If the Egyptologists are right then the excavation and removal of more than 2000 tons of solid rock in order to create the Descending Corridor—rock that first had to be mined and then hauled to the surface from increasingly greater depths through that cramped, unventilated, 26-degree channel—would all have been undertaken in vain. Vain, too, would have been the hewing out of the Subterranean Chamber itself, and also of its further shafts and pits. Indeed the whole enterprise would, in retrospect, have been entirely pointless if the end result had merely been to leave, at a depth of more than 100 feet below the Giza plateau, an unfinished, rough-walled, low-ceilinged crypt—‘resembling a quarry’[101]—for which nobody would ever have any use.
This obviously defies common sense. An alternative scenario does exist, however, which has stimulated the curiosity of a number of investigators during the last two centuries. According to this scenario the Chamber was deliberately left unfinished so as to hoodwink treasure hunters into believing that it had been abandoned and thus convince them of the pointlessness of further explorations there—a pretty effective means of keeping casual intruders away from any other cavities or concealed passageways that might be connected to it.
With such suspicions in mind, the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia and the British adventurer Colonel Howard Vyse both felt inspired (between 1830 and 1837) to drill holes into the bottom of the pit at the centre of the Subterranean Chamber. They extended its original depth of 10 feet by a further 35 feet (now largely filled in).
More recently the French archaeologist, André Pochan, has drawn attention to a curious passage from the Greek historian Herodotus who visited Egypt in the fifth century bc and spent much time interviewing priests and other learned men there. Herodotus reports that he was told quite specifically of the existence of ‘underground chambers on the hill on which the Pyramids stand ... These chambers King Cheops [Khufu] made as burial chambers for himself in a kind of island, bringing in a channel from the Nile ....’[102]
Pochan has calculated that if there really is a chamber fed by Nile water under the Pyramid, then it would have to be at a great depth—at least 90 feet below the pit. Likewise the Danish architect Hubert Paulsen has argued on the basis of geometry that the most probable place for any further chamber to be found in the Great Pyramid is underneath the pit[103]—a view that is also supported by the calculations of the British geometer Robin Cook.[104]
It is a French engineer, however, Professor Jean Kerisel, who has most vigorously pursued the quest for concealed subterranean chambers. The current President of the Association France-Egypte, he was in the pit with his assistants on 12 October 1992 when a major earthquake occurred, demolishing large parts of Cairo. This experience, he stated later, gave the researchers ‘a few very unpleasant moments some 35 metres under the plateau’.[105]
Happily, the Subterranean Chamber did not collapse and Kerisel and his team were able to finish their work. This involved the use of two nondestructive techniques: ground-penetrating radar and microgravimetry. The results were inconclusive in the chamber itself but extremely promising in the horizontal passageway that connects it to the end of the Descending Corridor. In Kerisel’s own words: ‘a structure was detected under the floor of the passageway, which could be a corridor oriented SSE-NNW whose ceiling is at the depth that the Descending Corridor would have reached had it been prolonged.’[106]
Nor was this all. A second very clear anomaly, a ‘mass defect’ as Kerisel calls it, ‘was detected on the western side of the passageway six metres before the chamber entrance. According to our calculations, this anomaly corresponds to a vertical shaft at least five metres deep with a section of about 1.40 x 1.40 metres very close to the western wall of the passageway.[107]
In short, what Kerisel believes he has identified off the Subterranean Chamber’s entrance corridor is something that looks very much like a completely separate passageway system, terminating in a vertical shaft. His instruments may have misled him, or, as he himself admits, he may merely have picked up the traces of ‘a large volume of limestone dissolved by the action of underground water—in other words a deep cave’.[108] Alternatively, however, if the ‘mass defect’ turns out to be a man-made feature, as he strongly suspects, then ‘it may lead to very interesting developments’.[109]
Labyrinth
It should be obvious that a civilization that could build up to the height of the Great Pyramid’s summit platform, that could create giant stone statues more than 240 feet long, and that could lift the 200-ton blocks of the Valley and Mortuary Temples into place (forming intricate jigsaw-puzzle patterns at heights of 40 feet and more above the ground) would not have experienced any insurmountable difficulty in building down as well. On the contrary, such a civilization could, if it had so wished, have hewn out underground complexes of immense size, connected to one another by labyrinths of tunnels.
The possibility therefore cannot be ruled out that the Subterranean Chamber under the Great Pyramid could be just one of many such deeply buried features. Indeed, as the reader will recall, the seismological work carried out at Giza in the early 1990s by the American geophysicist Thomas Dobecki did indicate the presence of a large and apparently man-made hypogeum in the bedrock beneath the Sphinx. Ultimately only further excavations and research can shed further light on these matters. Meanwhile, however, there is a great deal of evidence from all parts of the necropolis which suggests that the creation of ambitious rock-hewn structures—both above and below the ground—was, indeed, part of the standard repertoire of the Pyramid builders. They also quite frequently chose to mingle rock-hewn and built-up structures—as in the case of the tomb of Khent-Khawes, a supposed Queen of Menkaure, which consists of a natural outcropping sculpted in pyramidial form surmounted by a curious sarcophagus-shaped temple.
A more spectacular and conspicuous mixture of rock-hewn and built-up features occurs at the Pyramid of Khafre. It stands on an artificially levelled 12-acre platform cut bodily out of the plateau—which slopes steeply from north-west to south-east at this point (i.e. it is higher in the west and lower in the east). In consequence the north and west sides of the Pyramid are enclosed within a trench that decreases steadily in height from about 20 feet at the north-west corner to about 10 feet at the southwest corner—and to zero at the north-east and south-east corners. The lower courses of the Pyramid itself on the north and west sides are contoured out of the central mound of bedrock that the builders left in place after hollowing out the trench. On the east and south sides, however, the slope of the plateau falls below the level chosen for the base of the Pyramid. The builders solved this problem by bringing thousands of enormous filling blocks to the site—average weight about 100 tons each—to create an unshakable horizontal foundation. They then went on to lay the first few courses of the monument on the eastern and southern sides using the same unwieldy megaliths. Thereafter they reverted to smaller blocks and in consequence a clear demarcation line is visible between the two types of construction. Like some of the characteristics of the Sphinx and Valley Temples referred to earlier, this demarcation gives the impression not just of different building techniques but actually of two distinctly different stages of building separated by an unknown interval of time.
The mystery of the shafts
There is one other anomalous feature of the Giza necropolis which we have not yet mentioned but with which we shall close this chapter as it leads us on to the next stage of our investigation. This feature is confined to the Great Pyramid and is unique in ancient Egyptian architecture. It takes the form of four narrow shafts—usually described by Egyptologists as ‘ventilation channels’—two of which emanate respectively from the northern and southern walls of the King’s Chamber and the other two from the northern and southern walls of the Queen’s Chamber.
The four shafts have an average cross-section of 23 x 22 cm. and lengths that vary from about 24 metres (northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber) to about 65 metres (northern shaft of
the King’s Chamber). They are all inclined to the horizontal plane of the Pyramid and their angles of slope vary from 32 degrees 28 minutes (northern shaft of the King’s Chamber) to 45 degrees 14 minutes (southern shaft of the King’s Chamber). The shafts were constructed in a step-by-step manner as the Pyramid rose in height (i.e. they were not drilled through the masonry as some have supposed) and they reveal the use of very complex and sophisticated engineering and levelling techniques.
It has been suggested that the reason for their inclination was to find the ‘shortest route’ to the outside of the Pyramid and this has been taken to imply that the ancient builders wanted to ‘save’ work and time. However, such geometrical logic goes very much against engineering logic—for the simple reason that building shafts on an incline would not save time or work at all. Quite the contrary: no construction engineer or builder could possibly agree that the ‘shortest route’ is the best route in this case—even though it may seem so to those looking only at the geometry. The truth, as Egyptian architect Dr. Alexander Badawy first noted in the 1960s, is that to build inclined shafts rather than to have simple horizontal channels leading to the outside of the Pyramid would create many difficulties—and especially so when we consider the high precision and rigid consistency of the inclinations.[110]
11. The King’s and Queen’s Chambers and their four shafts. Note that the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber were not originally cut through into the chamber but stopped short several inches from the inner walls. The shafts were opened in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon.
To build inclined shafts rather than horizontal ones entails five tedious operations. First, the base course must be prepared; this calls for the shaping of special blocks with their upper faces sloping to serve as the ‘floor’ of each shaft. Secondly, more special blocks have to be prepared with U-shaped inner faces to form the profile, i.e., the ‘walls’ and ‘ceilings’ of the shafts. Thirdly, yet more special blocks have to be cut with their undersides inclined in order to cover the sides of the shafts. Fourthly, the tops of the shafts must be covered with other special blocks with sloping undersides. Fifthly, the main masonry courses of the Pyramid have to be integrated with these special design features along the entire lengths of the shafts.
12. Details of the Queen’s Chamber and its shafts.
If ventilation was really the objective then the question that must be asked is this: why opt for such complications and difficulties when an effective flow of air could have been provided for the chambers in a much simpler way? From an engineer’s point of view the obvious solution would have been to leave a masonry joint open—say 20 cm.—running horizontally from the top of each chamber right to the outside of the monument. In this case no special cutting of blocks would have been necessary, nor indeed any tedious alignments or levelling work.
In other words the ‘shortest route’ is not by any means the best route for the practical purposes of ventilation and, besides, it should be obvious that the Pyramid builders were not interested in time/energy-saving schemes—otherwise they would not have favoured such gigantic, multimillion-ton monuments in the first place. It therefore follows that we are unlikely to be rewarded in seeking an explanation for the precise north-south alignments of these steeply inclined shafts in terms of a time/energy-saving rationale based on quaint geometrical figures.
13. Queen’s Chamber wall and shaft mouth.
Any doubt over this issue can be resolved by a close study of the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber. Unlike the King’s Chamber shafts, those in the Queen’s Chamber (a) do not exit on the outside of the monument and (b) were not originally cut through the Chamber’s limestone walls. Instead the builders left the last five inches intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts—thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder. With the help of a steel chisel, they were finally discovered in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon, a Freemason whose curiosity had been aroused by the shafts in the King’s Chamber and who decided to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber.
14. Construction details of the Great Pyramid’s shafts. At least four different kinds of blocks (A, B, C and D), continuing the full length of the shafts, were required for the successful completion of these mysterious features of the Pyramid. The engineering problems would have been immense. The notion that the primary purpose of the shafts was for ventilation is disproved by the fact that the Queen’s Chamber shafts were originally closed at both ends and by the complexity of the design—which would not have been necessary if simple ventilation had been the objective.
In later chapters we will be considering the implications of Dixon’s 1872 discovery, and the follow-up to it. The point that we wish to make here, however, is the obvious one that shafts which were originally closed at both ends could not possibly have been used, or intended, for ventilation. They must, therefore, have had some higher purpose—one that was thought by the builders to justify the enormous care, skill and effort involved in constructing them.
As we shall see, that ‘higher purpose’ can now be identified with certainty.
Chapter 4
Stars and Time
‘The various apparent movements of the heavenly bodies which are produced by the rotation and revolution of the earth, and the effects of precession, were familiar to the Egyptians ... They carefully studied what they saw, and put their knowledge together in the most convenient fashion, associating it with their strange imaginings and their system of worship ...’
J. Norman Lockyer, The Dawn Of Astronomy, 1894
It is humbling and awe-inspiring to stand at dawn between the paws of the Great Sphinx of Egypt and to look up as the rising sun illuminates its face. The colossal statue seems ancient—almost as old, one might imagine, as time itself. And, as we saw in Chapter 2, a mounting body of geological evidence suggests that it is ancient—vastly older than the 4500 years allocated to it by Egyptologists and perhaps dating back as far as the last Ice Age when no civilization capable of fashioning such a monument is supposed to have existed.
Such notions are of course controversial and hotly disputed. Moreover, as should be obvious by now, geology is incapable of providing us with a precise chronology and is particularly limited by the present state of our knowledge of palaeo-climatology. Indeed, the most we can say, on the sole basis of the monument’s erosion patterns, is that it does appear to have been carved at a much earlier date than Egyptologists believe but that its antiquity could range anywhere between 15,000 bc and 5000 bc.
There is, however, another science which, provided one essential precondition is fulfilled, can provide a much more accurate dating—to within a few decades—of uninscribed ancient stone monuments. This is the science of archaeoastronomy. The precondition upon which it depends for its successful functioning is that the monuments studied should have been accurately aligned to the stars or to the rising points of the sun by their builders.
15. On the summer solstice at the latitude of Giza the sun rises 28 degrees north of east, on the winter solstice it rises 28 degrees south of east and on the equinoxes it rises due east. The Great Sphinx of Giza is an astronomical monument orientated perfectly towards due east and thus serves as a superb equinoctial marker or ‘pointer’.
The Great Sphinx fulfils this precondition. It lies exactly along the east-west axis of the Giza necropolis with its patient and eternal gaze set perfectly towards due east. It is, therefore, a superb ‘equinoctial marker’: its eyes target the exact position of sunrise at dawn on the spring equinox.
To clarify matters a little, astronomers speak of four ‘cardinal moments’ in the year: the summer solstice—the longest day in the northern hemisphere—when the earth’s north pole points most directly at the sun, the winter solstice, the shortest day, when the pole points most directly away from the sun, and the spring and autumn equinoxes when the earth lies broadside-on to the sun and when night and day are of equal length.
On the sum
mer solstice at the latitude of Giza, the sun rises about 28 degrees north of east. On the winter solstice it rises about 28 degrees south of east. By contrast, the main characteristic of the equinoxes (here and everywhere else around the globe) is that the sun always rises due east providing a sure and accurate geodetic reference to one of the cardinal directions.
It is towards this reference point, with high precision, that the gaze of the Sphinx is set—not by accident, but by design, and as part of a vast, archaic astronomical plan of uncanny accuracy and intelligence.
Observatory
Thousands of years ago, under the clear skies of a younger world, Egypt’s Giza plateau must have been the ultimate observatory. From the high ground half a mile to the west of the Sphinx on which the three principal Pyramids stand, there would have been a faultless 360-degree view around an enormous circular horizon—a prospect that would have invited observations of the rising and setting points of the sun throughout the year, and also of the rising and setting points of the stars. It is certain, furthermore, whatever the other functions of the necropolis, that it was indeed used for practical and precise observational astronomy of the kind developed by navigators to pinpoint the positions of ships on the open ocean. Like the ability to keep strictly to a chosen course, the fabulous accuracy with which the principal monuments of Giza are aligned to true north, south, east and west could not have been achieved by any other science.[111]