Pyramid Quest (6 page)

It is important to recognize that these conflicting opinions of Khufu, though themselves ancient by our reckoning, were recorded long after the fact. When Herodotus wrote his account, approximately 2,100 years had passed since Khufu’s rule. Herodotus was as far removed in time from Khufu as we ourselves are from Jesus of Nazareth. The accounts of Diodorus Siculus and Manetho are even farther from their point of origin.

Still, it is unlikely that the three writers were making up the story entirely. No doubt they were drawing on oral histories or folk tales, a source Herodotus in particular relished. At a minimum, those stories, coupled with the Fourth Dynasty’s religious upheaval, lead us to suspect that something curious and unusual was going on during Khufu’s time, something the standard story—which posits the Great Pyramid as nothing more than a giant mausoleum—falls short of explaining. Once again, we must ask whether the Great Pyramid has more significance than simply being “a tomb for some ambitious booby,” as Henry David Thoreau once expressed it.

In part, the standard story works. The Two Lands did come together and form a dynamic political alliance that grew into an expanding kingdom, one that extended its rule into the neighboring regions of Africa and Asia. A powerful elite personified by the pharaoh ruled this growing kingdom, and the religious ideology of royal Egypt transformed the pharaoh into a god awaiting divine transformation at death.

It is in the next leap—that the pyramids served only to house the preserved bodies of dead pharaohs and help in their metamorphosis into a god—where the orthodox explanation falls short. Put simply, the standard story doesn’t account for a number of realities, most strikingly in the case of the Great Pyramid.

To date, no unquestioned royal mummy has been found in the Great Pyramid, nor in any of the three large Giza pyramids for that matter. The best direct evidence for pharaonic interment in the larger Giza pyramids comes from the Menkaure Pyramid, where a basalt sarcophagus was discovered by the British colonel Howard Vyse in 1837 in one chamber, and human bones and the remains of a wooden coffin bearing the name Menkaure in another. Vyse had the sarcophagus shipped back to England for study, but the vessel foundered off the coast of Spain and took the sarcophagus to the bottom. The wooden coffin was probably a restitution from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664-525 B.C.), and, based on radiocarbon dating, the humans remains are from the Christian era. The Khafre Pyramid did contain a sarcophagus, but it housed the remains of not a human but a bull.

Perhaps robbers penetrated the royal tombs before archaeologists did and made off with the treasures they supposedly contained. The mummies themselves would also have been prizes. Even before history museums began adding mummies to their collections, mummy flesh was considered such a powerful medicinal ingredient in Europe that it fetched a stunning price. Thieves cleaned out more than a few ancient tombs, and the mummies of the pharaohs could have made up part of the supply that fed this ghoulish market.

But there is another explanation, one that has to be considered: the pyramids contain no mummies because they never were intended as burial sites. Diodorus writes that Khufu and Khafre were buried elsewhere. Perhaps they were hardly unusual in their choice of a final resting place somewhere other than the pyramids they are said to have built.

If so, then Khufu had another idea in mind with the Great Pyramid. Were he interested simply in building the biggest burial mound in human history, he certainly went to a great deal of unnecessary trouble, on both the inside and the outside of the structure.

The internal passages and chambers of the other pyramids of the Third and Fourth dynasties fit their putative purpose as burial sites. Basically, an entryway leads into one or more chambers located under the pyramid or close to its base. The Great Pyramid has a vastly more complex structure.

The original entrance begins on the Great Pyramid’s north side, as is typical of pyramids in this era, then angles along the Descending Passage to an intersection just above the original bedrock foundation of the pyramid. There the First Ascending Passage angles up, while the Descending Passage continues well down into the bedrock. It ends in a rough-hewn, apparently unfinished room known variously as the Pit, the Subterranean Chamber, and the Cul-de-Sac.

Meanwhile, the first Ascending Passage rises to an intersection of three passages. The first, called the Well Shaft, heads steeply down through the pyramid, changes course more than once, and connects finally to the Descending Passage before it reaches the Subterranean Chamber. The second Passage follows the horizontal into what was dubbed the Queen’s Chamber by the earliest Arab investigators of the pyramid. They gave it this name because it contained the kind of gabled roof used in women’s tombs among the Arabs, rather than the flat roof found in men’s.

The passages of the Great Pyramid. (
From Petrie, 1885, plate v.
)

The Great Pyramid currently contains 203 courses of blocks forming horizontal layers believed to run completely through the pyramid. The Great Pyramid does not come to a sharp point or apex, so it is often estimated that there may have been originally seven or eight additional courses, for a total of 210 or 211. The Queen’s Chamber lies at the twenty-fifth course of masonry, and it is large, measuring 19 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 15 to 20 feet high (the ceiling comes to a peak). Its most prominent feature is a large niche cut into the eastern wall. The chamber is built of limestone blocks so precisely joined that it almost appears to have been carved from a single solid block of stone. One curious, and as yet unexplained, feature of the Queen’s Chamber is the pair of vents, or airshafts, that begin 5 inches deep in the rock wall and lead over 240 feet, one north and one south, to within an estimated 20 feet of the exterior. The shafts, which are only about 8 inches square, are lined with limestone conduits. They weren’t simply cut after all the courses of stone were in place. Rather, they were designed in and cut as the stones were put down layer by layer. Why the builders of the pyramid would have gone to so much trouble to route two shafts such a distance, only to leave them sealed at both ends, remains one of the Great Pyramid’s many unanswered questions.

The third passage branching off the intersection horizontal to the Queen’s chamber enters the Grand Gallery. This remarkable structure stretches for 157 feet at a 26-degree angle under seven-layered corbel walls that angle in on themselves dramatically through their 28-foot height. The Grand Gallery creates the effect of a long, exalted tunnel.

The Grand Gallery ends in a single immense stone block called the Great Step. Directly behind the Great Step lies a small opening, only 41 to 42 inches high and wide, that gives onto a small room known as the antechamber. Yet another small opening leads to the King’s Chamber. Larger than the Queen’s Chamber, the King’s Chamber measures over 34 feet long, 17 feet wide, and 19 feet high, and it is built entirely of red granite from Aswan, in Upper Egypt. The King’s Chamber lies at the fiftieth course of masonry and is empty except for a lidless, rose-granite sarcophagus (also referred to as a coffer) widely considered to have received the mummy of Khufu. When Westerners first explored the King’s Chamber, however, the sarcophagus was empty. As in the Queen’s Chamber, 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.