of the neighbouring Second Pyramid, supposedly built by the Fourth
16 Piazzi Smyth, The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed, Bell Publishing
Company, New York, 1990, p. 80.
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Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre (Chephren). This stunning monument, second
only in size and majesty to the Great Pyramid itself (being just a few feet
shorter and 48 feet narrower at the base) appeared lit up, as though
energized from within, by a pale and unearthly fire. Behind it in the
distance, slightly offset among the dark desert shadows, was the smaller
Pyramid of Menkaure (Mycerinus), measuring 356 feet along each side
and some 215 feet in height.17
For a moment, against the glittering backdrop of the inky sky, I
experienced the illusion of being in motion, of standing at the stern of
some great ship of the heavens and looking back at two other vessels
which seemed to follow in my wake, strung out in battle order behind me.
So where was this convoy going, this squadron of pyramids? And were
the prodigious structures all the work of megalomaniac pharaohs, as the
Egyptologists believed? Or had they been designed by mysterious hands
to voyage eternally through time and space towards some as yet
unidentified objective?
From this altitude, though the southern sky was partially occluded by
the vast bulk of the Pyramid of Khafre, I could see all the western sky as it
arched down from the celestial north pole towards the distant rim of the
revolving planet. Polaris, the Pole Star, was far to my right, in the
constellation of the Little Bear. Low on the horizon, about ten degrees
north of west, Regulus, the paw-star of the imperial constellation of Leo,
was about to set.
Under Egyptian skies
Just above the 150th course, Ali hissed at us to keep our heads down. A
police car had come into view around the north-western corner of the
Great Pyramid and was now proceeding along the western flank of the
monument with its blue light slowly flashing. We stayed motionless in the
shadows until the car had passed. Then we began to climb again, with a
renewed sense of urgency, heading as fast as we could towards the
summit, which we now imagined we could see jutting out above the misty
predawn haze.
For what seemed like five minutes we climbed without stopping. When I
looked up, however, the top of the Pyramid still seemed as far away as
ever. We climbed again, panting and sweating, and once again the
summit drew back before us like some legendary Welsh peak. Then, just
when we’d resigned ourselves to an endless succession of such
disappointments, we found ourselves at the top, under a breathtaking
canopy of stars, more than 450 feet above the surrounding plateau on
the most extraordinary viewing platform in the world. To our north and
east, sprawled out across the wide, sloping valley of the River Nile, lay the
17 The Pyramids of Egypt, p. 125.
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city of Cairo, a jumble of skyscrapers and flat traditional roofs separated
by the dark defiles of narrow streets and interspersed with the needlepoint minarets of a thousand and one mosques. A film of reflected streetlighting shimmered over the whole scene, closing the eyes of modern
Cairenes to the wonder of the stars but at the same time creating the
hallucination of a fairyland illuminated in greens and reds and blues and
sulphurous yellows.
I felt privileged to witness this strange, electronic mirage from such an
incredible vantage point, perched on the summit platform of the last
surviving wonder of the ancient world, hovering in the sky over Cairo like
Aladdin on his magic carpet.
Not that the 203rd course of the Great Pyramid of Egypt could be
described as a carpet! Measuring just under 30 feet on each side (as
against the monument’s side length of around 755 feet at the base) it
consisted of several hundred waist-high limestone blocks, each of which
weighed about five tons. The course was not completely level: a few
blocks were missing or broken, and rising towards the southern end
there were the substantial remains of about half an additional step of
masonry. Moreover, at the very centre of the platform, someone had
arranged for a triangular wooden scaffold to be erected, through the
middle of which rose a thick pole, just over 31 feet long, which marked
the monument’s original true height of 481.3949 feet.18 Beneath this a
scrawl of graffiti had been carved into the limestone by generations of
tourists.19
The complete ascent of the Pyramid had taken us about half an hour
and it was now just after 5 a.m., the time of morning worship. Almost in
unison, the voices of a thousand and one muezzins rang out from the
balconies of the minarets of Cairo, calling the faithful to prayer and
reaffirming the greatness, the indivisibility, the mercy and the
compassion of God. Behind me, to the south-west, the top 22 courses of
Khafre’s Pyramid, still clad with their original facing stones, seemed to
float like an iceberg on the ocean of moonlight.
Knowing that we could not stay long in this bewitching place, I sat
down and gazed around at the heavens. Over to the west, across limitless
desert sands, Regulus had now set beneath the horizon, and the rest of
the lion’s body was poised to follow. The constellations of Virgo and
Libra were also dropping lower in the sky and, much farther to the north,
I could see the Great and Little Bears slowly pacing out their eternal cycle
around the celestial pole.
I looked south-east across the Nile Valley and there was the crescent
moon still spreading its spectral radiance from the bank of the Milky Way.
18 Ibid., p. 87.
19 ‘One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere,’ Gustave
Flaubert commented in his Letters From Egypt. ‘On the top of the Great Pyramid there is
a certain Buffard, 79 rue St Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.’
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Following the course of the celestial river, I looked due south: there,
crossing the meridian, was the resplendent constellation of Scorpius
dominated by the first-magnitude star Antares—a red supergiant 300
times the diameter of the sun. North-east, above Cairo, sailed Cygnus the
swan, his tail feathers marked by Deneb, a blue-white supergiant visible
to us across more than 1800 light years of interstellar space. Last but not
least, in the northern sky, the dragon Draco coiled sinuously among the
circumpolar stars. Indeed, 4500 years ago, when the Great Pyramid was
supposedly being built for the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops),
one of the stars of Draco had stood close to the celestial north pole and
had served as the Pole Star. This had been alpha Draconis, also known as
Thuban. With the passing of the millennia, however, it had gradually been
displaced from its position by the remorseless celestial mill of the earth’s
axial precession so that t
he Pole Star today is Polaris in the Little Bear.20
I lay back, cushioned my head in my hands and gazed directly up
towards the zenith of heaven. Through the smooth cold stones I rested
on, I thought I could sense beneath me, like a living force, the
stupendous gravity and mass of the pyramid.
Thinking like giants
Covering a full 13.1 acres at the base, it weighed about six million tons—
more than all the buildings in the Square Mile of the City of London
added together,21 and consisted, as we have seen, of roughly 2.3 million
individual blocks of limestone and granite. To these had once been added
a 22-acre, mirror-like cladding consisting of an estimated 115,000 highly
polished casing stones, each weighing 10 tons, which had originally
covered all four of its faces.22
After being shaken loose by a massive earthquake in AD 1301, the
majority of the facing blocks had subsequently been removed for the
construction of Cairo.23 Here and there around the base, however, I knew
that enough had remained in position to permit the great nineteenth
century archaeologist, W.M. Flinders Petrie, to carry out a detailed study
of them. He had been stunned to encounter tolerances of less than onehundredth of an inch and cemented joints so precise and so carefully
aligned that it was impossible to slip even the fine blade of a pocket knife
between them. ‘Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be
careful work’, he admitted, ‘but to do so with cement in the joint seems
almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians’ work on a
20 Skyglobe 3.6.
21 How the Pyramids Were Built, p. 4-5.
22 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 232, 244.
23 Ibid., p. 17.
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scale of acres.’24
Of course, the jointing of the casing stones was by no means the only
‘almost impossible’ feature of the Great Pyramid. The alignments to true
north, south, east and west were ‘almost impossible’, so too were the
near-perfect ninety-degree corners, and the incredible symmetry of the
four enormous sides. And so were the engineering logistics of raising
millions of huge stones hundreds of feet in the air ...
Whoever they had been, therefore, the architects, engineers and
stonemasons who had designed and successfully built this stupendous
monument must indeed have ‘thought like men 100 feet tall’, as JeanFrançois Champollion, the founder of modern Egyptology, had once
observed. He had seen clearly what generations of his successors were to
close their eyes to: that the pyramid builders could only have been men
of giant intellectual stature. Beside the Egyptians of old, he had added,
‘we in Europe are but Lilliputians.’25
24 Cited in Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 90.
25 Ibid., p. 40. Champollion of course, deciphered the Rosetta Stone.
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Chapter 35
Tombs and Tombs Only?
Climbing down the Great Pyramid was more nerve wracking than climbing
up. We were no longer struggling against the force of gravity, so the
physical effort was less. But the possibilities of a fatal fall seemed greatly
magnified now that our attention was directed exclusively towards the
ground rather than the heavens. We picked our way with exaggerated
care towards the base of the enormous mountain of stone, sliding and
slithering among the treacherous masonry blocks, feeling as though we
had been reduced to ants.
By the time we had completed the descent the night was over and the
first wash of pale sunlight was filtering into the sky. We paid the 50
Egyptian pounds promised to the guard of the pyramid’s western face
and then, with a tremendous sense of release and exultation, we walked
jauntily away from the monument in the direction of the Pyramid of
Khafre, a few hundred metres to the south-west.
Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure ... Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus. Whether
they were referred to by their Egyptian or their Greek names, the fact
remained that these three pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2467 BC)
were universally acclaimed as the builders of the Giza pyramids. This had
been the case at least since Ancient Egyptian tour guides had told the
Greek historian Herodotus that the Great Pyramid had been built by
Khufu. Herodotus had incorporated this information into the oldest
surviving written description of the monuments, which continued:
Cheops, they said, reigned for fifty years, and on his death the kingship was taken
over by his brother Chephren. He also made a pyramid ... it is forty feet lower than
his brother’s pyramid, but otherwise of the same greatness ... Chephren reigned
for fifty-six years ... then there succeeded Mycerinus, the son of Cheops ... This
man left a pyramid much smaller than his father’s.1
1 Herodotus, The History (translated by David Grene), University of Chicago Press, 1987,
pp. 187-9.
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Site plan of the Giza necropolis
Herodotus saw the monuments in the fifth century BC, more than 2000
years after they had been built. Nevertheless it was largely on the
foundation of his testimony that the entire subsequent judgement of
history was based. All other commentators, up to the present, continued
uncritically to follow in the Greek historian’s footsteps. And down the
ages—although it had originally been little more than hearsay—the
attribution of the Great Pyramid to Khufu, the Second Pyramid to Khafre
and the Third Pyramid to Menkaure had assumed the stature of
unassailable fact.
Trivializing the mystery
Having parted company with Ali, Santha and I continued our walk into the
desert. Skirting the immense south-western corner of the Second
Pyramid, our eyes were drawn towards its summit. There we noted again
the intact facing stones that still covered its top 22 courses. We also
noticed that the first few courses above its base, each of which had a
‘footprint’ of about a dozen acres, were composed of truly massive
blocks of limestone, almost too high to clamber over, which were about
20 feet long and 6 feet thick. These extraordinary monoliths, as I was
later to discover, weighed 200 tons apiece and belonged to a distinct
style of masonry to be found at several different and widely scattered
locations within the Giza necropolis.
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On its north and west sides the Second Pyramid sat on a level platform
cut down out of the surrounding bedrock and was thus enclosed within a
wide trench more than 15 feet deep in places. Walking due south, parallel
to the monument’s scarred western flank, we picked our way along the
edge of this trench towards the much smaller Third Pyramid, which lay
some 400 metres ahead of us in the desert.
Khufu ... Khafre ... Menkaure ... According to all orthodox Egyptologists
the pyramids had been built as tombs—and only as tombs—for these
r /> three pharaohs. Yet there were some obvious difficulties with such
assertions. For example, the spacious burial chamber of the Khafre
Pyramid was empty when it was opened in 1818 by the European explorer
Giovanni Belzoni. Indeed, more than empty, the chamber was starkly,
austerely bare. The polished granite sarcophagus which lay embedded in
its floor had also been found empty, with its lid broken into two pieces
nearby.2 How was this to be explained?
To Egyptologists the answer seemed obvious. At some early date,
probably not many hundreds of years after Khafre’s death, tomb robbers
must have penetrated the chamber and cleared all its contents including
the mummified body of the pharaoh.
Much the same thing seemed to have happened at the smaller Third
Pyramid, towards which Santha and I were now walking—that attributed
to Menkaure. Here the first European to break in had been a British
colonel, Howard Vyse, who had entered the burial chamber in 1837. He
found an empty basalt sarcophagus, an anthropoid coffin lid made of
wood, and some bones. The natural assumption was that these were the
remains of Menkaure. Modern science had subsequently proved, however,
that the bones and coffin lid dated from the early Christian era, that is,
from 2500 years after the Pyramid Age, and thus represented the
‘intrusive burial’ of a much later individual (quite a common practice
throughout Ancient Egyptian history). As to the basalt sarcophagus—well,
it could have belonged to Menkaure. Unfortunately, however, nobody had
the opportunity to examine it because it had been lost at sea when the
ship on which Vyse sent it to England had sunk off the coast of Spain.3
Since it was a matter of record that the sarcophagus had been found
empty by Vyse, it was once again assumed that the body of the pharaoh
must have been removed by tomb robbers.
A similar assumption had been made about the body of Khufu, which
was also missing. Here the scholarly consensus, expressed as well as
anyone by George Hart of the British Museum, was that ‘no later than 500
years after Khufu’s funeral’ robbers had forced their way into the Great
Pyramid ‘to steal the burial treasure’.4 The implication is that this
incursion must have occurred by or before 2000 BC—since Khufu is