For example the earth’s equatorial circumference of 24,902 miles works out at around 132 million feet, with the result that a degree of latitude at the equator is equivalent to approximately 366,600 feet (i.e. 132 million feet divided by 360 degrees). Each degree is divided into 60 arc minutes, which means that 1 arc minute represents just over 6100 feet on the earth’s surface, and each arc minute is then further subdivided into 60 arc seconds—with the result that 1 arc second is equivalent to a distance of about 101 feet. This system of measuring by degrees is not a modern convention but rather an inheritance of scientific thinking, connected to ‘base 60’ mathematics, that dates back to the remotest antiquity.[85] Nobody knows where, or when, it originated.[86] It seems, however, to have been employed in the geodetic and astronomical calculations that were used to locate the Great Pyramid—for the monument is positioned barely a mile to the south of latitude 30, i.e. almost exactly one third of the way between the equator and the north pole.[87]
5. Geodetic location of the Great Pyramid of Giza on latitude 30 degrees north (one third of the way between the equator and the north pole) and at the centre of the world’s habitable landmasses.
It is unlikely that this choice of location could have come about by chance. Moreover, because no suitable site for such a massive structure exists a mile or so to the north, it would be inadvisable to assume that the fractional offset from the thirtieth parallel could have been caused by a surveying error on the part of the Pyramid builders.
This offset amounts to 1 arc minute and 9 arc seconds—since the Pyramid’s true latitude is 29 degrees 58’ 51”. Interestingly, however, as a former Astronomer Royal of Scotland has observed:
‘If the original designer had wished that men should see with their bodily, rather than their mental eyes, the pole of the sky from the foot of the Great Pyramid, at an altitude before them of 30 degrees, he would have had to take account of the refraction of the atmosphere; and that would have necessitated the building standing not at latitude 30 degrees, but at latitude 29 degrees 58’ 22”.’[88]
In other words the monument turns out to be situated less than half an arc minute to the north of astronomical latitude 30 degrees, uncorrected for atmospheric refraction. Any ‘error’ involved is thus reduced to less than half of one-sixtieth of one degree—a hair’s breadth in terms of the earth’s circumference as a whole.
The same obsessive concern with accuracy is found in the orderly evenness of the Pyramid’s base:[89]
Length of West side:
755 feet 9.1551 inches
Length of North side:
755 feet 4.9818 inches
Length of East side:
755 feet 10.4937 inches
Length of South side:
756 feet 0.9739 inches
The variation between the longest and shortest sides is therefore less than 8 inches—about one tenth of 1 per cent—quite an amazing feat when we consider that we are measuring a distance of over 9000 inches carpeted with thousands of huge limestone blocks weighing several tons each.
There is no sign that the ancient Pyramid builders were in any way daunted by the task of maintaining such fastidious standards of symmetry on such a grand scale. On the contrary, as though willingly seeking out additional technical challenges, they went on to equip the monument with corners set at almost perfect right-angles. The variation from 90 degrees is just 0 degrees 00’ 02” at the north-west corner, 0 degrees 03’ 02” at the north-east corner, 0 degrees 03’ 33” at the south-east corner, and 0 degrees 00’ 33” at the south-west corner.[90]
This, it must be conceded, is not just ‘atomic clock’ accuracy but the Rolex, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Rolls-Royce and IBM of building engineering all rolled into one.
And there is more.
It is fairly well known that the Pyramid was aligned by its architects to the cardinal points (with its north face directed north, its east face directed east, etc., etc.). Less well known is just how eerily exact is the precision of these alignments—with the average deviation from true being only a little over 3 arc minutes (i.e. about 5 per cent of a single degree).[91]
Why such meticulousness?
Why such rigour?
Why should even the most megalomaniacal of Pharaohs have cared whether his massive ‘tomb’ was aligned within 3 arc minutes of true north—or indeed within a whole degree of true north? To the naked-eye observer it is virtually impossible to determine such a deviation. Indeed most of us could not spot a misalignment within 3 whole degrees (180 arc minutes), let alone within 3 arc minutes (and some people have trouble telling the general direction of north at all). So the question has to be asked: what was all this incredible precision for? Why did the builders burden themselves with so much extra work and difficulty when the effects of their additional labours would not be visible to the naked eye anyway?
They must, one assumes, have had a powerful motive to create what is truly a miracle of the surveyor’s art.
And what makes this miracle all the more remarkable is the fact that it was not performed on a perfectly flat area of ground, as one might expect, but with a massive natural mound, or hill, left exactly in the middle of the site on which the Great Pyramid was being erected. Estimated to be almost 30 feet high—as tall as a two-storey house—and positioned dead centre over the base area (of which it occupies approximately 70 per cent), this primeval mound was skilfully incorporated into the lower courses of the growing edifice. No doubt its presence has contributed down the epochs to the structure’s legendary stability. It is extremely difficult, however, to understand how the ancient surveyors were able to square the base of the Pyramid in its early and most important stages with the mound so solidly in the way (squaring the base normally involves taking repeated diagonal measurements across the corners).[92] All that we can say for sure is that the base is square and that the monument is locked into the cardinal axes of our planet with great care and precision.
6. Cross-section of the Great Pyramid of Egypt showing the natural mound of bedrock that is known to be built into its lower courses.
7. Internal corridors and passageways of the three Pyramids of Giza.
Chambers and passageways
The second and third Pyramids have relatively simple internal chambers and passageway systems—the former having one principal chamber just below ground level, positioned centrally under the apex of the monument, the latter having three main chambers, cut a little more deeply into the bedrock but again positioned centrally under the apex of the monument. The entrances to both Pyramids are in their north faces and take the form of cramped passageways sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, before levelling off to join horizontal corridors under the monument.
The internal structure of the Great Pyramid, by contrast, is much more complex, with an elaborate arrangement of passageways and galleries—sloping up and down again at 26 degrees—and with three principal internal chambers. Of these latter only one, the ‘Subterranean Chamber’, is below ground level. The other two—the so-called ‘Queen’s Chamber’ and ‘King’s Chamber’—are both located in the heart of the monument’s superstructure at substantial altitudes above the ground.
The layout of these internal features is best appreciated from the diagram printed on page 45. Chief amongst them, surmounted only by Davison’s Chamber (and above that by the four so-called ‘relieving chambers’ which contain the ‘quarry marks’ mentioned earlier) is the—rectangular red-granite room, now famous as the ‘King’s Chamber’. It proved to be completely devoid of either treasures or inscriptions, or the body of a king, when it was first entered by Calif Al Mamoun in the ninth century ad. Measuring 34 feet 4 inches in length, 17 feet 2 inches in width, and 19 feet 1 inch in height it is located about 150 feet vertically above the base of the Pyramid. Its many mysteries are too well known to require further elucidation here (and, besides, have been described in some detail in our earlier publications[93]).
8. Principal internal features of the Grea
t Pyramid. The entrance in the north face known as ‘Mamoun’s Hole’ was forced by Arab explorers in the ninth century ad. At this time the exterior facing blocks of the Pyramid were still intact, hiding the true entrance from sight.
Connecting the King’s Chamber to the lower levels of the monument is the Grand Gallery, one of ‘the most celebrated architectural works which have survived from the Old Kingdom’.[94] Sloping downwards at an angle of 26 degrees, it is an astonishing corbel-vaulted hall fully 153 feet in length and 7 feet in width at floor level. Its lofty ceiling, 28 feet above the visitor’s head, is just visible in the electric lighting with which the Pyramid has been equipped in modern times.
At the base of the Grand Gallery a horizontal passage, 3 feet 9 inches high and 127 feet long, runs due south into the ‘Queen’s Chamber’. Again found empty by Mamoun, this is a smaller room than the King’s Chamber, measuring 18 feet 10 inches from east to west and 17 feet 2 inches from north to south. Reaching a height of 20 feet 5 inches, the ceiling is gabled (whereas it is flat in the King’s Chamber) and there is a large corbelled niche of unknown function just south of the centre line in the east wall.
9. Detail of the corridors, chambers and shafts of the Great Pyramid.
Returning along the horizontal passageway to its junction with the base of the Grand Gallery the visitor will note, behind a modern iron grille, the narrow and uninviting mouth of the ‘Well-Shaft’—a near vertical tunnel, often less than 3 feet in diameter, that eventually joins up with the Descending Corridor, almost 100 feet below ground level. How the tunnelers, encysted in solid rock, were able to home in so accurately on their target remains a mystery. Mysterious, too, is the true function of all these odd systems of interconnecting ‘ducts’ which lead busily hither and thither inside the body of the monument, like the circuits of some great machine.
Sloping downwards from the Grand Gallery, and extending it in the direction of the ground at the continuing angle of 26 degrees, is another corridor. Known (from the point of view of those entering the Pyramid) as the Ascending Corridor, it measures 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 5 inches wide and has a total length of just under 129 feet. Leaving the Pyramid, the visitor is obliged to ape-walk uncomfortably down the Ascending Corridor until the point where it joins up with ‘Mamoun’s Hole’—the tunnel that the Arabs cut for their forced entry in the ninth century—on the western side of two hulking red-granite ‘plugging blocks’ which mask the junction with the Descending Corridor. At the bottom of this 350-foot-long corridor, off limits to all but bona fide Egyptologists (and those willing to bribe the increasingly hard-pressed and demoralized Inspectors and ghafirs responsible for the day-to-day administration of Giza) is a truly remarkable feature—the Subterranean Chamber that nestles in solid bedrock more than 100 feet below the surface of the plateau (and almost 600 feet below the Pyramid’s lofty summit platform).
Inner space
The first thing that the intrepid visitor should do, after gaining access to the Descending Corridor, is to climb up it a few feet in the direction of the Pyramid’s true entrance. Now covered with an iron grille, this entrance is located in the monument’s north face, nine courses above and 24 feet to the east of ‘Mamoun’s Hole’ (through which all members of the public enter the Pyramid today).
Here, at the point in the ceiling of the Descending Corridor where the mouth of the Ascending Corridor was hewn upwards, it is possible to inspect the bottom end of the lowermost of the two plugging blocks. It is as firmly jammed in place today as it was when Mamoun’s diggers first encountered it in the ninth century, and it is easy to understand why its presence there encouraged them to tunnel round it into the softer limestone, seeking a way past the obstacle and into the upper reaches of whatever lay beyond.
Perhaps this was exactly what the Pyramid builders had ‘programmed’ those early explorers to do. After all, if you see that a huge chunk of granite has been hauled into place to block what is obviously an upwards-sloping corridor, then it is only human nature to try to get into that corridor—which Mamoun’s men did.
More than a thousand years later, tourists and archaeologists still follow the trail that those pioneering Arabs blazed around the plugging blocks into the main north-south axis of the Pyramid’s system of passageways. And though there have been all manner of hackings and tunnellings in search of further passageways (in the floors and walls of the King’s and Queen’s Chambers, for example), the plugs at the base of the Ascending Corridor have never subsequently been disturbed.
This is an understandable oversight if one is satisfied that the sole function of these plugs was to block the Ascending Corridor in a north-south direction. Why, however, has no one ever tried to find out if anything lies behind their eastern aspect?[95] As well as having the same height and width as the Ascending Corridor, thus filling it completely, each of the plugs is about four feet in length—and thus easily long enough to conceal the entrance to a second and completely separate passageway system branching off at right angles towards the east.
There is certainly room for such a second system inside the Great Pyramid—and for much else besides. Indeed it has been calculated that as many as 3700 fully constructed chambers, each the size of the existing King’s Chamber could be accommodated within the monument’s vast ‘inner space’ of 8.5 million cubic feet.[96]
The stones of darkness and the shadow of death
Having examined the plugging blocks, the visitor is faced by a long climb down the full 350-foot length of the Descending Corridor, initially through masonry and thence into bedrock. As the journey proceeds, the rays of sunlight penetrating the barred entrance to the north grow progressively weaker and one has the sense of dropping like a deep-sea diver into the dark depths of a midnight-black ocean.
The corridor, which every intuition proclaims to be a remotely ancient, prehistoric feature, is 3 feet 11 inches high by 3 feet 6 inches wide and may originally have been cut into the 30-foot-tall rocky mound that occupied this site millennia before the Pyramid was built. It is unsettling, therefore, to discover that it is machine-age straight from top to bottom. According to Flinders Petrie, the variation along the whole passage ‘is under 1/4 inch in the sides and 3/10 inch on the roof’.[97] In addition there is one segment of the corridor, 150 feet in length, where ‘the average error of straightness is only one fiftieth of an inch, an amazingly minute amount.’[98]
With hunched back, the visitor continues down this long, straight corridor sloping due south into the bedrock of the Giza plateau at the now familiar angle of 26 degrees. As ever greater depths are plumbed it is hard not to grow increasingly conscious of the tremendous mass of limestone that is piled above and of the heavy, dusty, unfresh fug of the subterranean air—like the exhalation of some cyclopean beast. Looking back apprehensively towards the entrance, one notices that the penetrating light has been reduced to a glimmering star-burst, high up and far away. And it is normal, at this point, to feel a concomitant glimmer of apprehension, a slight tug of anxiety at the extent of one’s separation from the world above.
10. The complex internal design of the Great Pyramid. It is possible that many other passageways and chambers remain to be discovered within the gigantic monument.
On the west side of the corridor, quite near the bottom, is an alcove, again covered by an iron grille, that gives access to the vertical Well-Shaft and thence to the Grand Gallery and the upper chambers. Soon afterwards the 20-degree descending slope levels off into a low horizontal passageway, running 29 feet from north to south, through which the visitor is obliged to crawl on all fours. Near the end of this passageway, again on the west side, is another alcove, 6 feet long and 3 feet deep, that has been roughly hewn out of the bedrock and that ends in a blind, unfinished wall. Then, after a further 4 feet of crawling, the horizontal passageway opens at a height of about 2 feet above floor level into the Subterranean Chamber.
Were it not for a single low-wattage electric bulb installed in modern times, the visit
or would now be in complete darkness. The light that the bulb casts has a greenish, sepulchral hue, and what it reveals is a most peculiar room, considerably larger than the King’s Chamber, measuring 46 feet along its east-west axis, and 27 feet 1 inch from north to south, but with a maximum height of just 11 feet 6 inches.[99] In the approximate centre of the floor, on the east side, is a railing surrounding a square pit reaching a depth of about 10 feet, and beyond that, penetrating the south wall, is a second horizontal corridor, 2 feet 4 inches square, running due south into the bedrock for a further 53 feet and terminating in a blank wall. Looking to the right, one notes that the floor of the western side of the Chamber rises up into a kind of chest-high platform. This has been irregularly trenched, creating four parallel ‘fins’ of limestone running east to west, almost touching the relatively flat roof at some points but with a clearance of up to six feet in others.
All these strange features conspire to create an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere in the room that reminds the visitor of how far beneath the ground he has burrowed, and of how inescapably he could be entombed here if there were to be any serious collapse of the millions of tons of limestone above his head.
Very interesting developments
Egyptological opinion concerning the Subterranean Chamber may be summarized as follows: (1) it is not a prehistoric feature, but was built at the same time as the Pyramid (i.e. around 2500 bc); (2) it was initially intended to be the burial place of Khufu; (3) then the Pharaoh and his architects changed their minds, stopped work on it, and turned their attentions to the main body of the Pyramid—where they built first the Queen’s Chamber (also later ‘abandoned’ according to this theory) and then finally the King’s Chamber.[100]