Forgotten Ages Research

The Great Pyramid—The Impossible Monument

Report Topics:

• Conservative historians’ view of the building of the Great Pyramid by primitive methods only
• Major problems in resources available, calculated manpower, logistics, leveling and aligning the monument, carving and finishing the stonework, moving the stones to the construction site, and placing the stones in the structure using ramps or levers
• What ancient legends and accounts have to say about how the Great Pyramid was really built

Full Report:

Ten miles west of modern Cairo is a large plateau called Giza, which means the “skirt” of the desert. It is an extension of the Libyan plateau, which begins in Libya and stretches to within one-half mile of the banks of the Nile.

The Giza plateau itself is a human-leveled outcropping of limestone rock one mile square which rises 150 feet above the present river level and valley, and is believed to have a minimum depth of at least 400 feet. On the plateau are the remains of eleven stone pyramids, but of these the largest and most awe-inspiring, the one which overshadows all the rest, was raised at the extreme northeast protrusion of the plateau—the Great Pyramid.

Most conservative historians are of the opinion today that the Great Pyramid was built using primitive methods. Measurements were made with ropes, sticks and rolling wheels. The stones were carved and finished using simple copper tools. And the blocks were hauled and placed into the Pyramid through the efforts of hundreds of thousands of workmen engaged in pulling wooden sleds up earthen ramps.

But when we examine the precision of its construction, as well as calculate the logistics that would have been involved in building the Pyramid by manual labor alone, we find that the conservative theory is totally unfounded. The evidence, in fact, points to the uses of an unknown technology in the Pyramid’s construction so sophisticated we possess nothing today that can match it.

Engineers have discovered that the foundation of the Great Pyramid is amazingly level. No corner of its base is more than one-half inch higher or lower than the others. When we consider the Pyramid’s base covers 13.11 acres, this degree of near-perfect leveling over such a large area is truly remarkable. In fact, it is far better than what modern surveyors tolerate in modern building construction.

One conservative idea explains the Pyramid’s accurate leveling this way: The builders first constructed a wall enclosure around the foundation site and filled it with water.

Then, using the water level as a guide, a series of holes were drilled into the bed relative to the water level. Once the water was removed, the bedrock was excavated and smoothed over, uniform to the depths of the holes.

While this sounds practical, actual tests have shown that--because of the action of air currents on water surfaces (it gets very windy atop the Giza plateau), the difficulty of drilling into water-soaked rock, and the expansion and contraction o the rock due to saturation and then subsequent drying—the closest accuracy of leveling over a 13-acre area would have been within one foot. But the level of the Pyramid is closer to near-perfection by 24 times that amount.

After the leveling was completed, a base platform stone foundation was laid out, upon which the Pyramid structure was built. This platform too exhibit’s a remarkable degree of leveling. The Egyptian Survey Report of 1925 revealed that no corner of it was horizontally off from any other by less than seven-eighths of an inch.

The platform stones are composed of local limestone, averaging 21.5 inches in depth, and extend beyond the outer edge of the Pyramid structure averaging about 15 and three-quarter inches, at places at its very end sloping down about 18 degrees from the perpendicular. The surface of the platform, where the structure blocks have been removed above it, shows evidence of having been cut into, to receive each individual block, up to a depth of 2 inches.

These cuttings, as well as the joints between the platform stones, show a sophistication of precision that can only be appreciated using the best optical survey equipment available today.

Extending just beyond the platform at each of the Pyramid’s corners is a curious incised rectangular impression called a socket. They were discovered by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1880-81. Of all the pyramids in Egypt, only the Great Pyramid has them.

The sockets vary in depth relative to the platform, from 22 and a third inches for the southwest socket to just over 41 inches for the southeast socket. While these impressions define the true diagonals of the Pyramid within a fraction of an inch, yet they are also each at slightly different distances from the center of the structure, and the farther out they are, the deeper is the socket.

It is clear these squared holes were meant to hold something. One concept proposed is that the sockets once held small obelisks of Tura limestone, which were used as sighters for making specific measurements, but which the Arabs probably removed along with the Pyramid’s casing stones in the fourteenth century. Just what, exactly, was being measured at these corner obelisks will be the subject of studies to come.

Another curious aspect of the Great Pyramid is that it is still, even after the many thousands of years since its construction, one of the world’s most accurately aligned buildings to true north. The alignment is only one-twelfth of a degree off true north-south, and one-thirtieth of a degree off true east-west.

In terms of each side, the north side of the Pyramid is aligned to within 2 minutes 28 seconds of a degree, the south side within 1 minute 57 seconds (an error of only 1/10th inch in 756 feet), the east side within 5.5 minutes, and the west side within 2.5 minutes.

One of the best examples our own civilization today can offer for a perfectly aligned building is the Paris Observatory, and it is aligned 6 minutes off from true north.

Without a doubt, the one thing that is most impressive about the Great Pyramid is its size and volume. The average side length of the Pyramid is 755.78 feet, with a perimeter of 3,023. 13 feet. The height is calculated at 480.95 feet.

Within the total area of the Pyramid is 85 million cubic feet of stone, weighing an estimated 6 million tons. There is more masonry in the Great Pyramid than in all the churches and cathedrals built in England since the time of Christ, or more stonework than in St. Paul’s, St. Peter’s and Westminster Abbey combined.

In more modern terms, the Pyramid contains enough material to build 30 Empire State Buildings, or construct a highway 3 feet thick and 18 feet across from New York City to Salt Lake City, or build a wall 6 feet tall and 1 foot wide between Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon.

Another way of visualizing it is to imagine if all the Pyramid’s stones were sawed into one-foot square blocks and laid end to end, then the line would stretch two-thirds around the world.

No other structure matched the Pyramid in volume as a single stone construction in recorded history until the building of the Great Wall in China.

Despite its vast size, the Great Pyramid exhibit’s a stability that is a marvel even to modern engineering. H. Rossler, a Swiss architect-engineer, calculated that the horizontal thrusts of weight are directed toward the central core at every level of construction, and thereby reinforces the stability of the inner core of masonry, reaching from the summit to the base, with only the remainder of these thrusts having to be carried down into the rock bed. The stability thus increases with the height of the Pyramid.

The Pyramid structure is for the most part composed of over an estimated 2,300,000 blocks of limestone, each block averaging 50 x 50 x 28 inches, and weighing 2.5 tons apiece. No doubt, some of the blocks were quarried at Giza itself, probably as part of the residue from clearing and leveling the plateau in preparation for the building. But chemical analysis shows a good number of the blocks came from limestone quarries 10 miles east from the Pyramid on the other side of the Nile and modern Cairo.

A recent proposal made by French industrial chemist Joseph Davidovits that the Pyramid blocks were not quarried but instead were poured into molds and set, is contradicted by the fact that the blocks show natural fissures and fossil shell inclusions typical of the geological strata of the local Mokattan formations.

The blocks were built up from the Pyramid base in a series of 210 tiers or courses, a number which is the mystical 1 x 2 x 3 x 5 x 7—the first Prime Numbers. Today, however, the last 7 courses are missing, along with the capstone, so that what remains at the top is a relatively flat area about 20 feet by 20 feet.

Curiously, from base to apex, the stonework is not uniform in thickness, but reveals several prominent changes. As Kingsland reported, based on the measurements taken by Sir Flinders Petrie:

“The levels decrease tolerably uniformly as we ascend, but at the 35th course there is a sudden and marked increase in the depth. This course is 49.8 inches deep, while the one immediately below it is only 26.2, and the one above it 41.1. There are several sudden increases, but none so marked as this. The 67th course marks an increase from 23.7 to 35, and the 90th course from 22.7 to 38.5. At the 98th, the 118th, and the 144th there are similar increases, this latter being from 20.9 to 31.1. Although these increases are not so great as that of the 35th course, yet they are—considering the diminuation as we ascend—practically proportional to that increase.”

Deep in the Pyramid’s interior, in what is called the King’s Chamber, the builders utilized blocks of granite, which came from Aswan, a distance of 490 miles upriver to the south. The ceiling of the King’s Chamber and the supporting structures above it contain the most massive stone blocks in the Pyramid, each being 27 feet 8 inches by 7 feet square on average, and each weighing between 73 and 75 tons.

Originally, the entire Pyramid was covered on the outside with beautiful limestone casing stones, which gave the structure smooth, finished surfaces. According to Arab historian Abdul Latif, the first stone were removed by order of Karakush, attendant to Saladin, toward the end of the twelfth century.

The vast majority of stones, however, was dismantled soon after 1356, when an earthquake destroyed most of Cairo, and the Arabs stripped the Pyramid in order to rebuilt the city. Today, one can still see the remains of the Pyramid’s outer skin preserved in the mosques of El Rifai and El Hassan, and the fortress of Qalat el Gebel.

Fortunately, not all the casing stones were robbed. Twenty-three still are in place at the Pyramid’s base, having been buried under sand that once straddled the monument’s sides, which were never penetrated by the Arabs, and only in recent times cleared away by the first European archaeologists. These buried stones, plus fragments of others found scattered about the base, have proven important because they preserve for us the exact angle at which the Pyramid rose—51 degrees 52 minutes—from which we can calculate what was the original height of the structure.

The casing stones were made of limestone much finer than hat of the interior blocks, and were quarried at Tura and Masura opposite Memphis, to the south. This is a type of limestone which becomes harder and more polished with time and exposure to the elements. In their heyday, in fact, the Pyramid casing surfaces we know glistened in the sunlight, for the Egyptians and early Arabs called the Giza Pyramids Ta Khut, the “Lights,” or Ikhet, the “Glorious,” and used them for navigating through the desert up to several miles away.

During the late Roman period, however, this shimmering beauty was temporarily marred when the Pyramids were coated up o 2 millimeters (one-sixteenth of an inch) thick with red paint or stucco, composed of crushed Aswan granite mixed with red ochre having a manganese-ferrous oxide or hematite base. Egyptologist Andre Pochan and Sarbonne chemist Francois Boulanger, using a spectrometer, demonstrated in 1953 that many casing stone fragments still have slight red residue covering their outer surfaces, very different in chemical composition from the rest of the stone. Fortunately, this eye-sore of a coating on the Pyramid appears not to have lasted very long, having washed or flaked off for the most part soon after this application.

The Romans—who had no sense of appreciating ancient art—were also responsible for painting the Sphinx red as well.

Each of the Great Pyramid’s casing stones weighed an average of 16 tons, and measured 5 x 8 x 12 feet. The total number of stones is estimated to have been 115,565, covering the 22 acres of the Pyramid faces. Sir Flinders Petrie, who conducted a highly detailed survey and measurement of the monument in the early part of the nineteenth century, discovered further that the casing stones had been cut and positioned with unbelievable accuracy. He reported:

“The eastern joint of the northern casing stones is on the top .02, .002, .045 inches wide; and the face .012, .022, .013, and .040 inches wide. The next joint is on the face .011 and .014 inches wide. Hence the mean thickness of the joints is .020 inches; and therefore the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square is but 1/100th of an inch on a length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal only to the most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length. These joints, with an area of some 35 square feet each, were not only worked as finely as this, but cemented throughout. Though the stones were brought as close as 1/500th of an inch, or in fact, in contact, and the mean opening of the joint was but 1/50th of an inch, ye the builders managed to fill the joint with cement (an amalgam of powdered gypsum, carbonate of lime and sand), despite the great area of it, and the weight of the stone to be moved—some 16 tons.

“To merely place such stones in each contact at the sides would be careful work; but to do so with cement in the joints seems almost impossible.”

Modern builders regard a 1/10th inch tolerance to be a standard of excellence. So how did the Pyramid builders cut and position multi-ton blocks to a precision 5 to 10 times better? Clearly, the conservative theory that the builders used only sticks and lengths of rope and rolling wheels for measuring cannot be justified. The temperature changes, humidity, and fiber tension in rope and wood would have certainly created far greater errors than found in the Pyramid.

The mystery deepens when we realize that all six sides of each casing stone were cut with the same accuracy. Calculating with 115,565 such blocks, it means that the cutting—at a precision of one-fiftieth to one-one-hundredth of an inch—was accomplished over a total area of approximately 130 acres of stone surface. What is amazing still, this same degree of accuracy can likewise be observed in other portions of the interior construction of the monument, multiplying the amount of actual cutting area by several hundred times.

With such a refined degree of measuring and cutting so evident, we may well ask what kind of tools did the Pyramid builders use? In the Cairo Museum today one can see several simply copper and bronze saws on exhibit, which conservative scholars claim are like those that were utilized in the shaping of the Pyramid blocks, both the limestone and the granite.

But there is one problem here. On the Mohs Hardness Scale of Minerals, copper and bronze have a hardness of 3.5 to 4, copper with 2 percent beryllium (which is the hardest known copper alloy) is 4.5. The Pyramid limestone, on the other hand, had a hardness factor of 4 to 5, and the granite 5 to 6. What this means is that any type of copper or bronze tool would with extreme difficulty cut through the limestone, and barely scratch the granite at all.

One Egyptologist proposes that the cutters simply spent most of their time heating, hammering and tin-tempering their copper tools, and had to put up with a high loss by dulling and breaking blades. But one must remember that we are dealing with 115,000 casing stones, 2,300,000 building blocks, and several hundred hard granite monolithic blocks. The amount of time spent on constantly re-melting, reshaping and re-tempering the copper tools would have been many times longer than the actual man-hours spent on building the Pyramid itself.

There is a possibility that iron and steel may have been used, but here again we find severe limitations. On the Mohs Hardness Scale, even the best steel today has a factor of 5.5, which means it can cut limestone, but granite would still pose a problem.

When the Arabs broke into the Pyramid nearly 1,200 years ago, it took them over three months to tunnel inward 92 feet, employing full-time blacksmiths to repair tools made of the finest steel. When it came to obstacles of granite, by every means available to them they could not at first break through, eventually using heavy sledge hammers, but in most cases had to resort to the slow, painstaking task of digging around the blocks, through the softer limestone.

Above and beyond this, because the Egyptian soil is especially nitrous, anything made of iron or steel corrodes relatively quickly, so that there would have been a high turnover of tools simply form weathering. What is more, there is no substantiated archaeological evidence for the existence of either iron or steel existing in Egypt in the early Dynasties or before. In 1837 an assistant to Colonel Howard-Vyse, J. R. Hill, reported that he found a piece of sheet iron he claimed was embedded in an inner joint within the Pyramid. However, the piece of sheet iron was discovered during blasting done to clear rubbish blocking the southern air channel to the King’s Chamber, and came from a location only two layers deep from the outer surface of the Pyramid. We now know that extensive repair work was carried out on the Pyramid’s outer surface during the course of its long history, and the iron in question probably dates to a much later time of reconstruction, not to the period of the building’s first erection.

If metals could not adequately penetrate or shape the Pyramid stones, then another possibility might have been acid. Limestone can be dissolved in cold dilute acids such as citric or acetic acid. Citric acid, however, from oranges, limes and lemons, is and always has been in short supply in Egypt. As for acetic acid, it is found up to ten percent in solution in vinegar, and in similar quantities in old wine or fermented papyrus extracts.

Though these sources were certainly plentiful, the acid diluted in mixture would have been so weak it would have taken numerous applications for it to take full effect on the limestone surfaces. And the end result would not have been a clean, smooth surface as one finds on the Pyramid blocks, but rather an surface pitted with small pockmarks from the uneven dissolving action caused by the acid being unbalanced in solution.

Furthermore, while there is a slim chance that acid may answer the question of finishing the limestone, it does not begin to solve the mystery of the granite blocks. For granite is very resistant to most known acids, even at full strength.

Sir Flinders Petrie, over a century ago, proposed that the Pyramid blocks had been cut using saws with nine-foot blades and teeth studded with diamonds or corundum. Petrie came to this conclusion after observing what he thought were saw-marks on several of the King’s Chamber blocks, and calculated that only diamond or corundum could have penetrated the granite with success. But once again, there are difficulties involved. First, in the cutting of millions of blocks, even diamonds and corundum wear out, and what builder could have afforded the cost of a fortune in diamonds and rare corundum necessary to complete the awesome task? Worse than this, Petrie himself realized the impossibility of his idea when he calculated that in order for his nine-foot saws to cut through the granite, a pressure exceeding two tons would have had to have been continuously applied. Even if the diamonds or corundum had survived such a crushing weight, it is unlikely that the rest of the saw would have, even if it had been made of steel. On the first two-ton pressure application, the saw would be bent and broken to pieces.

So what possibility is left? A clue may be found in the so-called saw-marks observed on some of the Pyramid blocks. Several modern experts have examined the marks and have determined that they form the same patterns as would be created by a laser or sonic (maser) beam. The laser (or light amplified beam) in its most powerful concentration can cut through the hardest substances known, while leaving a very smooth surface in its wake. A maser or amplified sound beam could be harmonically tuned to create a cutting edge that was selective to granite only, and thus would have dissolved the mineral easily, much in the same manner sound can break glass attuned to it. It too, directed properly, can leave a highly smooth and accurately measured surface. If several lasers or masers were used at the same time, then their beam overlap would have caused the tell-tale abrasion marks seen on the Pyramid blocks.

Did the ancient Egyptians actually possess a technology sophisticated to the degree of understanding and operating laser-maser cutting tools on a grand scale? When we look at the evidence of “out-of-place” or anomalous artifacts discovered along the Nile—reflecting on an advanced knowledge of electricity, electrolysis, electric illumination, the Dendera electron tubes and plasma generation, as well as an impressive mechanical aptitude demonstrated in the designs of the Saqqara glider, the Antikythera computer, and ancient crystal lenses—the ability to create and utilize concentrated light and sound waves would by no means have been beyond their potential development.

A number of scholars point to both early Egyptian and Hebrew traditions regarding the power of strange “boxes” that were employed for various energy usages. One Egyptian legend tells how during the Zep Tepi or Age of the Gods, the god-king Ra created a “golden box” into which he deposited a number of his instruments of authority—his rod or staff, a lock of his hair (wiring?), and a cobra image (symbol of divine power) which he wore as a uraeus upon his forehead (the psychic third eye). After this passage, his successor, the god Geb, ordered that the golden box of Ra be brought to him and unsealed, so that he could manipulate the power tools for himself. Not understanding their usage, however, precipitated a major disaster.

As Geb tried unsuccessfully to work with the tools, a bolt of fire (what in the hieroglyphs was described as “the breath of the divine serpent”) was discharged from the box, killing everyone present except the god-ruler who was severely burned but managed to survive.

Some experts see this story not only as linked with the Hebrew Ark of the Covenent (which was likewise a gold-covered box containing power objects; its designer, Moses, we remember had been High Priest of Heliopolis before the Exodus), but also points to a connection with other similar devices depicted in Hebrew legends. One of these, called a shamir, utilized a “serpent” or energy beam to cut the rocks “without sound” used in the building of the Temple of Solomon. Had the Egyptians utilized the same lost technology in cutting the blocks for the Pyramid? We are reminded, too, of Solomon’s mysterious light sources called tsohars which gave off illumination in his Temple continually with no fire or heat present. We may also have an echo here of the wall engravings of “electron tubes” found in the Egyptian temple of Hathor at Dendera, which portray energy “serpents” being manipulated inside huge glass containers.

It is one thing to consider how the Pyramid stones were shaped—it is quite another matter trying to explain how they were moved and placed into the Pyramid structure. The subject of what the means were by which the Pyramid was built is one that has generated numerous heated debates in historical and archaeological circles for well over two centuries. The scorecard so far shows the conservatives losing, because for every theory they give for construction having been done by primitive methods, a multitude of serious objections can be raised to show otherwise.

The conservative scenario of how the Pyramid project was accomplished follows these lines: First, the stone were quarried and roughly shaped, then they were each dragged to the Nile bank by the combined efforts of a large number of workmen, pulling the stones with ropes on wooden sleds across roadways of logs, on which oil was poured to reduce friction.

The stones were then loaded on barges and floated across the river (or in the case of the Tura limestone casing stones and the Aswan granite blocks, down river) to a landing stage near the Pyramid where another team of workers again dragged the stones on sleds to the building site. Here the stones were finished and dressed. Finally, the stones were slowly hauled up one or more earthen ramps, or were lifted up tier by tier by a series of levers, to their designated placed in the Pyramid.

The first impression usually is that all this sounds somewhat plausible. But let us examine the various aspects of this scenario in more detail.

For the method of moving the stones, the conservative historians point to a painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep from the Twelfth Dynasty. The painting shows 172 men straining themselves on ropes, pulling a wooden sled on which rests a stone statue estimated to have weighed 60 tons. One man, riding on the front of the sled, is pouring olive oil on the roadway below, to lubricate and help facilitate the sled’s movement.

While this picture is most convincing, there are problems with associating it with the building of the Pyramid. First, according to conservative historians’ own reckoning, the Pyramid dates to the Fourth Dynasty, which means there is a minimum of five centuries between the Pyramid and when the tomb painting was made. There is no proof whatsoever that the techniques of transporting large blocks utilized during one era were the same used half a millennium before. As we shall see later, the time gap is really much greater, by more than eight thousand years.

The argument breaks down even further when we remember the quantity of Pyramid stones dealt with. The hauling by muscle, sled and oil may have been adequate to move one stone, but what about a total of over 2,300,000 stones?

First, consider the amount of olive oil that would have been needed for reducing the friction of movement. Olive oil was a precious and expensive commodity in ancient Egypt. It was found as gifts only in the most well-to-do of the ancient tombs.

The reason is simple—there were definite limits of olive oil in supply. Even if the Pyramid builders had imported olive oil from all neighboring countries, the quantity that would have been necessary to constantly wet the roadways for the sleds moving 2,300,000 blocks from the quarries and to the Pyramid and up the ramp, would have consumed the entire production of olives in the ancient world for two centuries.

An even bigger problem involves the quantity of wood needed. Timber, of course, would have been essential for the building of the hundreds of sleds, and for the barges transporting the stones on the river. But the most wood would have gone into the various roadways over which the sleds were pulled.

Because of the large weights being exerted on tem, coupled with them being repeatedly softened by applications of oil, they would had to have been constantly replaced with fresh logs. With 2,300,000 blocks dragged over them, the number of logs used up could only have been staggering. In fact, one conservative estimate puts the number at 26 million trees necessary to fulfill the requirements.

Now the land of Egypt itself has no forests, and its only trees--olive, date palm, etc.--were used for food and economic purposes, and could not have been spared for construction. The only possible nearest source of timber would have been the forests of Lebanon, the wood of which we know from ancient records the Egyptians frequently utilized, even as far back as Predynastic times. But the need of 26 million trees would have completely stripped Lebanon bare many times over. The cedars of Lebanon which contain the most durable wood are nevertheless a slow-growing tree and would have taken at least a century to replace each time the forests were stripped. Besides, even if such a vast quantity of wood could have been found, how much more wood would have been consumed to build the ships to carry the timber to Egypt by sea?

There are objections, too, to the Pyramid builders supposedly having transported the stones by barges on the Nile. In Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple near Luxor are wall engravings showing barges loaded with obelisks 200 x 80 feet in size, with a weight of the full barge estimated at 1,500 tons.

But the pictures date to about 1500 B.C.E. or over a thousand years after the Pyramid was supposedly built. There is no evidence such barges were in existence in the Pyramid age.

And even if they were, the actual transportation of the stones on the river is only half the problem. The other half involves getting the stones on and off the barges. It is known that the only time when work could have been done on the Pyramid was during the Nile flood stage, when the croplands were inundated for three months every year, and when farmers would have been idle and available as a labor supply. But the flood stage is also the most dangerous time to be sailing on the Nile, the waters being at their highest and swiftest, with many unpredictable and treacherous currents.

More than this, the Nile’s shores during those months were constantly changing, and always uncertain. How could millions of multi-ton blocks have been loaded and unloaded on flooded, shallow, muddy, shifting banks? The engineering problems involved are monumental, even by today’s standards, let alone for Egypt at least 4,600 years ago.

The next serious crack in the conservatives’ picture of how the Pyramid was built concerns the so-called ramp up which the stones were hauled to their positions. Again, scholars point to a tomb painting for their evidence, this time from the Eighteenth Dynasty, depicting small ramps used to erect temple columns. But as we have noted above, such paintings do not date from the Pyramid era, and are therefore inconclusive. In addition, while such ramps may have been utilized to up up 15-foot columns, a ramp for constructing a 480-foot monument is entirely a different matter. The gradient level for such a ramp, to facilitate the hauling upwards of multi-ton stones, could not have been steeper than 1 in 10.

This would mean, however, that the beginning of the ramp had to be placed 6,000 feet away from the base of the Pyramid, and the total volume of the ramp would have exceeded 75 million cubic feet of earth, almost equal to the Pyramid itself. There would have been more work involved with the ramp than with the Pyramid, because the ramp would have been piled up, and then dismantled when the project was completed.

There is, too, the added problem that the higher the ramp was built, the narrower becomes the ramp way at the top. To have enough room for several hundred men to maneuver the large blocks at the top of the Pyramid would have required the ramp way at this level to be at least 40 feet wide. With such a width, the widening down to the base would have more realistically required a ramp twice the volume of the Pyramid.

One alternative proposed is that, instead of one long, straight ramp, the builders constructed a spiral ramp, up around the sides. But a spiral built around a scale model Pyramid shows the gradient level would have been far too steep for practical purposes, or the volume of the spiral would have been no improvement over the straight ramp. Writer-researcher Graham Hancock noted further:

“Other Egyptologists have proposed the use of spiral ramps made of mud brick and attached to the sides of the Pyramid. These would certainly have required less material to build, but they would have also failed to reach the top. They would have presented deadly and perhaps insurmountable problems to the teams of men attempting to drag the big blocks of stone around their hairpin corners. And they would have crumbled under constant use. Most problematic of all, such ramps would have cloaked the whole pyramid, thus making it impossible for architects to check the accuracy of the setting-out during building.”

The final blow to the ramp theory is the simple fact that nowhere in the area of the Pyramid do we find any tangible trace that a ramp once existed. Minor piles of debris exist here and there, but nothing that points directly to the remains of what should have been gigantic slopes or ramps. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C.E., made this significant observation:

“The most remarkable thing is that, though the construction was on such a great scale, not a trace remains either of any mound or stonework, so that they (the Giza pyramids) have the appearance not of being the slow labor or men, but look like sudden creation, as though they had been made by some god and set down bodily in the surrounding sand.”

Many conservative historians admit the ramp theory is untenable, and believe that cranes or levers may have been used instead. The Egyptian fellahin or farmers today utilize a simple lever device called a shadruf for raising water from the Nile river into irrigation ditches. But there is no evidence how far back in time such levers were employed, or if such simple devices could have handled multi-ton blocks. Even if such were proven possible, there is a question of just how useful the levers would have been in lifting stones up the Pyramid. One proposal suggests that levers were placed along the four sides, and at each of the 210 tiers, making a grand total of 3,500 levers needed to do the job. Each stone would have been raised from one tier to the next, transferred to the lever positioned immediately above.

But to get even a single stone to the top would have involved so much time and effort as to make the entire method impractical.

We may add to this the observation that there are several post holes on the Pyramid and in the floor pavement around the Pyramid, but they appear in random patterns and not enough to have been used as supports for the levers needed.

As authors Clark and Englebach concluded: “Though here and there holes can be seen in the pavement or in the stone courses, in which levers may have been engaged when used as handspikes, or in which the fulcrum of the levers may have been anchored, they must be disregarded in the inquiry, since they are the exception.”

To deepen the mystery further about how the stones were moved, we find several examples in the Great Pyramid and neighboring pyramids of impossible engineering feats, stone blocks that were placed into positions where no cranes, levers or even sheer human strength alone could have put them. Sir Flinders Petrie fond a two-ton portcullis in a narrow passage in the Second Pyramid at Giza in a place inaccessible to a crane, and where no more than 7 or 8 men would have gotten to it. But the size and weight would have required the manpower of at least 50 or 60 men.

In the King’s Chamber ceiling in the Great Pyramid, the 75-ton blocks were carefully lifted and positioned using an area where only 4 to 6 men can stand, yet their massive size dictates the need for at least 2,000 men to grapple them. If human energy, even utilizing simple cranes, was not employed, what kind of energy was?

Reading through various works on the Great Pyramid, one finds quite a number of explanations made by authors attempting to show how “possible” it was to build the Giza monuments thousands of years ago by primitive methods alone. However, a severe blow was struck against the conservative viewpoint not by means of more calculations and statistics, but by the actual attempt to build a pyramid.

In February, 1978 an archaeological team from Waseda University near Tokyo, in association with the Nippon Corporation of Japan, received permission from the Egyptian government to begin construction of a 35-foot mini-pyramid, which was to be located just to the southeast of the Third Pyramid of Giza. The aim of the project was not for size but for technique. The Japanese endeavored to complete the pyramid building task by utilizing the same primitive methods supposedly employed by the ancient Egyptians, or at least the methods claimed they employed by modern archaeologists.

The Japanese objective was to quarry the stone out of the nearby hills, float them across the Nile by raft, drag them to the building site by the “heave-ho” method of large numbers of men pulling on the stones with ropes, and finally lifting and placing the stones into the pyramid structure with simple levers. The new pyramid was to be a showcase of how it was all accomplished.

But no sooner had work begun on the pyramid when the planners found themselves faced with insurmountable problems. First, the rock for the stones resisted most of the hand tools tried to cut them, so workers had to resort to modern air-jack hammers to accomplish the task. Then the quarried blocks could not be safely floated on the Nile river by wooden raft, so finally they were ferried across by modern diesel-powered boats. Once ashore, the stones were tackled by large teams of hired Egyptian workmen, but the stones budged little, sinking instead into the river silt and desert sands.

Again, modern technology had to be called upon, and heavy trucks were toiled to their limits in transporting the stones to the pyramid site. As a last straw, neither could the great number of workmen lift the weighty stones using ropes, levers or pulleys, so a large industrial crane had to come to the rescue, and eventually a helicopter, to put the stones in place.

Even then, employing some of the most powerful lifting equipment known today, the work of positioning the stones into the pyramid was slow and tedious, with the blocks left greatly out of alignment, and many broken and battered, by the difficult and clumsy handling. And these were stones only averaging less than one-half a ton in size each.

At this point the Egyptian government intervened, and fearing that the unauthorized use of heavy equipment was destroying the desert environment, ordered the Japanese pyramid to be torn down as soon as it was finished, to remove it as an eyesore. Even this, however, proved not to be an easy task.

Though the project ended in failure, the Japanese did demonstrate two important points. First, that the simple methods conservative scholars have for so long said were once used to build the Pyramid were totally inadequate for the job.

And second, even employing machinery of modern technology fell short of what was needed for quarrying, transporting, lifting and placing the blocks. The Japanese, with their crude and poorly shaped pyramid only 35 feet tall and composed of less than half-ton blocks, could only wonder all the more at the unknown forms of energy and wisdom which ages ago had gone into building a structure of over 2,300,000 blocks, between 2.5 and 75 tons each, all together rising 481 feet high, and positioned with spacing between the blocks of no more than one one-fiftieth of an inch, plus aligned with a deviation of only one-tenth of an inch over a length of 756 feet—the Great Pyramid.

The conservative theory of the building of the Pyramid crumbles even further when we begin to calculate the human numbers, the logistics and speed with which the Pyramid was erected. Most scholars believe the words of Herodotus, the Greek historian who visited Egypt in 443 B.C.E., and wrote that the Great Pyramid had been built in 20 years’ time, with 100,000 workmen hauling the stones by physical labor. What scholars fail to recognize is that Herodotus, by his own admission, was an Initiate into the secrets of Egyptian higher wisdom, and thus never would have fully revealed the true methods of how the Pyramid was built. His story and estimate were thus purposely written as fiction, to satisfy the curious and uninitiated, and hide the truth for the learned few. The ploy worked beyond his expectations, for even today Herodotus’ narrative is still the most quoted evidence in support of how the Pyramid was constructed.

Let us look at Herodotus’ figures more closely. First, the historian mentions 20 years of labor. As we noted earlier, only 3 months out of every year were available for construction projects, during the flood seasons, since the rest of the time had to be devoted to agriculture to feed the nation. This means an actual work-time of only 1,800 days, or at 12 hours per day, a total of 21,600 hours. Now divide this sum into 2,300,000 blocks, and the result is the Pyramid builders supposedly place about 1,200 blocks a day, or 100 blocks an hour—or more than a block every minute. As any modern engineer will tell you, this is a speed totally incompatible with what can be accomplished with modern technology, let alone a technology based on sheer muscle power.

Herodotus’ mentioning of a labor force of 100,000 stone haulers working at the Pyramid over the designated period can only be part of the total picture. If 100,000 men were dragging stones from the Nile to the Pyramid, then there would also have been needed proportionate numbers of quarrymen cutting stones, men pulling the stones to the barges, sailors unloading (at both ends), technicians, planners, architects, draftsmen, foremen and overseers, stone carvers and dressers, metallurgists repairing tools, men replacing worn-out logs on the roadways, men to construct and maintain the ramp or ramps up the Pyramid, soldiers and policemen to maintain order.

In addition, there would have been women and children to mix cement, and cook, feed, carry water and see to shelter and clothing for the work masses.

The grand total could, with these numbers, have been as many as a million people. The problem is, the archaeological record shows that in the Fourth Dynasty, when conservative scholars insist the Pyramid was built, the entire population of Egypt was less than one and a half million. So for this theory to work, the full population of the Nile would have been needed continuously for two decades of time.

Complicating things even further, there is evidence the Great Pyramid was erected with such a speed and so few a number of workers as to make any form of physical labor out of the question.

In the Pyramid of Senefru, located to the south of Giza at Dashur, an inscription was discovered on the northeast cornerstone, indicating the stone was dedicated in the 21st year of Senefru’s reign. Halfway up the pyramid another inscribed stone was found, dedicated in Senefru’s 22nd year. This means that it took just 2 years to raise the entire monument, a monument that is two-thirds the volume of the Great Pyramid. Now it must be admitted that the construction methods used in the Senefru Pyramid were greatly inferior to the precision of design and layout of the Great Pyramid. But even allowing twice the amount of time to build, by employing the speed exhibited in the Senefru Pyramid, it still means the Great Pyramid could have been raised in as little as 6 years.

There are Coptic legends, in fact, which record that the Great Pyramid was indeed built in exactly that time period. Taking the 3 months’ flood season as the actual work-time every year for 6 years, this figures to a total of 540 days, or at 12 hours per day, 6,460 hours. In terms of stonework, this means an incredible 350 stones were placed an hour, or 6 stones a minute.

Now add to this the discovery by archaeologists of what they believe to have been the actual workingmen’s quarters at Giza, which housed the workers who labored on the various early Dynastic monuments on the plateau. The quarters, the archaeologists have determined, housed no more than 4,000 people.

Even if this number represented only on-third of the total labor force (with one-third working at the quarries, and the other third transporting the stones), this still means a total of only 12,000 workers.

If we were to ask a modern construction engineer, someone who had access to all the latest heavy lifting machinery and sophisticated carving equipment, to build a structure 85 million cubic feet in volume, composed of 2,300,000 stone blocks averaging 2.5 tons each, with each block to be positioned and jointed with tolerances of no more than one one-fiftieth to one one-hundredth of an inch, and to complete the entire task in 540 days with only a crew of 12,000 men….

Before you went any further, the engineer would stop you and tell you what you were asking is not possible by any known means today. If a modern engineer, then, with 21st century technology, could not tackle such a project, how much more impossible would it have been for a “primitive” society—supposedly using sticks, copper blades, sleds and ropes—to have attempted the same work?

But there the Great Pyramid stands before us. The question still remains, just how was it built?

There is a very fascinating clue left to us from antiquity. The 10th century historian Al Masudi preserved from ancient Egyptian sources the legend that tells how, after immediately being quarried, the Pyramid stones were laid on sheets of some unknown metal inscribed with symbols and were “floated” along “roads” also inscribed with symbols. The high priestesses and priests, who alone possessed the secret knowledge, struck each sheet with a special metal rod, causing the sheets to “vibrate.” The sheets then lifted the stones in the air, and moved them by their own power down the “road” the distance of “one bow shot” of an arrow. This procedure was then repeated over and over, until the stones arrived at the Pyramid. The sheets were then struck several more times, they rose in the air a prescribed distance, and the stones were then easily placed into the structure at their desired height.

Al Masudi also recorded the curious facts that the strange “symbols” inscribed were known only to the people in power, that the rods they used to strike the sheets were of a specific length, also kept secret, and that the select few with wisdom spoke “words of sacred energy” with which they performed a variety of feats, including opening heavy doors without effort.

It was these floating sheets, rods and words that were remembered centuries later in Arabian stories of flying carpets, magic wands and the occult words, “Open sesame.” But what were the legends and stories really describing?

One modern interpretation explains the apparatus depicted as an ingenious method of levitation. The sheets were probably of an electrostatic metal, something similar to modern aluminum. The “roads” along which the sheets traveled are major earth currents called leys, and the so-called “symbols” were very likely tracks of conducting material in electrostatic repulsion. When the controllers struck the sheets with their rods, the “vibration” caused suggests the rods imparted an electrostatic charge to the system, resulting in the sheets with their multi-ton loads on top of them being repulsed by the earth energies along the road, and rising in the air a fraction of an inch, eliminating all friction of movement.

If the sheets were made of a special material that was a superconductor at ordinary temperatures, then the sheets and stones would have moved by themselves, caused by what is called the linear accelerator effect in the Earth’s magnetic field. The sheets and stones, the Egyptian legend goes on to say, only traveled “a bow shot” in distance at a time. The reason for this was to slow down the speed of the moving sheets and stones. If the process had been continuous, the sheets would have had to brakes, quickly reaching terminal velocity and flying off into space.

Once the floating sheets and their loads reached the Pyramid, it would only have been a matter of using the same principles on a different scale to levitate the stones to their places in the structure, as described.

A simple moveable scaffolding could have been used to help direct the floated stones to their positions, upon which the controllers stood to impart to the sheets a higher vibration, striking them with the rods of power and speaking further their words of energy. Herodotus may have hinted at the use of such a moveable scaffolding, for he mentioned in his writings that the Pyramid builders used “machines” made of short pieces of wood, that were no levers or cranes, yet were somehow used to “lift” the stones to their desired locations.

The small holes randomly placed on the Pyramid courses and on the platform at the base, may have been the supports fo the ancient simply scaffolding structure.

The beauty of the electrostatic levitation system is it was both very effective and also very efficient. There was no need for sleds, roadways of logs, oil, barges, earthen ramps, cranes, ropes, or impossible numbers of laborers or oxen for the hauling of the stones. A most potent argument in favor of the levitation process having been used is that not one single block found in the Pyramid shows signs of wear marks, chips or scars that would have been the result if the blocks were moved by any other physical method. Once the stones were placed on their floating sheets at the quarries, they never touched another surface again, until they were sonically or laser cut and placed into the Pyramid.

What is more, the actual moving process would have taken the efforts of only a handful of controllers, who, stationing themselves at designated intervals along the roads of earth currents, and upon the scaffolding at the Pyramid, simply recharged the floating sheets with their rods as the sheets came by. Using the electrostatic levitation system, there is no reason why the Pyramid could not have been built in 6 years’ time, and with the aid of only 12,000 people, as the evidence today suggests.

What is noteworthy is that modern physicists and engineers are only now just beginning to understand how the electrostatic system works. Proposals and actual working models have been made employing the principles for speedier, more efficient mass transit systems.

Various models demonstrate that subway cars, for example, ride far better and much smoother on a cushion of magnetic repulsion rather than on wheels.

In April, 1995 government researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico announced their development of a metal-and-ceramic tape—flexible, less than an inch thick, and resembling foil in a chewing gun wrapper—which can be fashioned into electrical cable carrying 100 times more current than existing superconducting material. According to Dean Patterson, head of the Lab’s Superconductivity Technology Center, the tape can carry over 1 million amperes per centimeter, as compared with less than 800 amperes over most commercial No. 12 copper wire. Since passing an electrical current through wire coils generates magnetic fields, one of the new applications for this tape will be to wrap it around specially designed track lines so as to create electrostatic levitation.

The one drawback is that the taping still needs to be cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen to work. Somehow, the ancient Egyptians overcame that obstacle, and developed superconductive materials which operate in normal temperatures, even in desert heat.

The Ancients in general ascribed mystical properties to an unknown substance they called electrum, which was supposed to be a combination of gold and silver fused by alchemical means. Both gold and silver are considered among the most conductive of metals. Did the Ancients know of a way to increase that conductivity dramatically, through a form of alchemy lost to our present technology?

Someone in remote antiquity, it appears, not only understood the principles of this form of levitation, but were applying those principles in practical ways on a grand scale. The Great Pyramid of Giza is a testimony that such an advanced technology existed, and was subsequently and mysteriously lost. We are only retracing the steps of science and technology once traveled before, in an age long forgotten to us.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]