How to build a pyramid
I remember teaching children about the Pyramids and a child responded to my question with “They put up the pointy stone at the top first and then put all the other stones in underneath it.” For 4,000 years people have contemplated how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. The Great Pyramid contains 2 million stone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons, and the 481-foot-tall pyramid was the world’s tallest structure for more than 3,800 years. We may have just discovered how it was built. There are three theories.
The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 B.C., said “machines” raised the blocks, i.e.cranes. Egyptian farmers used wooden cranes “shadouf” to raise water from the Nile. This device can be seen in ancient tomb paintings, so it was available to the pyramid builders. Hundreds of these cranes at various levels on the pyramid would be needed to lift the blocks. But Egypt simply didn’t have forests for so much timber. Further there is nowhere to place all these cranes large enough to lift heavy blocks of stone. Three hundred years later, Diodorus of Sicily wrote, “The construction was effected by mounds” (ramps). But the ramp would have to be approximately one mile long to reach the top of the pyramid containing as great a volume of stone as the pyramid itself, virtually doubling the man-hours needed to build the pyramid, and nothing remains of any such ramp.
Modern scholars know that neither theory is correct. A radical new theory however, may provide the solution. If correct, it would demonstrate a level of planning by Egyptian architects and engineers far greater than anything ever imagined before. This suggests an external ramp was used to build the lower third of the pyramid and was then cannibalized, its blocks taken through an internal ramp for the higher levels of the structure. This ramp still exists—inside the pyramid!
Wooden hoists on notches left in the edge of the pyramid could have been used to turn blocks onto the next part of the internal ramp. Such a notch exists. And we do know there is a hollow centre in the Pyramids. Desert foxes are seen to go in and out. The Supreme Council of Antiquities may grant permission for an infrared survey. So late this year we may know if the internal ramp exists. (Archaeology, June 2007, Vol 60 No3.)
REV THE HON. DR GORDON MOYES, A.C., M.L.C.