Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

that the vast area covered by the Great Pyramid could contain St. Peter's in Rome, the cathedrals of Florence and Milan, Westminster Abbey, and St. Paul's in London combined.

The entrance to the pyramid is on its north face. Inside, the structure contains three chambers, connected by descending and ascending passageways. The lowest of these chambers is known as the Unfinished Chamber. This structure was roughly hewn into the bedrock 98.5 feet below ground level, and is believed by Egyptologists to represent the proposed initial location of the burial chamber of King Khufu, who apparently changed his

mind and had another chamber constructed higher up the pyramid. The middle chamber is known as the Queen's Chamber, a name given to the room in error by the Arabs. The Queen's Chamber lies exactly midway between the north and south sides of the pyramid, and is the smallest of the three, measuring approximately 18.3 by 17.1 feet, with a pointed roof rising to a height of about 20 feet. The rough unfinished floor in the Queen's Chamber has suggested to many researchers that for some unknown reason work on this room was abandoned before completion.

Located at the heart of the Pyramid is the King's Chamber. This structure is built entirely of granite and measures 34.5 feet from east to west, 17 feet from north to south, and 19 feet in height. Near the west wall of the chamber lies the King's sarcophagus, supposedly once containing the body of Khufu, though there is no evidence that anyone was ever buried in it. The sarcophagus was hollowed out of a single piece of Red Aswan granite and is about 2.5 centimeters wider than the entrance into the King's Chamber. Consequently, the sarcophagus must have been placed in position while the chamber was being constructed. Napolean allegedly spent a terrifying night alone in the King's Chamber in the late 1790s, a feat duplicated with similar results by English occultist Paul Brunton in the 1930s.

The other main feature of the interior of the Great Pyramid is the Grand Gallery. This passageway was built as a continuation of the Ascending Corridor and is 152.8 feet long and 27.8 feet high. It is a stunning architectural achievement and possesses an ingenious corbelled vault, formed by the gradual inward projection of its polished limestone walls. As yet unexplained and unique features of the Great Pyramid are the mysterious shafts, two of which slope upwards out of both the King's and Queen's chambers. Thought once to be ventilation shafts, it is now believed that these narrow passageways had some religious significance. The shafts do appear to be astronomically aligned and are probably connected with the ancient Egyptian belief that the stars were inhabited by the gods and the souls of the dead.

©John Griffiths.

The pyramids of Giza

Recent archaeological discoveries on the Giza Plateau are shedding much needed light on the people who actually built the Great Pyramid. In 1990, investigations led by Secretary General of Egyptian Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass discovered the tombs of the Pyramid Builders close to the Pyramids at Giza. These tombs included the sarcophagus of a man identified by hieroglyphics as Ny Swt Wsrt, thought

to be the overseer of the pyramid builders' village. A few years later, in an area near this cemetery, the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, led by archaeologist Mark Lehner, discovered the site of a vast community of as many as 20,000 people, who had lived in the area around 2500 B.C. This has been dubbed "the workers' village" and includes such features as a dormitory or barracks for up to 2,000 temporary workers, as well as evidence for copper-working and cooking facilities.

One of the greatest enigmas of the Great Pyramid is how such a vast engineering project was organized and accomplished. How were such huge stone blocks, some weighing more than 40 tons, transported to the site, raised up, and fitted so precisely into position? Additionally, some of these stones were brought from Aswan, 620 miles south of Giza. How was this managed? Egyptologists believe that the Great Pyramid was constructed over a period of less than 23 years (the reign of King Khufu) finishing around 2560 B.C. There are some clues to construction methods in Egyptian reliefs from the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2489 B.c.-2345 B.C.) official Ti in Saqqara, which show teams of workmen using ropes and sleds to drag giant obelisks and statues into place. The question of transporting the stones, however far, does not seem so difficult when one considers that the Nile could have been used to float the blocks down to Giza. To raise the stones into position, Egyptologists suggest that ramps of mud, brick, and rubble were built on inclined planes. Egyptologist Mark Lehner has hypotheisized that a spiralling ramp, beginning in an adjacent stone quarry to the southeast and continuing around the outside of the pyramid, could have been used. The blocks would then have been dragged up the ramps on sledges to the required height. The remains of such ramps have been discovered at the Sinki pyramid at South Abydos and the Sekhemkhet pyramid at Saqqara. However, building a ramp large enough to support the building of the Great Pyramid would be almost as massive a task as the construction of the pyramid itself.

An alternative theory has recently been proposed by researchers Roumen V. Mladjov and Ian S. R. Mladjov, and also by Dick Parry, Professor of Civil Engineering at Cambridge University. Their idea originated from inscriptions carved into some of the huge blocks used in the construction of the Great Pyramid, which state "This side up." They reason that this instruction would be meaningless if the rectangular stone blocks were only meant to be dragged up ramps. Their ingenious theory is that the stones were literally rolled up the ramps onto the pyramid, using purpose-made wooden

devices similar to solid wheels. Evidence for these prototype wheels has been found in the form of a model of a wooden rocker, which consists of