The Giza Power Plant Read online

  And, indeed, the sound that Paul Horn brought into my living room was most fascinating. Listening to it, I could understand why so many people develop feelings of reverence when hearing it, for it has a most soothing effect on the nerves. For this alone, the album was worth the price. Horn himself described the effects this sound had on him: "Sitting on the floor in front of the coffer with the stereo mike in the centre of the room, I began to play, choosing the alto flute to begin with. The echo was wonderful, about eight seconds. The chamber responded to every note equally. I waited for the echo to decay and then played again. Groups of notes would suspend and all come back as a chord. Sometimes certain notes would stick out more than others. It was always changing. I just listened and responded as if I were playing with another musician. I hadn't prepared anything specific to play. I was just opening myself to the moment and improvising. All of the music that evening was this way—totally improvised. Therefore, it is a true expression of the feelings that transpired."7

  After noting the eerie qualities of the King's and Queen's Chambers, Horn went out onto the Great Step at the top of the Grand Gallery to continue his sound test. The Grand Gallery, he reported, sounded rather flat compared with the other chambers, but then he heard something remarkable: The music he was playing was coming back to him clearly and distinctly from the King's Chamber. The sound was going out into the Grand Gallery and was being reflected through the passageway and reverberating inside the King's Chamber!

  Horn does not attempt to explain this acoustical phenomenon, but it is tied in with the phenomena noted inside the King's Chamber. It would follow, therefore, that the coffer inside the King's Chamber was specifically tuned to a precise frequency, and that the chamber itself was scientifically engineered to resonate in harmony with sound waves that were generated in the Grand Gallery and focused into it. Perhaps these observations will provide an answer to Horn's experience and to a mystery that Petrie puzzled over at great length. He discovered a flint pebble under the coffer, after he raised it, and instead of dismissing it as debris or otherwise, he mulled over its significance. He wrote:

  The flint pebble that had been put under the coffer is important. If any person wished at present to prop the coffer up, there are multitudes of stone chips in the pyramid ready to hand. Therefore, fetching a pebble from the outside seems to show that the coffer was first lifted at a time when no breakages had been made in the pyramid, and there were no chips lying about. This suggests that there was some means of access to the upper chambers, which are always available by removing loose blocks without any forcing. If the stones at the top of the shaft leading from the subterranean part to the gallery had been cemented in place, they must have been smashed to break through them, or if there were granite portcullises in the Antechamber, they must also have been destroyed; and it is not likely that any person would take the trouble to fetch a large flint pebble into the innermost part of the Pyramid, if there were stone chips lying in his path.8

  If Petrie says that something is important, I tend to take notice of what he is talking about. Nonetheless, I am not convinced that this pebble could not have been brought into the King's Chamber long after the Great Pyramid was built and used to prop up the coffer so that it could be moved. On the other hand, Petrie does pose another alternative that deserves some speculation, and I cannot help wondering if it is possible that the pebble served a greater purpose for those who placed it there. If we had just manufactured an object like the coffer and had it tuned to vibrate at a precise frequency, we would know that to set it flat on the floor would dampen the vibrations somewhat. By raising one end of the coffer onto the pebble, however, it could vibrate at peak efficiency.

  Another unique feature of the Grand Gallery, which needs to be confirmed by on-site inspection, is the approximate angle that is achieved by it having a ratchet-style ceiling. The problem with coming up with an accurate calculation of the true angle of the overlapping stones in this ceiling is that there is conflicting data from the only two researchers I have found who pay these overlaps any close attention. However, preliminary calculations are interesting to say the least. According to Smyth, the angle of the Grand Gallery is 26°17'37", the height of the Grand Gallery is between 333.9 inches and 346.0 inches, and he counted thirty-six overlaps in the 1,844.5-inchlength of the ceiling.9 Writing about his observations and measurements of the tilting tiles, Smyth said, ". . . when I was actually pushing up the point of a long measuring rod, against the roof stones, differences were found to so great an extent as 12.1 inches, which I did attribute chiefly to that very cause [that the tiles did indeed tilt] ."10 With the overlaps estimated to have approximately a twelve-inch tilt, the surface of the overlapping stones in the ceiling yields an amazing approximation to a 45-degree angle from a vertical plane (135 degrees polar coordinates, given that the ends of the gallery are 90 degrees). With this tilt of the roof tiles, a sound wave traveling vertically to the roof would be reflected off the tiles at a 90-degree angle and would travel in the direction of the King's Chamber (see Figure 39).

  This gives pertinence to another report, which did not receive much attention at the time it was made. It has been reported that Al Mamun's men had to break a false floor out of the Grand Gallery, and as they broke one stone out, another slid down in its place. This is a sketchy bit of information that would require further research, if further research is possible, because Al Mamun's men were tearing out so much limestone that little attention was given to this incident. However, what if that stone slid because the tiled floor in this gallery had a rachet style that matched the style of its ceiling? Much of the stone that Al Mamun cut out of the Ascending Passage was dropped down the Descending Passage. Later explorers, such as Caviglia, Davison, and Petrie, eventually cleared this passage of all debris, and most of this debris was dumped on the traditional rubbish pit on the north and east sides of the Great Pyramid. Petrie reported finding inside the Great Pyramid a prism-shaped stone that had a half-round groove running its length. In the Descending Passage he found a block of granite that was 20.6-inches thick with a tube-drilled hole cut through the thickness on one edge. Where this granite came from and what purpose it was used for in the Great Pyramid was a mystery to Petrie, who wrote, "What part of the Pyramid this can have come from is a puzzle; nothing like it, and no place for it, is known."11 With more significant findings attracting researchers' attention, though, it is not surprising these details were not given much consideration.

  FIGURE 39. Roof Tiles of the Grand Gallery

  It has been assumed that the rachet-style ceiling in the Grand Gallery was so designed to prevent an accumulation of forces bearing down the angle of the gallery and pressing on the lower pieces. Yet other angled passages in the Great Pyramid, such as the Ascending and Descending Passages, have flat ceilings, so I am left to conclude that this feature was, indeed, specifically designed for an acoustical purpose.

  Even if some of the masonry clues are now lost to us, it may be possible for an acoustical engineer to confirm that the Grand Gallery indeed reflected sound in the manner proposed by examining only its dimensions and angles. Perhaps this book will encourage an engineer to create a computer model of the Grand Gallery and perform an analysis by simulating the movement of sound within the cavity. Though I have attempted to find some means to accomplish this, I have not been able to find anybody with access to a supercomputer who is willing to do the work, and the software needed to perform the analysis has not, to my knowledge, been published for a microcomputer yet.

  We can also extrapolate other information about acoustical devices that are obviously no longer in place within the Grand Gallery. Knowing that the King's Chamber will respond to sound of a specific frequency, thereby transducing that energy into electrical energy, I theorized earlier that the Grand Gallery housed resonators that converted the coupled Earth/pyramid vibration to airborne sound. The existence of resonators in this gallery is predicted by what has been found inside the King's Chamber and th
e design of, and phenomena noted in, the Grand Gallery. The mystery of the twenty-seven pairs of slots in the side ramps is logically explained if we theorize that each pair of slots contained a resonator assembly and the slots served to lock these assemblies into place. The original design of the resonators will always be open to question; however, if their function was to efficiently respond to the Earth's vibration, then we can surmise that they might be similar to a device we know of today that has a similar function—a Helmholtz resonator.

  A Helmholtz resonator responds to vibrations and actually maximizes the transfer of energy from the source of the vibrations. The resonator is normally made out of metal, but it can be ma4e out of other materials. A classic example of a Helmholtz resonator is a hollow sphere with a round opening that is 1/10 to 1/5 the diameter of the sphere. The size of the sphere determines the frequency at which it will resonate. If the resonant frequency of the resonator is in harmony with a vibrating source, such as a tuning fork, it will draw energy from the fork and resonate at greater amplitude than the fork is able to without its presence. It forces the fork to greater energy output than what is normal, or "loads" the fork. Unless the energy in the fork is replenished, its energy will be exhausted quicker than it normally would be without the Helmholtz resonator. But as long as the source continues to vibrate, the resonator will continue to draw energy from it at a greater rate (see Figure 40).12

  FIGURE 40. Helmholtz Resonator

  To extrapolate further we could say that each resonator assembly that was installed in the Grand Gallery was equipped with several Helmholtz-type resonators that were tuned to different harmonic frequencies. In a series of harmonic steps, each resonator in the series responded at a higher frequency than the previous one. In a manner similar to the King's Chamber's response to energy inputs—its creation of an F-sharp chord—these resonators raised the frequency of the vibrations coming from the Earth. To increase the resonators' frequency, the ancient scientists would have made the dimensions smaller, and correspondingly reduced the distance between the two walls adjacent to each resonator. In fact, the walls of the Grand Gallery actually step inward seven times in their height and most probably the resonators' supports reached almost to the ceiling. At their base, the resonators were anchored in the ramp slots. Not surprisingly, there is additional evidence in the Grand Gallery to support this premise, especially in a design feature of the gallery that is seldom given much thought. This is a groove, or slot, cut along the length of the second layer of the corbelled wall. This groove suggests the resonators were held in place inside the Grand Gallery and positioned, or keyed, into the structure by first being installed into the ramp slots and then held in a vertical position with "shot" pins in the groove. Once the resonator assemblies were positioned and locked into place, the angle of the slot effectively prevented them from moving (see Figure 41). The vertical supports for the Egyptian resonators were most likely made of wood because it is one of the most efficient responders to vibration; and, as we will discuss in chapter twelve, their disappearance from the pyramid can be easily explained. In crafting the resonators out of wood, the ancient Egyptians made a natural and logical choice, as the wood probably emitted a humming sound itself.

  Prior to my visit to Egypt in 1986, I had speculated that the slots along the Grand Gallery floor anchored wooden resonators, but that these devices were balanced in a vertical orientation reaching almost to the full height of the gallery. If this speculation were true, it would logically follow that the geometry of the twenty-seven pairs of slots would provide proof. The bottom of the slots might have been parallel to the horizontal plane rather than parallel with the angle of the gallery, and the side walls of the slots might have been vertical to a horizontal plane rather than perpendicular to the angle of the gallery. This was a significant detail and a simple one to check out.

  FIGURE 41. Design and Installation ofthe Resonators

  My first trek inside the Great Pyramid in 1986 did not reveal anything about the geometry of these slots because they were filled with dirt and debris. The following day I set out with a soup spoon that I had "borrowed" from the hotel restaurant. Digging out the dirt and debris, with tourists and guides looking at me like I was crazy (actually, it was probably illegal to do this as you need special permission to carry out excavations in Egypt), I finally came to the bottom of one slot and it was as I predicted it would be: parallel to the horizontal, and the sides of the slot perpendicular to the horizontal. Other slots were perpendicular to the horizontal as well, though some of them had bottoms that were parallel with the gallery floor. In either scenario, it appears that the slots were prepared to accommodate a vertical structure, rather than to restrain weight that would exert shear pressure from the side (see Figure 42).

  In attempting to determine the design and materials the resonators were made of, we must consider evidence from artifacts that are not inside the pyramid but are housed within the Cairo Museum, where the most remarkable feats of machining in the world can be found. In the museum's collection are stone jars and bowls so finely machined and perfectly balanced that they inspire awe and wonder. One bowl in particular, a schist bowl with three lobes folded toward the center hub, is an incredible piece of work. If the artisans used ultrasonics and sophisticated machinery, I can understand how it could have been made; but even if they used those methods, the purpose for creating such a complex piece, for what is assumed to have been a domestic purpose, has long escaped me (see Figure 43). Other vases with small necks that open into a wide round belly on the inside have confounded other researchers, such as Graham Hancock, who wrote, "During my travels in Egypt I had examined many stone vessels—dating back in some cases to pre-dynastic times—that had been mysteriously hollowed out of a range of materials such as diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and metamorphic schist. For example, more than 30,000 such vessels had been found in the chambers beneath the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara. That meant that they were at least as old as Zoser himself (i.e. around 2650 BC)."13

  FIGURE 42. Grand Gallery Resonators

  FIGURE 43. Schist Bowl

  Regardless of the age of these artifacts, the technical accomplishment of the artisans who created the vases and bowls does not support the notion that they worked with primitive tools. I am in full agreement with Hancock, who pondered on an unimaginable technology and said, "Why unimaginable? Because many of the vessels were tall vases with long, thin, elegant necks and widely flared interiors, often incorporating fully hollowed-out shoulders. No instrument yet invented was capable of carving vases into shapes like these, because such an instrument would have had to have been narrow enough to have passed through the necks and strong enough (and of the right shape) to have scoured out the shoulders and the rounded interiors. And how could sufficient upward and outward pressure have been generated and applied within the vases to achieve these effects?"14

  The questions Hancock posed are legitimate. As a machinist, I have created smaller products with similar geometry, for the aerospace industry. The technique I used to hollow out these modern stainless steel artifacts on a lathe involved drilling a hole and then using a series of L-shaped tools. After the first L-shaped tool had been used to open up the "chamber" bore, I held each successive tool in my hand and "snaked" the L through the neck into the piece before clamping the tool in the tool-holder. Once it was firmly clamped, I had to make sure that it was positioned correctly within the piece before the lathe began to rotate. It was a tricky operation that required the use of a small mirror and a powerful light to see inside the workpiece (see Figure 44).

  The work I performed in steel was easy compared to the granite, diorite, basalt, and metamorphic schist that were cut by the ancient Egyptians. I was extremely puzzled and could not undertand why they went to such trouble to create vases in this manner. We certainly do not go to this trouble to create vases today. Their purpose was obviously very important to have required such an effort. It then occurred to me that perhaps
these stone artifacts were not domestic vases at all, but were used in some other way. Perhaps they were being used to convert vibration into airborne sound. Given their shape and dimensions—and the fact that there were 30,000 of them found in chambers underneath the Step Pyramid—are these vessels the Helmholtz resonators we are looking for? As if to provide us with clues, one of the bowls in the Cairo Museum has a horn attached to it, and one of the bowls does not have handles normally seen on a domestic vase, or urn, but has trunnion-like appendages machined on each side of it. These trunnions would be needed to hold the bowl securely in a resonator assembly (see Figures 45 and 46).

  FIGURE 44. Machining a Swan-neck Vase

  FIGURE 45. Vessel with Horn Attached

  FIGURE 46. Precision Machined and Balanced Bowl

  Heading back to the Great Pyramid, we find more evidence for our theory. The enigmatic Antechamber has been the subject of much consternation and discussion. Ludwig Borchardt, director of the German Institute in Cairo (circa 1925), proposed that a series of stone slabs were slid into place after Khufu had been entombed. He theorized that the half-round grooves in the granite wainscoting supported wooden beams that served as windlasses to lower the blocks (see Figure 47).