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

two shafts lead from the interior space toward the pyramid’s exterior. The King’s Chamber’s vents, though, do reach all the way to the surface and open into the chamber, creating a pathway for airflow between interior and exterior. No other pyramid has this feature.

    The Grand Gallery looking south. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch .
    Nor does any other pyramid have the five so-called Relieving Chambers constructed atop the King’s Chamber. The uppermost of the five chambers has a pointed limestone roof that channels weight pressing down from above onto the sides and distributes it to the four chambers beneath. The engineering is ingenious. Various scholars have said that the King’s Chamber would have collapsed under the weight of the rock above it without the Relieving Chambers. In fact, though, the Great Pyramid itself contains evidence against this argument. The Queen’s Chamber lies 25 courses deeper in the pyramid and carries far more weight per square foot of roof area, yet it has survived for millennia. Perhaps the Relieving Chambers were an unneeded safeguard designed by an overly cautious architect. Or perhaps they served some other and still-unknown purpose.
    Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt and Director of the Giza Pyramids Excavation, argues that the complexity of the Great Pyramid’s interior resulted from indecision on the part of its builders. Hawass maintains that the Subterranean Chamber was the original burial chamber. Before this underground vault was finished, however, the builders decided to construct a new passage up into the body of the pyramid, then went horizontally to the Queen’s Chamber, which was likewise left unfinished. Changing plans yet again, the builders constructed the Grand Gallery as an entryway to the larger, and even more magnificent, burial vault that became the King’s Chamber.
    This explanation, though, obscures a number of facts. For one thing, the entire internal structure shows forethought. As examples, the Ascending and Descending passages follow almost exactly the same angles, and the lidless sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber is too big to have been moved up the passages. It had to be put into place before the chamber was finished. For another, the internal structure demonstrates a very high level of design and effort. In the other pyramids, passages serve only as paths for moving the royal remains and the funeral party into the burial chamber. If that were true for the Great Pyramid as well, why did anyone go to the trouble of building the exquisite Grand Gallery when an ordinary tunnel would have done just as well? And other details get in the way of accepting the King’s Chamber as Khufu’s burial vault. The sarcophagus, though too big to drag up the passages, is too small to accept a royal mummy and its customary multiple wooden coffins. And why, if this site were intended to bear the pharaoh’s remains into eternity, is it supplied with shafts that apparently supply air? Among the dead an air supply merely hastens decay, a royal mummy’s archenemy.

    The granite coffer in the King’s Chamber. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch.
    The exterior of the Great Pyramid shows a similar attention to details, many of which the standard story does not explain. One is the structure’s extraordinary precision. The most accurate survey of the Great Pyramid, conducted in 1925 by J. H. Cole for the British colonial government in Egypt, found the north side to be 230.253 meters long, the south 230.454, the east 230.391, and the west 230.357. The variation from longest to shortest is but 0.201 meter, or just under 8 inches, over a distance well in excess of two football fields. The Great Pyramid comes about as close to a perfect square as human engineering, modern or ancient, can make it.
    The same precision applies to the Great Pyramid’s orientation. The four sides each point to one of the cardinal directions.