gate left open for the junction now spans both lanes.  This is because from now on the external ramp will only have a single, wide lane.   Technically there are still two lanes divided by the higher-quality central lane that will bear the 60+ ton granite slabs in Phase 2 (not shown), but there will no longer be different lanes at staggered heights.  In other words, the lanes at layer 35 will remain there until the time comes to raise the entire ramp (all three lanes) to layer 36.

Incidentally, with the raising of Lane B to layer 35, traffic on the ramp effectively doubled.  With the alternating lanes strategy abandoned, work on the ramp has stopped for now and both lanes (now one single wide lane) are open to traffic.  Without “Men at Work” causing obstructions on half of the ramp, twice the number of workers can use it at the same time.  This boost in productivity was also anticipated by Hemienu’s design.

We now get a hint of how Jean-Pierre believes Hemienu was able to keep work flowing on the pyramid, even when the ramp was closed due to construction.  Just as both lanes are now open for use, the entire ramp would have to be shut down when it came time to raise it a layer.  But work stoppages on the pyramid itself could still be prevented.  In Figure 19 we see that a small ramp has been constructed that connects the incomplete level 36 to level 37.  This ramp would only be a meter or so high, but it was the key to keeping the pyramid on schedule.

With pyramid level 36 still incomplete, Figure 20 shows building materials that have been stockpiled on level 37 via the mini-ramp.  Having calculated how long it will take to build layer 36 of the ramp, Hemienu has lain up enough materials to keep the workers busy on level 37 of the pyramid while the ramp is under construction.  The surge of extra labor and materials allowed by the single extra-wide lane, combined with a design that meant each successive layer of the ramp would take less time to build than the previous, meant no work stoppages on the pyramid.

Again drawing on the double-tiered causeway at Deir el-Bahri for inspiration—what the two ramps at levels 36 and 37 may have looked like (Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg)

In figure 21 we see pyramid level 36 is complete and work on level 37 has begun, even though the ramp is also under construction.  Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory shows that by planning well in advance Hemienu could have kept work moving on the Great Pyramid even when the ramp was not available.  It was a matter of being aware of the limitations of particular strategies and knowing how to adapt once these limits were met.  The architect Houdin shows how the architect Hemienu, like a masterful chess player, would have thought out his strategy many moves in advance, with every outcome predetermined.

With layer 36 of the ramp complete, the pace of work on the pyramid can again shift into high gear.  In Figure 22 we see that, as was the case in Figure 20, work on the current level is suspended while preparations for the following level are made.  With about half of the core packed into place, a mini-ramp has been erected between levels 37 and 38 and the stockpiling of materials for level 38 has begun.  Once sufficient building materials are stored to keep work on level 38 moving while the ramp is built up a layer, the workers will return their attention to finishing pyramid level 37.

With the alternating lane system now obsolete, Hemienu would have continued with this strategy until level 50 of the pyramid was finished and layer 50 of the external ramp was constructed.   These achievements, along with the leveling of the core at 43 meters, would signal the end of Phase One.  The external ramp would then be ready to transport the huge beams to be installed in Phase Two, the internal structures of the pyramid that would enable this feat would be complete, and the foundation for the King’s Chamber would be set. 

We have now laid out the basic concepts of how the external ramp worked with the pyramid, how this strategy was adapted when circumstances required a change of plan, and how and why the pyramid was built from the inside out.  In Phase One, Part 3, we will take a brief look at the internal structures of the bottom third of the pyramid (or two thirds, if you are considering mass instead of height).  After that we will be ready to proceed to Phase Two:  Building the King’s Chamber.

Related Articles

• Introduction:  Building a Great Pyramid
• Part One:  How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?  Straight or With a Twist
• Building the Great Pyramid Year One:  Six Letters from Hemienu
• Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part A—One Third of a Ramp, Two Thirds of a Pyramid

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

The photograph “surviving khufu facing stones”, and the images “internal foundation” and “bottom two thirds structures” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin and are used with his permission, all rights reserved.  The graphics “installing blocks from the inside”, “blocks from Tura”, “installing facing blocks junction”, “different teams different sections”, “ramp lanes at different layers”, “the main quarry” and “building pyramid level 8” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systems, and are used with their permission, all rights reserved.  The following photographs are used in accordance with the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license:  “3118978318_ca15ef01cb_o.jpg” by Ed Yourdon; “3311903763_53d3cfa91b_o.jpg” by “4342225010_4635cd72f3_o.jpg” by Ian McKellar ; “1287145759_6712deb3c0_o.jpg”, “136550733_b73f77746f_o.jpg” and “1288005326_cc1a4e4d02_o” by  Vyacheslav Argenberg.  The following photographs and images are in the public domain:  “edgar bros facing blocks” from the John and Morton Edgar collection; “Nummulitic limestone forming the bedrock of the Great Pyramid” by WLU; “plateau_32.jpg” and “great_pyramid_04.jpg” by Jon Bodsworth; and “Piazzi-plate-1.jpg” by Charles Piazzi Smyth, also courtesy of Jon Bodsworth.

Architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has put forth a comprehensive theory of how Khufu’s architect, Hemienu, could have built the pyramid using only the tools, methods, and materials that we know would have been available at the time.  Now, just weeks before M. Houdin is to release an avalanche of new work and material that will greatly update and solidify his theory, Em Hotep has endeavored to get a detailed and thorough description of his work to-date online and available for reference. 

Picking up where I left off over a year ago with the Hemienu to Houdin series, I admittedly have my work for the coming month cut out for me.  Wish me luck!  But with the generous oversight of the theory’s author himself, I can promise that the forthcoming will be the best precursor you can find on-line for what Jean-Pierre mysteriously refers to as “Episode 2.”  

In this current article we will examine how Jean-Pierre’s theory describes the external ramp that was used to build the bottom third of the Great Pyramid.  In particular we will see how Hemienu could have built two thirds of the pyramid with a ramp that only reached one third of its final height; we will see how the Great Builder overcame the limits imposed by the terrain and turned many of them to his advantage; and we will begin looking at how this deceptively simple structure solved some rather complex issues confronting Khufu’s Chief Architect. 

To understand how the Great Pyramid was constructed, and how Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory suggests Hemienu went about this work, it helps to outline the project in terms of three general phases.  In each phase Hemienu had specific goals and confronted unique challenges that required individualized strategies.  Each of these phases were literally built one on top of the other, so there was no room for Hemienu to make up the plan as he went along.  Before even the first cut of the foundation was made he already knew how the pyramidion would be placed on the top. 

Whether we are talking about the theories of Jean-Pierre Houdin or not, the pyramid was by necessity constructed in three phases:  One—the bottom third, which contains all known internal structures except the King’s Chamber; Two—the King’s Chamber, during which the fiftieth level of the pyramid’s blocks literally became the construction site of a monument built inside the monument; and Three—the completion of the top of pyramid.  We will begin our breakdown of Phase One by reviewing what would not have worked and what challenges Hemienu faced. 

Review of the Cons and Pros of a Straight Ramp

Nearly all theories of how the Great Pyramid was built involve ramps, with many of them describing a straight ramp leading up from the desert to the face of the pyramid.  But as we saw in Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?, there are many problems with this idea.  One problem was how to keep the ramp from being too steep. 

Most of the blocks used to build the pyramid weighed an average of two tons, and to keep the supply train moving fast enough to complete the project on time there had to be enough room on the ramp for multiple teams.  In order to keep these teams small enough—about ten to twelve men was ideal—the incline of the ramp needed to be kept at a maximum grade of around 8—8.5 percent.  The steeper the ramp is, the more men you need pulling the blocks, and the larger the teams are, the fewer you can have on the ramp at one time.  The fewer teams, the slower the progress. 

This presents a problem because the pyramid’s original height was about 146 vertical meters.  In order for a straight ramp to reach this high, while maintaining a grade between 8 – 8.5 percent, it would have to be over a mile long.  So what is wrong with that?  Couldn’t the Egyptians, famous for their architectural feats, have built such a ramp?  Sure, but not without extreme—and unnecessary—difficulty. 

First, consider the terrain.  The only place to build such a ramp would have been to the south.   The plateau ends in a sudden drop just to the north, and there were cemeteries to the east and west that were growing even as the pyramid was being built.  But a ramp that would extend over a mile to the south would not only cut through the main quarry, it would also run straight into the wadi, a gradual drop-off formed by a sort of canyon that defines the southeastern contour of the plateau. 

Building into the wadi would have increased the size of the ramp much more than you might think.  As the  ramp spanned the drop-off formed by the wadi, the top—the walking surface—would need to maintain the same grade of around 8—8.5 percent, so the base of the ramp would need to be extended downward while the top remained at the same angle of descent.  In order to maintain the structural integrity of the ramp, the base had to be wider than the top, with the sides leaning inward and tapering up to the walking surface.  Otherwise it would grow top-heavy as it became too tall, and collapse. 

So the taller the ramp, the wider the base had to be.  Even a ramp as wide as the base of the pyramid itself, at a seven percent grade, would only reach about 130-135 meters high, which is still eleven to sixteen meters shy of the apex.  And once this ramp reached the wadi, the base would have to grow even wider as it extended downward. 

This presents a second problem with straight ramp theories.  Building a straight ramp that was one+ mile long over the wadi and through the quarry would require more building material than the pyramid itself.  Of course, the project would have been less complex than the pyramid, so it would not necessarily have doubled the time or labor, but it would have more than doubled the material required and would have severely taxed Hemienu’s schedule.  And a ramp this large, which itself could have qualified for one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, raises a third question—where are its ruins? 

Where would you hide the ruins of something at least this big? (Photo by Lyn Gateley)

Where could Hemienu have disposed of enough limestone blocks and filler material to construct a second Great Pyramid?  Some theories contend that much of the ramp would have consisted of sand, which could have been spread out over the plateau when the ramp was dismantled.  But some of the blocks transported up the ramp weighed in excess of sixty tons, which would have required a much more solid core for the ramp than sand.  

Besides, the plateau is not as sandy as one might imagine.  You needn’t dig far before hitting bedrock, and gathering enough sand to fill a structure larger than the Great Pyramid would have presented more difficulties than are immediately apparent.  Hemienu could have used limestone chips and scrap from the quarry, which takes us a little closer to how he actually did build the ramp, but again, where did he dispose of the ramp when the project was completed?  There is simply no convincing archaeological evidence that a mile-long ramp as described above ever existed on the Giza Plateau. 

We have already looked in detail at the problems of building the Great Pyramid with just a straight ramp in Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?.  But we also saw that there are advantages to using a straight ramp, some of which are indispensible.  The only feasible alternative to a single straight ramp is one that would have spiraled around—or within—the pyramid.  But spiraling ramps have their own limitations which exclude them as a singular solution to how the pyramid was constructed. 

Again, please refer to Part One: How Do You Prefer Your Ramp? for the specific details of why a spiraling ramp alone would not have been sufficient in constructing Khufu’s pyramid, especially during Phase One.  For here, we will just say that an external spiraling ramp would have been structurally unsound and would have prevented the engineers from making the observations required for maintaining the pyramid’s shape.  And both internal and external spiraling ramps are excluded by one really big factor—the 60+ ton blocks of granite that were required to construct the King’s Chamber could not have navigated the right angle turns. 

In fact, the megalithic granite blocks of the King’s Chamber pretty much demand that a straight ramp was used in some of the construction.  So where does that leave us?  It means that Hemienu needed a straight ramp that was short enough to fit into the terrain while maintaining a grade of 8—8.5 percent.  The ramp also had to be wide and stout enough to bear the 60+ ton blocks at least to the 43-meter level, that of the King’s Chamber.  A 43 meter-high ramp could have been built that would have met these criteria while fitting into the limited space, but such a ramp would reach less than one third of the pyramid’s final height. 

This isn’t quite the disaster it sounds like.  The bottom third of a pyramid has some very useful geometric qualities that worked to Hemienu’s advantage.  He had been around for the construction of Pharaoh Snefru’s pyramids and knew from the beginning what he was getting into and how to go about achieving it.  His design for Khufu’s Pyramid assured that every feature that required a straight ramp could be accomplished with one that only reached a third of the pyramid’s total height.  In essence, he could build two thirds of the pyramid with one third of a ramp.  

The Bottom Third of the Pyramid and One Third of a Ramp

Hemienu was bound by the limits set by time, terrain, and materials.  How was the Great Pyramid built within the 20-24 year timeframe which most Egyptologists agree on?  How did the builders work within the limitations imposed by the terrain?  How could it have been done with just the materials and tools for which we have evidence?  Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory accounts for all of these conditions, beginning with the straight ramp. 

So if it’s true that the only straight ramp that could squeeze within all of these limitations would only have reached one third of the pyramid’s total height (slightly less, actually), then how much of the Great Pyramid could Hemienu have built before needing to pursue a different strategy?  This is where geometry was in his favor.  Consider the nature of the pyramid as a three dimensional shape.  If you were to build a four-faced pyramid out of sugar cubes, by the time you reached the top of the first third in terms of height, two thirds of the total volume would be in place.  

As Jean-Pierre explains: 

The Egyptians…understood that the volume of a pyramid with a square base had an amazing property:  for any value of the slope, the volume corresponding to one third of the height contains two thirds of the total volume.” (Houdin, Khufu’s Pyramid Revealed, p. 27) 

So by the end of Phase One, Hemienu would have only been one third of the way finished in terms of height, but two thirds of the pyramid’s mass would have been completed. This is not a bad investment of labor and materials—one-third of a ramp was sufficient to supply two thirds of the construction.  In fact, once the King’s Chamber and its surrounding core are factored in, the 43-meter-high ramp supplied more like 73% of the total volume of the Great Pyramid.  So in a certain sense, Hemienu actually accomplished nearly three quarters of the pyramid with one third of a ramp. 

Another aspect of the Great Pyramid’s design that maximized the usefulness of the one-third ramp is the fact that Hemienu located nearly all of the internal structures (that we know of) in the bottom third.  The pyramid’s entrance, the subterranean burial chamber, the Queens Chamber, the Grand Gallery, and all connecting passageways are below the 43 meter level.  The King’s Chamber would itself rise to nearly seventy meters, but its foundation (and worksite) was the surface of the 43 meter level.  Thus, the straight ramp remained in use throughout both Phases One and Two. 

Of course, the 43 meter-high ramp could not have moved the granite slabs or twenty-ton limestone rafters into their final positions above the King’s Chamber, about seventeen meters higher than top of the ramp.  As we shall see when we examine Phase Two, a sort of miniature pyramid was built on the surface of the 43 meter level to facilitate the construction of the King’s Chamber, complete with ramps of its own.  We will also get into the details of how the top two thirds (or one third, depending on whether we are talking about height or volume) were constructed when we take a look at Phase Three. 

So let’s now take a more detailed look at the external ramp of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory, including how it would have been built and how it would have worked.     

The Ramp

Materials 

Before getting into the details of the location and orientation of the external ramp we should first explain what it was made of.  In order for this to make sense, we need to jump ahead a little bit and discuss the structure of the ramp.  The specific reasons for some of these details will be explained at length as we progress, but for now we will only be describing the materials from which it was constructed and how Jean-Pierre Houdin proposes it was assembled. 

At its base the ramp would have been about 90 meters wide and divided into three lanes—a narrow central/dividing lane flanked by two wider side lanes.  As we have already discussed, the ramp would have to taper as it went up in order to remain structurally sound, so with each layer the ramp rose in height, the lanes would have become narrower.   In its earliest stages the ramp would have been mostly a horizontal causeway, sloping only at the foot.  But just as the ramp would grow narrower as it rose, the sloping section at the foot would grow longer with each layer as the horizontal section became shorter. 

In many ways, the external ramp mirrored the structure of the Great Pyramid itself.  Like the pyramid, it had an outer layer of precisely cut blocks and a dense core of rougher blocks and filler.  The central lane was an internal structure within the ramp, and like certain internal structures of the pyramid, served the sole purpose of transporting the heavy megaliths to the fiftieth level.    The final layer of the central lane even had a pavement of Tura limestone like the facing stones of the pyramid.  Using these materials was not just a matter of convenience,   it was an example of Hemienu’s foresight and a hint as to why the ramp left no ruins behind. 

The outer sides of the ramp provided structure and stability, a sort of shell that contained the core.  They would have been made of the same well-calibrated 2-ton blocks of locally quarried limestone as we see on the outer surface of the pyramid today.  In the construction of each layer of the ramp, the sides and central lane would have been constructed first because they were more precise—the core could be made to fit them, but not the other way around—and because they served as a guide for how high to make the rest of the layer.  They defined the boundaries of the lanes. 

The core filled the area of the side lanes between the superior masonry of the central lane and the outer walls.  The core blocks were cut from the same local quarry as the better-shaped blocks of the sides, but were not dressed to the same degree.  They were not as uniform in size and shape, and no attention was given to making them fit together as seamlessly as the side and central blocks.  The core blocks were packed in as closely as possible, and then limestone chips were poured into the spaces between blocks and pounded in tightly.  Gypsum mortar was used to further cement the core into place. 

Although built much later and for different purposes, it is hard to look at the causeway to Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri and not think of Hemienu’s external ramp (photo by Ana Paula Hirama)

The central lane was not just a divider between the side lanes, it was constructed with the final purpose of the external ramp in mind—supporting the sleds carrying the 60+ ton beams of granite up to the level of the King’s Chamber.  As stated above, the central lane was a sort of internal structure inside the ramp, the core of the core.  It had to support the heaviest weights for the longest periods of time.  The giant sleds bearing the megaliths were pulled up in forty-meter stretches and then had to rest while a counterweight system in the Grand Gallery was reset (much more on this in Phase Two). 

The central lane was made of the same well-cut blocks from the local quarry as the sides of the ramp, but the final (fiftieth) layer of the central lane would have been paved with the imported limestone that was also used for the pyramid’s facing stones, and then fitted with wooden rollers for the sleds.  The local limestone contained hard little coin-shaped fossils of marine creatures called nummulites which caused its surface to be bumpy and pock-marked.  The limestone imported from Tura did not contain these fossils and provided a smoother surface for the wooden rollers and their heavy burden. 

All of the materials Hemienu used for the external ramp were recyclable—they could be reused in building the pyramid.  The ramp was an early example of Green Technology, and the reason why there are no significant ruins of the external ramp.  As we will see when we get into Phase Three, the pyramid “ate” the external ramp.  When it was no longer useful it was dismantled, carried up through the internal ramp, and incorporated into the structure.  Jean-Pierre theorizes that the external ramp remains hidden in plain view to this day as part of the top third of the Great Pyramid. 

Orientation and Elevation 

So now that we have an idea of what the ramp was made of and the basic architecture of its layers, where exactly does Jean-Pierre Houdin propose it was built?  We have already seen that straight to the south was the shortest route to the wadi, but this was also the most level terrain.  Wouldn’t the flattest surface be the most ideal for the external ramp?  Not necessarily. 

Jean-Pierre suggests that rather than building straight toward the wadi, Hemienu could have instead built the ramp at a twenty degree angle to the southwest where he could turn the uneven terrain to his advantage.  The plateau continues to rise in a gentle upward slope in this direction, a characteristic Pharaoh Khafre made use of a generation later.  By building on the higher ground, Khafre was able to make his pyramid appear taller than Khufu’s.  Jean-Pierre observes that by locating the foot of the ramp on this slope Hemienu could have built a shorter ramp without increasing the steepness of the incline. 

There were other advantages to building in this direction as well.  To begin with, a twenty degree southwestern trajectory would have both dodged the wadi and left access to the southeastern corner of the pyramid unimpeded, the importance of which will become apparent when we discuss the internal ramp (Phase Three).  This angle would also have better aligned the ramp with the easiest route up from the quarry and the quay where ships delivered the Tura limestone and Aswan granite.  But the real advantage came from the higher ground. 

Situating the foot of the ramp on the southwestern slope meant that it would have been higher than the base of the pyramid, which would have achieved the opposite effect of building into the wadi.  Instead of having to fill in all the terrain, some of the terrain would have been incorporated into the ramp.  Of course, the gap formed by the lower terrain between the slope and the pyramid would have to be filled in, but Jean-Pierre demonstrates how even this could have been turned to Hemienu’s advantage.  

Jean-Pierre Houdin has calculated that a 43-meter high ramp built from the center of the southern face of the pyramid and oriented 20 degrees to the southwest would have its foot on a point on the plateau about eight meters higher than the base of the pyramid.  With the foot of the sloping section of the ramp at this elevation, a straight ramp around 425 meters long would extend from the foot to the apex with an incline within the 8—8.5 percent range (8.24 percent, but this an approximation).  That is admittedly a lot of numbers, angles, and directions, so let’s break it down into manageable parts. 

Deconstructing the External Ramp 

Forty-three meters high is a magic number because that was the level at which construction began on the King’s Chamber, the pyramid’s raison d’être.  Recall that the primary need for a straight ramp was to avoid right angle turns while transporting the megalithic blocks of Aswan granite up to the level of the King’s Chamber, so the straight ramp had to be at least 43 meters high.  Any higher was unnecessary because after the King’s Chamber was finished, all other building materials could come up through the internal ramp (except the pyramidion, but we will cover that in Phase Three). 

The center of the southern face of the pyramid is a magic spot because locating the top of the ramp here lines it up with the Grand Gallery.  The importance of this will become clear when we examine Phase Two, but for now we will just say that the enormous beams used in the building of the King’s Chamber were pulled up with the assistance of a counterweight system located in the Grand Gallery.  This could only work if the apex of the ramp was aligned with the Grand Gallery.  We will get into the details of how the 20-degree angle of the ramp was negotiated when we get to Phase Two. 

Twenty degrees southwest is a magic angle because building the ramp in this direction located the foot on the higher ground where the plateau continues to rise, whereas due south the plateau begins to decline.  Building on higher ground helped mitigate the need to build as short a ramp as possible with the need for the shallowest slope possible because raising the low end of a diagonal without changing the height or the slope means a shorter ramp.  Thus, locating the foot of the ramp on the incline meant a shorter ramp while still being able to keep the grade at 8—8.5 percent.  

The 8—8.5 percent grade is a magic slope because, as we have already noted, the more gradual the slope, the longer the ramp has to be, and the steeper the slope the more effort that is required to haul the 2-ton blocks up the incline.  Hemienu wanted to keep the supply chain of blocks moving at maximum pace.  Ideally, as a block was finished in the quarry at one end of the chain, a block should be fitted into place at the opposite end.  This meant Hemienu wanted room for as many teams on the ramp as possible, and an 8—8.5 percent grade allowed for small teams of ten to twelve men.  

Four hundred twenty five meters is a magic length because at this distance the foot of the ramp hits the southwest slope at an elevation eight meters higher than the base of the pyramid.  Eight meters is a magic elevation because starting the sloping section of the ramp at this height means that the vertical height from the sloping foot to the apex would be 35 meters, and a 425 meter long ramp that ascends 35 vertical meters would have an incline within the range of the magic slope ((35/425 = .08235 = 8.24%).  Again, 425 meters is an approximation, but it is a good place to drop anchor because +/- a few meters still falls within the magic slope and elevation range. 

So let’s summarize.  If you were to sit at the middle of the southern edge of the fiftieth course of the pyramid (the 43-meter level), right where the top of the ramp would be, and shine a laser pointer twenty degrees southwest at an 8—8.5 percent downward angle, the red dot would hit the southwestern slope at an elevation about eight meters higher than the base of the pyramid.  If you were to point the laser due south at the same downward angle, the beam would be longer because the terrain is lower.  To the southwest the terrain rises to meet the beam.  To the south it declines away. 

Now let’s say that you climbed down the pyramid and hiked over to the spot on the southwestern slope where your laser beam had pointed.  If you then directed the beam northeast toward the pyramid at a horizontal trajectory, the red dot would hit the pyramid at eight meters above the base, at about the top of the sixth course of blocks.  The beam would be about 425 meters long, thus establishing the full length of the longest horizontal layer of the ramp. 

This raises a new line of inquiry.  Obviously, no ramp was needed to build the first course of the pyramid—it was at ground level.  As the graphic to the left shows, the seventh level of the pyramid would have been constructed using the horizontal layer (dark grey) that forms the base of the first sloping layer (light grey), which in turn would have been used to build pyramid level eight.  But what about pyramid levels two through six? 

A Ramp of Tiers 

They had to stack it all up somehow… (Photo by Daniel Csorfoly)

There are basically two ways Hemienu could have built a straight ramp that was able to grow with the pyramid, and both types involve building successive layers of the ramp to reach the pyramid levels under construction.  One type would have consisted of diagonal layers each of which sloped all the way from the ground to the face of the pyramid.  The other type would have been constructed of layers of horizontal tiers that only sloped at the foot-end.  Again, this is easier to say than visualize, so let’s break this down too, starting with the diagonal ramp. 

But before we continue, let’s take a moment to clarify some of the terminology we will be using.  Since both the ramp and the pyramid consist of layers of construction, it is easy to get confused by statements such as the second layer of the ramp was used to build the third layer of the pyramid.  For this reason, layers of the ramp will always be referred to as layers or tiers, and levels of the pyramid will always be referred to as levels or courses.  

Thus, layer or tier X will always refer the ramp, and level or course Y will always refer to the pyramid.  We will have to adapt this system in Phase One, Part B, when we begin dealing with the facing stone and backing stone layers of the pyramid, but for now, layer refers only to a layer of the ramp, not pyramid blocks.  It is also helpful to remember the equation ramp layer X is used to build pyramid level X+1.  In other words, ramp layer 2 (X=2) is used to build pyramid level 3 (X+1). 

With that out of the way, let’s now take a look at the structure of a diagonal ramp.  Diagonal ramps take the most direct route—a sloping surface straight from the ground to the level under construction.  So once the first level of the pyramid was complete, the first layer of a diagonal ramp would have been a simple wedge from the ground to the top of the first course of blocks.  When the second course was finished, then a new diagonal layer would have been built on top of the first, again stretching from the ground to the work site.  This would be repeated until the fiftieth pyramid course. 

But there are some problems with this design.  One structural issue is the amount of pressure directed at the foot.  With diagonal layers, the weight of the ramp is directed downward and outward, and the higher the ramp goes the more pressure that is pushing down against the foot.  This is not a major problem for a ramp with an 8—8.5 percent grade—most of the weight would still be directed downward rather than against the foot.  But keep in mind that the final layer of the ramp, the fiftieth, was not only the longest and heaviest, it was also the layer that bore the 60+ ton granite slabs. 

A more nagging problem would have been the paving.  As already noted, the blocks used to build the side lanes were rough-cut stones packed in with filler.  But the top surfaces of the side lanes—the surfaces over which the two-ton blocks were transported—would have been made to a higher standard.  While probably not as well-cut as those of the sides and central lane, and certainly nothing like the Tura limestone that would cover the final layer of the central lane, the top surfaces of the side lanes would nonetheless have been smoother and more durable than the rest of the core blocks. 

This layer of higher-grade paving stones was especially important on the sloping part of the ramp.  As mentioned above, the pressure of the weight on an incline is distributed downward and outward, which on Hemienu’s ramp would have been largely mitigated by the very shallow incline—an 8—8.5 percent grade is directing most of the weight downward rather than outward.  But the reality of movement on the ramp was more complex than just this.  Not only was there the gravitational pull on the sleds, there was also the foot pressure of the pullers seeking traction and the forward pressure of the sleds in motion. 

So the cycle of movement/pressure/weight on the diagonal surface would have been the downward and outward foot pressure of the teams pulling the sleds, the downhill gravitational pull on the sleds between tugs, interspersed with bursts of uphill gouging-type pressure from the rails as the sleds in motion met the resistance of the surface of the ramp.  That is an awful lot of multidirectional jarring from millions of tons of traffic over years of use, so the pavement on the diagonal surfaces had to be pretty tough. 

A ramp constructed of repeating diagonal layers would have required this high-quality pavement over the top surface of every layer of the side lanes, one through fifty, from foot to apex.  Although the inner core could be rough, the traffic-bearing uphill surfaces would need this layer of paving, and on a diagonal ramp, every outward facing surface is uphill.  But a ramp of tiers would consist mostly of horizontal surfaces, which means better weight distribution, less effort for the pulling teams (and thus, less foot pressure on the surface), and smoother movement of the sleds over the pavement. 

Jean-Pierre believes that Hemienu would have opted for a ramp of horizontal tiers rather than diagonal layers.  Instead of the first layer being a diagonal wedge, Jean-Pierre proposes that it was a simple tier which extended from the face of the pyramid across to the foot of the southwestern slope at a constant height equal to that of the first level of the pyramid.  To construct the second level of the pyramid, the builders would have pulled their sleds down the southwestern slope and across—not up—the first layer of the ramp.  The second layer of the ramp would have been another horizontal tier atop the first.   

This answers the question of how the ramp serviced levels two through six of the pyramid, even though the foot was situated eight meters higher than the base.  The foot of the sloping section of the ramp was located at the higher elevation—parallel to the seventh pyramid level—but the first six layers of the ramp were horizontal tiers with no slopes.  This implies another advantage of a ramp of tiers over a diagonal ramp.  The first six courses of the pyramid, about 14.5 percent of the total volume, were constructed without any uphill sections.  A diagonal ramp would have been continually uphill. 

Yet another advantage of a ramp of tiers is its superior foundation.  Unlike a ramp of diagonal layers, every layer of a ramp of tiers rests on a flat surface.  Although the chance of slippage between layers on a diagonal ramp with an 8—8.5 percent grade are negligible, with a ramp of horizontal tiers it is eliminated entirely.  Of course, there would still be the short diagonal sections at the foot of each layer, but the surface beneath these sloping sections would be flat rather than another diagonal. 

Starting with the seventh layer of the ramp, each horizontal tier begins with a short sloping section at the foot-end, but these wedges are structurally superior to the long sloping stretches of a ramp of diagonal layers.  Although from the outside the ramp appears to have a single diagonal surface that grows with each layer, in reality each wedge-shaped section functions more like an individual ramp resting on its own horizontal foundation.  Unlike a long diagonal layer, each wedge bears the weight above it individually, with virtually no transference of pressure to the sections above or below it. 

Wall painting of a ramp of tiers from the Tomb of Rekhmire

As mentioned above, this configuration would also reduce the amount of paving required for the side lanes.  Superior weight distribution, reduced foot pressure due to the sled teams pulling on a flat surface rather than an incline, and less wear and tear from forward and backward jerking of the sleds, again due to a flat surface rather than an incline, meant that the paving on the horizontal sections did not have to meet the same demands as the diagonal slopes.  The short diagonals would still require the superior pavement, but the total diagonal surface would be equal to just the final layer of a diagonal ramp. 

So a ramp of horizontal tiers would have been advantageous to Hemienu in many ways.   The amount of uphill pulling would have been minimized.  In fact, building the six largest levels of the pyramid would have been a straight shot across with no uphill section of the ramp at all.  The uphill section would grow from the seventh layer to the fiftieth as both the ramp and the pyramid grew, but as the diagonal got longer and the horizontal sections got shorter, the layers of the pyramid were getting smaller too.     

A stack of horizontal tiers is more solid than diagonal layers.  The base of all sections of the ramp, even the upward-facing diagonals, would be a flat surface.  Layers one through six may have been partially extended onto the bedrock, but from level seven upward each layer would rest on a horizontal surface equal in length to its base, with nothing ever built over top of a sloping section.  With regard to paving, the total area of a ramp of tiers that would require the highest quality paving would equal to just the final layer of a diagonal ramp.  A lower-quality paving would suffice for the horizontal sections. 

So we have examined why Jean-Pierre Houdin thinks Hemienu would have built the straight external ramp twenty degrees to the southwest.  It allowed him to use the incline to situate the foot of the diagonal section of the ramp about eight meters higher than the base of the pyramid, which meant a shorter ramp while still keeping the grade below 8.5 percent.  We have seen that levels two through six of the pyramid were built using horizontal sections of the ramp as it slowly filled the gap between the pyramid and the southwestern slope, rising level by level like water filling a bowl. 

So far we have not examined why the ramp described by Jean-Pierre has three lanes.  We know the central lane was to support the sleds bearing the heavy granite beams to the King’s Chamber worksite in Phase Two, and naturally, having a central lane implies side lanes.  But the side lanes were not simply a result of dividing the ramp with a central structure, they were an essential part of the plan.  The two side lanes were an innovation designed to address another problem ignored by traditional ramp theories. 

In most theories of how the Great Pyramid was built, all work on the pyramid has to stop at the completion of each level while the ramp is built up a layer.  The architect Jean-Pierre suggests a way such stoppages could have been avoided, which he proposes the architect Hemienu would also have realized.  The three lanes of the external ramp were actually three ramps in one. 

A One Third Ramp that was Three Ramps in One

We have seen that the external straight ramp described by Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory could be called a “one third ramp” because it only reaches one third of the final height of the pyramid, but we have also seen that this would have been sufficient to construct two thirds of the actual mass of the pyramid.  There would have been additional ramps constructed on the top surface during Phase Two in order to maneuver the huge granite and limestone beams into place above the King’s Chamber, but the 43-meter-high straight ramp would have been the means of delivering them to the worksite. 

But the external ramp of Jean-Pierre’s theory could also be called “three ramps in one.”  Since a “one-third-ramp-that-was-three-ramps-in-one” sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland, we will continue to refer to them as lanes, but to a certain degree each lane functioned independently of the others.  The central lane would not come into service until layer fifty, and we know that the side lanes would carry all of the traffic until then, but for layers 1—34 only one of the side lanes would be in use at any given time (we will get into the details of what happens at layer 35 in Phase One, Part B). 

One of the unique features of the ramp described by Jean-Pierre’s theory is that prior to layer 35 the central lane and one of the side lanes were always under construction while the opposite side lane was used to service the pyramid level currently being built.  The active lane would alternate from left to right and back again with each successive level of the pyramid.  This pattern was the key to how work on the pyramid could continue uninterrupted for the duration of Phase One. 

Most ramp theories require a go/stop work cycle for building the levels of the pyramid:  

Build a level of the pyramid and then stop 

   

Build the ramp up a layer and then stop 

  

Resume work on the pyramid until the new level is finished and then stop 

    

Resume work on the ramp, building it up a layer and then stop.  

Repeat. 

But these work stoppages were unnecessary.  As shown in the figure to the right, while Lane B is used to build the current level of the pyramid, Lane A is being raised up from the previous layer to the same layer as B.  But once Lanes A and B are at the same layer, work continues on Lane A, raising it a second layer in preparation for the next pyramid level.  

Thus, once the pyramid level is finished Lane A will already be in place to begin work on the next level, the workers simply switch from Lane B to Lane A.  Lane B is then built up two layers in preparation for the next pyramid level. 

The ramp at Deir el-Bahri—note the wedge-shaped blocks between the horizontal and diagonal layers (Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg)

And again we have a paragraph packed as tightly as the ramp’s core with difficult concepts to visualize!  Fortunately the next chapter, Phase One, Part B, is dedicated entirely to the concept of the alternating lanes and how the pyramid was “built from the inside out.”  

We will start by constructing a model of how the ramp was used to build the first two levels of the Great Pyramid, followed by an in-depth look at the construction of level three to see what is meant by “building from the inside out.”  We will conclude Part B with a look at what happens at layer 35, why it happens, and how it was resolved. 

Next in Series: 

Hemienu to Houdin: Phase One, Part B—Alternating Lanes and Building from the Inside Out

Related Articles

• Introduction:  Building a Great Pyramid
• Part One:  How Do You Prefer Your Ramp?  Straight or With a Twist
• Building the Great Pyramid Year One:  Six Letters from Hemienu

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Images “one third two thirds”, “floating king’s chamber”, “pyramide1-3”,  “bottom two thirds structures”, “ramp fiftieth level”, and “ramp and pyramid at 43m” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin and are used with his permission, all rights reserved.  Images “exterior frontal ramp”, “exterior spiraling ramp”, “the external ramp” and “top of the ramp” are copyrighted by Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systems, and are used with their permission, all rights reserved.  The image “Contour map of the Giza Plateau” is copyrighted by Albert Ranson and Jean-Pierre Houdin, and is used with their permission, all rights reserved.  Photographs “2168146740_49ba524b93_o.jpg” by Lyn Gateley,   05b – “5140964578_7abb52ed4e_o.jpg” by  Ana Paula Hirama, and “1294081579_5e200f1f9d_o.jpg” by Vyacheslav Argenberg are used in accordance with the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.  Photograph “GizaPyramid_Kheops_2007jan20-42.png”  by Daniel Csorfoly, and image “Ramp – Tomb of Rekhmire” are in the public domain.

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

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

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

Letter 1:  The Selection of the Building Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter 2:  Expedition to Open the Sinai Copper Mines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Isis watch over you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter 4:  Recruitment of the Skilled Labor Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter Five:  The Opening of the Quarry at Tura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter Six:  The Opening of the Quarry at Aswan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annotated Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

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

Isso foi possível através de uma parceria exclusiva com o escritor brasileiro José de Anchieta, que estará publicando os artigos em seu Web site O Antigo Egito para Leigos. Para sua facilidade, foram traduzidos os seguintes artigos:

• De Hemienu a Houdin: Construindo Uma Grande Pirâmide – Introdução
• De Hemienu a Houdin Parte 1: Como Você Prefere a Sua Rampa, Reta ou Com uma Virada?

Verifique regularmente em O Antigo Egito para Leigos e em Em Hotep! o próximo capítulo dessa saga histórica!

For my english readers, this is an announcement that the Hemienu to Houdin series is available in Portugues via special arangement with José de Anchieta of O Antigo Egito para Leigos.

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

What is an Egyptian Sphinx?

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

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

The Sphinx of Queen Hatshepsut (Photo by Keith Payne)

The Greek Sphinx, Sphiggein (Photo by Rosemanios)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Sphinx of Giza

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does the Head Look So Odd?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Sphinx Complex

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

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

The Old Kingdom Temple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dream of Thutmose IV

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

Thutmose IV (Photo by Siren)

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

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

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

The Great Sphinx as Horemakhet, Validator of Thutmose IV

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

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

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

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

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

Who Built the Sphinx?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Conservation Efforts

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

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

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

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

See Also

• Riddles of the Sphinx:  Video Review 

Additional Online Resources

Egyptian Monuments

The Sphinx, by Su Bayfield

Talking Pyramids

Riddle of the Sphinx, by Vincent Brown

Photo of the Week – Sphinx, by Vincent Brown

Tour Egypt

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

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

Heritage Key

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

Zahi Hawass’ Blog

Sphinx Scientific Update Report, by Zahi Hawass

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

But first, who are these two architects?

Hemienu, son of Nefermaat—or Snefru

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

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

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

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

Pharaoh Snefru (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Pierre Houdin, son of Henri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synthesis

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

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

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

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

Hemienu to Houdin—Building a Great Pyramid

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

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

Next Part: 

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

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

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

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