Pyramid Quest by Robert M. Schoch Read Free Book Online Page A

unnecessary trouble, on both the inside and the outside of the structure.
    The internal passages and chambers of the other pyramids of the Third and Fourth dynasties fit their putative purpose as burial sites. Basically, an entryway leads into one or more chambers located under the pyramid or close to its base. The Great Pyramid has a vastly more complex structure.
    The original entrance begins on the Great Pyramid’s north side, as is typical of pyramids in this era, then angles along the Descending Passage to an intersection just above the original bedrock foundation of the pyramid. There the First Ascending Passage angles up, while the Descending Passage continues well down into the bedrock. It ends in a rough-hewn, apparently unfinished room known variously as the Pit, the Subterranean Chamber, and the Cul-de-Sac.
    Meanwhile, the first Ascending Passage rises to an intersection of three passages. The first, called the Well Shaft, heads steeply down through the pyramid, changes course more than once, and connects finally to the Descending Passage before it reaches the Subterranean Chamber. The second Passage follows the horizontal into what was dubbed the Queen’s Chamber by the earliest Arab investigators of the pyramid. They gave it this name because it contained the kind of gabled roof used in women’s tombs among the Arabs, rather than the flat roof found in men’s.

    The passages of the Great Pyramid. ( From Petrie, 1885, plate v. )
    The Great Pyramid currently contains 203 courses of blocks forming horizontal layers believed to run completely through the pyramid. The Great Pyramid does not come to a sharp point or apex, so it is often estimated that there may have been originally seven or eight additional courses, for a total of 210 or 211. The Queen’s Chamber lies at the twenty-fifth course of masonry, and it is large, measuring 19 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 15 to 20 feet high (the ceiling comes to a peak). Its most prominent feature is a large niche cut into the eastern wall. The chamber is built of limestone blocks so precisely joined that it almost appears to have been carved from a single solid block of stone. One curious, and as yet unexplained, feature of the Queen’s Chamber is the pair of vents, or airshafts, that begin 5 inches deep in the rock wall and lead over 240 feet, one north and one south, to within an estimated 20 feet of the exterior. The shafts, which are only about 8 inches square, are lined with limestone conduits. They weren’t simply cut after all the courses of stone were in place. Rather, they were designed in and cut as the stones were put down layer by layer. Why the builders of the pyramid would have gone to so much trouble to route two shafts such a distance, only to leave them sealed at both ends, remains one of the Great Pyramid’s many unanswered questions.
    The third passage branching off the intersection horizontal to the Queen’s chamber enters the Grand Gallery. This remarkable structure stretches for 157 feet at a 26-degree angle under seven-layered corbel walls that angle in on themselves dramatically through their 28-foot height. The Grand Gallery creates the effect of a long, exalted tunnel.
    The Grand Gallery ends in a single immense stone block called the Great Step. Directly behind the Great Step lies a small opening, only 41 to 42 inches high and wide, that gives onto a small room known as the antechamber. Yet another small opening leads to the King’s Chamber. Larger than the Queen’s Chamber, the King’s Chamber measures over 34 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 19 feet high, and it is built entirely of red granite from Aswan, in Upper Egypt. The King’s Chamber lies at the fiftieth course of masonry and is empty except for a lidless, rose-granite sarcophagus (also referred to as a coffer) widely considered to have received the mummy of Khufu. When Westerners first explored the King’s Chamber, however, the sarcophagus was empty. As in the Queen’s Chamber,