Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [32]
The theories as to the size of the pyramid are thus proved entirely impossible…. The fantastic theories, however, are still poured out, and the theorists still assert that the facts correspond to their requirements. It is useless to state the real truth of the matter, as it has no effect on those who are subject to this type of hallucination.
There is no way out; the Great Pyramid of Giza was a royal tomb, and nothing else. There is no “lost mystery” about the methods of its construction, which required only unlimited manpower and the simplest of tools. We know how this pyramid and others were built, and we could build another one just like it, using the same methods, if we had any desire to do so—and if we could conscript enough workers. Most of the stone was cut on the spot, or at quarries near Cairo from which it was floated across the river on barges at the time of Inundation, when the water extended to the edge of the desert. From that point the blocks were dragged, possibly on rollers, up the slope to the plateau. The first course of stones was laid in a square, on a site already surveyed and leveled. There is no doubt that the Egyptians knew enough about astronomy and geometry to get their angles straight. They did a beautiful job of laying out the ground plan of the Great Pyramid; the errors of orientation are astoundingly small. But they could have done it with very simple tools and equally basic mathematics.
When the first layer was in place, the second level was added by hauling the stones up a ramp of sand and brickwork. There is still some debate about precisely how these ramps worked; instead of stretching straight out from the pyramid on all four sides, and being raised when the next layer of stones was added, they may have wound round the structure. The subject is too complicated to discuss in detail; just take it from me that some form of ramp was involved. Not magic, not Martian science.
Most of the interior rooms and passages were built while the exterior was in the process of construction; the huge stone sarcophagus in Khufu’s pyramid was lowered into the burial chamber before the roofing blocks were put on. Once the structure was finished, the facing of fine white limestone was added as the ramps were moved downward, so that when all was done the slopes of the pyramid presented a smooth, unbroken surface, glistening in the sun and looking from a distance as if they had been neatly frosted. This fine casing material is gone today, which is why the Great Pyramid looks like a giant four-sided staircase; the blocks were a handy source of building stone for later kings and conquerors.
Khufu’s Valley Temple exists only as a basalt pavement. His Pyramid Temple has been cleared, but it isn’t in much better shape than the Valley Temple. The pyramid and its temple are the only major monuments of Khufu’s we possess, and we actually know very little about the monarch who constructed the largest single monument ever raised to the glory of one individual. Khufu had a bad reputation among the Greeks. Like modern visitors to Giza, they took one look at all that stone and immediately started calculating in terms of man-hours. Their calculations were supported by the ancient dragomen, who told Herodotus that it took 100,000 men twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. Modern estimates are considerably lower. The workmen were divided into “gangs,