The Giza Power Plant Read online

  People who spend their entire careers building things, either on a building site or in a manufacturing tool shop, will know of several ways to do a task. An Egyptologist's attempt to build a pyramid using primitive means may be experimental archaeology, but because it is based on a technologically limited insight into the real significance of the Great Pyramid, it is not scientific; it only proves that what the researchers accomplished can be accomplished in the manner it was accomplished, nothing more. I applaud Dr. Mark Lehner's honesty in confessing that he had used steel tools and a front-end loader while building the demonstration pyramid for the WGBH/NOVA documentary This Old Pyramid.3 I wonder, though, why that construction effort was cut from the film and we viewers never got to see it.

  The most refreshing account of the talent possessed by the builders of the Great Pyramid can be seen in a video produced by Atlantis Rising Video. An interview with respected builder and architect James Hagan, who designed the Walt Disney shopping village in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, the concrete Sanford Stadium at the University of Georgia, and the impressive MARTA Five Points Central Station in Atlanta, reveals an architectural genius of modern times who uses every technique available for modern structures, yet is humbled by the creation of the Great Pyramid. Without pride or arrogance, his humility was combined with awe as he afforded the builders of the Great Pyramid the highest accolade one professional can bestow on another. "The Egyptians, or whoever built the pyramid." he said earnestly in his southern drawl, "they could build anything they want to!"4 His comment becomes more significant when it is understood within the context he set forth, admitting that it would be impossible to build a Great Pyramid today using modern building methods, and, therefore, impossible by primitive methods. "The thing I am concerned about" he said, "are the elements of the construction, and how they came to be. These are the principles I am involved with in my world, and these are the principles I apply to the Great Pyramid." The precision built into the pyramid puzzled Hagan. He doesn't understand why this kind of precision would be necessary. Modern buildings do not require that kind of accuracy, so there is no reason to do it. "So why," he mused, "did they try to accomplish it is the first mystery." His hands-on, real-world experience is bolstered by innocent sincerity and respect that transcends the plethora of amateurs (compared to him) who profess to "know" how the pyramids of Egypt were built, and is credible support for those who still see a mystery in this edifice, and who are still seeking answers.

  It is interesting how Hagan and I came to this point. In school we were both taught that the pyramids were the tombs of the Egyptian kings. After working many years in our respective technological fields, we became more aware of the construction challenges the Great Pyramid presented, and we could compare it with our practical experience. Others are not so fortunate. They must rely only on the experience and opinions of others. General knowledge of the Great Pyramid has been greatly influenced by traditional historical teachings, which are then carried into the popular media. However, the information I am focusing on in this book is not available in most popular works, and so the general population has little comparative data to work with as they evaluate Egyptologists' theories. In proposing methods of construction, academics have given little or no consideration to the fine tolerances maintained throughout the Great Pyramid's structure. They pass over the astounding accuracy of the Descending Passage's construction, or at best give it just cursory consideration (see Figure 13). These facts have not attracted the critical attention they deserve because there is a big difference between reading these figures in a book and the actual experience of having to maintain this precision in one's work.

  FIGURE 13. The Descending Passage

  Regarding the measurements taken by early explorers at the Great Pyramid and the possibility of duplicating this structure while maintaining similar tolerances throughout, the many craftspeople with whom I have discussed these details disavow the primitive construction methods that Egyptologists propose. In my research, I had the opportunity to question modern stonecutters and find out the tolerances they work with. For instance, Indiana is famous for its limestone quarries—there are approximately thirty-three of them in and around Bedford—and they have a long history of providing limestone for many famous buildings, most notably New York's Empire State Building and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

  At one time I lived sixty miles away from Bedford. One day I took an easy and pleasant drive through the picturesque southern Indiana countryside, which was ablaze with fall foliage, to talk to Tom Adams, who at that time worked at one of the quarries. Adams worked in the shop, cutting and dressing the stone, and the accuracy he was required to maintain in his work was not as stringent as for those who work with machine tools. Any craftspersons in a tool shop or machine shop can tell you exactly the tolerances they are working to. I asked Adams about the tolerances they work to in the quarries. He answered, "Pretty close." I asked, "How close is pretty close?" He responded, "Oh, about a quarter of an inch." Adams was astounded to hear that the limestone in the Great Pyramid was cut to .010-inch tolerance. His response regarding the abilities of the pyramid builders confirmed my belief that, contrary to what we have been taught, the pyramid builders were not primitive workers of stone.

  It was clear to me that modern quarrymen and the ancient pyramid builders were not using the same set of guidelines or standards. They were both cutting and dressing stone for the erection of a building, but the ancient Egyptians somehow found it necessary to maintain tolerances that were a mere four percent of modern requirements. Two questions sprang from this revelation. Why did the ancient pyramid builders find it necessary to hold such close tolerances? And how were they able to consistently achieve them?

  It goes without saying that if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone.5 These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place.

  The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inch per foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.

  In Pyramid Odyssey, William Fix stated that the most accurate survey of the base of the Great Pyramid showed it as 3023.13 feet around the perimeter, with the average of the sides being 755.78 feet. If the alignment of this structure was governed by today's building standards, then one side of the Great Pyramid would be allowed a variation of 15.115 inches.

  The generally accepted academic theory on how the base of the Great Pyramid was leveled for the most part cannot account for this accuracy. Egyptologists propose that the area was leveled through the use of standing water: A grid-like system of canals was dug into the bedrock where the Great Pyramid was to stand, and then these canals were flooded. The dry rock, or bank of the canals, was cut level, using the surface of the water as a height gauge. Although there is no evidence to support this traditional theory, at first glance it does appear to have some elements of logic. If we believe that the pyramid builde
rs were not sufficiently advanced to have developed the precision tools that are used by today's surveyors, that would seem to be the only method available to a primitive society. However, proponents of this theory sometimes fail to mention that there is an outcrop of bedrock that was left intact at the center of the pyramid. This would mean that any grid canals would have encircled the bedrock mound.

  More importantly, another detail that so far has not been given any consideration by proponents of this theory is: At what rate would the water in the grid canals system have been absorbed into the porous nummulitic limestone bedrock of the plateau, or have evaporated into the atmosphere? The grid system theory of leveling the base of the Great Pyramid is accepted on the premise that the standing water remained at a constant level in the canals. If such canals were indeed cut, how much water would be needed to reach a saturation point of the limestone plateau, which would be necessary for the water to remain at a certain level in the canals? The presence of fissures in the limestone possibly could be overcome by packing mud into them. However, this still does not explain why a primitive society, which had supposedly not yet invented the wheel, felt the need to build to such tolerances. If they did have that need and the grid system was the only method available to them, it would seem that this process would be so arduous and fraught with uncertainty that the very idea would be open to debate and promptly dismissed by the planners.

  There is no evidence to support the theory that water channels facilitated the leveling of the Great Pyramid, and such a method does not seem very reliable. Mark Lehner proposed that a series of holes in the pavement around the Great Pyramid may have held sticks that were used as measuring devices, but this technique does not account for the pyramid's incredible precision. There is a modern instrument similar to that proposed by Lehner—it is called a transit, which is three sticks (a tripod) with a sophisticated measuring device on the top—but even with this instrument modern builders are not required to achieve such precision.

  There is evidence that shows that ancient Egyptian builders used mechanical means to remove material in order to level the limestone bedrock for the foundation of various structures. In Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, Petrie noted, "At El Bersheh (lat. 27°42') there is a still larger example, where a platform of limestone rock has been dressed down, by cutting it away with tube drills about 18 inches in diameter; the circular grooves occasionally intersecting, prove that it was done merely to remove the rock."6

  Petrie's observations strongly support the speculation that the ancient Egyptians did not carry out their work with painstaking, back-breaking labor, but completed it with speed and precision through the employment of tools that would not be out of place on today's building sites. It certainly makes sense to cut away excess material by using a rotating "drill" and working it down to a preselected required depth. These methods of removing excess material are common in machine shops today. Therefore, it could be suggested that as far as foundation laying goes, the ancient Egyptians had reached a finite state of the art, where there was little room for improvement.

  From their precisely leveled plateau, the ancient pyramid builders raised a mountain of limestone and granite with the same care and precision with which they laid its foundation. The estimated height of the Great Pyramid is 480.95 feet. It is estimated to weigh 5,300,000 tons and contain 2,300,000 blocks of stone. The stones that makes up the bulk of the pyramid are limestone, which was quarried locally on the plateau itself and in the Mokattam Hills across the Nile River, twenty miles away. The inner stones are poorer quality and are known as nummulitic (nummulitic is used to describe round fossil shells; it literally means "coin-shaped"). The composition of the stone is calcium carbonate (CaCo3),whichisanimportantfact to remember when we later look at the evidence that supports my theory.

  The quantity of stone that had to be quarried, hauled, and hoisted into place in the Great Pyramid becomes even more impressive when it is compared with other civil engineering feats, whether real or imagined. It has been stated that it contains more stone than that used in all the churches, cathedrals, and chapels built in England since the time of Christ. Thirty Empire State Buildings could be built with the estimated 2,300,000 stones. A wall three-feet high and one-foot thick could be built across the United States and back using the amount of masonry contained in the Great Pyramid. The list of such comparative observations is long and could fill many pages, but these few suffice to impress upon us the prodigious feat the ancient builders accomplished.

  The Great Pyramid's orientation is as impressively precise as its construction. It is oriented within three minutes of a degree from true north. Researchers speculate that because the pyramid was built 4,800 or more years ago, this variation may have been caused by a shifting of the Earth's crust or of its axis. Whatever the reason for its slight deviation from absolute true north, the Great Pyramid was the most accurately aligned structure in the world until the building of the Paris Observatory.

  Adding to the mystery of the Great Pyramid is the fact that its shape appears to incorporate the mathematical function of pi. This incommensurable number, 3.14159 ad infinitum, exists in a pyramid when the angle of the pyramid's sides is 51° 51'14" per side. Given such an angle, the perimeter of the pyramid is in relationship to its height as the circumference of a circle is to its radius. It may be stretching the truth a little to say that the Great Pyramid had this exact angle, or that it was the builders' expressed intention to have a structure that exhibited this mathematical constant. Still it was certainly close. Petrie's measurements unequivocably show that the angle of the sides of the pyramid was constructed with remarkable precision. He wrote, "On the whole, we probably cannot do better than take 51° 52' plus or minus 2' as the nearest approximation to the mean angle of the pyramid, allowing some weight to the South side."7 Having worked with blueprints where tolerances on angles are frequently given as plus or minus one degree unless otherwise specified, I am certain that Petrie's measurements indicate that the angle of the Great Pyramid was a critical part of the entire structure.

  As we can see, there is four minutes of a degree tolerance band within which anybody so desiring could arrive at the perfect pi angle of 51°51'14". This angle fits well within the tolerance band described by Petrie, and if we wanted to choose this particular figure to prove that the builders had the knowledge of pi, we could probably do so. I prefer to present the data as Petrie did, with deviations that are bound to arise over such a large area. Although the incorporation of pi into the shape of the Great Pyramid has been attributed by some to be pure chance, the fact that such an angle was discovered in the casing stones suggests that the builders were at least knowledgeable in the sciences of mathematics, trigonometry, and geometry.

  The enigmatic Great Pyramid initiates many very basic questions. Why is it so big? Why was it necessary to build it with such a high degree of accuracy? How was it built? Methods of transporting materials to the building site are still under debate. There have been attempts to vindicate traditional theories by following the methods that were proposed in building the pyramids. However, it could be said that hauling or dragging blocks of stone over the desert floor—just to prove that it can be done—does as much to prove that this was the way the blocks were moved as the apprentice toolmaker perspiring over his deburring work proves that his efforts explain the entire General Motors operations, or the Nippon Corporation of Japan.

  It is difficult to ascertain what the Japanese Nippon Corporation was trying to prove when, in 1978, they attempted to erect a sixty-foot pyramid in Egypt. Under prescribed conditions, they received permission from the Egyptian government to erect a pyramid southeast of Mycerinus' Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. They were to use the same methods that the original pyramid builders supposedly used. They were not to use the stone from the plateau itself, but from the quarry that provided the original blocks. The rules were that after Nippon had finished this demonstration, they were to dismantle their pyramid and restore the site to
its original condition.

  Agreeing to these stipulations, the Japanese set to work quarrying, hauling, and erecting approximately one-ton blocks of limestone. The reports and films taken of this operation reveal the difficulties they encountered during their long and difficult task. Reportedly, their first difficulty was getting the stones across the Nile River. In Pyramid Prophecies, Max Toth wrote:

  Once cut into approximate one-ton blocks, the stones could not be barged across the River Nile. Floatation apparently was not the simple answer, as had been suggested. The blocks finally had to be ferried across by steamboat.

  Then, teams of one hundred workers each tried to move these stones over the sand—and they could not move them even an inch! Modern construction equipment had to be resorted to, and once again, when the blocks of stone were finally brought to the building site, the teams could not lift their individual stones more than a foot or so. In the final construction step, a crane and helicopter were used to position the blocks.8

  The reported difficulty the Japanese encountered moving the limestone seems to conflict with other reports by Egyptologists. According to I.E.S. Edwards, moving a one-ton block of limestone was not as difficult as the Japanese made it out to be:

  Without wheeled vehicles, how did the Egyptians move such great weights, and how did they raise them to the heights of the pyramids at Giza? In an experiment not many years ago, a French investigator obtained a one-ton block of limestone. The block was positioned on a track of moist mud taken from the Nile, and a crew of about 50 men was assembled and instructed to pull it with ropes. When they started pulling, the block slid along as if it were almost weightless. With half as many men, the block again ran away. The experimenter soon found that one man, with no difficulty, could push the ton of stone along on the wet mud. In ancient records we see Egyptian crews dragging great weights on sledges while waterbearers wet down the surface ahead.9