Introduction THE LAST SURVIVING WONDER The people of classical times knew that many things were marvelous, but saw that only a few of these things were the work of humanity rather than of the gods. And of these miracles of human ingenuity, only a very few were deemed worthy of universal admiration. You could number them on the fingers of two hands. They were: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia -- the work of Athens's greatest sculptor, Phidias (c. 490 - c. 415 BC), also renowned for creating the heroic marble forms for the facade of the Parthenon, works now known to the British as the Elgin Marbles; the Pharos, or lighthouse-fortress, of Alexandria, built in 279 BC to the designs of Sostratus, an Asiatic Greek in the service of the Ptolemies, and dedicated to "the Savior Gods" -- an edifice well over 400 feet (122 meters) high, and topped by a mirror-like structure which combined the functions of reflector and telescope. Then there were the Colossus of Rhodes -- a bronze statue of the sun-god Helios, which towered over the entrance to Rhodes harbor and was reported by the elder Pliny to be some 70 cubits (100 feet / 30 meters) tall; and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus -- a white marble tomb for Mausolus, ruler of Caria (377-353 BC), well over 130 feet (40 meters) high, erected by his widow Artemisia and decorated with carvings by the brilliant sculptor Scopas. Finally, there was the Great Pyramid of Cheops (also known as Khufu), at Giza. These were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as compiled by the Greek poet Antipator of Sidon around 130 BC. Scholars and adventurers undertook long and arduous journeys to visit them, then came home again and told or wrote awe-inspiring tales of what they had seen. The Seven Wonders passed into legend. Centuries passed, and time took its usual revenge on these monuments of vaulting ambition. An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes in 224 BC. The Pharos survived almost a millennium longer, and was still in use after the Arab conquest of Egypt, but was itself destroyed by earthquakes in AD 700. Earthquakes also did away with the Mausoleum in the fifteenth century AD. Of Phidias's great Olympian Zeus, visited by Pausanias and described in his epic ten-volume travel book, the Guide to Greece , nothing is left except a tiny image on the coins of Elis. Almost all the Wonders were destroyed: the sands rose and buried them, or -- when a few recognizable ruins survived -- the thieves came looting, while rats bred and scurried among the rubble. Eventually, however, starting with a slow trickle of interest in the early Renaissance and building into a flood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new bands of travelers from younger countries came to follow in the path of the classical wanderers, and thrilled to their gradual rediscovery of the grand archaic ruins. This time, however, they came with a very different frame of mind. They looked, not on perfected structures, but on shards and fragments; they reflected, not on the splendors of human achievement, but on its transience. If the great nations of Egypt, Greece and Babylon had fallen, how long could, say, Germany or France or Spain hope to thrive? A thousand years? Five hundred? Less? The reflective mood was caught most memorably near the start of the nineteenth century by the English poet Shelley, who was fascinated to discover that some ancient writers had anticipated this very modern spirit. He found a traveler's tale from ancient Egypt recorded in the pages of the historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in Greek. The story, already a couple of centuries old when Diodorus wrote it down some time around 49 BC, told of one Hectaeus of Abdera, a contemporary of Alexander the Great who journeyed throughout Egypt and recorded his impressions. One day, Hectaeus came across the ruins of what had been built by one of the most powerful of all the pharaohs, Ramses II, believed by some to be the pharaoh mentioned in the Old Testament book of Exodus. In Greek, Ramses's throne name was rendered as user-maat-re , or "strong in right is Re." Shelley seized on this word, anglicized it, and turned it into "Ozymandias." I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. The somber ironies and implicit threat to tyrants of the modern age -- for Shelley was a revolutionary -- helped make the poem one of the most famous short verses in the English language. Schoolchildren were made to learn it by heart, though not, perhaps, to inquire too deeply into its politics. It is a remarkable poem, and yet the truth it tells is only a partial one. For if the Ramesseum and the other magnificent wrecks of Egypt's golden age reminded visitors that sic transit gloria mundi -- "so passes the glory of the world" -- there was one monument which told exactly the opposite story: a story of triumph over time. Six of the Seven Wonders vanished. The seventh endured, to be called by various names: the Pyramid of Giza; Khufu's Pyramid; most commonly and justly of all, the Great Pyramid. Four and a half thousand years after its creation, the Pyramid still stands, still strikes awe into everyone who sees it. True, it has suffered some damage -- the glorious white limestone casing which once made it gleam and dazzle in the Egyptian sunlight has long since been stripped off; builders have helped themselves to some of its stones for their own, more modest creations; and it has been centuries since grave-robbers looted its magnificent interior. Still, it endures: the greatest time traveler of all. Awesome, of course, in its sheer scale, and in the thought of the human effort that went into its making, but awesome in its other qualities, too. Awesome in the astonishing accuracy of its proportions -- an architectural feat to rival anything that can be done with steel and glass and concrete by modern builders armed with computers, and all performed by a people whose main tools of measurement were the rope and the stick. Awesome in its dazzlingly precise alignment with north, and in its complex relationship with the sun, moon and stars -- features which modern archaeologists and astronomers are only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, beginning to comprehend. Awesome, above all, in its mystery. What does the building mean? What motive could possibly have been powerful enough to compel the expenditure of so much labor, skill, ingenuity and treasure on a structure with no apparent function? Who were the people who built such a marvel, and how -- how on earth -- did they accomplish it? It is no surprise that the Pyramid should have inspired wild answers to these difficult questions. That vast and enigmatic form, known to almost every-one on earth, has been the object of speculation that ranges from the contentious via the merely fanciful to the frankly insane. The steady output of writings on the subject since the twelfth century AD became an entire publishing industry by the end of the nineteenth century, as a motley army of mystics, theosophists, spiritualists, charlatans and conspiracy-mongers set themselves up to reveal the (supposed) Secret of the Pyramid. Among the more celebrated contenders in the field were those who insisted that the Pyramid was built with the use of esoteric magic -- an occult tradition then passed down from the Egyptian priesthood via Hermes Trismegistus (see page 121) to ... well, whoever had written the book you were reading. Then there were those who believed that the Pyramid's famously intricate dimensions were a coded account of -- among other ludicrous claims -- the rise of the Nazis, or the French Revolution, or the entire course of history from creation to (imminent) Armageddon. It did not escape the attention of conspiracy theorists that the U.S. dollar bill bears the image of a pyramid. As popular madnesses developed, pyramid theories evolved along with them. In the 1960s and 1970s devotees of New Age wisdom, noting how well the Egyptians managed to preserve their dead in these structures, claimed that little plastic pyramid models could be used around the house to keep milk fresh, razor blades sharp, plants blooming and what have you. And those with an extraterrestrial bent were fond of claiming that the Great Pyramid -- manifestly too extraordinary a creation to be the work of unaided humanity -- was inspired (or, as the extremists would have it, even built) by helpful teams of passing aliens: possibly from Sirius, one of the stars with which Khufu's building does indeed have a demonstrable link. All of which was, in a sense, harmless nonsense. In another sense, it was pernicious nonsense, since it sent thousands of readers racing off after imaginary secrets and splendors when a whole set of real, verifiable and fascinating secrets and splendors were there for the investigating. This book, although it will look from time to time at some of the crazier things that have been believed about the Great Pyramid, will stay strictly in the realms of demonstrable fact or well-justified conjecture, in the belief that the truth is ultimately more enthralling, and even more inspiring, than the most lurid of those wild apocryphal theories. To try to justify this claim right from the outset, let us consider a little more closely the most immediately over-whelming aspect of Khufu's creation: its size. IMMORTAL STATISTICS Let us begin with the bare figures. The Pyramid rose to 481 feet (146.6 meters) --the top 31 feet (9.45 meters), including the capstone, are now missing. According to early calculations, its base length was an average of 756 feet (230.42 meters). It contained approximately 2,300,000 separate blocks of stone, each weighing an average of 2 1/2 tons. Some were much larger than this: the limestone casing blocks which once covered its exterior weighed 10 tons or more, and there are granite blocks in its interior known to weigh up to 40 tons. Its total weight was thus almost 6 million tons: more precisely, some 5,955,555 tons. But, as anyone who has visited the Giza site will verify, these statistics do not really convey the sheer impact of the building, which is why so many writers are driven to comparisons and superlatives -- pointing out, for example, that until the building of the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889, the Great Pyramid reigned supreme as the tallest building in the world; or that, at 6 million tons, it weighed more than all the buildings in the modern City of London's square mile put together. One much-repeated formula is that you could easily fit the Houses of Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral into its base area and still have room to spare. Another proposes that the cathedrals of Florence, Milan and St. Peter's in Rome would all fit comfortably inside. Those who prefer a more planetary scale might like to know that, if the Pyramid were sliced up into regular 12-inch (30 cm) cubes, and those cubes then placed in a row, they would stretch two-thirds of the way around the earth. It was Napoleon, no less, who appears to have initiated this particular computational game. When his armies invaded Egypt in 1798, trailing groups of scientists and scholars in their wake and thus giving birth to the modern discipline of Egyptology, Napoleon declined the invitation to make a personal ascent of the Pyramid and instead occupied himself with pen and paper. On the return of his tired and sweaty underlings, he announced that if the three pyramids on the Giza plateau were dismantled, they might be used to build a defensive wall, 10 feet (3 meters) high and 1 foot (30 cm) thick, along the entire perimeter of France. It would appear that Napoleon's skills as an amateur mathematician rivaled his flair as a general, for one of his scientists rapidly corroborated these figures. (Or perhaps that sage, a Monsieur Monge, was merely an accomplished flatterer.) Once these brain-confounding figures have been digested, one can pass to the next most astonishing aspect of the Great Pyramid. It was not only the largest that Egypt had ever seen, but the most accurately constructed. The base of the Pyramid is level to within less than an inch (2.1 cm). The average deviation of the sides from their alignment to north, south, east and west is a tiny fraction of a single degree: 3 minutes 6 seconds. The four corners of the Pyramid are almost perfect right-angles. Its angle of slope is a remarkably exact 51 degrees 50 minutes 40 seconds. It used to be estimated that the sides of the Pyramid were identical to within less than 8 inches (20 cm), with dimensions of: north 755.43 feet (230.26 meters); south 756.08 feet (230.45 meters); east 755.88 feet (230.39 meters); and west 755.57 feet (230.3 meters). More recent calculations, however, suggest that it was even more accurate than this -- accurate, in fact, to within less than 2 inches (4.4 cm). And this is not even to mention some of the most truly remarkable feats of planning and engineering which may be found in the Pyramid's complex and wonderful interior, especially its Grand Gallery and King's Burial Chamber; a whole recondite world which requires a lengthy account in its own right. When a structure of such overwhelming dimensions has been executed with such astonishing precision, it is easier to forgive those who wish to attribute its making to supernatural forces. But, as this book will try to explain, no such leap into the unknown is required. For all its daunting magnificence, the Pyramid is the work of human beings; and before we proceed to examine its secrets in more detail, we need to encounter one human being in particular -- the man known to the Greeks as Cheops, to the Egyptians by the formal name of Khnum-kbuf ("the god Khnum is his protector") and to present-day scholars by the abbreviated form of that name: Khufu. KHUFU This ruler came to the throne of Egypt in about 2551 BC, inheriting it from his father Sneferu, who may well have reigned as long as half a century. Although there are still disputes and uncertainties about exact datings, the history of ancient Egypt is conventionally divided by modern historians into thirty or thirty-one Dynasties, beginning around 3100 BC and ending in 332 BC. Sneferu was the first king of the lVth Dynasty (2575-2465 BC) and Khufu the second. Historians have also arranged the various dynasties into nine main periods; the second of these is known as the Old Kingdom, runs from 2686 to 2181 BC and is made up of the ILIrd, IVth, Vth and VIth Dynasties. The Old Kingdom was the golden age of pyramid building, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Pyramid Age. As we shall soon see in greater detail, the earliest forms of pyramid, known as step pyramids, started to be erected in the IIIrd Dynasty under a king called Djoser (2630--2611 BC). True pyramids did not emerge until the reign of Sneferu, which means that Khufu's builders were working with an extremely novel form of architecture: one calculation has it that barely sixty years elapsed between the completion of Djoser's pyramid and the beginning of Khufu's, which means that someone who was a child in Djoser's reign could, with luck and good health, have watched the first stones being put in place at Giza. Khufu's own monument -- the largest and most extraordinary that Egypt would ever see -- was soon joined by the smaller but nonetheless gigantic pyramid built near his own at Giza by his son Khafre (also known as Chephren: 2520-2494 BC), and then by one considerably smaller still, although in any other surroundings it would seem highly imposing, built by his grandson Menkaure (also known as Mycerinus: 2490-2472 BC). Menkaure's pyramid was the last flourish of the art for the lVth Dynasty, and although the Vth and VIth Dynasty rulers also built a number of pyramids, they were on a much more modest scale. Alter this, in the time known as the First Intermediate Period, pyramid building virtually ceased, and was not revived until the Middle Kingdom (2040--1640 BC), and then only fitfully. In all, about ninety pyramids have survived to the present day in one form or another, although some of them are little more than rubble-strewn sites, their original forms unidentifiable save to the trained eye. Almost all the products of the Pyramid Age were built just to the west of the Nile, on the edge of the desert, in a thin strip running from Meidum in the south to Abu Roash in the north -- all, that is, within easy reach of the ancient capital and home of the royal palace, Memphis. In the context of the long sweep of Egyptian history, therefore, pyramid building was an art which developed swiftly, peaked early and went into almost immediate decline. The vast pyramids which have haunted the imagination of the world were built in the course of just three generations: the reigns of Sneferu, Khufu and Khafre. Add together all the eighty-five-odd pyramids of all the rest of Egypt, and they still only amount to 41 per cent of the total mass of stone used by those three monarchs. In terms of sheer bulk, Sneferu must be judged the greatest of the pyramid builders, since it has been estimated that his pyramids alone -- disregarding the complexes in which they stood -- contained some 124 million cubic feet (3.5 million cubic meters) of stone. But for individual size, grandeur and technical perfection, the laurels must go to Khufu. The Egyptians called the Great Pyramid Akhet Khufu - "The Horizon of Khufu." Sadly, little is known of Khufu himself. It is a small irony of history that the only known image of the man who commanded the building of the Great Pyramid is a minute figurine, no more than 3 inches (7.6 cm) high, found at Abydos; it is marked with his Horus-name, Her-Mejedu . It is fairly certain that he was quite young when he came to the throne; the inference is that he wished to compete with, and outdo, the amazing achievements of his father; the impression is given that he may have been overweeningly arrogant -- but then, as Pharaoh, he was in effect a god. Still, even if relatively little is known about the man, a very great deal is now known about his creation; and to explore it is one of the most enthralling of all journeys in imaginative history. To stand at the start of this journey is to be in much the same position as that of Howard Carter when he peered into the newly opened depths of Tutankhamun's tomb on November 26, 1922. "Do you see anything?" his companion, Lord Carnarvon, asked nervously. "Yes", Carter replied. "Wonderful things." Excerpted from Building the Great Pyramid by Kevin Jackson, Jonathan Stamp All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
