For many years, the
Sound and
Light Show at Giza
opened with, "You have come tonight to the most fabulous and
celebrated place in the world. Here on the Plateau of Giza stands
forever the mightiest of human achievements. No traveler, emperor,
merchant or poet has trodden on these sands and not gasped in awe".
Though there
are many outstanding ancient monuments in Egypt that survive to this
day, one in particular is best known and the most closely associated
by the general public with ancient Egypt. It is, of course, the
Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), the largest in Egypt, located on the
Giza Plateau just
outside Cairo. Its
name was "Khufu's Horizon" In fact, even if people have very little
knowledge of Egypt, they will frequently not only know of this
monument, but will also have any number of opinions about how and
when it was built, as well as its function. Arguably, it is the best
known manmade structure in the world, and for good reason.
The name of the Great pyramid, Khufu's
Horizon
Of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World,
Khufu's Pyramid
is the first, and only survivor. It is indeed impressive, originally
standing some 146.59 (481 feet) high and covering about thirteen
acres of land , though in the last hundred or so years, modern
marvels (the Empire State Building, built in 1930, is over three
times as tall though situated on only two acres of land) probably
make it seem less impressive to visitors than to those who, for
thousands of years, came to visit the pyramid prior to our modern
era. In reality, modern scholars for the most part probably find
this pyramid less interesting than many other ancient structures in
Egypt, mostly because it is not decorated with reliefs and
inscriptions (though parts of its subsidiary structures were), and
is otherwise, except for some parts of its
internal structure, a fairly typical pyramid complex.
Other
pyramids are almost as large, and many pyramids are really more
enigmatic. Khufu's pyramid was not the first, nor was it even the
first true pyramid. Other pharaohs, such as
Sneferu,
Khufu's father, had moved probably as much stone, building three
different pyramids himself.
Yet,
Khufu's pyramid
was, in a line of astonishing architectural leaps forward, a
significant link in
Pyramid building's evolution. In terms of its size, the
technical accomplishments of its construction, the great concern for
cardinality and the organization required for its construction,
this pyramid represents a phenomenal effort. Like
later
pyramids, it encompasses all of the standard elements of the
pyramid complex, though most have since disappeared. The finished
pyramid, which included a superstructure and substructure, was
surrounded by an enclosure wall of fine
Turah
limestone, which enclosed a court paved in limestone. There was
a valley temple, a causeway from it leading to a mortuary Temple
that was itself situated against the pyramid. There was also a cult
pyramid, as well as three pyramids for the burial of queens, a
number of boat pit and other structures.
Though we
really do not know with absolute certainty, the pyramid complex of
Khufu probably
remained mostly intact for almost 4,000 years. During that period of
time, most visitors to it must have been amazed by its enormity, and
probably by the ancient Egyptian's reverence toward the structure.
In the end,
the deterioration of this pyramid, like its conception, can be
attributed at least partially to religion. It was created to bury
the king in a complex that would conform to the
ancient Egyptian religion. It probably survived in relatively
good shape until that religion was replaced by another, and then
another. By the time the Arabs invaded Egypt during the seventh
century, there was little or no religious reverence afforded the
structure, so casing stones and other building material from the
complex were reused for new building projects in the area of
Cairo. This process
was not exclusive to Khufu's pyramid and in fact, the reuse of material from older
structures was not even uncommon during the age of the
pharaohs. However, even this did not happen to the Great Pyramids
until, in the Middle Ages, a series of earthquakes loosened the
casing stones and allowed them to be harvested for other projects.
Most people
with a limited knowledge of Egypt believe that the Great Pyramids of
Giza lie out in the
desert, and are therefore rather surprised when, traveling down
Pyramid road to the east,
they see them rise up, seemingly among the distant buildings. They
in fact sit on the city limits of Greater
Cairo, and are
threatened by man's expansion, though scholars are very aware of
this today, and work to prevent damage to the structure.
For awhile,
mankind treated the Great Pyramid with more curiosity than
reverence. It was tunneled through, climbed, and generally abused,
right up to our modern era. In her book, The Mena House Oberoi, Nina
Nelson tells us that,
"Climbing
Cheop's Great Pyramid continues all and every day. ... It is a
labourious task yet everyone who does it enjoys it. The blocks
of stone measure from two to five feet high and certainly one3
should have a guide to help pull one along the difficult
places."
At one time, various people
even attempted to set records for scaling the monument
During World
War II, there were even gun emplacements built on its apex. The
Egyptological community, and particularly
Zahi Hawass can be credited for bringing that to a halt. No
longer are people allowed to climb it (unless very special
permission is granted), and its investigation today is always
non-intrusive. Planes are not allowed to fly above it and in
general, it receives the national protection it deserves.
Nevertheless,
it has been and continues to be a place of considerable activity.
Races were often held at the pyramids, and in recent years, it has
served as a backdrop for artistic displays and musical performances.
With
Zahi Hawass as Chairman of the SCA, it is doubtful that we will
see
many more performances by artists such as Sting and the Grateful
Dead, but it remains the primary venue for Verdi's Aida opera.
Perhaps one of
the most interesting aspects of
Khufu's pyramid
complex is the amazing amount of investigation it has received, and
the astonishing degree of controversy that it has inspired. The
research of the complex continues even today, and new discoveries,
sometimes major ones, have been made even in recent years. For
example, only very recently, the estimated number of blocks used to
build the pyramid itself has been cut almost in half, while as I
write this article, a new robot is being prepared to further
investigate the pyramid's internal structure.
The history of
man's thoughts about this structure is by far more complex, and
often more interesting than the pyramid itself. Even in recent
years, speculation that the pyramid was constructed by aliens or
perhaps Atlantians continues. Countless books have been written
about this Pyramid, many scholarly, but others not.
Take, for
example, the matter of the metric system. Used by most countries as
the official standard of measure, and by the scientific community
worldwide, there has been a reluctance on the part of Americans and
the British to incorporate the system. Much of this may be a
reluctance on the part of their respective populations to change
from the system familiar to them.
However, the Great Pyramid of
Khufu certainly
played a part in all of this.
John Taylor
was an eccentric British publisher who, in 1859, produced a work
entitled The Great Pyramid: Why Was it Built? And Who Built It?
Borrowing from the work of Tompkins, he thought that the Pyramid was
actually built by Noah of biblical fame. He thought that the Great
Pyramid's dimensions were very purposeful, which they probably were,
but he saw in them relationships to many physical measurements, such
as the number of days in the year and the radius of the earth. Part
of his calculations involved a unit of measure he called the Pyramid
Inch which he believed the Egyptians used in building the pyramid,
which only differed from the British inch very slightly. He is
essentially credited with being one of the founders of modern
Pyramidology, but his ideas would probably not have caught on were
it not for the work of Professor C. Piazzi Smyth, a British
Israelite and the Astronomer-Royal of Scotland. Smyth built on
Taylor's ideas. Though Taylor had not traveled to Egypt, Smyth did,
and set about measuring every minute detail of
Khufu's
monument.
Smyth
attempted to connect the measurements he made of the pyramid to many
different natural aspects of the world and our universe, to the
point were even many of his contemporaries thought him ludicrous. A
Christian man, Smyth nevertheless though that the number
relationships he derived from the pyramid were a record of "perfect"
standards of measurement that God intended man to use. In reality,
many of Smyth's calculations seem artificial and arbitrary to us
today. Smyth was hardly a dispassionate, objective scientist when
dealing with the pyramid. His writings shows that he certainly had a
deep emotional commitment to demonstrating "scientifically" that the
Christian religion is true, and that he saw his work with the
pyramid as a means by which he could do so.
In his work,
he pointed out that the meter was devised by man, whereas he
believed the Pyramid Inch, and thus the British Inch, were a
measurement provided by god. And while scientists seem to have in
general rejected the work of Taylor and Smyth, a number of Christian
religious leaders accepted their theories and made them an article
of faith, particularly in England and the US, but also even in
France.
Many of
Smyth's contemporaries and disciples were as hostile to the metric
system as was he. With some amusement Martin Gardner recounts the
fact that in the United States the pyramidologist Ohio Auxiliary
Society, of which President James A. Garfield was a supporter,
published a journal entitled The International Standard to defend
the "true inch" and other measurements against the metric system.
Thus, the Great Pyramid of
Khufu became a
star in the arsenal of 19th century Christianity, and at least for a
time, helped arrest the expansion of the
metric system of measurement. But perhaps more importantly, Taylor
and Smyth helped create a mystic association with the Pyramid Khufu
that spawned imaginative ideas that continue to this day.
When one
visits the Pyramid of Khufu, one is actually walking in the footsteps of the famous,
both of the modern and ancient world.
Alexandria the Great
stood before it, just as modern visitors, and swore to build for his
father, the Macedonian king Philip II, a funerary monument as large
as the Great Pyramid, though death took him before he was able to do
so. Herodotus,
Strabo and
Pliny certainly all made visits to the pyramid. Doubtless, every
famous traveler in antiquity must have visited Khufu's complex. Many
later individuals came to see this wonder of the ancient world, and
they continue to come today. For years, it was popular for them to
climb the pyramid, though this is no longer allowed, but atop it one
can see the names etched in stone of those who did.
Ground Plan of the Great Pyramid Complex of
Khufu
Though most of
the early visitors to the Great Pyramid were non-intrusive, by the
time of the Arab Invasion of Egypt, the ancient Egyptian religion
was gone and so too was apparently the Egyptian's understanding of
the monument. Fables arose of fabulous treasures and immense
knowledge contained within the structure, long before Taylor and
Smyth's work. Finally, Caliph al-Ma'moun (831-832 AD) is believed to
have acted upon this information. Though the pyramid, or at least
the substructure had been breached by unknown robbers during
antiquity, al-Ma'moun was apparently the first known individual to
do so. After having at least looked for the original entrance, but
unable to find it, al-Ma'moun instructed his men to tunnel into the
pyramid from a point at the center of its north face, seven courses
up. Apparently, the pyramid still held at least some of its casing
stones, for they had to light fires to heat the blocks before
cooling them rapidly with vinegar to induce fractures. Once past the
outer core, they dug for about 100 feet, finding nothing in the
process. However, one of the workmen heard a muffled thud of
something heavy falling within the pyramid, not too far away, and
they altered course and eventually broke through into what is now
known as the "Descending Passage". While al-Ma'moun's men explored a
considerable part of the pyramid's interior structure, they
apparently found nothing except an empty coffin, though rumors,
legends and fables, also grew from their exploration.
Even though
al-Ma'moun apparently found no riches or hidden knowledge within the
Great Pyramid, it continued to retain its mysterious, hidden meaning
for most travelers. All of the European scientific travelers and
pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land seem to have visited it. They
are too numerous to mention here. However, the first attempt at an
Egyptological study, it seems, was conducted by John Greaves, and
English scholar from whom Tomkins would later draw some of more
fanciful ideas. he climbed to the top, measured the pyramid's blocks
and also made his way inside the pyramid. His sectional drawing of
the structure is remarkably accurate for its time.
However, only
at the turn of the nineteenth century did true archaeological work
begin using scientific methods. Nathaniel Davison discovered a lower
relieve chamber as well as a tunnel connecting it with the Great
Gallery during the 1760s. The scholars with Napoleon's expedition
also measured and described the Great Pyramid again, and made
exploratory soundings in and around it. Early in the nineteenth
century,
Giovanni Battista Caviglia cleaned out many spaces inside the
pyramid and in 1937, both
Vyse and Perring investigated the structure. Their books,
Operations Carried Out on the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (3 vols.)
and The Pyramids of Gizeh (3 vols.), respectively, are still
valuable sources.
Between 1843
and 1844,
Lepsius focused his attention primarily on the structure of the
Great Pyramid, expressing his view that the core consisted of
inclined accretion layers. For the birthday of the Prussian King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the archaeologists honored their prince and
patron by scaling the pyramid and flying a flat from its top.
Petrie, who carefully examined the Pyramid between 1881 and 1882 did
not agree with Lepsius' accretion theory.
Petrie, who seems to have always been more interested in his
Egyptological studies than comfort, set up his headquarters in one
of the nearby rock-cut tombs, and slept on a layer of sand, using a
kerosene stove for cooking. The account of his investigations,
The Pyramids and
Temples of Gizeh, remains even today one of the most important
studies on the pyramids.
Borchardt also worked on
the famous monument. He first concentrated on explaining the method
originally used to measure and orient the ground plan, and on
reconstructing the stages in which the pyramid was built.
In 1954, The
Egyptian archaeologists
Kamal
Mallakh and Zaki Iskander and their colleagues discovered on the
south side of the Great Pyramid, two pits that contained intact
burial boats. Later, in the second half of the 1980s, the French
architects, Jean-Ptrice Dormion and Gilles Goidin made precise
geophysical measurements of its inner core, which was later
confirmed by a Japanese team.
Finally,
Zahi Hawass, a longtime investigator at
Giza and now the
Chairman of the SCA (Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities),
focused on the grounds of the presumed valley temple, the causeway
and the mortuary temple. It was he who, not so long ago, discovered
the cult pyramid as well as its pyramidion. Though he has now moved
on to head Egypt's antiquity community, work nevertheless continues.
Today, the
Pyramid of Khufu,
though lacking its original luster, remains perhaps the most visited
site in Egypt. It is said that "Man fears Time, yet Time fears the
Pyramids" Hence, the Pyramid of Khufu, though not the oldest in
Egypt, nevertheless has become a symbol of long lasting durability,
and it is probably for this reason more than any other, that one can
still find it pictured on the reverse of the US Dollar Bill.
Technical
The Pyramid
Height: 146.5m
Base: 230.38m
Slope: 51o 50'
Great Gallery
Height: 8.48 to 8.74m
Length 47.85m
Slope: 26o 16'
40"
Queens Chamber
Height 6.26m
Length 5.76m
Width 5.23m
King's Chamber
Height: 5.84m
Length: 10.49m
Width: 5.42m
Causeway
Length: 825m
Boat Pits (On Northeast and
Southeast Corners of Pyramid
internal structure, a fairly typical pyramid complex.
they see them rise up, seemingly among the distant buildings. They
in fact sit on the city limits of Greater
many more performances by artists such as Sting and the Grateful
Dead, but it remains the primary venue for Verdi's Aida opera. 
However, the Great Pyramid of
Smyth
attempted to connect the measurements he made of the pyramid to many
different natural aspects of the world and our universe, to the
point were even many of his contemporaries thought him ludicrous. A
Christian man, Smyth nevertheless though that the number
relationships he derived from the pyramid were a record of "perfect"
standards of measurement that God intended man to use. In reality,
many of Smyth's calculations seem artificial and arbitrary to us
today. Smyth was hardly a dispassionate, objective scientist when
dealing with the pyramid. His writings shows that he certainly had a
deep emotional commitment to demonstrating "scientifically" that the
Christian religion is true, and that he saw his work with the
pyramid as a means by which he could do so.
metric system of measurement. But perhaps more importantly, Taylor
and Smyth helped create a mystic association with the Pyramid Khufu
that spawned imaginative ideas that continue to this day. 