Em Hotep:  January 27 marks the one year anniversary of the premier of Khufu Reborn at la Géode in Paris.  Of course, January 25 marked the one year anniversary of the January Revolution in Cairo.  Much has changed in Egypt in the last year, and the story continues to develop.  How has this affected your ability to work on-site, particularly with the planned survey with Laval University?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:  First of all, your question makes me think about something none of us can control:  Time!  Time flies…  It has already been one year since the premiere of Khufu Reborn at la Géode.

Jean-Pierre Houdin with his father, Henri, refining the internal ramp theory

This also begins my thirteenth year of research on Khufu’s pyramid, which has expanded to include research on the other large pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty.  When you consider twelve full years dedicated to one single quest, to learn how these large pyramids were built, that’s a lot of time invested in learning, analyzing, researching, thinking, modeling and simulating on a single subject.

In life, you learn in school—at high school and then at university—before having a job for most of the rest of your life, where your education continues.  That is what I did.  I studied architecture at the Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1970 and 1976, so that is six years spent earning my Ph.D in architecture.  Then I ran my own architectural business for more than 22 years, so that is another 22 years of field training, from designing structures on paper and computer modeling to actually being on-site to assist in their construction.

Then in January, 1999, came the big jump into the unknown, in every sense of the word.  To leave a comfortable life to focus exclusively on the search for an explanation about one of the last great enigmas of our day:  to understand a 45-centuries-old civilization in what is its biggest achievement—the pyramids.

A new life, full of uncertainties about my own future, but rich in knowledge and understanding because of this determination to resolve an enigma, something you can’t get in high school or university because they simply don’t have the answer.  This is not the kind of quest where the answer is there waiting for you in a book; for this sort of quest you have to become the scholar and write the answer yourself, based on the compilation of your learning and the addition of your own research.

Jean-Pierre Houdin at la Géode, Paris, in 2007 for the premier of the first part of his work, Khufu Revealed (photo courtesy Jean-Pierre Houdin/Dassault Systèmes)

After twelve years of research I’m still not a knighted Egyptologist, but I’ve surely acquired more knowledge on the specific subject of the pyramids than almost any other human being, Egyptologists included.  This had to be said…for those who missed this point…  My work incorporates the knowledge of Egyptologists, both what has been written and those who have worked directly with me, the expertise of engineers and computer modeling specialists, as well as my academic and practical experience as an architect and a builder.  All of these are required to understand the enigma of the pyramids.

Now, a year is gone and not a quiet one on the Egyptian soil.  While we are celebrating the first anniversary of the Géode première, Egyptians are celebrating the first anniversary of the Tahrir Square revolution, a search for a new beginning after sixty years of a non-democratic regime.  And this revolution was absolutely needed and is still not fully achieved.  Any revolution takes time to succeed…

It is not hard to imagine that, on the Egyptology side, or at least on my own research side, nothing could have happened during this period of time.  But there have been some important developments with the SCA and the Ministry of Antiquities that could clear the way for a better relationship with the authorities in charge.  We should expect less personal decisions regarding the authorizations to carry out a survey. The new Ministry of Antiquities, Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim, made it clear that now any approval regarding any mission or survey will be decided by the SCA council members and not by one man. There again, time will tell.

Meanwhile, we are still preparing, with Dassault Systèmes and Laval University, the future mission on site using an infrared camera, a truly non-destructive technique because we won’t touch the pyramid at all.  Experiments are being set for the coming weeks on the “Redoute”, a fortified building in the walls of Old Quebec.

The Project Khufu Team at Laval University (left to right) Xavier Maldague, Matthieu Klein, Mehdi Tayoubi, Jean-Pierre Houdin, Richard Breitner (Courtesy Mehdi Tayoubi/ Dassault Systèmes)

But I often ask myself, what is going wrong with our world?  Why is there this resistance to letting science move forward?  I have put forward a totally coherent theory from A to Z based on dozens of clues that I have gathered, most of which are right before our eyes for anyone to observe.  The theory is fully explained and can literally be experienced thanks to the same virtual reality and 3D technology that engineers and architects use to design modern structures.  We have many non-destructive techniques available, some of which could give a definitive proof in a few days, whilst others, like Multipolar Infrared Vision (the one in preparation) would take a little more time, but would be well worth it for Egyptology and the people of Egypt themselves.

A year from now, January 25, 2013, we could celebrate the second anniversary of the Tahrir revolution with a tremendous asset for the future of Egypt: a complete understanding of the big pyramids and a new reason for millions of tourists to come in Egypt—rediscovering Khufu’s Pyramid, walking in its internal ramp and visiting its two antechambers.

Should I be wrong…science would have been respected and Time could pass on the pyramids.  The worst thing is to do nothing.

Now…I don’t think that I will be wrong, because…

Em Hotep:  I saw where Japan recently did a television special on your work. Are there other documentaries forthcoming that we can look forward to?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:  In fact, in 2008 and 2009, several documentaries, all co-produced by Dassault Systèmes, were filmed in Egypt about my work.  The National Geographic Channel produced Unlocking the Great Pyramid (also known as The last Secret on BBC), Gedeon (for French Channels France 2/France 5) produced Kheops Révélé (directed by Florence Tran) and NHK Japan produced three different versions.  All of these documentaries were big successes and greatly helped the theory being known all around the world.

Mehdi Tayoubi and Florence Tran (Courtesy Mehdi Tayoubi/Dassault Systèmes)

Recently, I discovered the long NHK version about the theory and I was really impressed by the meticulous and scientific approach to my work.  Although it was in Japanese, thanks to the images and 3D animations, I was able to fully understand all the processes and details of the theory.  The Japanese director had remarkably transmitted the message.

Over the last four years I have seen evidence of the impact these documentaries are having:  each time one is broadcasted somewhere on Earth, the day after I always receive e-mails from viewers telling me that they are totally convinced and that they support me and my work.  By now I have received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, and I always reply.  I’m proud of having so many ambassadors for the theory almost everywhere on the globe.

We have no plan, for now, to make a new documentary but this could change very quickly if we get permission for a survey on site.

Otherwise, time is not lost at all.  With the “Khufu Team” (lead by Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner) at Dassault Systèmes, we are now working, with the CATIA software, on the modeling of the last pyramid of Khufu’s father Snefru, the Red Pyramid at Dashur.  The architectural legacy between the Red Pyramid and the Great Pyramid is amazing and the building processes are similar, although with some design differences regarding the internal ramp.

Richard Breitner and Jean-Pierre Houdin guide us through the 3D virtual reality world of Khufu Reborn at la Géode one year ago today (courtesy Tayoubi/Dassault Systèmes)

You will be surprised by the cleverness of the architects and engineers.  Just as Khufu’s pyramid is a “Chef d’oeuvre” of great engineering due to its size and its multiple internal chambers and corridors, Snefru’s Red pyramid is equally a “Chef d’oeuvre” for its fineness, simplicity, purity and over all, for how quickly they were able to built it.

Last but not least, I’m very proud to learn more and more every day that the theory is being taught to pupils and students in many parts of the world.  Slowly but surely, this theory is gaining momentum in schools and universities, replacing theories that have been stubbornly taught for more than a century despite their lack of evidence and common sense, theories that literally cannot fit within the topography of the Giza Plateau.

Em Hotep:  In the comments section of the Pyramid Shafts article there was much discussion and explanation by you regarding the shafts, and I have had several people send me some questions which I have promised to ask you. I will be publishing the follow-up article about the Djedi Project and interviews with Shaun Whitehead and Mehdi Tayoubi about this project the first part of next week. I know the shafts play a role in the development of your theory, both as explanations as to their purpose and as clues to the antechambers. May I revisit the question of the pyramid shafts with you after the Djedi article/interviews are posted?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:  Absolutely…once your article and interviews about the Djedi Project have been published, your readers will then have a strong base to understand my own ideas about these shafts. The Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber shafts seem to have the same purpose, but this is not the case.  More to come.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2012.  All rights reserved.

The Djedi Project was back in the headlines at the end of December when New Scientist magazine named the discovery one of the Top 10 Science Stories of 2011.  For the next few articles, Em Hotep will bring you up to date on the history of the exploration of the mysterious shafts in the Great Pyramid.  This current article will cover the ground from Waynman Dixon up to the Pyramid Rover Project, with the next article focusing exclusively on Project Djedi.  This will be followed by a couple of very special interviews you will not want to miss..

The Pyramid Shafts

The Great Pyramid of Giza (Photo by Keith Payne)

The Great Pyramid was built over 4,500 years ago as the final resting place of Pharaoh Khufu, the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty.  Designed and executed by Khufu’s vizier and Master of Works, Hemienu, Khufu wanted a pyramid that would rival that of his father, Snefru—the Red Pyramid located at Dashur.  He succeeded.  The Great Pyramid is the tallest, and at 146.5 m would remain the tallest man-made structure in the world for another 3,800 years.

Hemienu and his fellow architects took the secrets of its construction to their graves and we are only just now beginning to fathom how the work could have been done with the tools and methodologies that we know existed at the time (for more on this, start with Hemienu to Houdin: Building A Great Pyramid – Introduction).  But even ignoring for the moment how the pyramid was built, many of the elements in the structure itself have raised questions.  From the unusually tall sloping passage known as the Grand Gallery to the equally puzzling tiered compartments above the King’s Chamber, Egyptologists and everyday people have wondered whether these labor and resource intensive structures served  ritual or structural purposes, or both.  The pyramid shafts would fall into this category as well.

There are four shafts that we know of, two exiting the north and south walls of the King’s Chamber (KCN and KCS, respectively) and two exiting the north and south walls of the Queen’s Chamber (QCN and QCS).  Their purpose has always been cause for speculation.  They have often been referred to as ventilation shafts, but they seem to be too long and narrow to efficiently provide airflow, so this is almost certainly not their purpose (But see Comments section at the end of the article).  Zahi Hawass, former secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, has proposed that they are related to king’s spirit and the solar boats that were discovered buried on the southern side of the pyramid.

The boats are oriented on an east-west axis, corresponding to the daily journeys that the sun god Ra would make through the sky. He believes that the southern shaft [KCS] symbolically served as a portal through which the king’s ka could travel in the night and day barques in the afterlife.  He also speculates that the northern shaft (KCN) would allow the king to symbolically journey on his boats toward the east as Horus surveying his kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt. (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 215)

This theory sits well with what we know about Old Kingdom royal funerary practices, but it doesn’t tell us much about the shafts in the Queen’s Chamber.  Unlike those of the King’s Chamber, QCN and QCS do not exit the pyramid—they seem to terminate somewhere within its massive bulk (it is worth noting that even the King’s Chamber shafts may have been covered by the now-missing casing stones that once covered the pyramid’s surface).  This would also seem to rule out astrological functions, as the sky would not be visible from the shafts, and would eliminate the ventilation theory for obvious reasons.  Besides, until their discovery in 1872 by a British engineer named Waynman Dixon, the shafts were sealed from the inside as well.

The Djedi Project is the latest in a series of explorations to better understand the pyramid shafts, particularly the Queen’s Chamber shafts, and what purpose they may have served.  Were they of religious significance, or did they serve a functional purpose in the building of the Great Pyramid?  Even if their purpose was spiritual in nature, which aspects of their structure are symbolic and which are functional?  Were the markings found in QCS by the Djedi Project team religious in nature, or were they notations left by the ancient builders?

The answers to these questions could provide clues about how the pyramid was built, the religious and funerary practices of the time, and could even lead to an as-of-yet undiscovered section of the pyramid.  Before we can approach the Djedi Project and how it might help us have a better understanding of the Great Pyramid, we should first review the history of the exploration of these mysterious shafts.  This article will cover this history from their discovery by Waynman Dixon up to the Pyramid Rover Project.

Charles Piazzi Smyth and Waynman Dixon

Charles Piazzi Smyth

The story of the Queen’s Chamber shafts begins with the surveys commissioned by Charles Piazzi Smyth, director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, from 1846 to 1888.  Smyth became interested in the Great Pyramid when he read John Taylor’s 1859 book The Great Pyramid:  Why Was It Built?  Who Built it?  Influenced by Taylor’s notion that the pyramid had been designed and constructed by Noah, of Great Flood fame, Smyth believed that the pyramid was built on the principles of sacred geometry, and that an understanding of this system could be deduced if accurate measurements of the pyramid were undertaken.

Smyth set out to measure every aspect of the pyramid he could think of, inside and out.  His first survey was conducted in 1865, an expedition Smyth funded himself when the Royal Society refused him a grant due to what they considered to be the pseudo-scientific underpinnings of his work.  Nonetheless, his extremely thorough survey was published in the Edinburgh Observations Vol. xiii and led to his partial vindication when he was awarded the Keith Prize by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1867.

Sacred Geometry aside, Smyth’s survey of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was the beginning of our scientific understanding of this awe-inspiring edifice (Above: Plate VII from Charles Piazzi Smyth’s “Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid”)

Charles Piazzi Smyth wanted to undertake additional measurements in 1872 but was prevented from returning to the Giza Plateau by illness.  Instead, he asked a friend and colleague, Waynman Dixon, a British engineer who along with his brother John were involved in construction work at Cairo, to take some measurements on his behalf.  The brothers Dixon set aside some time to help their friend, a fortunate development for the rest of us.  The Dixons shared Smyth’s inquisitive nature, and the addition of their expertise as builders and engineers led to one of the great discoveries in Egyptology.

The Dixons quickly fell under the Great Pyramid’s spell and were soon looking for secrets of their own.  Waynman was particularly curious about the shafts leading from the King’s Chamber and suspected that there might be similar shafts in the Queen’s Chamber.  He was drawn to a crack in the masonry of the southern wall, and after inserting a rigid wire between the blocks discovered that there was a hollow space behind them.  After chiseling through the facing stone he discovered that he was right—there was a shaft that seemed to correspond to those in the King’s Chamber.

The Smyth-Dixon survey of the Queen’s Chamber with “Dixon’s Channels” marked on the northern and southern walls. QCN still shows Dixon’s chisel marks, while QCS has been patched up a bit.

The Dixon Artifacts, minus the wooden slat (photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Using the same methodology Dixon discovered a matching shaft in the northern wall of the Queen’s Chamber, and was rewarded with an additional discovery.  In one of the shafts—he does not specify which but from the context it would seem to be QCN—Dixon found three artifacts:  a small copper hook measuring around 5cm, a small diorite ball, and a broken piece of wood about 13cm long.  Known as the Dixon Artifacts, these objects appear to be tools left behind by the ancient builders.

Diorite pounding tools were used to shape softer stone (photo by Scitim)

The Dixon Artifacts have themselves been the cause of speculation.  The wooden plank is missing, although it is thought to be somewhere in the Marischal Museum at Aberdeen (The Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid, by Zahi Hawass).  The diorite ball is similar to other spheres used by the ancient Egyptians to pound softer stone into shape.  The chisels used by the pyramid builders were made of copper, a soft metal that was only good for a dozen or so strokes against the local limestone, and which was totally useless against the red Aswan granite that was used in some of the structural elements of the pyramid (but see Comments below).  Diorite is harder than the red granite and was one of the tools of choice in the Old Kingdom period.

Rudolf Gantenbrink’s robot crawler, Upuaut-2, took this shot of an object in QCN that might correspond to the riveted hook recovered by Dixon. The track-like object is an iron rod abandoned by previous explorers (Photo by Rudolf Gantenbrink)

The copper hook (bronze by other accounts, cf. The Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid by Zahi Hawass) is of less obvious utility.  The hook has two rivets and might be related to another small rectangular object photographed by Rudolph Gantenbrink in QCN.  This latter object, which has yet to be recovered, appears to have two holes in it that might correspond to the rivets in the hook (The Upuaut Project—The Lower Northern Shaft).  It is not certain whether these objects were purposely left there by the ancient builders, or were dropped into the shaft at a point in construction when it was impossible to retrieve them.

But Dixon didn’t just recover some artifacts from QCN—he seems to have left a couple of his own.  Someone, presumably Dixon, used long iron rods to probe into the Queen’s Chamber northern shaft and several of these rods became stuck and were abandoned.  These more recent artifacts would be a vexation to the future missions into QCN, but more on that later.

Whatever we make of the iron rods, we can be certain that the Dixon Artifacts themselves are of ancient origin.  The shafts had been sealed on their lower end by the pyramid builders, and as we shall see, nobody dropped them in from above any time recently.  Dixon’s discovery of the Queen’s Chamber shafts and the artifacts therein was a major accomplishment, but it would be 120 years before another scientific mission would expand on his findings.

The Upuaut Project

The next phase of exploration originally began, somewhat inadvertently, as an effort to reduce the humidity levels in the Great Pyramid.  Humidity causes damage by allowing moisture to seep into the stone, causing it to expand.  Over time this can lead to major structural damage, so the Supreme Council of Antiquities had the idea that whether the shafts in the King’s Chamber were intended to for ventilation or not, they could potentially be used for that purpose.

Rudolf Gantenbrink

In 1989, a German engineer by the name of Rudolph Gantenbrink began working on a computer database to analyze the pyramids in an attempt to understand their construction.  It baffled Gantenbrink that, with all of the technological advances in recent years, and their potential for exploration, nobody seemed to be applying them to the mysteries of the Great Pyramid.

My engineer’s curiosity was aroused because there seemed to be so many questions and so few answers.  I just couldn’t get over the fact that we can fly to the moon and explore the depths of the oceans, but we can’t answer so many basic technical questions about the most exhaustively studied historical monument of all times.  (Rudolf Gantenbrink, The Upuaut Project—The Upuaut Story)

Rainer Stadelmann

Gantenbrink was particularly curious about the shafts.  As an engineer he appreciated the technical and mathematical genius behind creating these precise channels through a layered structure on such a grand scale and suspected they must have been an important part of Hemienu’s plan.  In 1990 he presented his analysis to the director of the German Archaeological Institute (GAI), Dr. Rainer Stadelmann.  Stadelmann was impressed with Gantenbrink’s work and met with him again in 1991, where Gantenbrink proposed revisiting the pyramid shafts with the best technology available.

A partnership was forged—Gantenbrink would make all of the technical arrangements, including the design of a robot crawler to explore the shafts, and Stadelmann would arrange all the permits through the GAI.  It was during this planning phase that the mission to explore the shafts became entangled with the ventilation project.  One of Gantenbrink’s early considerations was the possibility that the robot crawler might run into debris, and so planning for a cleaning operation would be a necessary part of the overall project.

Debris clogging KCN—before a robot survey mission or ventilation system could be installed, Gantenbrink would have to play the part of chimney sweep.

The SCA had also considered the need for cleaning out the shafts in the King’s Chamber as a part of installing the ventilation system, and Gantenbrink’s project sounded like a great opportunity to outsource this dusty undertaking.  In the process of negotiating the permits, somehow the installation of the ventilation system became a “rider” on the project to explore the shafts.  But for Rudolf Gantenbrink, all that mattered was that his project had received the go-ahead.  He arranged for a third party to design the ventilation system based on his database while he set about the task of designing the robot.

Rudolf Gantenbrink with “Father of Upuaut”

As it turned out, Gantenbrink would have to design a series of robots for his mission, The Upuaut Project.  The first robot, which was originally unnamed but came to be called Father of Upuaut, was made mostly of poly-carbonate plastic, had dual independently controllable tracks, and was mounted with a stationary forward-facing color video camera.  In March 1992, Gantenbrink prepared to deploy the robot into the Queen’s Chamber shafts, but soon discovered that the pressure from the chamber’s roof beams had caused the shafts to settle just enough that the robot was too tall—by half a centimeter.

One of the iron rods left in QCN, photographed by Father of Upuaut during its brief trip into the shaft.

Father of Upuaut was unable to make it much more than twelve meters into the Queen’s Chamber shafts, but had proven that they were not faux structures.  The predominant theory among Egyptologists at the time was that the shafts probably did not extend more than 3-4 meters before ending, an interesting position given that Waynman Dixon had managed to get his iron probing rods at least 12 meters (actually much farther) into QCN before getting stuck!  In addition to one of these rods, Father of Upuaut was able to transmit back photographic proof that there was much more to be explored in the Queen’s Chamber shafts.  Frustrated but wiser for the effort, Gantenbrink returned to Germany to begin work on a new robot.

Upuaut-1

The next robot Gantenbrink designed took only about four weeks to construct.  Dubbed Upuaut-1, this robot was actually a sled-mounted camera equipped with a special laser pointer/receiver capable of taking exact measurements of the shafts and the block joints.  Upuaut-1 was designed specifically for surveying the King’s Chamber shafts.  It had no treads or other independent propulsion and relied on a towing system that took advantage of the fact that the King’s Chamber shafts were open-ended, meaning the sled-bot could be towed from a pulley mounted on the surface of the pyramid.

Looking down Upuaut-1’s laser-mounted snout as it climbs KCS, the towing line is visible in the upper right corner of the shaft, the red laser surveying dot can be seen on the lower left wall.

Upuaut-1 was deployed into the King’s Chamber shafts in May of 1992, and other than a few minor snags unrelated to the sled-bot (a sand storm and a lost slip of paper with survey notes and measurements that had to be repeated), it performed brilliantly.  The shafts were cleared of debris, the survey completed, and the ventilation system was installed.  It was a success by all measures, literally.  Now Gantenbrink could return his attention to the Queen’s Chamber shafts, which would require a more sophisticated type of robot than Upuaut-1.

The sled-bot had worked for the King’s Chamber shafts, but without an opening to the surface there was no way to tow a similar robot through the Queen’s Chamber shafts.  The next generation of Upuaut would have to be independently propelled.  For his next robot Gantenbrink returned to a tread system, an over-and-under design that would allow the robot to extend tracks to both the floor and ceiling, giving it excellent power and leverage.  The new robot also had a new laser guidance system and a superior camera with pan and tilt.  It was also, incidentally, shorter than Father of Upuaut.

Irregularities such as this jutting wall section in QCS press on Upuaut-2 from all sides, but also yield discoveries such as the red mason’s mark visible along the edge of the block.

Upuaut-2 was deployed in March of 1993, and returned some of the most tantalizing discoveries since Dixon’s initial discovery of the shafts.  The little robot met no small amount of obstacles.  At one point Upuaut-2 proved to be too short for QCS, somewhat ironic given Father of Upuaut’s height difficulties, but this was fixed by using long slats to push the robot forward manually.  In QCN Upuaut-2 was turned back by a combination of a difficult 45-degree angle turn and one of the rods Dixon had left in the shaft, which itself had probably become snagged in the same turn.  Gantenbrink did not want to risk getting Upuaut-2 hopelessly entangled, so he decided to focus on QCS.

Mohammed Sheeha, Rudolf Gantenbrink, and Ulrich Kapp watch the monitor as Upuaut-2 makes history.

On March 22, 1993, Project Upuaut made its greatest discovery.  After climbing one last step at the 53 meter mark, Upuaut-2 came to a section where the masonry was clearly of higher quality than the team had observed anywhere else in the pyramid shafts.  But most exciting of all was the last obstacle of QCS—a block that promised to be more than just the end of the shaft, if it was the end indeed.

As we approach the slab, we can see two dark streaks on it, which upon closer inspection turn out to be copper fittings. And there is something else. The face of the inspector sitting next to me at the monitor has become chalk white. He draws my attention to two round, white marks on the copper fittings.  “These are seals, these are seals!” he exclaims, visibly shaken.  (The Upuaut Project—The 1993 Campaign)

The blocking slab, which would popularly come to be known as Gantenbrink’s Door, was a truly unique structure in the Great Pyramid (although, as we shall see later, there is a similar feature in QCN).  To begin with, the slab and part of the surrounding shaft are made of a different type of stone.  Most of the shaft is made of the same rough local limestone as most of the rest of the pyramid.  The shafts are formed by U-shaped blocks that resemble upside-down gutters that rest on flat base blocks.  The U-blocks, laid end-to-end on top of the base blocks, form the walls and ceilings of the shaft.

The final U-block and the blocking slab (Gantenbrink’s Door) that plugs it are both made from the lighter and finer Tura limestone that was used for the now mostly missing smooth facing stones that once covered the outer surface of the pyramid.  Gantenbrink noted that both the blocking slab and the final U-block were smoother and of higher craftsmanship than any of the other features of the pyramid shafts so far.

The upper-left corner of the “end” of QCS shows the higher quality of both the craftsmanship and the limestone, as well as the left-hand copper pin.

Regarding the roundish white “seals” that appeared to mark the slab behind the copper pins there was room for maybe-maybe-not.  Stadelmann, who seemed for whatever reason to have been distancing himself from the project by this point, insisted that Old Kingdom seals were created by rolling a pressing cylinder over a lump of clay, which would have looked nothing like what they were observing on the slab that sealed the shaft.  But Gantenbrink’s own research revealed that some Old Kingdom seals were made in gypsum, which might have looked similar to the white marks on the slab (The Upuaut Project—The 1993 Campaign).

The Upuaut Project had advanced the exploration of the shafts literally by leaps (over bumps and ledges) and bounds (up inclines and through breakdowns).  The SCA had gotten its ventilation system, and Gantenbrink had been able to explore the shafts as far as his robots and the legal permits would allow.  But the greatest obstacle would seem to have been a conflict of personalities.

For now, the mystery would remain.

Despite his original enthusiasm, Rainer Stadelmann had gradually cooled to Project Upuaut to the point where he rarely showed up on-site and seemed perpetually dissatisfied with Gantenbrink’s analyses and reports.  On March 28, 1993, just five days after the discovery of the blocking slab, Rudolph Gantenbrink withdrew from the joint venture and returned home.

For their part, the German Archaeological Institute seemed to lose interest in the pyramid shafts and the permits to continue the work seemed in danger of lapsing.  Was the work about to end just as things were getting really interesting?

The Pyramid Rover Project

The Upuaut Project provided some answers, and a lot more questions.  Gantenbrink’s Door presented us again with the Timeless Question—is this a functional part of the structure, or does it serve a symbolic purpose?  The copper “handles” certainly seemed to suggest that the block was movable, but how and by whom?  It was too small and too far within the pyramid to be accessible by people, and besides, both Queen’s Chamber shafts had been sealed up during the pyramid’s construction.  This later point seemed to exclude astrological purposes, and certainly ruled out the ventilation hypothesis.

Looking up QCS toward the blocking stone and the higher quality final (?) section of U-block.

The fact that the blocking slab was made of Tura limestone was interesting, but perhaps equally interesting was that the final U-block was of the same higher quality stone and workmanship.  The U-blocks were simply the walls and ceilings of the shafts and up to that point the local limestone had been suitable for the purpose.  Why was this final section of walls and ceiling given “the works”?  Was the blocking slab the end of the line for QCS, or was it really a door?

Zahi Hawass, who had initially been more skeptical than Stadelmann but had come to take an increasing interest in the shafts, knew that the only way to find out what was behind the slab would be to drill a hole in it and take a look—easier said than done, even for the chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.  All of the work permits had been arranged by Stadelmann and assigned to the GAI, who were no longer pursuing the project.  Egyptian law required that the permits be assigned to a university or similar research institution, so Gantenbrink could not pursue the work on his own.

Zahi Hawass

Hawass decided that the best work-around would be to have the SCA resume the project with himself assuming directorship.  He had a good relationship with National Geographic, and in 2001 contacted Tim Kelly, president of National Geographic’s television and film division, to assist with the next chapter in the drama of the pyramid shafts.  They agreed that the operation would be broadcast live on TV “in order to refute speculation about the withholding of information that has provided great interest to many people” (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 204).

The Boston, MA, firm iRobot was commissioned to design and build the next robot crawler, aptly dubbed Pyramid Rover.  The Pyramid Rover shared some aspects with Upuaut-2’s mobility design, including a vertically expandable chassis with over-and-under treads that allowed it to grip the floor and ceiling.  The iRobot team tested the traction system by recreating the shaft conditions in their lab.  Wooden planks were mounted at the proper angle with limestone surfaces and every conceivable obstacle, from speed bumps to sand traps.

Pyramid Rover’s primary camera was top-mounted with some tilt capabilities and a wide-angle lighting array.  The robot also had a specially mounted drill that would, if feasible, bore a small hole through the blocking slab just large enough for its secondary camera, a fiber optic camera with its own LED light source, to slip inside and take a peek.

But before any drilling could take place, Pyramid Rover would first have to determine the thickness of the slab and find an optimal spot for the hole.  This was achieved with a specially modified concrete thickness gauge (CTG) designed by Olsen Engineering, Inc., a company specializing in nondestructive structural analysis.   CTG uses impact-echo analysis, a type of sonar that works by lightly tapping a surface and then measuring the impact response.  Pyramid Rover’s CTG sensor had its own wheels so it could be moved around the face of the slab while remaining flush to its surface.

The Pyramid Rover Project was divided into two phases.  Phase I would involve a number of reconnaissance missions spread out over eight days.  Pyramid Rover was first sent up QCS for preliminary analyses of the blocking slab and the copper pins.  Phase I revealed that the base (floor) and U-blocks of QCS suffered from deterioration, most of which was natural, but some of which was attributed to scuffing from Upuaut-2’s treads.  The team also discovered two crystals that were likewise attributed to modern contamination, most likely of the New Age variety.

Of more ancient origin, Pyramid Rover transmitted back images of red marks that were interpreted as cutting lines made by the ancient stoneworkers.  Phase I also provided a more complete picture of the copper pins, which were observed to be bent downward at a 90 degree angle, flattening them against the surface of the slab.  The whitish material that Gantenbrink suggested might have been a royal seal, on closer examination, appeared to be mortar used to secure the pins in the slab.  The Rover confirmed Gantenbrink’s description of the slab as smooth highly-worked limestone of higher quality than the local limestone.

(Left) Rover sent back images of cutting lines, including this block familiar from Upuaut-2’s trip up QCS. (Right) The Rover mission also confirmed Gantenbrink’s description of the blocking stone as smooth and highly worked, but the white circular marks were looking less like royal seals and more like mortar patches.

Two of Dixon’s metal rods

Pyramid Rover was next sent up the northern shaft with a goal of exploring beyond the turn that had prevented Upuaut-2 from progressing more than 19 meters.  Rover passed this test with flying colors and navigated two more bends at 22 and 25 meters, apparently designed to keep QCN from running into the Grand Gallery.  At 27 meters Pyramid Rover encountered another modern obstacle—two more metal rods of the type Waynman Dixon had used to probe into the shaft more than a century before.  Rover could go no further into QCN at this time, having become snagged on Dixon’s now-infamous iron rods, but transmitted video showing that the shaft continued after yet another turn.

Phase II had similar objectives to Phase I:

The goals of this phase were very similar to that of the first; determine the thickness of the blocking stone in QCS, determine what was behind the blocking stone, study the metal pins on the opposite side of the block, discern the purpose of the blocking stone, and investigate the terminus of QCN.  (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 205).

On September 16 (Cairo time), 2002, Pyramid Rover climbed QCS and deployed its echo-impact probe, which tapped ever so lightly on the door and listened…  After taking multiple readings it was determined that the slab was just 5-9cm thick, well within the capabilities of the drill and probe-mounted camera.  Whatever was on the other side, Rover would be able to fetch.  The decision was made to drill the hole, 2 cm in diameter, and proceed with the mission.  The following day, with National Geographic broadcasting live, the fiber optic camera was inserted into the hole and 4,500 years into the past.

After drilling the peep-hole (left) Pyramid Rover returned with the probe camera deployed (right).

At about 18 cm from the first slab was another block.  Unlike Gantenbrink’s Door, this block was more rough cut, appeared to be of the local yellow limestone, and had no features like the copper handles, just what appeared to be cracks.  There were two possible takes on this discovery.  It might mean that Pyramid Rover had come to the end of the line—that after an ornate faux block the shaft ended with the core stone that makes up the bulk of the pyramid’s solid structure.  The other, more optimistic take was that this was a second sealing block with something else beyond.  Understandably, Dr. Hawass opted for the later.

“What’s this…? We can see another sealed door. It has cracks… It’s another sealed door! It’s another space, another sealed door, but it looks to me we have a discovery.” (Zahi Hawass, National Geographic Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed)

But Hawass’ optimism was not unfounded.  Yes, the opposite “wall” did appear to be a rough-cut block of local yellow limestone rather than the Tura limestone of the first blocking slab and the surrounding U-block, but so was the rest of the shaft preceding the door.   There was no reason to assume the shaft could not continue on the other side as it had leading up to the small chamber.  And it did appear to be a chamber.  If the door had been a facing stone, why the 18 cm gap?  The space inside seemed to be intentional.

Hawass also pointed to the large chip in the bottom of the rough block, just right of the center.  It appears that the floor of the shaft continues under the block, which would not be the case if the shaft came to an end against the core masonry.  Although it was not certain by any stretch, a reasonable argument could be made for the block on the opposite side of the chamber being something that was inserted into the shaft, like a cork in a bottle, rather than something pressed against the shaft’s end, like a lid on a jar.

Unfortunately, the Rover’s probe-mounted camera had no tilt or pan capabilities, and the LEDs did not provide enough ambient light to tell much about the inside of the chamber.  The fixed mounting also meant that the camera could not look back at the backside of the door, so there was no way of knowing if the metal pins continued on the other side.  In some ways, it was like a high-tech version of the rigid wires Waynman Dixon had inserted into the masonry of the Queen’s Chamber to discover the shafts—they knew there was something back there, they just couldn’t say for sure what without being able to take a better look.

A new frontier? A third blocking stone in QCN

But the Pyramid Rover Project wasn’t quite finished yet.  Three more trips were made up the northern shaft, and this time Pyramid Rover made it past the metal rods that had stalled it at 27 meters.  Pushing up the slope, at 63 meters they discovered another blocking slab nearly identical to the one found in QCS, metal pins included.  Another interesting discovery was made between 18 and 21 meters within QCN—a plain piece of paper and a ticket for the Sphinx and pyramids!  Although modern contamination was expected, this was a fairly good distance into the shaft for these light objects to be discovered, considering that airflow is limited by the blocking slabs.

Charles Piazzi Smyth’s quest for the sacred geometry of Noah and Waynman Dixon’s chisels and iron rods may seem anachronistic by the standards of today, but they undoubtedly paved the way for Upuaut-2 and Pyramid Rover.  Far be it from us to judge the shoulders upon which we stand.  The next step into the pyramid shafts would build not only on the adventures we have covered here, it would pull together some of the most brilliant minds in fields as far reaching as scientific 3D simulation and virtual reality development, search and rescue technology, even space exploration.  Prepare to meet Djedi, and with apologies to George Lucas, the Force will be strong with this one.

Works Cited

• Zahi Hawass, Shaun Whitehead, TC Ng, Robert Richardson, Andrew Pickering, Stephen Rhodes, Ron Grieve, Adrian Hildred, Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner.  “First report: video survey of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.”  Annales du Service des AntiquitÉs de l’Égypte.  Tome 84, 2010.  Pp. 203-16.
• Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed.  Dir. Cynthia Page.  National Geographic Television & Film, 2003. DVD.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2012.  All rights reserved.

Photograph Modern Egyptian shows the use of Diorite balls as carving tools for granite, at Aswan by Scitim is used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License.  All images watermarked “Copyright Rudolf Gantenbrink” are from the official Upuaut Project website, and are the property of Rudolf Gantenbrink, all rights reserved.  All images watermarked “National Geographic” are copyrighted by National Geographic, all rights reserved.  Copyright law allows limited use of copyrighted material under the fair use doctrine, to whit, “[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism.”  The copyrighted material reproduced in this article is used for the sole purpose of discussing and documenting the history of these various projects and does not seek to compete with the originals, prejudice their sale, or diminish their profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.  The positions of the originals are, as much as possible, represented fairly and accurately with no speculation attributed, implicitly or explicitly, to the creators of the originals, nor is it suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that the creators of the originals have endorsed this article or its contents.  Having said such, if you are the owner of the copyright to any of the material reproduced within this article it is not the intent of Em Hotep or any of its agents to violate your rights as the owner, and if you feel your rights have been violated and request that said material be modified or removed, it is the policy of Em Hotep, where it is reasonable to do so, to comply with said requests.  All other images are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright law.

My good friend Marc Chartier of Pyramidales (and more recently of Égypte-actualités, but more on that endeavor later..) had a chance to sit down recently with Jean-Pierre and discuss these questions and more.  Thanks to Em Hotep’s partnership with Pyramidales, I am able to bring you the English language version of this interview.  Enjoy, and please feel free to join the conversation, as they say…

In January 2011, Pyramidales joined the international press at La Géode in Paris for the premier of Khufu Reborn, the second phase of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work with the Great Pyramid originally introduced to the world in 2007 with Khufu Revealed.  Thanks to the Passion for Innovation program, Jean-Pierre has enjoyed full access to the technology and talent of Dassault Systèmes, the world leader in industrial 3D CAD and simulation, to integrate and test his theories in a virtual environment based on the most thorough surveys of the pyramid and the Giza Plateau to date (you may enter and explore the simulation yourself online here).

Subsequently, Pyramidales fully described and illustrated these new developments regarding the construction and the technical configuration of the Great Pyramid of Giza (see the Pyramidales Interviews in the right sidebar).  Now, as we come up on the one year anniversary of Khufu Reborn, Pyramidales again joined Jean-Pierre for a discussion of how the work is progressing, in particular, how the new material covered in “Phase II” has been received and interpreted by expert and amateur enthusiasts of Egyptology and the public in general.

It is with warm gratitude to Jean-Pierre that Pyramidales brings this interview to you.

Pyramidales:

Jean-Pierre Houdin, it has been nearly a year now since you premiered, at an international press conference, the continuation of the work you first presented in Khufu Revealed back in 2007 explaining your research and work regarding the manner of construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Looking back, how do you assess the reactions generated both among the general public and from specialists and experts in the field of Egyptology by these extensions to your original theory?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

The presentation of Khufu Reborn, on January 27^th, 2011, at la Géode, was already for me the expression of a major vote of confidence from my friends on the “Khufu Team” at Dassault Systèmes.  For reasons that have nothing to do with science, no scientific research has been carried out on-site since the revelation, on March 30th, 2007, of the theory of the internal ramp; the result is the inability to get scientific proof of the existence of an internal ramp.  Otherwise, the discovery by Dr. Bob Brier, while filming a documentary in 2008, of a large unknown room behind the notch on the north-eastern edge was a clue of great importance.

Given this context, the decision made four years later by the “Khufu Team” to help me, by means of an extraordinary 3D animation, to go even further in my revelations with the announcement of the possible existence of two antechambers next to the King’s Chamber, was for me a major event for the theory. After nearly eight years of silence on this aspect of my work, I can now demonstrate the consistency of this research.  No previous researcher has delved as thoroughly into the study of Khufu’s pyramid as we have, both with regard to the architectural project drawn up by the designers of the time as well as the implementation of the project.

In addition to the satisfaction they bring, public reactions are quite telling: one can observe in my proposals the gradual development of my theory and how each progression of the work consistently builds a more complete picture, based on simplicity and logic, which fully answers the questions that are related to the construction and purpose of the Great Pyramid.  The public is finally able to see the genius of the ancient Egyptians by understanding how an “inexplicable” mystery—how the Great Pyramid was built—involved neither magic nor miracles, just tried and true construction methods.  The theory explains how simple human intervention addressed seemingly impossible tasks.  Now, about the construction specialists, there again the response has been very positive.  The 3D presentation spoke their language very convincingly.

Finally, let’s talk about experts in Egyptology … the French ones!  They have not deigned to usefully express themselves since the initial presentation of the theory, so why should it be different now, particularly if the generally positive reception the work has gotten elsewhere reflects them in an unflattering light?  In contrast, many foreign Egyptologists have shown a growing interest in my work.

Unfortunately, as always, traditional Egyptological explanations about the pyramid of Khufu are based on a trompe-l’oeil: a north-south cross-section showing three rooms, some corridors and the Grand Gallery.  Looking at the inner works of the pyramid from just this perspective has resulted in theories that simply do not hold up under careful analysis.  These theories collapse when examined in light of how the different internal parts are laid out and relate to each other, how the funerary rites and processions would have been conducted, and especially in terms of building principles.  Yet the construction of the pyramids during the Fourth Dynasty, with Snefru, Khufu and Khafre, was the result of practical know-how, of course constantly improved, but in the service of architectural continuity.

An example of this sort of misinterpretation is the so-called “rupture” of Khufu, based on the famous north-south cross-section view.  This is not a rupture at all.  This erroneous conclusion is based on an Egyptological interpretation of the monument, not from an architectural interpretation.  But the pyramid was designed by architects, and it takes the perspective of a fellow builder to bring together all the elements in a way that allows us to understanding the intentions of the designers.  The stones speak to those who can understand their language … an architect, for example.

Pyramidales:

It seems to me, after a very thorough survey of the literature both in print and on-line that that your name remains primarily associated with the first phase of your work, in particular, with the internal ramp aspect of your theory.  In other words, Khufu Revealed is more well-known while Khufu Reborn seems to remain confined to more confidential spheres.  Do you feel that the second phase of your work, especially as it relates to the two antechambers next to the King’s Chamber, is encountering some difficulty in gaining traction?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

This apparent state of affairs is absolutely not related to the “quality” of the information revealed on January 27 (the probable presence of two antechambers close to the King’s Chamber), but to the “quantity” of information that has spread on the web after the press conference.  When Khufu Revealed premiered on March 30, 2007, there was an extraordinary “cocktail” between quality and quantity of news, the theory being propelled, thanks to a very innovative presentation in 3D animation and in real time, to the top of the news cycle for more than 24 hours.  The news went around the world with the time zones.  This type of “state of grace” is exceptional and it clearly set the bar very high for any new statement on the subject.

The purpose of the press conference on January 27, 2011, was quite different: push the theory a little deeper into the minds of people, by revealing the elements (the two antechambers) that could have blurred the message if they had been included in the 2007 presentation.  The conference itself was a great success, major French television channels (TF1, FR2, and FR3 in particular) talking extensively about the event in their mid-day and evening news.  As for news agencies and newspapers, they have widely spread the information on their side, except for a large agency that has managed to “conveniently” miss the subject, resulting in fewer articles than we enjoyed in 2007.

But I believe that above all, there was a major event nobody could have anticipated or planned for, and which partly stole the show to “Khufu Reborn”: on January 25, 2011, the first news about an embryonic revolutionary movement was arriving from Cairo… on January 27, the day of the conference, the revolution in Tahrir Square was already on the front page in all media.  You know what happened next.

Also, when you search the theory on Google, there are more responses related to 2007 than to 2011. This is only linked to the quantity of information available, not to the quality.  But I can tell you, and the “Khufu Team” certainly agrees with me, that the message is very well perceived.  Every day I receive, from everywhere around the world, many e-mail from passionate people who know a lot about pyramids and who are totally convinced by the overall consistency of the theory.

A visit to the official Khufu Reborn website made by Dassault Systèmes enables visitors to put their “feet on the site” and explore both the theory and the pyramid and its environment in a way that has never been possible before.  People can visit the website and see how the entire theory fits together and when they emerge from this journey their emails to me show that they are “getting it” and their understanding of this work leaves little room for doubting the veracity of the theory.

Finally, I conclude on this issue by taking your sentence: “In other words, Khufu Revealed is more well-known while Khufu Reborn seems to remain confined to more confidential spheres

For me, on the front line, I perceive absolutely no confinement.  Khufu Reborn perfectly complements Khufu Revealed and anyone who is interested in my work ends up having knowledge of the theory as a whole.  The goal is reached.  As for the “confidential spheres”, I would say that these terms are more applicable to a very small number of people in the world of Egyptology who have chosen to ignore me. Too bad for them, the dialogue would have been interesting.

Pyramidales:

During your public presentation of Khufu Reborn last January, contacts were established with two experts from Laval University in Quebec, for a possible in-situ observation of the Great Pyramid, using the technique of Multipolar Infrared Vision.  Can you share the current status of this project?

And a necessary complement to this question: such a project presupposes an implied agreement at the highest levels of Egyptian Antiquities.  Now Egypt has experienced the upheavals that we have all witnessed.  Will the appointment of a new Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and a minister of Egyptian Antiquities, possibly open a window to the completion of your project?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

The collaboration with a team from Laval University, consisting of Professor Xavier Maldague, Matthew Klein and Clemente Ibarra Castanedo, is developing very well.  Working meetings were held in June at the university and we have established a specific protocol, with a strategy for the establishment of a mission.  In addition, a Multipolar Infrared Vision campaign was set up in Quebec: the experience is being applied to the “Redoute”, a fortified building in the walls of Old Quebec, with local authorities being warmly receptive to the project and amenable to making the building available.  We will therefore be able to refine the protocol based on the results acquired during this local project.

This leads me to answer the second part of your question: as always, it is essential that any survey to be carried out on-site is conducted with the cooperation of our Egyptian counterparts and in accordance with the legal authorities of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The current situation in Egypt does not leave a clear vision of what is going on with the SCA, the post of Secretary-General being successively held by several people in a very short time.  The current elections are an additional element of uncertainty about the future of this service.  It follows that it is unfortunately impossible to see at the moment a “window” to complete the project.

Pyramidales:

Does your theory as formulated in Khufu Reborn represent the culmination of your “reconstitution of the building site” of the Great Pyramid?  Or is it likely to have new developments or improvements?  If so, what are the new areas of your research?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

The theory is now globally formulated, funerary architecture is determined, construction processes are detailed and the entire Giza Plateau is integrated into the explanation of the project and its progression. But as in any hypothesis, the details can still be improved.  However, they will render the theory even more relevant.  I am very pleased because the theory became more refined and simplified while its developments and its logic were enhanced.  Every step, every detail, every process, every architectural choice are supported by solid arguments or evidence visible in situ.

Countless 3D simulations conducted with the CATIA software provided by Dassault Systèmes allowed the team to construct a perfect virtual model of the pyramid and its place on the Giza Plateau, and within this environment we were able to simulate and test any concept or potentiality, and it is through this process that the refined theory has emerged.  Now, only confrontation with the reality will allow us to correct any differences in detail.

Doubt is part of the research, of course, but it is more and more difficult for me to imagine any other way apart from the technique of “building from the inside” for the construction of the Great Pyramid.  When I try to put myself “at the outside” in order to address the issue, and because of all the knowledge I gained during twelve years of research, I always understand quickly that I stumble against an impossibility.  I had the time to turn the problem in every way, believe me!

As I often say, Khufu’s pyramid has not arrived on the Giza Plateau by chance: it is the result of an evolution in the art of building from the early mastabas.  Having studied all the pyramids built from Djoser up to Menkaure, it is now appropriate that I specify for each one their specific mode of construction, especially the two pyramids of Snefru at Dahshur (the Bent and the Red Pyramids) and Khafre’s pyramid in Giza.  If construction “from the inside” is the rule, there will still be variations adapted to each of the monuments in the building processes.  The modeling of these pyramids will demonstrate these changes and can only complement and strengthen the principles of the theory.

Pyramidales:

Henri Houdin, Jean-Pierre's father, attentive to his son's research

Khufu’s pyramid is considered the ultimate pyramid architecture on the Giza plateau, the culmination of the skills of the Egyptian builders.  Does this mean that this pyramid is unique?  Or do you think that the techniques used in its construction – in particular, from your point of view, the internal ramp – have also been used to build other pyramids, Khafre, for example, or Menkaure as well?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

As I indicated in my previous answer, Khufu’s pyramid is, at the beginning of its construction, the culmination of the expertise of Egyptian builders and is absolutely not a unique monument, although this pyramid is unique in its category (funerary architecture in the heart of the monument).  The construction technique of “building from the inside” was applied to all large smooth pyramids built after the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.  This does not mean that all smooth pyramids were built in part by an internal ramp.  This technical process was only necessary for the large smooth pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty (Bent, Red, Khufu and Khafre … and certainly Meidum).  For all other pyramids from Menkaure and after, Egyptians will continue to build “from the inside”, but without recourse to an internal ramp; a construction trench penetrating in one side of the building will be reserved during construction before being recapped at the end of construction.  There are traces of trenches in the ruins of the pyramids of Neferirkare and Sahure at Abusir.

Pyramidales:

A fundamental question to me: regarding the multiple contemporary theories which succeed each other in an attempt to decipher – at last! – The “secret of the pyramids”, what are, in your opinion, the strengths, or even more, the skills, that any researcher must or should show in this field?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

I believe it is important to think first to the monument itself, to understand the design philosophy, to follow the logic of the scalable architecture of the time, to analyze in detail the components, and especially to not come proposing a gadget that could respond to a specific point of construction.  The Great Pyramid of Khufu was built using processes that were simple, logical, and controlled, they just did so on a larger scale than before.

The schedule of conditions was clear: build a pyramid, just a pyramid, and not, for example, build a big ramp “at lost” or build locks to build a pyramid.  Resources in Egypt were precious, and one had to build without wasting any material or effort.  Extracting a stone to build an external ramp was not an end but a step in the life of this stone.  Processes tailored to each major stage of construction lowered the cost of construction, because the same stone used in one phase (the external ramp) was recycled in the next phase, becoming a component of the building itself. This is the great art of the Egyptians of the time.

What are the necessary skills?  Certainly a good knowledge about construction, that makes sense to me … especially when I see some theories that ignore gravity!

I do not think that we can learn much just from the study of ancient texts, especially when these texts are so few and sketchy.  Herodotus is absolutely not sufficient, far from it!

To the contrary, we have to draw upon the totality of knowledge this period has left to us, a surprisingly vast reference library.  One can find common parameters, an architectural language and religious principles, and understanding these elements is mandatory to solving these puzzles.  By understanding how these principles have been applied elsewhere we can extrapolate how they may have served in the building of Khufu’s Pyramid.

Pyramidales:

You have lent your voice to encouraging and promoting the Earth Pyramid project developed by Steve Ward.  Why do you think this initiative is promising?  What does it reveal?

Jean-Pierre Houdin:

I have been in touch with Steve Ward for more than a year.  Steve found my theory simple, logical, ecological and perfectly suited to his project to build a modern pyramid today.  So there was already a likeable side in this encounter via the Internet.  But what attracted me the most was the idea of the Earth Pyramid Project: to build a monument intended to cross the centuries for future generations, involving the younger generations of today in a large rallying movement.

Why is this initiative promising?

We never get something for nothing.  The men and women who will support this initiative are themselves those who will make the initiative promising.  But the Earth Pyramid project has a lot going for it that makes me hopeful:  the project is positive, constructive, generous, peaceful, somewhat utopian (we will always need dreamers), dedicated to children around the world who have a sacred need to have another vision of Earth than the one they see all day long in the TV: wars, crises, disasters, famines … there is nothing very positive in all this.

So when someone is deeply motivated, fights for a noble and smart idea (transmitting messages from children intended to be read in a thousand years), I support it, it’s as simple as that.  It’s a bit of fresh air in a quite turbulent world.  And the symbol of the pyramid containing a “time-capsule” is a great idea.  It is clear that this type of monument can defy time without too much trouble … These are just the actions of men that can disrupt their life: who would dare attack a symbol dedicated to children from around the world?

In addition to providing the full simulation illustrating Jean-Pierre’s theory in detail, the Khufu Reborn universe is interactive.  You can actually navigate you way around the Giza Plateau of 4,500 years ago.  But if you aren’t ready to dive into Khufu’s world just yet, this Em Hotep tour and tutorial will equip you for the journey.

On January 27, 2011, Khufu Reborn premiered at La Géode in Paris, France.  This was the official launch of Episode Two of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s work with the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu.  The presentation was a stunning larger than life 3D simulation of the Giza Plateau, the pyramid, and a detailed explanation of Jean-Pierre’s theory.  But if you were unable to attend the premier, Dassault Systèmes has brought it to you, right to your desktop.

Marc Chartier, Jean-Pierre Houdin, and Keith Payne at the premier of Khufu Reborn (Courtesy of Marc Chartier)

Now you can log on to the Project Khufu section of the Dassault Systèmes website, download a small plugin, and see the presentation in its entirety, but with an advantage those of us in attendance did not have—at any point during the presentation you can take control and travel to anyplace in the Khufu Reborn universe to look at things in as much detail as you wish.  Here is the link to the site:

Click Here to Go Back 4,500 Years to Khufu’s Egypt!

Feel free to click on and jump right in!  But if you would like a short guided tour, then do read on.

The Khufu Reborn online interactive simulation is rendered in such detail that it really has to be seen to be believed.  And despite having all of the eye-popping graphics and navigational freedom of a cutting edge first-person video game, this universe is not by any stretch make-believe.  The environment is based on accurate surveys of the Giza Plateau and the pyramid itself, with the clock turned back 4,500 years.  Ancient details, based on up-to-date archaeological evidence, have been recreated in a way that lets you move through the Giza Plateau of Khufu and his Master Builder, Hemienu.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you first go to the site you will land at the Khufu Reborn: The Story Continues page where you can watch a brief introductory video.  The video gives you an idea of how Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory has evolved and will set the stage for the journey you are about to embark upon.  After the video, click on the Discover a unique interactive 3D experience with 3dVia button located below the video.

The first thing that will happen is you will be prompted to install the 3dVia software from the Dassault Systèmes website.  You need the 3dVia software to run the simulation, and since the software comes direct from Dassault Systèmes you can be assured that it is safe, virus and ad-ware free, and that your privacy will be in no way compromised.  Once the software is installed on your computer you are ready to visit the Giza Plateau of 4,500 years ago.

You next find yourself at the loading screen for the simulation, as shown below.

Note the blue progress bar in the lower right-hand of the screen.  This bar does not move at a regular pace and will possibly seem to freeze up as the simulation is loading, but be patient!  The Khufu Reborn simulation is a very detailed program and some of the segments can take a while to load, and you may begin to suspect that the program is frozen.  You may even get a pop-up window saying that the plug-in appears to have stopped, asking if you want to cancel it.  Choose “no” as it is almost certainly still loading.  The wait will be worth it.

Another thing discovered during beta testing was that pulling up another application, or even another window from your browser, can cause the simulation to actually lock up, so I would recommend that you visit the Khufu Reborn universe at a time when you can dedicate your computer to just exploring the simulation.  Give yourself about an hour for your first visit so you have time for all of the narrated segments, as well as time to explore on your own.  It is, after all, interactive!

After the simulation finishes loading you will be at the intro screen, as appears below.

There are five different sections, and for your first visit you might want to take the entire tour, starting with the first section, The two enigmas of the Great Pyramid.

When you click on two enigmas you will again be greeted with the loading screen.  Allow the program time to load.  The gods of Egypt will be impressed with your patience.  I would again reiterate that while the loading screen is present don’t pull up another program or browser window.  This will displease the gods, who will punish you with a genuinely locked up simulation.  The good news is that once the segments are loaded the program is extremely stable.  While writing this tutorial I was able to switch back and forth between Google Chrome, MS Word, and Photoshop while the simulation was loaded and running without a single crash.

The Two Enigmas section will begin with a flight up the Nile to the Valley Temple and the scene of Khufu’s embalming.  The narration will begin, explaining what you are seeing.  After that we are again off and flying—up the course of Khufu’s Royal Causeway, over the Upper Temple, and circling around for a great view of the Great Pyramid.

This might be a good opportunity for your first experiment with the interactive part of the simulation.  If you click on the button labeled Free Navigation Mode in the lower right of the screen you will find that the narrative stops and the buttons change to say Normal, Expert, and Play Mode.  If the Expert button is lit up, click on Normal.  The screen should now have some navigation controls in the upper right of the screen.

The navigation controls operate the virtual camera that flies you through the simulation.  With the narration paused, you are now in full control.  The controls are pretty easy to use.  The +/- on the left side of the controls allow you to tip the camera angle up or down.  The directional keys in the center of the circle move the camera forward and backward and from left to right.  The +\- on the right of the control allows you to zoom in and out.  The left/right arrows at the bottom allow you to pan the camera circularly left and right.  As simple as these commands are, they allow you to travel practically anywhere on the landscape and observe from any angle and distance.

In the above image I have navigated over to get a closer look at the boat pits.  Take a little time playing with the navigation controls to get a feel for how they work.  The movement is very intuitive and in no time you will be flying around the virtual environment like Horus himself.  When you are done, press the Play Mode button and the camera automatically reorients itself and the narration resumes where it left off.

Once the two enigmas segment has finished you will want to return to the intro screen to select the next segment.  You will notice that at all times when in the simulation there are three small icons in the upper left of the screen.  The first icon, shaped like a house, is the Home button.  Press this at any time during or after a segment to return to the intro screen.  The middle icon, with the question mark is a Help button.  The third icon, shaped like a gear, pulls up the Options panel.

The Options panel allows you to toggle the music and narration on and off, as well as switch to full screen mode.  You will also notice that you have an option to immerse yourself more fully into the Khufu Reborn universe with 3D.  You can either set the simulation to work with a 3D TV, or you can go the old fashioned route and don your 3D shades.  The old cardboard type with the red and blue lenses will work just fine.  After checking out the Options panel, click on the Home button to return to the intro screen.

Back at the intro screen, you will notice that if you move the cursor over the next section, The genius of the builders, that you have three options:  the Fifth Year, the Fourteenth Year, and the Fifteenth Year, each representing different phases of the construction leading up to the King’s Chamber.

For your first trip through I recommend taking the sections in order so you get both a fuller understanding of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory and a complete idea of what the Khufu Reborn universe contains.  The simulation is intended to be enjoyable and educational, but it is also a tool for your own research, so it is worth the time invested to learn how it works.

Once the genius of the builders—the fifth year segment has loaded you will notice that there is an arrow icon on the left side of the screen.  If you run your cursor over this icon the Timeline will appear, as pictured below.

The Timeline is divided into chapters and you can either move the segment forward or backward using the vertical sliding bar, or jump straight to a chapter by clicking on it.  Not all segments have chapters, so the Timeline will not be available everywhere.  As always, you can pause the narration at any time and take control of the camera by clicking on the Free Navigation mode button.

The last thing we will look at is the top bar of the display where you will see buttons labeled Khufu Reborn, 3D Experience, The Story, and Clues.  You will notice that the 3D Experience button is toggled while you are in the simulation.  Khufu Reborn simply takes you back to the screen with the introduction video.  The Story gives you the option to download a pdf (or pull it up in your browser”) of the press kit that was provided at the Khufu Reborn premier.  This tells the story of how Jean-Pierre Houdin became interested in the Great Pyramid, how Dassault Systèmes became involved in the project through their Passion for Innovation program, and touches on some of Dassault Systèmes’ other current projects on the Giza Plateau.

Clues gives you an opportunity to evaluate the evidence for Jean-Pierre’s theory for yourself.  There are two videos—one explaining the counterweight system in the Grand Gallery and another explaining “Bob’s Room”, the corner room first explored by Bob Brier.  There is also another pdf file you can view and download called “Khufu’s Pyramid—The “Inside-Out” Construction Theory:  34 Clues in Support for the Theory”.  If you are skeptical of Jean-Pierre’s theory, then this is the place to get some answers.  Here Jean-Pierre lays out the physical evidence for his theory in detail.

That pretty much concludes this guided tour of the Khufu Reborn online interactive experience.  Go forth now and explore!

Click Here to Go Back 4,500 Years to Khufu’s Egypt!

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise stated, all images are provided courtesy of Jean-Pierre Houdin and Dassault Systèmes, copyright 2011, all rights reserved.

Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory of the how the Great Pyramid was built continues to unfold.  How were the sixty-ton megalithic beams moved from the harbor at the base of the Giza Plateau to 43+ meters high into the Great Pyramid?  Was there a second counterweight system like the one in the Grand Gallery?  Why was Khafre’s Royal Causeway so wide?

In this, the sixth in a series of articles and interviews from Pyramidales writer Marc Chartier, we learn some of the key evolutions in Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory.  In the few short years between Khufu Revealed and Khufu Reborn, researcher/architect Houdin has expanded his work to account for anomalies surrounding the pyramid of Khufu’s successor, Pharaoh Khafre, and what they tell us about Khufu’s pyramid.

The English-language version of this article was very kindly provided by Marc Chartier, Jean-Pierre Houdin, and the Project Khufu team at Dassault Systèmes exclusively for Em Hotep readers.

The "main construction causeway" for the building site

The number two has pride of place in Khufu Reborn (aka Khufu Renaissance), the new version of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s reconstitution of the Great Pyramid’s construction. After the two ascending corridors (one for the service circuit inside the pyramid, the other for the “Noble Circuit”), the two horizontal corridors (one giving access to the Queen’s Chamber, the other being a section of the “Noble Circuit”), the two antechambers preceding access to the King’s Chamber, two entrances to this chamber and the two levels of the internal ramp, space was made for two external ramps built on the Giza Plateau to transport the materials used to construct the monument (limestone blocks and granite monoliths from the Aswan quarries).

The first of these ramps, qualified as the “main construction causeway”, follows a line east-west towards the position where the Pyramid of Khafre would later be built; its upper part is equipped with a counterweight system. The other ramp continues towards the south face of the Great Pyramid and enters the monument under construction, as a trench, up to the 70 m level.

Tale of a discovery, in several steps

A study of the Giza Plateau, together with the technical implications of transporting the materials used to construct the Pyramid of Khufu, led Jean-Pierre Houdin to the following observation: “Everything on the Giza Plateau proves that the Royal Causeway, connecting the Low and High Temples of the Pyramid of Khafre, was constructed on a ramp that had previously been used for the construction of the Pyramid of Khufu.”

The architect was thus able to provide a significant variant to the theory that he had developed and published in 2007, according to which the Great Pyramid’s construction site was supplied from the port following the natural slope of a wadi (temporarily dry riverbed), workers obviously dragging the sledges loaded with blocks or monoliths along the gentlest slope.

“When I presented my ‘Khufu Revealed’ theory,” Jean-Pierre Houdin tells us:

I explained that the granite beams for the King’s Chamber were hauled up the external ramp using the counterweight system in the Grand Gallery. Well, one day I received this message from someone who attended one of my conferences: ‘Your counterweight enables the beams to be raised from the base of the external ramp as far as the level of the King’s Chamber (+43 m). But how do you get these same beams from the port to your ramp? The distance between them is at least 500 m, and more particularly the port is located 40 m lower than the ramp. Shouldn’t you consider a second system to haul the blocks over this distance?’

This correspondent was right! Explains Jean-Pierre:

If the Egyptians had considered the counterweight solution, they would certainly have applied it to the entire journey made by the beams. A second counterweight would have had to be used to haul the granite blocks from the unloading port for materials coming from Aswan as far as the base of the external ramp. But do traces of its existence still remain?

A revealing photograph

The right questions had been asked. It was now a matter of trying to answer them…

Two days later, the architect discovered a photograph of the Giza Plateau with its three pyramids on the Talking Pyramids website. It was taken in 1905, from a balloon, by the aerostat pioneer Eduard Spelterini.

“As I was examining this document,” comments Jean-Pierre Houdin, “an obvious fact came to me: the royal funereal causeway linking the Low Temple to the High Temple of Khafre’s Pyramid had been built on an old ramp. This foundation could only have been used during a construction project before Khafre’s: that for the Pyramid of Khufu!”

Days passed… Then, during a recent trip to Egypt, Jean-Pierre Houdin spent long hours studying the topography of the site at Giza, with the aim of checking the accuracy of his intuitions against Spelterini’s photographs. He describes his observations:

I started by examining Khafre’s royal causeway in order to find any clues to the existence of the ancient ramp leading from the port to Khufu’s construction site. Then I discovered that this causeway, about ten meters wide, is laid on a perfectly uniform foundation 23 m wide, extending 6.5 m on each side, which is the case neither for Khufu’s royal causeway (10 m wide), nor for Menkaure’s causeway (8 m wide). Over the better part of the south side, very large limestone blocks were even put into place to fill in hollows.

After walking back up Khafre’s royal causeway to its western end, I stood exactly where the external ramp for the Pyramid of Khufu should have started. From there, I was surprised to discover a sort of large slab floor, made of limestone blocks, pointing towards the Great Pyramid. These blocks have nothing to do with Khafre’s Pyramid (the transport of the blocks needed to construct this pyramid did not require such an infrastructure), from which I deduced that they would probably have served as the foundation for the external ramp of Khufu’s Pyramid.

Moreover, along its route, this ramp serves several of the quarries on the plateau, which supplied most of the materials for the Great Pyramid. This ramp, currently measuring nearly 500 m with a slope of 8.5%, is ideal for the stresses of moving sledges, even more so for dragging beams loaded onto large sledges on rollers.

 In my view, the conclusion was obvious: the royal funereal causeway connecting the Low and High Temples of the Pyramid of Khafre had been constructed on an ancient ramp that could only have been used on the previous construction project for the Pyramid of Khufu. King Khafre must have reused a route that had served in the construction of his father’s pyramid.

Two counterweight systems

The counterweight sliding in Grand Gallery

However there remained a problem: human strength alone, which has limits for reasons of co-ordination, could not be sufficient to drag beams weighing up to 63 tons the length of this royal causeway. Jean-Pierre Houdin considers that additional force was therefore absolutely essential: the most logical possibility, given the Egyptians’ technical knowledge at the time, is that the source of this force would have taken the form of a counterweight moving in a slide channel, a technique enabling human strength to be combined with mechanical force, the mechanical force being “rewound” by human force sequenced in time and space.

But if there had been a counterweight, it was still necessary to find traces of it, proof of its existence…

Resuming his observations “on the ground”, Jean-Pierre Houdin then took an interest in the configuration of the second Giza pyramid.

Jean-Pierre Houdin notes:

When you study plans of Khafre’s Pyramid you notice that the funereal corridor leading to the King’s Chamber was dug into the ground, under the monument, about ten meters below the level of the Plateau in this area. But there is an anomaly in its construction. Over a length of 8 m, the Egyptians did not dig the corridor: they built it, floor, walls and ceilings, in stone. Why? The only plausible explanation is that there was a sizeable hole there, a very deep trench requiring special treatment. Now, if we extrapolate the ramp from the port, or royal causeway, as far as the Pyramid of Khafre, we observe that it crosses the funereal corridor exactly where this construction is found.

This meant there could be no further doubt for Jean-Pierre Houdin: in the precise line of the royal causeway starting from the port, and toward its higher end, this trench under the Pyramid of Khafre had been dug into the bedrock at the time of Khufu, to serve as a slide channel for a counterweight system.

Based on the considerable, not to say indispensable, advantages offered by an external ramp built as an “expressway”, he understood that the Giza Plateau had been landscaped to provide the following logistical facilities: a direct ramp from the port to the foot of the pyramid’s external ramp (in red on the sketch above), simplifying and speeding up material supplies to the site; then, as an extension, almost right-angles, a second ramp running towards the south face of the pyramid (in blue). The special feature of this system is that its “driving force” relied on two identical counterweight systems (in green):

It was not possible to use human strength alone, so the architects and engineers decided on the principle of using counterweights from the start of the project, in other words from the design phase. This meant installing two counterweight systems. The first, sited in a trench excavated in the bedrock of the Giza Plateau, to haul the monoliths from the port (level 20 m) to the foot (level 75 m) of the external ramp of the Pyramid of Khufu. A first dragging ramp was built from the port, toward this trench, for this purpose. The second system was sited directly in the heart of the pyramid, between levels +21 m and +43 m: its still visible slide channel, namely the Grand Gallery, is opposite the external ramp that served the construction site up to a maximum level of +43 m.  (Jean-Pierre Houdin)

An external ramp… extending as an internal ramp

Another new feature then appeared in the reconstitution of the Great Pyramid’s construction, the Khufu Renaissance version: the configuration of the external ramp extending beyond the royal causeway and heading towards the monument’s south face.

External ramp (level 43 m)

Located on a natural promontory of the plateau, the starting point for this ramp was higher than the pyramid’s base level. The ramp thus reached a height of 43 m (base of the King’s Chamber, with a length of only 325 m. It was extended in a trench, inside the monument, to a height of 70 m (this is new compared with the 2007 hypothesis), the whole thing having a slope scarcely more than 8.5%.

At a height of 70 m, no more than 15% of the volume remained to be built, over an additional 76 m height. This last part of the construction site was out of reach of the external ramp; otherwise it would have been necessary to extend it excessively and make it exceed the volume of the pyramid itself. Hence the necessity for the internal ramp, the central idea of the Houdin theory in its first Khufu Revealed version.

“At the start of my research into construction of the Pyramid of Khufu,” says Jean-Pierre Houdin,

I thought that the Egyptians had built almost three-quarters of the monument using the external ramp. But I was still far away from what they were capable of doing… Discovering the ramp from the port enabled me to position Khufu’s external ramp precisely on the ground. Among other things, I noticed that it arrived at the monument at the level of the base of the King’s Chamber to the west of the south face, almost at the point where the internal ramp ended. During the construction of the King’s Chamber, the pyramid continued to rise normally, except for this southern part where the granite beams were stored.

External ramp (level 70 m)

The external ramp arrived at the south-west corner and continued as a trench in the pyramid by turning clockwise until it reached above the roof of the King’s Chamber (+70 m). The southern part remained at level +43 m while the King’s Chamber was built.

Construction of the internal ramp was therefore interrupted in this southern part, but the Egyptians’ big trick was to continue its construction and use by making it restart from the south-east corner. Thus for several years, teams were dragging sledges on the flat and in the open air at level +43 m, then pulling them up a slope from the south-east corner. When they had finished using the external ramp, the southern part was filled in and a horizontal tunnel was constructed to link the internal ramp from the south-west corner to the south-east corner. This is why, as shown by measurements made in 1986, the section of ramp in this southern part remains horizontal.

"You must first ask yourself the true questions”

By not cutting across the path of the external ramp with the internal ramp during the construction of the King’s Chamber, the Egyptian builders had succeeded in constructing 85% of the pyramid’s volume by using the external ramp. However this trick had one drawback: part of the internal ramp stayed permanently horizontal at level +43 m, but this was largely compensated for by the fact that there remained no more that 15% of the volume to be constructed. On the other hand, there still remained more than 76 m in height to be completed: this is where the internal ramp played its part to the full.”

Three complementary ramps

In summary, Khufu’s Pyramid was built using three separate and complementary ramps: the ramp from the port (future Khafre’s royal causeway) used, with its counterweight, as far as the level of the current Pyramid of Khafre; the external ramp, as far as level +43 m of the pyramid, extended by a ramp built in a trench running clockwise as far as the +70 m level; the internal ramp, constructed from the base of the pyramid (south-east side), spiraling counter-clockwise and including a flat part at the +43 m level.

It is precisely onto this flat part (+43 m) that the monoliths for the King’s Chamber and the relieving chambers were first raised (using the counterweight in the Grand Gallery), then stored temporarily before being put in place (still using the Grand Gallery counterweight system) at their various levels to form the ceilings of the King’s Chamber and the relieving chambers.

The "main construction causeway" (in red) and the natural ramp (in blue)

To complete this logistical configuration of the Giza site, Jean-Pierre Houdin guides us to a final observation, while still keeping an eye on the plateau’s topography. This time it is connected with the facing blocks made of Tura limestone delivered to the port and those extracted from quarries excavated around the Sphinx and a little higher up.

There was no need for these blocks to take a detour towards the position where Khafre’s Pyramid was subsequently erected. They were quite simply pulled over a small natural ramp (in blue on the sketch above) following the incline of the plateau in order to be brought as far as the entrance to the internal ramp located in the southern face of Khufu’s Pyramid and about 25 m from its south-east corner.

Transported to the foot of the pyramid being constructed, the blocks then began their ascent into the bowels of the monument, following the internal ramp.

“After filming of the ‘Khufu Revealed’ documentary in 2008,” adds Jean-Pierre Houdin,

..and Bob Brier’s discovery of a room behind the notch in the north-east ridge, we were able to use 3D modeling of this area to specify the geometry of the internal ramp. This enabled us to understand the role of this room and gave us very precise information about the route of the internal ramp within the pyramid, because we now had several reference points in space: firstly, at the base of the pyramid, the entrance in the south-east area; then the passage above the rafters of the north-face entrance, then again the end at level +43 m under the west face, and finally this room at +81 m in the north-east edge; the horizontal route of the ramp at level +43 m beneath the south face then became evident.

By relying on the picture of the density anomaly detected in 1986, and by positioning the entrance to the internal ramp precisely using field observations, I was able to reconstruct the likely route for blocks inside the pyramid.

The first section of the ramp (in blue) is parallel to the face and climbed as far as the first corner chamber in the north-east corner. The second and third sections (the first two white segments) climbed ‘at an angle’, because as they rose they followed the slope of the pyramid inclined towards the interior. The fourth section located at a height of +43 m (in yellow) is horizontal and parallel to the south face. The following fourteen sections (in white) climb ‘at an angle’ as far as the summit.”

At each corner of the pyramid, corresponding to the junction between two sections of the ramp, a volume (a room as discovered by Bob Brier) was created to rotate the sledges used to transport the blocks.

One of these volumes, under the north-east edge of the pyramid, gave rise to detailed exploration by the American Egyptologist Bob Brier.

The results will be presented in a forthcoming article on this blog.

Interview by Marc Chartier

Illustrations: copyright Jean-Pierre Houdin / Dassault Systèmes

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin sees the answer in the arrangement of internal elements of the pyramid’s architecture still hidden from plain view, but discernable by other architectural and material oddities, such as the relieving compartments themselves.  Why were they so high?  What purpose did raising the pressure points serve?

This is the fifth in a series of fascinating dialogues held between writer Marc Chartier, of the website Pyramidales, and Jean-Pierre Houdin following the premier of Khufu Reborn, the next chapter in the unraveling the mysteries of the Great Pyramid and the Giza Plateau.  This series of articles is being provided in English for Em Hotep in an exclusive arrangement with Marc, Jean-Pierre, and the Project Khufu team at Dassault Systèmes.

I do not think this will be a scoop for anyone: the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid is topped by an imposing and complex superstructure, made from five so-called “relieving chambers”, supposed to protect it from hypothetically crushing the last remains of the Pharaoh nestled in the heart of the monument.

Even those uninitiated into the subtleties of the art of Egyptian construction can easily feel how much these masses and spaces capping the funereal chamber could and still can fuel debates between Egyptologists or pyramidologists. (This latter term is sufficiently vague that it usefully covers an entire army of researchers trying to understand the hows and whys of the Egyptian pyramids).

In particular, among other good questions, why a “simple” raftered vault would not have sufficed, as in what is called the “Queen’s Chamber” – also intended to house the mortal remains of the Pharaoh at some time in the pyramid’s history, and on the face of it subject to the same volumetric compression? What is the “security” bonus of this stack of utterly enormous monoliths?

We will skip over the thorny question of the cracks that appeared in this enormous structure: this is not relevant here. Moreover, Pyramidales has already made a contribution on this subject, unwittingly stirring up a pretty unhealthy controversy just where the search for knowledge is called for, to the exclusion of any favoritism or personal bitterness.

As the five superimposed chambers are not there purely for style, nor in answer to any gratuitous challenge the Egyptian builders might have set themselves, but really are important pieces of the gigantic pyramid “puzzle”, Jean-Pierre Houdin could not disregard them in his Khufu Reborn (aka Khufu Renaissance) reconstitution of the Great Pyramid’s construction. Quite the opposite, he recognizes their essential role, without which part of the “puzzle” could collapse.

Let’s summarize what we already know from Khufu Reborn. Following Jean-Pierre Houdin along what he calls the “Noble Circuit” (corridors and structures deep within the pyramid intended for the royal funeral procession), we have discovered two antechambers in front of the King’s chamber, then an access corridor running up to the “formal” entrance to this chamber, distinct from the service entrance.

The architect then continues his reading of these places, using a totally new approach. In his opinion, the relieving chambers were not designed to be, as is generally thought, a cascade of bulwarks to prevent the King’s chamber caving in. Their construction and disposition must rather be associated with the existence of the two corbel-vaulted antechambers, ensuring their stability by protecting them from the effects of transferred load.

A major technical challenge

According to Jean-Pierre Houdin, the major technical challenge that must have faced Hemienu and Ankhhaf, the architects of the Great Pyramid, derives directly from their decision to build a flat ceiling for the King’s chamber. This innovation was fundamental… but it did not make the task easier! It is the very key to the special nature of the monument’s construction and the raison d’être for some of its main structures, such as the Grand Gallery, for example.

 “From one pyramid to the next,” comments Jean-Pierre Houdin,

Egyptian builders kept what was successful, abandoned what they considered not so good and, above all, took advantage of the opportunity to try new construction techniques. For the Great Pyramid, they kept corbelling for the antechambers and set themselves a gigantic challenge: that of offering their king, Khufu, a funereal chamber with a flat ceiling. This was a technical feat that they had never before attempted.

The entire organization of the project depended on this bold choice. The architects ordered materials from different quarries, from those at Tura for the facing blocks, from those at Aswan, more than eight hundred kilometers to the south, for granite for the King’s Chamber. This granite was the only material capable of spanning a void of some 5.20 m between the north and south walls of the chamber. The quarrymen could not deliver the beams to Giza at the start of construction because it would take years to extract and transport them. While they got down to their work, the monument was taking form. The beams would all have to be delivered to the site by the fourteenth year of Khufu’s reign at the latest, the pyramid having then reached a height of 43 m.

Jean-Pierre Houdin then made a detailed examination of the consequences, in terms of cost and technological progress, of the architectural choice governing erection of the Great Pyramid, which had a funereal chamber that until then had not featured on any architect’s plans:

The Egyptians did not order granite beams from Aswan for the pleasure of hiding such a quantity of beams inside the bulk: 2,100 tons altogether in the 43 beams distributed over 5 ceilings between level +48.85 m and level +60.15 m.

Exceptional technical resources were deployed to bring them from the banks of the Nile to their final position: between the levels of the delivery port (altitude 20 m ASL) and the last ceiling (altitude 100.15 m ASL), an uphill haul of more than 80 m!

Exceptional resources for an exceptional project

Major resources for a major project. Indeed, exceptional resources for an exceptional project. According to Jean-Pierre Houdin, the construction of the Great Pyramid required nothing less than:

• the construction of a ramp more than 600 m long (in red on the sketch above) between the port and the bottom of the Great Pyramid’s exterior ramp (in blue on the sketch);
• the installation of a counterweight-assisted traction system by cutting a huge trench in the bedrock (later buried under the pyramid of Khafre: in green, in the middle, on the left on the sketch) as an extension of the ramp coming from the port (Pyramidales will return to these technical aspects in a future article);
• construction of the Grand Gallery (in green, on top on the sketch) , a real built-in “crane”, as a second counterweight-assisted traction system to bring the beams into the pyramid enclosure for the construction of the ceilings;
• creation of an entire series of additional structures (ascending corridor no. 1, horizontal corridor no. 1, portcullis chamber), needed to operate the counterweight.

Counterweight sliding in Grand Gallery

This is what it cost to implement the ambitious plans of the architects for the Pyramid of Khufu! “The construction of a corbelled roof for the King’s Chamber,” comments Jean-Pierre Houdin,

would not have required any of these facilities, and there would never have been any granite in this pyramid. To have brought granite into the pyramid, the only material capable of spanning a void more than 5 m side and thus the only material to allow the construction of a flat ceiling, is the result of an architectural choice.

The “umbrella” effect

At this stage in our reading of the architectural plan for the Great Pyramid, guided by Jean-Pierre Houdin, a question arises: Hemiunu and Ankhhaf decided to install a flat ceiling on the King’s chamber. So be it! But why were they not content with just one ceiling, then capping it directly with a raftered vault, the only structure to deflects loads laterally, rather than transmit them vertically downward?

The architects of the Great Pyramid didn’t choose this solution

With such a hypothetical single ceiling surmounted by its inverted “V” vault, the Grand Gallery with its corbelled vault constructed parallel to the slope would not have seen its stability threatened in the slightest. The location of the Grand Gallery on a projection of the northern rafters of the roof at a slope of 50% would have been structurally equivalent, for example, to a buttress of a Gothic cathedral. The gallery therefore certainly did not require the installation of additional relieving chambers.

Let’s read our architect-guide’s explanations: “Rafters transfer loads along an oblique, and if there had been only the Grand Gallery in the zone receiving the oblique load, it would have had no difficulty ‘absorbing’ it.

“There are three reasons for this:

• the Grand Gallery is aligned with the oblique load and, given its very imposing structure, it reacts as an abutment (it is even stronger than the surrounding ‘in-fill’);
• the empty part of the Grand Gallery (2 cubits: the width of the last corbelling) only receives the oblique load over half of each rafter, which is positioned so that the other half is butted against the side walls of the Grand Gallery;
• given the position of the Grand Gallery entirely to the east, the rafters transfer more than 90% of the northern oblique load into the ‘in-fill’, compared with 100% of the southern rafters’ load.

“Conclusion: there would be no structural reason for the structure of the relieving chambers, as constructed, if there were only the Grand Gallery to consider.”

The relieving chambers were not therefore constructed to protect the Grand Gallery, although the Grand Gallery was built to transport and position the monoliths for the five load-deflecting chambers.

From this it follows that the reason for the relieving chambers must be sought elsewhere. And this “elsewhere” is called the “antechambers”, an essential part, according to Jean-Pierre Houdin, of the funereal architecture in the “Khufu’s Inheritance” version (see previous article from Pyramidales).

Without the relieving chambers superstructure, the antechambers would have been crushed down by the oblique load transferred by the rafters of the North side of the roof.

Jean-Pierre continues:

If the Egyptian builders had put the inverted “V” roof immediately above the ceiling of the King’s chamber, this roof would have underpinned the entire load above it in order to transfer it to the sides. And the corbel-roofed antechambers, unable to withstand this huge oblique load, would have ended up collapsing. They would have been crushed under the load.

So the architects had not hesitated. As they needed the counterweights of the Grand Gallery to construct the first ceiling in any case, it was no harder for them to construct five of them, each one above the other, before installing the raftered roof.

In the end, what we term the ‘relieving chambers’ were not constructed to protect the King’s Chamber, but to protect the nearby antechambers. Nor are the ‘ceilings’ really ceilings, but beams that retain the side walls of a large void (described nowadays as a ‘reinforced trench’). Hemiunu and Ankhhaf, the Viziers of Khufu’s Great Royal Works, were not only great architects, they were also great engineers.

By raising the roof very high, the architects greatly enlarged the protected zone so that the oblique load passed above the corbelling of the antechambers. Therein lies the real reason for the huge structure above the King’s Chamber. The Egyptians could not have done otherwise. The ‘relieving chambers’ served only to raise the roof of the King’s Chamber as high as possible, so that the oblique loads did not push on the corbelling of the antechambers.

This is what Jean-Pierre Houdin describes as the “umbrella” effect: “This type of structure is only found in the Great Pyramid, but it is essential due to the choice made by the designers to cover the King’s Chamber with a flat ceiling.”

Jean-Pierre Houdin concludes his analysis:

With the antechambers perpendicular to the King’s Chamber, they could possibly have been covered by raftered roofs. The problem would then only have been worse: it would also have been necessary to ‘raise’ the ‘stone umbrella’ (the raftered roof) very high up in the mass, because, being perpendicular to the funereal chamber, they would have similarly received the oblique load from the northern rafters of the roof to the King’s Chamber. They would then have been distorted (tilted) or perhaps even crushed under the pressure.

But another problem would have arisen: the eastern slope of the antechambers’ raftered roofs would then have transferred the absorbed vertical loads laterally directly against the western wall of the Grand Gallery; and it is the latter that would finally have been crushed. The choice of corbelling for the antechambers was extremely shrewd and perfectly suited to the situation: they wisely absorbed the vertical loads, without spreading them around, which is why they had been considered and tested for almost a century.

The pyramid’s designers therefore created a zone devoid of oblique load from the rafters between the top of the antechambers’ corbelling and the upper oblique line of the sheltered zone.

This is explicit proof of a very great understanding of materials, loads, forces, stresses and structural behavior. Nowadays would we call this an ‘Engineering and Building Technology Consultancy’.

One little detail: this was 45 centuries ago; in other words, with 5 generations per century, 225 generations ago. Egyptology, which was itself born following Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign, can only claim (a maximum of) 10 generations in existence…”

Interview by Marc Chartier for Pyramidales.

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

So who pushed the block into place, when did they do it, and how did they get out?  Human sacrifice within royal tombs had not been practiced since the early years of the Second Dynasty, so, cork or no cork, ultimately the King’s Chamber had to be sealed from the outside.  How do we reconcile this contradiction?

This is the fourth in a series of articles and interviews conducted by Marc Chartier, writer and webmaster of the French-language site Pyramidales, with Jean-Pierre and other key members of Team Khufu, provided in English exclusively to Em Hotep.

The King’s Chamber in its current state

In the new “reading” that the architect-researcher Jean-Pierre Houdin is suggesting for the pyramid of Khufu – Khufu Reborn – the King’s Chamber takes all the honors. And for good reason! This room is in fact the heart of the entire architectural system of the monument, its function and that of the entire pyramid being to contain the mummified mortal remains of the king who built it, for eternity.

Well, the funereal chamber of the Great Pyramid has been, and still is, the subject of a great many interpretations and endless, sometimes stormy debates, regarding its purpose, its structure, its superstructure (what are known as the “relieving” chambers), its shafts (for “ventilation”), the damage it has suffered (well known cracks in the ceiling, which have given the neighbors something to talk about), its final use (did it or did it not house the august pharaonic mummy?), its hypothetical counterpart lost who knows where in the bulk of the monument (did someone say “secret chamber”?), etc.

To the list of questions and answers, we must now add the entrance to this chamber, namely the only passage still “in service” today, under which visitors must “bow their heads” in order to enter the chamber, in the north-east corner. For centuries and centuries, the “Consensus Thinking”, to use Jean-Pierre Houdin’s expression, has taken this entrance to be the one used by the funeral procession transporting the mortal remains of the Pharaoh.

In Khufu Reborn, Jean-Pierre Houdin takes this entrance to be in reality merely an additional element in the service circuit, therefore already sealed long before the day of the royal funeral. According to his analysis of the pyramid, the King’s Chamber had to be accessible through another – “real” – entrance, the end for the “Noble Circuit”, now hidden from our eyes.

Actually, not everyone’s eyes! As the following demonstrates…

Reading the Language of the Stones

At a glance, the King’s Chamber at its heart bears witness to the changes or upheavals the Great Pyramid of Giza has undergone over the centuries (sarcophagus lid missing, damage in the north-west corner, etc.), the various intruders, well intentioned or otherwise, not always having had the wherewithal to achieve their ends.

A more experienced eye will be able not only to interpret these changes, but also to recognize the original plan in the construction and lay-out of the chamber. Stones have their own language for those who can understand them.

First Observation: the disappearing block

The first observation made by Jean-Pierre Houdin: where did the stone block come from that we could still see, a few years ago, beside the sarcophagus, on the west side of the north wall of the King’s Chamber? And what happened to it, since it has now disappeared?

Entrance in the northeastern side of the King Chamber

The answer to the second part of the question is simple: during renovation of the King’s Chamber in 1998, Dr Zahi Hawass, then supervisor in charge of Egyptian antiquities, ordered the block to be removed. No doubt he thought it was too untidy.

“At the same time,” comments Jean-Pierre Houdin, “he removed ‘part of the puzzle’.”

“Happily,” the architect continues, “many witnesses had made drawings and taken photographs to prove the existence of this block.” But as to where it is now… mystery!

More importantly: what was the original position of this block, and what was its function in the overall structure?   

The block’s dimensions, observes Jean-Pierre Houdin, exactly matched (since it has disappeared, we should use the past tense) those of the entrance in the east of the funeral chamber’s north wall. So it quite naturally had its place, as originally planned. 

We should immediately note that there is a difference of 2 cm between the floor levels in the chamber and in the corridor, the latter being lower. We must also be aware that the cross-sectional area of the corridor between the Grand Gallery and the portcullis chamber is smaller than that of the corridor between the portcullis chamber and the King’s Chamber. So for Jean-Pierre Houdin, the conclusion is clear:

The block that sealed the entrance to the King’s Chamber, on the east side, never passed through the portcullis chamber. And yet, it finished by exactly blocking access along the line of the north wall of the King’s Chamber, pushed up against the floor in this room. For this reason, thieves who succeeded in reaching the back of this block via the entrance dug in the north face of the pyramid, the ascending corridor, then the Grand Gallery and finally through the portcullis chamber, were forced to break the top part of it and, when there was enough room, to tip it into the King’s Chamber, where it loitered for 1,250 years.

Northeastern entrance: to bow one’s head

In other words, this block, whose function was to block the north-east entrance to the King’s Chamber, was not put in place “after” the royal funeral ceremony. “It was from the 17th year of the pyramid’s construction, a date mentioned by graffiti in the last ‘relieving chamber’,” explains Jean-Pierre Houdin:

…so when construction of the King’s Chamber was finished and the counterweight system in the Grand Gallery no longer served any purpose, that, pushed from the inside of the chamber before the setting in place of the slab on which it stopped, it was put into the place it occupied until the year 850 AD (arrival of Al-Ma’mun), to seal access to the chamber. It was thus sealed for 3,350 years, no more, no less, until the day Al-Ma’mun’s advance scouts broke it and then tipped it into the chamber. But it was then no longer in its original position.

It follows that the migrant block, even if it was observed for a long time close to the grille covering the tunnel in the north-west corner of the King’s Chamber, had nothing to do with this tunnel opened by Al-Ma’mun and later re-visited by Perring. It did not come out of it. It was actually made of granite, while the sapping opens onto limestone blocks. Note that I am using the past tense in my description of the block, as it is no longer accessible for observation following the strange decision by the ‘master of the house’ to remove it from our view!

Second Observation: a second entrance, “between the lines” in the north wall of the King’s Chamber

It becomes a question of the sapping, on the west side of the north wall of the King’s Chamber. It has a quite unusual history.

Why did Al-Ma’mun’s soldier-engineers dig here precisely? They must certainly have spotted clues “somewhere” in the wall, attracting their curiosity and justifying their efforts.

These clues, if they were really revealing, should still exist today. Al-Ma’mun, doubtlessly searching for any treasure associated with the funereal chamber, simply made a mistake in interpreting them. He had excavations made downwards, when he should have dug horizontally!

So let’s look at the north wall, following Jean-Pierre Houdin’s instructions:

What do we see on the wall? On the right (east side, low down, in orange), the entrance through which we currently enter this room. On the left, the layout of granite blocks forms a doorway (in pink) that takes the entire weight of the (dark) granite ceiling beams. The (yellow) blocks filling the doorway do not bear on the central block at the bottom (blue). This seals the second entrance. It is free, exactly like the block that once sealed the first entrance. Free: in other words, it could be moved… for example, at the end of the king’s funeral ceremony, when the pyramid had to be sealed.

The cracks on the North wall of the King’s Chamber (from Gilles Dormion drawings)

Since these observations I have entered the pyramid numerous times, especially to the King’s Chamber, to make a close analysis of this north wall. I then paid attention to several other details. The first yellow block above the blue block is cracked in two places, at the center. This proves that there was a space between the two blocks, so that the one above did not rest on the one below.

Furthermore, we know that the ceiling beams have been cracked since construction, following subsidence of the chamber’s south wall. Later, certainly when Al-Ma’mouns workers dug the hole at the foot of the second entrance, the north wall also moved a little, 2 or 3 mm, i.e. practically nothing. But this was enough for the yellow block to crack and rest on the blue block.

The true entrance in the King’s Chamber

I also carried out an experiment with an out-of-date plastic credit card: I tried to slide it into the right-hand joint between the blue block and the pink block of the doorway I could do it easily, although it is practically impossible elsewhere. (It is often said of the joints in the pyramid that they are so perfect you could not insert a razor blade into them.) I slid this card, laid flat, along the stones, from block to block, to check their alignment. The only time my card stopped was exactly on this joint, proving that the blue block is slightly below the pink block. If the blue block had been put into position at the same time as the other blocks in the chamber, it would have been perfectly aligned with the others.

We close!

At this stage in the inventory of structures in the Great Pyramid, as made by Jean-Pierre Houdin, we find the subject of the previous article in this series, concerning this author:  the two antechambers. It is also good to remember certain developments from the second part of the exclusive interview given by the author to Pyramidales (see under the sub-title “A complex and wonderful closure system”).

Passing (virtually) through the north wall of this room, from inside the King’s Chamber, on the other side we actually find the upper part of the second antechamber, by passing along a fairly short corridor that plays an essential role in permanently sealing the funereal chamber, after the royal funeral.

Finally, do we really need to insist, in order to pay homage to a preconceived and outdated idea that found favor for a while? The King’s Chamber was not permanently closed from the inside. The royal mummy could hardly make workers, however devoted, wall themselves up like kamikazes. While the stone blocking the first entrance – service entrance, east side – was positioned from inside the chamber in the manner and for the reasons given above, that blocking the second entrance – the “Noble Circuit”, west side – was positioned from the outside by means of a pushing-block and piston operated from the second antechamber.

This technique introduced by Jean-Pierre Houdin in his reconstruction of the building of the Great Pyramid has been described and illustrated in the interview mentioned above.

Given its complexity, here is another explanation of it, a Pyramidales special, offered by the author:

The problem:

1 – For the day of the royal funeral, the corridor between the second antechamber and the King’s Chamber had to be totally cleared to allow the funeral cortège to pass.

2 – Yet it had to be possible to close the King’s Chamber with a granite block that sealed it perfectly, so having dimensions 2 or 3 mm smaller than its final position, and stored “nearby, on hand”.

3 – The King’s Chamber had to be closed from the outside, so that the workers were not imprisoned in the room after the operation, with no possible way out.

4 – It is impossible, “practically” and “materially”, to store the closure block in the second antechamber, then to raise it 7 m and present it in front of a passageway having the same dimensions, to the nearest 2 or 3 mm, and insert it … This would have required equipment and precision of movement that the Egyptian workers performing the operation could not possibly have provided.

5 – The “storage” area for the closure block therefore had to be located between the King’s chamber and the second antechamber, at that level.

The solution:

1 – Presence of a small corridor, about 4 cubits long and 2 wide, perpendicular to the connecting corridor and on its east side

2 – In this small corridor, two “twin” blocks (1 and 2 on the diagram above) were placed, the first becoming part of the east wall to the connecting corridor, the second “stuck” behind it.

3 – The front face of the second in contact with the rear face of the first was very slightly concave so as to leave a small space over the greater part of the surface. A brass “pad” was inserted into the second block, two thirds of the way up, projecting sufficiently to be theoretically in vertical alignment with the face. Its role was to allow the first block to be pushed fully into the corridor without “jamming” it against the opposite wall. When pushed by the piston (4 on the diagram), only this pad would be rubbed and very quickly worn away by the granite of the first block.

4 – As the driving force for the system, a pushing block (3 on the diagram), based on the type of drop-stone trap built into a corridor of the Bent Pyramid: this expertise gave rise to a pushing block used for the Red Pyramid and Khufu’s Pyramid.

5 – Up to this stage, everything was done “automatically”, the system being triggered (removal of a wedge across the corridor) by workers further on, movement being achieved on a “layer” of very fine sand.

6 – A stop prevented the pushing block from going further in its movement than necessary. When the second block had taken the place of the first, it could no longer move forward because the pushing block was at the end of its travel.

7 – The piston was pre-assembled in the second antechamber, on cross-beams. It did not move as long as the first block had not been pushed into the connecting corridor.

8 – Once the block was in the corridor, the piston was moved up to its north rear face (formerly the north side face of the block when it was still in the perpendicular corridor), then placed against it.

9 – In order to get the 750Kg-f needed to move the block, eight workers climbed onto the traction ropes, and four others pulled on the assembly: the first block moved forward in the connecting corridor until it stopped against the raised edge of the King’s Chamber floor.

10 – At the end of the operation, everything that could be recovered was dismantled and removed.

Much more to come!

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

But erecting the final resting place of a god-king involved more than structural and aesthetic considerations.  Hemienu was creating sacred ground, and within Khufu’s holy mountain there were specific paths to be trodden and a celestial order of operations to be observed. 

Beginning with the physical evidence from the pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin pieces these ancient traditions together in a way that suggests where to look and what to look for in unlocking the secrets of the Great Pyramid.  This is the third in a series of articles and interviews conducted by Marc Chartier with Jean-Pierre and other key members of Team Khufu, provided in English exclusively to Em Hotep.

In his studies of the Great Pyramid, presented in Khufu Reborn (read the exclusive interview given by the author to Pyramidales), Jean-Pierre Houdin has identified a “Noble Circuit”, namely the ritual route inside the monument followed during the Pharaoh’s funeral. One stage of this circuit did not pass unnoticed, and for good reason: two antechambers with corbelled vaults, a few meters before the entrance to the King’s Chamber, designed to shelter the sovereign’s goods and personal possessions.

Here Jean-Pierre Houdin contributes a few remarks in addition to the interview mentioned above, for readers of Pyramidales.

In the summer of 2003, when Jean-Pierre Houdin had already invested several thousand hours in 3D computer modeling, he made an observation that led him to suspect the existence of two antechambers in the pyramid of Khufu. A “dark zone” in the middle of the known internal structures kept coming up in his research. He could already distinguish this zone by analysis of micro-gravimetric readings that were in his possession but, oddly, had been overlooked. Now comparative observations of pyramids from the Third and Fourth Dynasties provided an answer to this dark zone.

The architect did not in fact consider the pyramid of Khufu as an isolated monument, even if it was the most famous in ancient Egypt. He placed it in a lineage, in an architectural scheme in which, from the stepped pyramid of Djoser to the smooth pyramids, each pyramid designer built on the innovations used in previous ones, while further developing the architectural concept. This is what Jean-Pierre Houdin sums up with the term “inheritance”. And Khufu did not escape the rule.

Two Observations

Two observations in particular captured the architect’s attention.

Firstly, the strange misalignment of the corridors and the Grand Gallery in the pyramid of Khufu, relative to the north-south axis. Such an offset could not be the result of chance. Nor could it be a “mistake” made by the Egyptian architects: they knew their job perfectly, based on solid tradition. So this could not possibly be an error, but a project, a plan, even if it is not necessarily easy to grasp at first glance, especially when we are bogged down in what Jean-Pierre Houdin calls “consensus thinking”.

After years spent 3D-modeling numerous potential solutions, illumination – the second observation, the real turning point of Khufu Reborn – was finally provided by another pyramid: the Red Pyramid, the last construction of Snefru, Khufu’s father. So, what was observed? This pyramid, built just before that of Khufu, encloses two magnificent antechambers with corbelled roofs, in front of the entrance to the funeral chamber. They are level with the base of the pyramid, although the chamber is nearly 8 m higher. This was a change in pyramid architecture: the funeral apartments had gained in height.

“Why, all of a sudden,” Jean-Pierre Houdin wondered, “did Khufu’s architects abandon this type of antechamber? They already had a lot to tackle, with the new roofing technique (flat ceiling) for the King’s Chamber, and they were not going to change everything from one pyramid to the next. They had a duty to respect their tradition, thus to ‘develop’ but not ‘revolutionize’ ”.

The two antechambers and the funerary chamber of the Red Pyramid

The two antechambers and the funerary chamber of Khufu’s Pyramid: a perfect copy and paste

Jean-Pierre continued his reasoning thus: “An experiment was called for: one of taking the antechambers from the Red Pyramid of Khufu’s father and quite simply ‘pasting’ them into his son’s pyramid, on a ‘design grid’ made up of one-cubit-sided squares. (1 cubit = 52.36 cm.) The funereal apartments of the Red Pyramid then appeared perfectly positioned in the pyramid of Khufu.”

“My investigation was making clear progress,” adds the architect-researcher. “I had a perfect antechamber model, similar to those we can visit today in the Red Pyramid at Dashur. And using CATIA 3D design software from Dassault Systèmes, I merely had to paste this model onto the Khufu grid, taking into account various factors already known or that I had found:

• for the Queen’s Chamber: a second entrance, a section of the ‘Noble Circuit’ and a marked deviation in the northern shaft;
• for the King’s Chamber: a very precisely located second entrance and a bizarrely routed northern shaft.

And here again: surprise! The model fitted perfectly. Not only did both the antechambers from the Red Pyramid ‘fit’ the grid perfectly, but they were centered on the north-south axis. The two antechambers from the Red Pyramid and the associated ‘Noble Corridor’ fit perfectly into the pyramid of Khufu. The interior architecture of the Great Pyramid was finally beginning to look like the funereal architecture of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty.”

The Red Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khufu:  Look for the Similarity!

The press release summarizing Jean-Pierre’s research and conclusions and issued at the official presentation of Khufu Reborn on January 27, 2011, provides further explanations:

The Red Pyramid has the purest plan. The funeral chamber is in the edifice, preceded by two antechambers. The access corridor, antechambers and the chamber are perfectly aligned along the monument’s axis. The antechambers served to store the funeral belongings left to the deceased.

This very pure plan and these antechambers, led Jean-Pierre Houdin to wonder about Khufu’s inheritance. No antechambers in his pyramid, strangely offset corridors? Why this apparent inconsistency in the plan for the Great Pyramid? Why was the technique of antechambers with corbelled vaults, long since perfectly mastered, not used again? Would Khufu have had no goods? Hard to imagine for a king who left us the most imposing monument ever!

Hence the intuition by the author of Khufu Reborn to superimpose plans for the two pyramids. Let’s read on:

Jean-Pierre Houdin raised the corridor from the Red Pyramid and the antechambers so that the latter became those of Khufu’s chamber. They match perfectly. Better still, an explanation emerges for the well known misalignment of the descending and ascending corridors and the Grand Gallery. On the other hand, the set of antechambers is located precisely along the north-south axis and the west wall of the second antechamber is on a perfect alignment with the west wall of the King’s Chamber!

View from above

Although the current descending and ascending corridors of the Grand Gallery are generally considered as the circuit by which Khufu’s mortal remains were transported into his pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin has always challenged the funereal character of the Grand Gallery. For him, it was only a slide used to house the counterweight system.

Furthermore, using this passage poses an insoluble problem in connection with the sealing of the King’s Chamber. The granite block that obstructed the north-east entrance to the King’s Chamber (which entrance is not to be confused with the other one – the real one – on the west side of the chamber’s north wall), which was removed by Al-Ma’mun, could only be put back in place from the inside. And it is inconceivable to consider that a few unfortunate workers were walled up alive in the company of the dead king!

The pyramid’s plan can now be viewed in a new light. On the one hand, a consistent architectural legacy between the Red Pyramid and that of Khufu is re-established; on the other, the offset in the distribution of the corridors, considered strange until now, is explained.

As Jean-Pierre Houdin’s research progressed, his intuition, nurtured by further clues and a comparative study of pyramids from the Third and Fourth Dynasties, became a conviction: the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, just like the internal layout of the Red Pyramid, based on the logic of architectural legacy, was itself preceded by two antechambers with corbelled vaults.

One final observation: inside the second antechamber of the Red Pyramid, high up, three pairs of circular holes face each other. The upper level of these holes is at exactly the same level as the floor of the corridor leading to the funeral chamber. According to Jean-Pierre Houdin, these holes were used to embed wooden beams across the antechamber and, over these beams, Egyptian builders placed a kind of “piston” made from a long piece of wood operated from below by a system of ropes. Pulling on these ropes pushed the piston forward in the corridor leading to the King’s Chamber. The piston then moved a block forward, sliding on a very thin layer of sand, and ended up resting against the floor of the King’s Chamber and sealing its entrance forever.

This closure block had quite simply been stored in the corridor’s east wall, in a small perpendicular passage in which its “twin” was also stored; a clever system, based on a pushing block and derived from a closure technique by drop-stone trap in the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, pushed the two twinned blocks from a notch, once a wedge has been removed: the closure block was located in the corridor ready to be pushed by the piston and its twin took its place in the wall. This system can be observed in the Red Pyramid.

For Jean-Pierre Houdin, the transfer of this technique to the pyramid of Khufu seems to be a logical conclusion. Why – in what quest for originality – would the Great Pyramid’s builders have refrained from what, as a means of sealing a pyramid, was without any doubt the fruit of an architectural legacy, which, moreover, nothing would have allowed them to disregard?

 Many Centuries of Archaeological Myopia

Even if it meant facing the wrath of the higher echelons of Egyptology or researchers with various degrees of training in the vast and inexhaustible field of pyramidology, Jean-Pierre Houdin could no longer escape his own convictions: in his view, a structural analysis of the monument sheds new light on the real route of the funeral procession inside the Great Pyramid.

In this approach, without claiming to play the killjoy or, worse still, the kamikaze, he expects to have to confront many centuries of archaeological myopia. But his new plan of the Great Pyramid, in his opinion, has the merit of being based on history and sound reasoning, and, as well as being geometrically correct, explaining the many strange features in the pyramid’s design.

Above all, in the architect’s view, it provides King Khufu with the antechambers for the royal funeral goods, a logical deduction far removed from the fantasies of the treasure hunters.

In connection with these antechambers, Jean-Pierre Houdin likes to quote something a friend wrote to him in congratulation: “You have filled a historic void with a hole that dates back several millennia…”

That sums it up…

Clues from the Red Pyramid

“The Red Pyramid at Dahshur has two antechambers. Inside the second, high up, three pairs of circular holes facing each other. The upper level of these holes is at exactly the same level as the floor of the corridor leading to the funereal chamber. I considered that these holes had been used to embed wooden beams across the antechamber and over these beams, Egyptian builders had placed a kind of ‘piston’ made from a long piece of wood operated from below by a system of ropes. Just pulling on the ropes was enough to advance the piston into the corridor. Thus it pushed the block, sliding on a very thin layer of sand, ending up resting against the floor of the King’s Chamber and sealing its entrance forever.

This scenario was perfect, but still needed one most important answer: how do you push a block that could not have been lifted high enough, and that could not have been stored in the corridor because it would have prevented the funeral procession from passing. This squares the circle!

I have found part of the answer in another pyramid of Snefru: the Bent Pyramid, built just before the Red Pyramid.” (Jean-Pierre Houdin)

Clues from the Bent Pyramid

“To block the passage and prevent access to Snefru’s funereal chamber, the architects had installed two enormous portcullises in the corridor leading to it that, were retained in very narrow and inaccessible recesses before being lowered. The most interesting thing for me was the way in which these portcullises were released to block the passage:

• firstly, in the raised position, they were held leaning on a small block that prevented them remaining stuck in place at the moment they were released;
• secondly, a simple wooden wedge (in red) held them in this raised position.

To close the passage, the workers just had to remove the wedge and the portcullis was lowered automatically.”

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

“The Egyptians built what they knew how to, as simply and logically as possible.”  –Jean-Pierre Houdin

Continuation of the interview Jean-Pierre Houdin gave exclusively to Pyramidales, to coincide with the public presentation of his “theory” Khufu Reborn (aka Khufu Renaissance).

After discussing his working approach in presenting the Great Pyramid’s construction in a new light, then flying us over the Giza Plateau (royal causeway, external ramp extended by a second internal ramp), he takes us inside the monument to show us structures abandoned a great many centuries ago to the silence of the stone.

The aim of his reasoning:  to reveal the “how” of the pyramid’s primary function. Before being a gigantic arrangement of limestone and granite blocks, this monument was actually designed and built to serve as the eternal resting place for a deceased Pharaoh. Now, the similarities between the Fourth Dynasty pyramids lead the architect to draw the obvious conclusions, given the funereal architectural logic of the era: the inference of the existence of two antechambers in front of the King’s Chamber; the abandoning of the “service circuit” (descending and ascending corridors, Grand Gallery, etc.) as insufficiently “noble” for the royal funeral; the second entrance (the real one) to the King’s Chamber, and so on.

The “Noble Circuit” inside the Great Pyramid

For Jean-Pierre Houdin, the constructional logic of his former builder “colleagues” is irrefutable: how could Khufu have given up the technical advances used in pyramids built immediately before his own? Unthinkable! The seventh Wonder of the World, the Great Pyramid, in its internal configuration, was only able to include the “Noble Circuit” and the essential facilities for an eternal resting place, by starting with the antechambers to the sarcophagus chamber.

Calling on the 3D techniques in which they are the internationally renowned specialists, the experts at Dassault Systèmes made virtual models of the pyramid to test the “feasibility” of the construction project as identified by Jean-Pierre in his study of the monument. The architect himself drew practical conclusions from this study: from now on, we can no longer look at or study the Pyramid of Khufu as we have considered it in the past. Archaeological myopia no longer applies to this illustrious monument.

The external ramp : up to 1/3 of the pyramid’s height

Pyramidales: “The facts learned from your reconstitution of the Great Pyramid’s construction are now well known: an external ramp up to one third of the final height, equivalent to two thirds of the pyramid’s final volume; a regularly reset counterweight system, developing into the Grand Gallery and the ascending corridor, to raise the monoliths for the King’s Chamber; an internal ramp to transport the blocks used for the last third of the volume, equivalent to the last two-thirds of the pyramid’s total height. Are you sticking to these facts? Or are you changing them with Khufu Reborn?”

Two Internal Ramps

J.-P. Houdin: “In fact I am coming back to these facts, by building on them. The new position of the external ramp, determined by the position of the plateau ramp, and the discovery of a room behind the notch on the north-east edge had a very special significance: 85% of the pyramid’s volume could be built using the external ramp.

Level +43m (storage area for the granite beams)

“From then on, I suspend construction of the internal ramp at level +43 m (south face) during the construction of the King’s Chamber and until the pyramid reaches a height of 70 m. The internal ramp ends in the south-west corner at level +43 m and resumes its progress at the same level in the south-east corner. Between the two, the teams dragging the facing blocks made of Tura stone passed through the storage area for the granite beams at this same level. The internal ramp, which runs counter-clockwise and which I now call the ‘main internal ramp’, no longer cuts across the path of the external ramp, so a second internal, spiral, open-trench ramp extends the route up a slope in the body of the pyramid, this time in a clockwise direction. The possibilities offered by this second ramp stop at about +70 m, as the snake chases its own tail.

Advancement of the construction (external ramp and internal ramp)

The trench is then filled in and the section of the internal ramp between the two south-west and south-east edges is built, permanently connecting the two parts. The southern part is built up to catch up with level +70 m. The external ramp can then be dismantled to provide the limestone blocks needed to construct the last 76 meters in height. No extracted stone will be wasted.

“The price paid by the Egyptians: a section of the main internal ramp is horizontal, which might appear stupid: on the contrary, by sacrificing slope in this section, the Egyptians greatly reduced the workload of the ramp: it still needed to provide supplies for the construction up to the summit, that is to enable construction of the remaining 76 m in height, but only 15% of the volume instead of 33%. The advantage far outweighs the disadvantage.

“Moreover, the very strong supposition concerning the presence of a first counterweight on the plateau consequently supports the function of the Grand Gallery as a slide channel for the second counterweight. I fail to see any reason constraining the designers to give the Grand Gallery two functions. Making an antechamber of it? With a slope of 50%, it is not the most practical place to store funereal goods!

In the Khufu Reborn version of the theory of Jean-Pierre Houdin, the internal ramp has two levels: The first one, at the lower level, for the teams pulling the sledges carrying the blocks; the second, the upper level, for the teams coming back to their base with the empty sledges. The big advantage: the external gangway has disappeared. Everything is done inside the pyramid. At the junction of two sections of the internal ramp the sledges were rotated at a 90° angle to face the next section. An example is “Bob’s Room”, the notch which has been explored by Dr Bob Brier, the Egyptologist and friend of Jean-Pierre Houdin

“We forget that the pyramid was built in successive horizontal layers (courses) and that therefore, at each level, workers were working on a flat surface. It was then easy to construct rooms of the same type as the antechambers in the Red Pyramid in parallel with construction of the Grand Gallery, and to create the shortest possible corridors to connect them to the entrance in the north face. For example, the second horizontal corridor of the Queen’s Chamber, discovered by the Japanese, is located at the same level as the summit of the first series of rafters above the descending corridor. No need to use a donkey to follow the route: it’s flat!

“I cannot see my colleagues of the period forgetting to make such as corridor and being content only to keep a route leading to the Queen’s Chamber, passing through the known structures. Taking the descending corridor over nearly 40 m, then continuing by going back up the ascending corridor for 35 m, and following another 35 m of horizontal corridor finally to enter this chamber: this is an assault course, not a logical plan for a precise function, namely to get from A to B by the shortest route, as the Egyptians had the habit of doing in pyramids.”

Pyramidales: “Now let’s go inside the pyramid, in your company. Let’s begin at the start of the journey that will bring us as far as the funereal chamber: the entrance to the monument.

What is the configuration?”

The “Adaptor”

Jean-Pierre Houdin: “This other structure of the Great Pyramid still reveals the genius of its designers: it’s what I call the ‘adaptor’.

The entrance of the pyramid: the “adaptor”

“The Egyptians, while keeping a single entrance shared by all the pyramid’s corridors, grafted a double room a few meters from the north face onto the descending corridor. The role of the rafters we can see in this area was to cover voids (the double room) to the back of which the other circuit, the ‘Noble Circuit’, could be connected. The funereal route then became logical and short: 5 m of descending corridor, passing through a 2 m-high shaft into the double room, continuing through a second ascending corridor, 35 m long and parallel to but higher than the known one, arriving in a horizontal corridor linking the first antechamber, passing into the second antechamber and ending up in the King’s Chamber through a short 5 m corridor beginning more than 7 m above the floor of the antechambers.

“I could describe the route of Snefru’s funeral in similar fashion, with the difference that, for the latter, the procession descended from the entrance, while for Khufu it climbs. And this adaptor had a last function: to link the ‘Noble Circuit’ to the internal ramp, which crosses a few meters above, through a small vertical shaft that was modeled in the bedrock and 50 m east of the pyramid, as the same time as other complex details that we find inside, such as the junctions of different corridors.

“This small shaft will play a very significant role at the end of the funeral: after having sealed the King’s Chamber and corridors, the workers will leave the pyramid by going back up this shaft and taking the internal ramp as far as its entrance at the pyramid’s base; once outside, this entrance will be sealed in its turn. Nothing simpler and more logical… because it was designed in advance!

“One last thing: the Egyptians certainly never thought of constructing pyramids so that their architectural structures would become enigmas to be solved by a civilization coming along several millennia later. They built what they knew how to, as simply and logically as possible. They never considered building tricks, to fool possible looters; this function was reserved, with a greater or lesser degree of luck, to the portcullis and especially the stopper-blocks we find in the pyramids. The ‘Noble Circuit’ that I suspected matches the architectural logic perfectly.”

Structures of the internal ramp

Pyramidales: “After having followed a second ascending corridor, then a second horizontal corridor – ‘new features’, if I may say so, in Khufu Reborn – the solemn funeral procession ended up at what you call the ‘Royal Apartments’. What were their function and their configuration?”

Two Antechambers

J.-P. Houdin: “In the funereal architectural tradition of the end of the Third Dynasty and a large part of the Fourth, the deceased’s apartments in the hereafter were composed of two antechambers immediately adjacent to the sepulchral chamber. To continue his life in the next world, the King therefore had his goods and personal possessions stored in these antechambers, what through the greed of man would later be called the ‘treasures of the Pharaohs’, but which in the spirit of the age had only a religious purpose; and this is only the later which interest me.

“At the end of the Third Dynasty, then in the Fourth under Snefru’s long reign, the architectural model of these apartments was based on the principle of a funereal chamber immediately preceded by two antechambers, slightly offset on a longitudinal axis. We find them in the form of two small cubicles in the Pyramid of Meidum, then as two contiguous rooms in the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, and finally as two twinned rooms in the Red Pyramid, again at Dashur.

“In parallel, we see continuous elevation of the funereal apartments, constructed first in the bedrock, then totally within the mass of the stonework for the Red Pyramid, the last one built before Khufu’s Pyramid.

“We find nothing of this architectural logic in Khufu; and there lies the real reason that we can ask ourselves: do we really know this pyramid? Would its looting and exploration by the Caliph Al-Ma’mun have led to a misunderstanding that lasted twelve centuries? The simple fact that looters reached as far as the King’s Chamber does not necessarily imply that we were aware of the funereal apartments. The end of the story of looting by the Caliph, finally ending in failure, must be seen as an invitation to push on further in terms of the internal architecture.”

Pyramidales: “We may wonder about the structural link between the configuration of the two chambers in front of the actual King’s Chamber and the monumental superstructure, over several floors – the so-called “relieving chambers” – for this latter chamber…”

Without the “Relieving Chambers” structure, the antechambers would have been crushed by the oblique load transferred by the rafters on the north side of the roof, their corbelled roofs being unable to bear any other load than a vertical one.

Above the King’s Chamber, the purpose of the “Relieving Chambers” is to raise up, higher up in the core of the masonry, the limestone rafters which cover the whole structure, acting like an umbrella.

The “Umbrella” Roof

J.-P. Houdin: “If, in the Pyramid of Khufu, we include conceptual consideration about the possible existence of a funereal apartment in this architectural continuity, while also including a change in technical expression (here I am talking about the innovative choice made by the designers to cover the sepulchral chamber with a flat ceiling, but without challenging technical knowledge, the magnificent corbelling of the antechambers in the Red Pyramid), the reason for the presence of this structure of “relieving chambers” suddenly becomes crystal clear.

“By combining antechambers roofed by corbelling (arches with springer stones), structurally only able to withstand vertical loads, and a vault with rafters located on a perpendicular axis, for the roof of the King’s Chamber, transferring oblique loads, the Egyptians made the bold choice by taking a calculated risk. Very knowledgeable about materials and force transfer, they chose granite to make the ceiling of the King’s Chamber, because it was the only stone that made it possible. As this ceiling takes no load, they would then have been able to place the roof of limestone rafters immediately above it, but then, the north slope of the latter would have transferred the supported load laterally and the corbelling would have been crushed under the load. They only had one solution: move the roof very high into the mass, which we can compare to an umbrella protecting the ceilings, so that the oblique loads transferred from the northern slope are no longer applied to the corbelling.

“The cost was worthy of the stakes: to create a room with absolutely perfect dimensions in the heart of the edifice, because the pyramid’s constructors had to place more than 3,000 tons of granite stacked over five ceilings. After having already been obliged to build in the counterweight systems for the beams for the first ceiling, they used installation methods that were already planned anyway.”

Pyramidales: “In your opinion, the only visible entrance to the King’s Chamber, which is still used today, only had an access role to this part of the construction site. How was it permanently blocked off?

“And the other entrance, in the west part of the north wall of the King’s Chamber, the one that you say was used for the funeral ceremonies, how was it permanently closed in its turn, to preserve the privacy and secret of the royal sepulcher?”

A Complex and “Wonderful” Closure System

J.-P. Houdin: “The entrance to the King’s Chamber on the east side of its north wall, from what I call the service circuit (ascending corridor and Grand Gallery), could only be sealed from inside the chamber. Many details prove it. The sealing block that “lay around” in the chamber for 1,200 years is the absolute proof of it.

“To close off access to the chamber from the 2nd circuit, the “Noble (or funereal) Circuit”, the Egyptians had included the essential technical process for perfect and simple closure right from the original plans, in the section of the corridor linking the last antechamber to the King’s Chamber.

“If we carefully analyze the closure system in the west access corridor of the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, we notice the presence of two enormous oblique portcullis stones intended to block the passage to the funereal chamber. Through the chance of history, one of these two portcullis stones remained in its raised position, the second blocking the corridor in front. This closure mechanism is based on a block weighing several tons maintained in its raised position by a wooden prop on the corridor side (visible on the second, unreleased portcullis), while being ‘unstuck’ from its slide by being tipped up on a limestone block on the opposite side. Such unsticking is fundamental to avoid what is called ‘starting (or sticky) friction’, which if not dealt with prevents any movement without a ‘bit of a boost’, even on a pronounced slope (this is why on Egyptian bas-reliefs we often see figures carrying wooden levers used to unstick the back of the runners on transport sledges).

“The operating principle of this type of portcullis is therefore as follows: a worker removes the wooden prop straddling the corridor, thus releasing the portcullis that, not being ‘stuck’ to its slide, moves forward by making the rear block tip over. The portcullis then gains speed on its slide and ends its travel in the rebate made at the other end of its journey. We can say that this is practically an ‘automatic’ portcullis.

“From this system, the architects transposed a more elaborate version of it than that in the Bent Pyramid at Dashur. In the case of the Great Pyramid, it was no longer a question of closing the access corridor, but of very cleanly and almost undetectably sealing the funereal chamber itself. The closure block therefore had to be able to merge completely with the other blocks in the room. The floor of the last antechamber before the funereal chamber being nearly 8 m lower than that of the chamber, it was impossible for a dozen workers to raise a block weighing more than 3 tons to such a height, and particularly to introduce it into a corridor having an identical cross-section, to the nearest 2 mm. The only solution: store this block between the two rooms, as close to the connecting corridor as possible, and bring it into the corridor after interring the King in his sarcophagus.

“And here again Egyptian genius has worked wonders: this block was positioned, with a little bit of play, in the wall of the corridor, halfway along it, as an integral part of this wall; it was held in place by a wooden prop laid on the floor across the corridor, this prop becoming the trigger for the planned mechanism. Stuck to the back of this block, a second ‘twinned’ block was positioned in a small corridor perpendicular to the access corridor. The aim was to bring the first block into position in the access corridor and to replace it in the wall by its twin. So that the operation was able to function, it was necessary to be able to push the two blocks from behind the second block using an independent mechanism; and this is where we find the development from the Bent Pyramid’s portcullis system. This was transformed into a ‘push-block’, while keeping the same original characteristics for starting it moving.

“The mechanism was very simple: after having sprinkled a very fine layer of Sinai sand on the corridor floor (for its perfectly regular ‘quartz beads’ properties), workers positioned in the second antechamber removed the wooden prop from the corridor using a rope. Once it was cleared away, the push-block was released and pushed the two twin blocks, the first taking its place in the corridor, and the second its place in the corridor wall. It only remained to push the closure block up to its final position in the wall of the funereal chamber.

“And here again, a stroke of genius: a wooden ‘piston’ (a single piece of wood about 7 m long) positioned longitudinally over cross-beams fitted between the corbelling of the second antechamber, at the same level as the corridor floor, was operated from the room. Once the block was in the corridor, there only remained about 1.50 m to travel for it to reach its final position. The piston was then brought up to the rear of this block weighing more than 3 tons. To push it, a force of about 750 kg/f was required, which was a mere formality for the workers. The piston was operated using ropes from the base of the antechamber, almost 8 m below. About eight workers climbed ‘by rope’, adding their own weight to the mechanism, four others remained on the floor pulling the entire system until the block arrived at its stop against the floor slab of the funereal chamber.

“In the Red Pyramid, it is very easy to confirm that this system was also used, by analyzing the second antechamber (holes in the corbelling for the beams supporting the piston) and the connecting corridor (twin block different from the other wall blocks and special feature of the ceiling in two parts).

“This system functioned perfectly and was repeated for Khufu’s Pyramid. When the closure block was put into place, some sand was perhaps pushed inside the funereal chamber, leaving something unusual on the floor. It was perhaps this that attracted the attention of looters from the time of Al-Ma’mun: although there are close to 32 linear meters of wall in this room, they dug a tunnel just to the right of this closure block…nowhere else. They felt that there should have been ‘something’ in this area, but instead of thinking of digging horizontally into the wall, they dug vertically to a depth of more than 5 meters!”

Pyramidales: “Every construction project comes to an end. Like others, even that of the most sumptuous pyramid. And of course an exit route was needed for the last workers… Until now, a certain consensus was formed around the usefulness, for this purpose, of the ‘well’ leaving from the junction of the ascending corridor-horizontal corridor towards the Queen’s Chamber, coming out into the descending corridor. Now, according to you, this well had no other function than to ventilate the site. So from where did the last workers leave? And, for that matter, the priests and officials from the funeral procession, once the royal mummy had been laid in its eternal resting place?”

The Exit Well

J.-P. Houdin: “The technique used to construct this ventilation shaft says a lot. Originally, there would have had to be a vertical route between the bedrock and the rear of the west wall of the Great Gallery at its junction with the ascending corridor, its route being the most logical. It had to be extended into the rocky footing at an angle, until it joined the descending corridor level with the ceiling of the underground chamber, thus creating what is called a ‘throat effect’, like in a fireplace to increase the draw and create a double circuit with the descending corridor.

“The presence of an unexpected cave immediately adjacent in the footing pushed the architects to take advantage of this void to save time. The part dug towards the underground chamber started vertically to join the theoretical oblique route and continue as planned. On the other hand, to return to the vertical towards the Great Gallery, the architects were obliged to reduce the deviation from the original vertical route: being so close to the north-south axis, they had the means of knowing where they were going. So they constructed the part of the shaft within the mass by remembering that they were sappers, people who dig. So they laid a first horizontal layer (course) of limestone blocks and dug into this layer to ‘find’ the shaft beneath. They continued in this way slightly offsetting the hole towards the north, but always the same distance from the north-south axis, until they returned to the vertical of the planned outlet. From then on they continued the process vertically.

 “This well was necessary to enable a dozen workers to dig the underground chamber under acceptable conditions. The position of its outlet at the bottom of the Grand Gallery was shrewd: throughout its entire construction, ventilation was provided at no great cost! The well had taken the shortest possible route in order to be used for the longest possible time.

“But when the King’s Chamber was constructed, the underground chamber was permanently abandoned and the Grand Gallery was going to be used for the reason it had been constructed: to be the slide channel for a giant counterweight. The well’s outlet, dug into the shelf on the west side, was filled in with perfectly executed masonry, in order to enable the roller train to move correctly.

“The way it was rediscovered by Al-Ma’mun’s men clearly shows that this shaft had been very carefully filled in from inside the Grand Gallery, preventing it being used to evacuate workers after the funeral, what’s more setting off the stopper-blocks obstructed the bottom of the ascending corridor.

“Nonetheless we must remember a fundamental element: the architects that designed this pyramid certainly did not forget the ‘why’ of the project, namely to construct a royal tomb to ensure eternity for their King. The question of the funeral was therefore one of the main subjects in their thoughts. They weren’t going to ‘botch’ this part of their project. In designing the ‘Noble Circuit’, the one passing through the antechambers, they planned the way out for priests and workers.

“Fifty meters east of the pyramid, they modeled all the slightly complex details that they were not able to deal with using their design system (using a horizontal grid and a vertical grid, which gives 3D when you read the two grids at the same time!). Thus we find details of the entrance to the descending corridor, its junctions with the ascending corridor, and finally the junction between the ascending corridor, Grand Gallery and horizontal corridor. And they detailed, above the junction of the ascending and descending corridor, a shaft that had very great significance for the project and that has not (yet) been found in the pyramid: this well had to connect the ‘Noble Circuit’ to an element that had already been included in the project from the start, for good reason: the internal ramp. The designers traced its route by making it cross the ‘Noble Circuit’ close to and a few meters above the entrance rooms (under the rafters).

“One shaft four meters high settled the problem of evacuating the workers after sealing the ‘Noble Circuit’ from the inside. The rest was just a ‘walk in the park’! The workers, once they had reached the internal ramp, were able to descend as far as its entrance on the south face. Stonemasons were waiting to close this entrance for good and bury it beneath the cloak of Tura limestone: 10 m2 of blocks immersed in a facade of 21,000 m2… a needle in a haystack!”

Pyramidales: Following Khufu Revealed, you have called Episode 2 Khufu Reborn – for Khufu Renaissance  -. Why this term? Our dictionaries offer several definitions for the word “renaissance”: “new birth”, “reappearance or new lease of life”, “intellectual and artistic revival”, appeared with the Italian Rinascimento in the XVth-XVIth centuries… Which of these definitions did you use as your reference?”

J.-P. Houdin: “This is a very interesting question. Khufu Renaissance is a title suggested by Mehdi Tayoubi. It matches the content of this new stage in the development of my work perfectly, by combining each of the definitions you quoted:

• ‘new birth’, because our knowledge of the Great Pyramid is incomplete and it was really ‘born’ on January 27, 2011 (from my point of view, at least);
• ‘intellectual revival’, because this challenges our perception and our analysis of this monument: all the explanations regarding its construction, its internal layout and the funeral journey are ‘blown apart’;
• ‘reappearance’: we had not actually given any news since 2007;
• ‘new lease of life’: this presentation will relaunch the theory and especially bring an analysis and a new look to the whole Giza Plateau and beyond, including the other great pyramids: the Red Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid and Khafre’s Pyramid.

“And finally, in the context of The Renaissance as ‘intellectual and artistic revival’, it is actually a major evolution/revolution in the approach of archaeology; it brings it out of the simple context of studying documents, analysis on the ground and excavations, projecting it into the past using technologies of the future, at the center of which is 3D in all its forms (design, virtual reconstitution, animation and real time and relief immersion, for example). It brings a new dimension, anticipatory archaeology, enabling research on the ground to be guided.”

Pyramidales: “Jean-Pierre, to thank you for the welcome you have given readers of Pyramidales and for the clarity of your answers… a trick question! There was Episode 1 (the Great Pyramid in its operational structures). Now there is Episode 2 (the pyramid in its functional and ritual structures), from which we can already catch a glimpse of the impact on the general public and informed ‘pyramidologists’. Will there be, in the medium or longer term, an Episode 3? Or there again, are you planning to pitch your researcher’s tent at the foot of some other pyramid?

And now?

J.-P. Houdin: “Marc, strictly speaking there will be no Episode 3. No Hollywood thoughts in my approach, no desire for a Khufu Saga, but throughout all these years of research, I have discovered and studied all the great smooth pyramids from Snefru’s to Menkaure’s and, little by little, I have, in parallel, solved the problem of constructing each one.

“A fundamental point common to them all: they were all constructed from the inside and they all, except Menkaure’s (and the Djedefre interlude), had an internal ramp running around their mass; on the other hand, this internal ramp was adapted to each pyramid. The route for one differed from that of another.

“Starting with Menkaure’s Pyramid, the technique of constructing from the inside continued for the smooth pyramids, but the problem of height, less serious, would be solved by construction trenches as can be seen in the ruins of the pyramids of Sahure and Neferirkare at Abu Sir.

“My next steps should lead me to North Dashur (the Red Pyramid) and South Dashur (the Bent Pyramid), with yet another surprise in terms of the stages of construction for the latter.

“But nothing will take me away from the Giza Plateau, because I still have one last small formality to complete: to be able to walk along the internal ramp and visit the funereal apartments… This is the only thing I have not achieved!”

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Previously available only in French, this is the first official English language translation, made available through our partnership with Pyramidales and Dassault Systèmes.  Over the next few weeks I will be publishing, in addition to Part Two of this interview, translations of additional material that is being very kindly provided by Marc, Jean-Pierre, and the Project Khufu team at Dassault Systèmes.  This will allow me some time to get caught up and reoriented after having to take one of my infamous sabbaticals (sometimes life just shows up with a bag full of challenges, but all is well, Gentle Reader!).

“There is no reason to abstain, especially when you are an architect, from studying the construction of the pyramids, on the pretext that you don’t have the ‘certified Egyptologist’ badge” (Jean-Pierre Houdin)

It was on March 30, 2007, a significant date for the architect-researcher Jean-Pierre Houdin: on this day he publicly “revealed”, in the futuristic setting of the Géode, (la Villette in Paris), what it is advisable to call his “theory” on the construction of the Pyramid of Khufu.

Today, January 27, 2011, for the preview of Khufu Reborn (also known as Khufu Renaissance), still the same venue, the same décor. But while the same people are involved (the Dassault Systèmes “Khufu Team” is still at the controls), the contents of the paper have developed considerably, as would have been expected. Since 2007, when it was essentially a question of an internal ramp and of the Grand Gallery as a track for a gigantic counterweight inside the Great Pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin has taken his inventory of the monument much further, in its internal structure and it topographic environment.

New elements in the reading and understanding of the pyramid, the results of numerous observations made by the architect, represent not only a development but, in his mind, a real revolution – the word is not too strong – that could well cause shudders, or even the grinding of teeth, in (elevated) spheres and among all ranks of pyramidology. From Khufu Revealed (2007), the first formulation of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s “theory”, to Khufu Reborn (2011), there is not only a four year gap, but above all a radical change in perspective, already underlying Khufu Revealed, but here expressed in full maturity.

Jean-Pierre Houdin has actually broadened the scope of his research. He has probed deeper into the bowels of the Great Pyramid. He also went to see the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid, always with his eye on gaining a better understanding of Khufu’s Pyramid. And there it was, the surprise appeared, in his view, as an obvious fact: common points between these pyramids emanated from the same architectural “school”, to the point of making room for the “copy-and-paste” technique to configure the main structures of the monuments. This is what Jean-Pierre Houdin call “inheritance”.

With this approach, major structural elements appear inside the Great Pyramid that have been oddly left in the shade for many centuries: two antechambers to the King’s Chamber, a second (in fact: the real) entrance to this very chamber, a second access corridor to the Queen’s Chamber, a second ascending corridor starting at the (T-shaped) entrance to the monument, followed by a second horizontal corridor leading to the antechambers, an evacuation shaft for the end of construction, connecting the upper space of the pyramid’s entrance to the internal ramp… all these elements making up a “Noble Circuit” reserved for the Pharaoh’s funeral. As far as the other known structural elements are concerned (descending and ascending corridors, Grand Gallery, drop-stone trap chamber, service shafts, etc.), in Jean-Pierre Houdin’s analysis, they only had a functional role, serving no purpose once the construction of the King’s Chamber was finished.

Left to right: Marc Chartier, Jean-Pierre Houdin, Keith Payne

Pyramidales will examine the results of this substantial addition to the inventory in detail. As a preview, here is an exclusive interview that Jean-Pierre Houdin gave us, during which he discusses his working method and the essential skills learned from some twelve years of his research in the shadow of the monument, which he still considers as an absolute architectural masterpiece: the Pyramid of Khufu.

Below is the Part One of the interview.

Pyramidales: “Jean-Pierre Houdin, you have already been kind enough to answer my questions, for readers of Pyramidales. During this interview, you announced a major continuation of your research into your reconstitution of the construction site for the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The time has come to publish the results of this new research, which you have called Episode Two.

Does this mean that in your opinion Episode 1 was incomplete, despite the very large audience that this first work met, as much among the general public as with informed researchers, in numerous countries?”

A two-stage tactic

Jean-Pierre Houdin: “I’ll say right away that already in the summer of 2003, so nearly eight years ago now, my work on the Pyramid of Khufu had provided a much more comprehensive explanation for this construction project than that prevailing at the time.

“In June 2005, during my first meeting with my friends at Dassault Systèmes, Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner, of course I decided to tell them everything about this work. They felt the extent of the theory and the overturning of “The Unique Thinking’ aspect of what I had just revealed to them appeared too important, and above all too explosive, to be placed in the public domain in one go. We therefore agreed on a two-stage tactic: Episode 1 covered the whole theoretical part of the theory dedicated to construction of the pyramid and Episode 2 covered everything relating to the architecture of the funereal apartments. The intention was to target the largest possible audience and present the theory in the most scientific and credible way possible, through virtual validation using Dassault Systèmes’ software, in order to gain unassailable credibility on this point.

“Once the theory was established, we thought we could rapidly put it to the critical test by obtaining authorization to undertake a research mission on site using non-destructive tests. The great advantage of the theory lies in the fact that it is irrefutable: the discovery of the internal ramp would close debate over the question of the monument’s construction.

“The Khufu Revealed presentation at the Géode on March 30, 2007 elicited considerable response from around the world. In one morning, the theory was recognized as the most plausible on the subject. Unfortunately, afterwards, as far as real validation was concerned, things did not go as planned; submission of an application for a scientific mission remained impossible despite several meetings at the highest level. In the end, this additional period ‘granted’ to us turned into a real godsend: Episode 2, version 2011 has gained considerable weight compared with Episode 2 as first imagined in 2005, and we have been very successful in collecting clues on the ground.”

With technical support from Dassault Systèmes (in the foreground: Richard Breitner)

Pyramidales: “Before coming to the real content of your new developments on the Pyramid of Khufu, can you give us an insight into your research method? Looking at your previous publications and presentations, I think I see at least three principal working themes in your approach to the Egyptology ‘thing’: meticulous observation of the site, a builder’s logic (we haven’t forgotten you are an architect), enabling you to ‘talk’ across time with the Egyptian builders, and an awareness of construction techniques specific to several pyramids from various eras.

 “Do you recognize yourself in this description? If necessary, how would you add to it?”

More than 5,000 hours spent modeling in 3D

J.-P. Houdin: “First of all, there was a ‘founding’ event that led me to devote more than twelve years of my life, full-time, to Khufu and, by extension, to all the great smooth pyramids. It was the intuition my father had on January 2, 1999 and that I love to recall: ‘If I had to construct the Pyramid of Khufu’, he told me, ‘I would build it from the inside’. With a single sentence, ‘The Unique Thinking’ was blown apart! At the time, I was approaching fifty and Bulle, my wife, finally convinced me that we don’t live forever, that routine is the enemy of passion, and so I was looking for an ‘idea’ worth devoting myself to. Khufu ‘landed in my lap’! The architect in me told me quite simply that this was my path. The Pyramid of Khufu was worth it!

“Starting from this intuition, slowly and surely I unwound the ball of thread that nobody had been able to untangle, because they didn’t have the right code to find one of its ends.

“And then, after spending my whole childhood immersed in building and civil engineering, having qualified as a professional architect and having worked in the profession for more than twenty years, being initiated into computer-aided design, I had the ‘necessary qualifications’ to enable me to succeed in seeing through a serious and probing study of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the pyramids, and then publish proposals in this field.

“Between 1999 and 2005 (before meeting Dassault Systèmes), I thus spent more than 5,000 hours modeling my ideas in 3D, with the unique advantage of being able to visualize whatever came into my mind, practically in real time. I also had the possibility of finding out the precise relationships in space between the various elements that I had in front of me on the computer screen.

“From the start, I understood that I had to think as an ‘Egyptian of the time’ and not as a modern builder. I therefore did a lot of research on the subject, both in books and on the Internet (having spent a year in New York from 1996 to 1997 and experienced it first-hand, I had grasped the huge revolution that this tool would bring), to find out about the techniques, materials, tools and expertise of the ancient Egyptians. This enabled me to notice in passing that the literature about the pyramids was fairly thin, padded with rehashed quotations passed from one author to the next, with no personal analysis and particularly very often missing the point. Finally, starting 2004, thanks to help from sponsors, I was able to make regular trips to Egypt and do my own research on site; every time, I found a clue to support my proposals.”

Pyramidales: “Among your working tools, 3D now occupies an essential place, thanks to the skills and intellectual proximity you have found with your friends at Dassault Systèmes. What extra benefit does this virtual presentation bring to your work?”

 

From left to right: J.-P. Houdin, Mehdi Tayoubi, Richard Breitner

J.P. Houdin: “As I told you before, 3D has an essential place in my research. My meeting with the engineers from Dassault Systèmes was extraordinary: we spoke the same language and they offered me the Rolls-Royce of the computer-aided design field. At once my work took giant leaps forward, scientific simulations underpinning virtual modeling. For example, simulations performed by the Khufu Team in connection with the cracking of the beams over the King’s Chamber provided the precise answer enabling me to confirm that the Egyptians mastered the situation very well at a moment of disarray and did not abandoned this room during construction. The best proof: 45 centuries later, the damage has not got worse.”

Pyramidales: “There’s no point burying your head in the sand! The logistics established around your work, with the media impact we have seen, have aroused envy and will do so again. Unfortunately, it seems that the microcosm of Egyptology, no doubt like other areas of scientific research, cultivates an innate sense of controversy. How do you explain this observation?”

“I had to take up my pilgrim’s staff”

J.-P. Houdin: “Research is not a class prerogative; freedom of thought is fundamental and there is no reason to abstain, especially when you are an architect, from studying the construction of the pyramids, on the pretext that you don’t have the ‘certified Egyptologist’ badge.

“The pyramids were designed and built by men like Hemiunu and Ankhhaf, Viziers of all Khufu’s Great Royal Works, a title that can be compared nowadays with that of an architect or an engineer.

“Egyptology was born during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign and, from the start, was directed towards the archaeology of measurements, excavations and collection of relics. University studies in this field are based principally on the understanding of hieroglyphs, documents, history and religion; they provide no particular training in the understanding of construction techniques. The result: no theory put forward by Egyptologists bears analysis, right from the first lines. I think that my architect’s background qualifies me as much as an Egyptologist, if not more so, to investigate the problem of the construction of the pyramids 

Picture from the documentary Kheops Révélé (Gédéon Programmes)

“Now, my position as an ‘outsider’ closes the door to many facilities: not being an insider, it was out of the question for me to be supported by public bodies. I had to take up my pilgrim’s staff and go to convince sponsors in France and Egypt (because I have some there too). The commitment by Dassault Systèmes is exemplary, as part of a sponsorship program (Passion for Innovation). Sponsorship is particularly oriented towards sport and the arts; in my case, it is to support research into our past, into an admirable civilization that still has a lot to teach us. Nothing could be more normal than for sponsors to mediatize this action. Let those who are envious understand this: my breakthrough in the world of Egyptology has not been an ‘overnight success’, the fruit of this wide media exposure alone, but the result of a great deal of effort, privation, passion and conviction on the part of my contacts.

“I don’t think I need advice from people (very few incidentally) who have proved incapable of making objective and substantiated criticism of my work.”

Pyramidales: “To come now to the heart of the matter, namely the content of Episode 2, what are the main points, what are the structures or components of the Pyramid of Khufu that formed the subject of your complementary analyses and interpretations? In other words: what have you observed in what, until now, remained silent or secret from the fantastic ‘language of the stones’ that the pyramid offers to those who know how to decode it?”

J.-P. Houdin: “I called the content of Episode 2 ‘Khufu’s Inheritance’, that is the real funereal architecture of the Great Pyramid, a logical continuation of the sepulchral tradition and experience in construction accumulated by the Egyptians over more than a century, particularly in the reign of Khufu’s father, Snefru.

“In 2003, so after already having spent four years studying and researching Khufu’s Pyramid, and the other great smooth pyramids of the 3rd and 4th Dynasties, I arrived at the conclusion that there was something that didn’t ‘fit’ in the internal architecture of this funereal monument. I use this word ‘funereal’ because it is essential to come back to the ‘why’ of the royal pyramids: to serve as tombs for kings and their close family for eternity, in the belief of a life in the hereafter. This involved having a real apartment with, if I may be so bold, living room, dining room and bedroom. Also, the Egyptians paid much more attention to constructing their eternal dwelling than they did to that for their earthly life, the latter being only a brief stay.

The two antechambers of the King’s Chamber, similar to the ones of the Red pyramid

“By means of thousands of hours of 3D modeling, literally getting inside the volume with all the possibilities this technology offered me, I could observe, analyze and understand the spatial relationships between the various internal structures: the chambers (and their passageways), the corridors and the Grand Gallery. As far as the Grand Gallery was concerned, I was already firmly convinced that it could only have been a technical element associated with the construction and that it was pointless to try and give it a funereal function. Moreover, certain explanations linking the three chambers (the underground chamber, called the Queen’s chamber, and the King’s Chamber), in order to ‘include’ them in the funereal tradition seem to me to be mistaken, even fanciful.

“I had already spent enough time ‘in the company of’ my fellow architects of the period to understand that our knowledge of this pyramid was incomplete. It had no room for their constructive logic or the simplicity of their approach to the configuration of the funereal apartments.

“The presence of two antechambers in the Pyramid of Khufu, modeled on those in the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, constructed by the same ‘college of architects’ for Snefru, Khufu’s father, was a foregone conclusion for me. The language of the stones did the rest, 3D modeling contributing an extraordinary ‘beyond the visible’ visual representation.”

Pyramidales: “To back up, indeed corroborate, your observations, were you able to profit from studies, assessments or experiments, to some extent made public, or even conversely perhaps kept secret… because they were too disturbing for what you call “The Unique Thinking”?

J.-P. Houdin: “During all these years of research, I was aware that in the end you could find a great many clues just by going ‘fishing’ in projects already carried out or studies published over the years. During the micro-gravimetric campaign performed under the patronage of the EDF Foundation in 1986/87, the results were not what was hoped for at the time, namely the detection of an unknown chamber, which proves that there are many people who are not satisfied with the current status quo. The anomaly of the spiraling low-density zone would have remained at the bottom of the drawer if my curiosity had not pushed me to look much more closely at these results. The ‘catch’ had been excellent, because in my mind the probability of later finding this spiral perfectly matching that in the theory was practically zero. This anomaly can only have one rational explanation and any attempt to deflect its significance towards other constructional explanations is doomed to fail because the fundamental subject is then forgotten: how was the pyramid built? And here we have to go into detail rationally, which has not been done since the dawn of time.

“Moreover, during this investigation, other results concerning other anomalies that also fell into the drawer supported my latest suggestions: micro-gravimetry had also detected low-density and high-density zones at exactly the places I expected.

“I had also learned that at the same time, under the direction of a well-respected Egyptologist, Professor Yoshimura, the University of Waseda in Japan had undertaken two radar studies in the pyramid shortly after the French project. One very significant result, detected during each of these two missions, brought to light a corridor about thirty meters long, parallel to the horizontal corridor leading to the Queen’s Chamber and finishing in the north-west corner of the chamber’s north wall. This discovery was the subject of an official publication, but the establishment misunderstood it at the time. Competition between Egyptological teams appears to be fierce, with the consequence that a mass of information is closeted away without trace for simple reasons of ego. For me, science cannot and should not be hampered by clan disputes; but this example proves that the reality is quite different.

“As for ‘The Unique thinking’ I often talk about, I will summarize it with a phrase from the Greek historian Thucydides: ‘Instead of taking the trouble to search for the truth, we generally prefer to adopt ready-made ideas.’”

Pyramidales: “Adding to your previous research, in order to refine your reconstitution of the Great Pyramid’s construction, your new observations initially led you to focus your attention on the area around the monument, namely the Royal Causeway intended to transport stone blocks. What are the configuration and route of this causeway?”

A trench in the bedrock to serve as a slide channel for a second counterweight

J.-P. Houdin: “I often say that by having had this sudden inspiration in 1999, ‘The pyramid was built from the inside’, my father had finally found one of the two ends of the thread in the ball of wool that represented the enigma of the pyramid’s construction. Those who maintained ‘The Unique thinking’, according to which the pyramid was constructed from the outside, were turning this ball around while themselves going round in circles, with nothing (the end of the thread) to establish a plausible theory. From the start, I had this element and I pulled the thread little by little, the ball getting progressively smaller.

As for the Giza Plateau, it was the thought of a reader that pushed me to examine it more closely. This reader pointed out to me that I had not explained how I transported the granite beams from the port to the base of the great external ramp; and he was right to point it out to me. Indeed, it is such remarks that help things move forward.

The building site was organized around two main axes (in red): Both pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure had not yet been built at the time

“And, as if by a strange coincidence (?), the next day on Talking Pyramids, Vincent Brown’s blog, I saw a photograph from the beginning of the 20th century taken by Spelterini from a balloon. And the penny dropped: why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? The Royal Causeway of Khafre was built on a ramp dating from Khufu’s construction project! The Egyptians always considered simplicity and economy in organizing their construction sites: first construct the pyramid in a first quarry, to supply materials over the shortest possible distance, to have as much as possible to hand, if I might say.

Illustration from Dassault Systèmes

“Nonetheless they had two materials that came from other regions of Egypt: Tura limestone for the facing stone and Aswan granite for the walls and beams of the King’s Chamber. They needed a canal and an unloading port as close as possible: the current port in front of the Valley Temple of Khafre and the Sphinx was the ideal place. From there, the Tura blocks could follow an allowable natural slope of 8 to 9%, to be delivered at the base of the pyramid, at the entrance to the internal ramp. On the other hand, the beams having to be delivered to the level of the base of the King’s Chamber, the route had to be longer to maintain an identical slope. The hypotenuse of the triangle was not suitable and the two sides of the triangle became more logical. Khafre’s Royal Causeway crossed my external ramp. By moving this slightly to the west, profiting from the greater altitude of the Plateau in this area (15 m higher than the base of the pyramid), it was shortened by about one hundred meters and its starting point was naturally located on an extension of the Causeway and practically at right-angles to it. The difference in level between the port and the base of the King’s Chamber is about 83 m, two-thirds (55 m) being covered with the aid of this plateau ramp, the final third (28 m) by means of the exterior ramp (the blue line below). Incidentally, I noticed the presence of several quarries along the route of the plateau ramp (the red line below). These must have been used as required and were directly linked.

“This ramp, which was nearly 24 m wide, was much too big to be just the foundation for Khafre’s Royal Causeway (9.50 m), especially given that the other plateau causeways have foundations that do not extend beyond their masonry (10 m for Khufu and 8.5 m for Menkaure).

“This ramp sorted out the route for materials, but did not explain how the beams were brought up from the port to the base of the Khufu’s external ramp.

“In my theory, I say that the beams were dragged from the base of the pyramid to level +43 m using a counterweight moving inside the Grand Gallery (the green line at the top, above). Logic would therefore expect the Egyptians to have installed a first counterweight at the end of the plateau ramp to bring the monoliths to the base of the second ramp. To do this, they would have had to dig a trench in the bedrock to serve as a slide channel for this second counterweight; and this is what they did! Precisely in line with the plateau ramp, and beyond the starting point of the external ramp for Khufu’s pyramid, they dug this ditch and we had a clue we hadn’t dared hope for.

Although this trench had disappeared under Khafre’s pyramid (the green line, above, left), one detail is remarkable: while all the funereal apartments and corridors were dug into the bedrock, the corridor connecting the entrance to the sepulchral chamber, with its floor more than 10 m below the level of the plateau, has indeed also been dug, but suddenly, over about ten meters exactly aligned with the plateau ramp, it is constructed in stone, floor, walls and ceiling. And this trench had a great influence on the location of the internal structures; it required the designers to move them about twelve meters to the east, in order to avoid having a significant void to fill in under the stone-built section of the corridor.”

To be continued!

Copyright by Marc Chartier, 2011.  All rights reserved