The pyramid builders, whoever they were, did not leave behind any description of their methods. To this day, no Egyptian documents have been found that say how the pyramids were built, who built them. Egyptologists, based only on dubious data, concluded that the step pyramid in Sakkara is the oldest, they attributed its construction to the architect Imhotep, who lived during the reign of King Djoser from the Third Dynasty (XXVIII century BC).
The stepped pyramid of Meduma dates back to the reign of Cheops' father Sneferu (XXVII century BC); The construction of the curved pyramid at Dashur dates back to the same era.
The more ancient mention of the Great Pyramid in sources indicates that it was erected in memory of a global cataclysm in the planetary system, which led to fires and flooding. The Arabs believe that the pyramids were built before the Flood by a king who had a vision that the world would turn upside down and the stars would fall from the sky. Therefore, the king encrypted in the pyramid all the knowledge that the wisest people of those times possessed, including the secrets of astronomy, geometry and physics, treatises on precious stones and mechanisms, on the structure of the celestial sphere and the globe.
The earliest Jewish evidence - apart from the biblical "pillars of stone" - is from Joseph (1st century), who said that the Sephites were wisdom makers who understood the laws of the heavenly realm. To preserve knowledge for all mankind, they built two monuments - one stone, the other brick - stone survived until the time of Joseph.
According to Arab legends, in the Great Pyramid, not only the map of the stars and their cycles, but also the history and chronology of the past and the future are encrypted.
As for the question of who built the Great Pyramid, Arab historians, such as, for example, Ibrahim bin Ibn Wasuff Shah, testify that the pyramids of Giza were built by an antediluvian king named Surid or Saurid, who dreamed of a huge planet that would fall on our planet at the moment when "the heart of Leo reaches the first minute of the head of Cancer." Abu Zeid el-Balkhi quotes an ancient inscription, which says that the Great Pyramid was built at a time when the constellation Lyra was in the constellation of Cancer, or about 73 thousand years ago.
The famous traveler Ibn Batuta, who lived in the XIV century, argued that Hermes Trismegistus (Judaic Enoch), "having learned from the appearance of the stars that a flood was coming, built pyramids, recording in them scientific treatises and other knowledge worthy of being preserved."
According to Theosophist Basil Steward, author of The Mysteries of the Great Pyramid, one cannot be sure that the pyramid, although it is in Egypt, was built by the Egyptians. The steward argued that if all the evidence was collected and analyzed carefully, it would be clear that "the seeds of Egyptian wisdom were sown by several colonists who came to the country in peace and built this great structure."
Promotional video:
These colonists, according to Steward, were Asian or European travelers, extraordinarily wise. Having completed the construction of the pyramid, they left Egypt, taking their knowledge with them.
The steward wrote that the plans for the construction of the Great Pyramid were hatched long before the start of its construction and were the fruit of the work of a single sage, "who belonged to a white civilization endowed with moral, scientific and cultural merit, far superior in development to all other civilizations." Petri agreed with this and added:
"Perfect creations, often from the early period (of Egyptian architecture), are not associated with some school of ubiquitous teaching, but rather with a group of people whose phenomenal abilities far exceeded those of their contemporaries." Regarding the incredible precision with which the Great Pyramid was built, Petri remarked: "It owes its existence to the talent of one person."
Relatively not so long ago, Russian scientists suggested that the Egyptians could have come from Indonesia, who left the country when 10-12,000 years ago, the local civilization died as a result of some kind of cosmic catastrophe, for example, an asteroid fall. Astronomical maps of incredible accuracy have been discovered, on which the location of the stars is indicated where they should have been several millennia ago.
Also, during the excavation, several items were found, including crystal lenses, absolutely spherical and precise, which may have been used in telescopes. Similar lenses have been found during excavations in Iraq and Central Australia, but these days they can only be made using an abrasive material made from cerium oxide, which can only be obtained electrically.
As for the legends, on the question of the dating of the erection of the pyramid, apart from the mention of the fact that it was built 300 years before the Flood, they do not add clarity. Egyptologists who established that the reign of the Fourth Dynasty dates back to 2720 2560 BC. BC, it is believed that the Great Pyramid was built in 2644 BC. e.; others call the date of the beginning of its construction 2200 BC. e., it took another 3056 years to complete the work. According to another version, the pyramid is 1000 years older.
As for the method used by the builders, history has not preserved information. Edwards of the Egyptian Department of the British Museum, who devoted his whole life to finding at least some facts on this subject, points out in his scientific treatise, written in the 1930s, that neither ancient Egyptian texts nor rock paintings shed light on this question.
But Egyptologists agree that initially the builders needed to clear the Giza plateau from sand and stones to the soil layer, then level the surface. R. Engelbach, a pupil of Petri, who for many years worked as a curator of the Cairo Museum, believes that to level the land, the Egyptians surrounded the construction site on four sides with small embankments of river silt, filled its inner space with water and laid a network of canals on it. Cole was able to assess the result of their work, who found that on an area of 5.2 hectares, deviations from the horizontal level did not exceed 2.5 cm.
On the cleared soil layer, rectangular slabs of white limestone were laid, which served as a covering on which the first row of facing stones was laid. Then it was necessary to anchor large corner blocks on the ground to form square corners for laying layers of facing slabs. Archaeologists easily found that most of the limestone blocks were delivered from the Mokattam hills on the banks of the Nile, although some of the blocks could have been taken directly from the Giza hills. On individual slabs with red ocher, there are the names of the stonecutter brigades, for example, "Boat brigade" or "Strong brigade".
The closest source of the seventy-ton granite monoliths used to enclose the Tomb of the King are the Aswan quarries, about 800 km up the Nile; from there they were probably transported downstream on barges. W. Emery proved that already during the First Dynasty, the Egyptians had wonderful copper tools, including saws and chisels, with which they could crush and cut limestone, and that their technology for grinding granite was improved to the level of art. They supposedly used moistened quartz sand as an abrasive material for sawing operations.
Several tools were designed by the Egyptians for cleaving rock from the hills, traces of some of them can be found today in the Mokattam quarries. For a hundred meters, adits were cut into the rock, ledges were cut between the ceiling and the block that had to be removed, then a vertical groove was punched with wooden hammers and copper chisels, hardened by some unknown method. Wooden wedges moistened with water were inserted into this groove; widening wedges split the rock. Sometimes bonfires were kindled, and when water was poured onto a hot stone, they got a completely even break.
The only historical evidence of the way the blocks were transported to the place of the pyramid's construction belongs to Herodotus, who wrote that, as he was told in Egypt, it took 20 years to build the pyramid, and 100 thousand people transported stones from the mountains for three months. For the transportation of huge blocks, a road 900 meters long and 18 meters wide was built in 10 years from polished stone, along which heavy stones were dragged on runners.
Captain F. Barber, an American naval attaché who worked in Egypt and wrote a pamphlet entitled The Mechanical Triumph of the Ancient Egyptians, calculated that if the road were to rise 36 meters above the Nile, it would have a slope of 30 cm for every 7.5 m. of the canvas, which, in his opinion, is a relatively small steepness, taking into account the lubrication of the surface. Barber calculated that it would take 900 men, two in a row, to drag the 60-ton monolith along such an inclined plane using 4 ropes. This harness would have taken up a space of 67.5 meters long and 4.8 meters wide, and he considered this arrangement quite compact.
Barber argued that it was not too difficult for so many workers to move stones, especially if they were trained to move in sync; that is why he believed that intelligent people were employed in such works, and not beasts of burden - it is not difficult to teach people to rhythmic movement, especially if you use a marching song or a semblance of a metronome. The momentary force exerted by all these people allows them to move a plate, the weight of which is almost equal to their total own weight, which is several times higher than their usual pulling force.
If there were gaps in the ranks due to sick workers, they could be compensated for by a competent distribution of the strength of the rest. The drawings that have come down from those times show processions similar to the one reconstructed by Barber, which included a specially selected person who poured some kind of lubricant onto the road to reduce friction.
Other Egyptologists believe that, due to the huge amount of used stone, many such roads were needed, but very few of them survived. According to the French scientist E. Amelino, at the end of the 18th century, the remains of the inclined path leading to the pyramid of Khafre remained; and traces of the road to the pyramid of Mykerin can be seen today. Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan says that there are significant areas at the edge of the Giza plateau, lined with large limestone blocks; this pavement stretches in a northeasterly direction and descends half the height of the plateau.
The scientist believes that it may be the remains of a road that was destroyed after the construction of the pyramid. Another Egyptian archaeologist, Ahmed Fakhri, assures that the remains of the southern part of the road, consisting of boulders mixed with mud, still exist near the southern side of the main pavement.
As for the technology of building the pyramid itself, the opinions of Egyptologists differed on this issue. Herodotus mentioned that at first the upper part of the pyramid was completed, after the middle and, finally, the lower one. This means that the cut facing stones were set at the top close to the core (center), probably by means of an inclined plane, or ramp, which decreased as the builders moved down; this technology required the use of four ramps - one opposite the other.
Herodotus noted that the facing stones were raised from the ground step by step on wooden cranes by means of a mechanism that he did not describe in detail. Cotsworth calculated that if the stones were lifted up in the manner indicated by Herodotus, it would take about a month to lift one stone to the top.
Barber argues that cranes or derrick cranes would have been needed to lift the huge slabs, so in the absence of such equipment, the Egyptians had to construct ramps. Remains of such ramps were found at the pyramid of Amenemkhet in Lisht, as well as in Medum. Aerial photography also revealed the presence of ramps in the sands of Dashura. Petri believed that the facing layer was laid simultaneously with the inner blocks, and construction was carried out from the bottom up. He calculated that up to 500 blocks were delivered and stacked every day from the quarries. Since the lower layers contain 50,000 blocks, it would take over three months to install each layer.
Petrie claims that the blocks were transported in three months of the spill, when it was possible to employ a large number of workers and float the blocks on water. He suggests that even if for each stone with a volume of 1.12 cubic meters and weighing about 2.5 tons there were no more than 8 people, they could transport a dozen such stones to the pyramid in three months, for two weeks they would drag blocks from the quarry along road, in a day or two, with a good wind, they would ferry them down the Nile, and it could take six weeks to climb them to their proper place on the pyramid.
Petrie calculated that the Great Pyramid contains about 2,300,000 blocks weighing 2.5 tons each, measuring an average of 127 x 127 x 71 centimeters. If 8 people could cope with a dozen stones in three months, then 100 thousand people could deliver 125 thousand stones every season, thus it turned out that the construction of the pyramid took 20 years, as Herodotus noted.
Edwards notes that undoubtedly, in addition to the 100,000 people who transported the blocks to the pyramid, the construction involved many more workers. They were experienced bricklayers and their assistants. Perhaps they lived in buildings that Petri discovered to the west of the Khafre pyramid, where up to 4 thousand people could be accommodated in the barracks at the same time. Petri calculated that 40,000 experienced workers could easily process 120,000 blocks every year; 4 people would work on one stone for a month.
Petrie was convinced that the masons laid layers of masonry on the ground before lifting them. He found horizontal lines etched into the cladding and interior slabs showing how they fit. In his opinion, the work was carried out under the guidance of experienced bricklayers who drew up a plan for the whole year and supervised the work, and during periods of spills, groups of laborers lifted the finished slabs and placed them in their proper places. Petri said that the tiles, skillfully crafted, were set in position from the inside, while the inner layers were filled later.
Two Italian scientists, Maragoglio and Rinaldi, who measured the pyramids in Giza relatively recently and presented the results of their work in a 4-volume work, agreed that the outer and inner layers were laid simultaneously. They believe that the tiles were slid into place over a thin layer of slurry that served as a lubricant, not just a binder; these slabs were levered to the rear and side so that cracks or chips were not visible from the outside.
Ballard noted that it would be impossible to install such elaborate blocks without damaging them; he suggested that the slabs were being modified according to the template already in place. While supporting Petrie, Edward points out that because the lower layers of the masonry were located on a smooth pavement that protruded about half a meter beyond the base of the pyramid, it was impossible to lay facing stones from the outside without damaging the protruding edge of the pavement; also, they could not be refined in the masonry, since the pavement would also suffer from this.
The fact that some of the limestone slabs that made up the pavement were laid below the central blocks also indicates that the center of the pyramid was filled after the outer layer was laid. According to Petri, the outer slabs were laid close to each other on the ground and fitted along the side, back and bottom edges so that all that remained in place was to align the outer edge.
According to the testimony of the architect Rex Engelbach and the engineer Somers Clark, the authors of the book "Ancient Egyptian Masons", in order to make the side faces of the facing stones absolutely equal, they were laid close to each other, and passed between them with a saw. However, Maragoglio and Rinaldi did not find any traces of sawing work on the vertical side edges.
Petrie claims to have found traces of red ocher on the face of some of the slabs that were not carefully polished, from which he concluded that the polishing was stepwise - much like a dentist treats a tooth - and at the same time the ocher-coated wafers were inspected. In any case, the final fit of the tiles had to be done before they were laid in place.
All stones visible in our time are internal, specially processed in such a way that they fit snugly to the external. They are also well processed, but made not of pure white limestone, but interspersed with fossils. The slabs of the next layers of masonry are processed much worse and differ in size, this was also done so that the seams did not match. The slabs were held together with a mortar of sand, lime and crushed red ceramic, which gave it a pinkish color.
Petrie believed that a ramp installed opposite one face was used to lift all layers of facing and central slabs to the top of the pyramid, and he determined that its volume should be at least equivalent to the volume of the pyramid itself. Barber believes that the inclined plane, ending at the top of the pyramid, with an inclination of 10 degrees, should have started to be carried over 1,800 m in the Nile Valley, such a platform 480 m longer than the pavement that Herodotus wrote about. Moreover, according to Barber, it took 4 times more effort to lift the slabs on the ramp than on the pyramid itself.
To install the ramp at the pyramid, according to Barber's calculations, it would take 2,100,000 cubic meters of bricks from the Nile, or 4 times more stone than was used to build the pyramid. With each successive layer of masonry, the ramp got higher and longer, but it also narrowed. According to Pliny, the ramps were built from saltpeter and salt, and later it was possible to dissolve them with water, but this statement seems fantastic, since a whole ocean of water would be required.
In the November 1970 issue of Natural History, engineer Olaf Tellefsen argued that the Great Pyramid could have been erected by only a few thousand workers if they used a simple mechanism consisting of a sturdy wooden girder balanced by counterweights at a fulcrum and fixed on wooden slopes. This, in his opinion, would make it possible to get rid of bulky ramps. Tellefsen assured that in Ancient Egypt there would not be enough labor to build ramps more than half the pyramid high. Egyptologists objected with a slight snide that there was no proof of Tellefsen's theory yet.
Cotsworth believes that the Egyptians invented a more efficient system for lifting stones: they used the pyramid itself as a ramp, dragging stones along its spiraling outer wall.
This system provided additional benefits if the southern wall of the pyramid was completed earlier and further work was carried out in its shadow, and not under the scorching sun. However, even if you forget about the heat and imagine the entire amount of work that the Egyptians did, it will certainly seem incredible. Barber stated that such a project should have been led by a truly brilliant engineer: it was necessary to correctly plan the work, assign workers to different operations, control that everyone works in concert, provide the required number of tools, as well as food and housing for workers, and even foresee actions for case of unforeseen situations.
Barber pointed out that community works were necessary during the spill to provide food for the population. August Mencken suggested that in addition to workers, it was necessary to provide food, housing and security for at least 150 thousand women and children. From ancient texts and drawings, Barber gleaned information about how the overseers treated the forced laborers, and concluded that an army of 400 thousand people would be needed to ensure order in the construction of the pyramid.
Cotsworth suggested that a hot, dry climate such as Egypt did not require housing for workers accustomed to living on grain and water for food, and as for sanitation, they were much better there than in Victorian England.
Waste rocks and materials were transported over the rocks of Giza to the northern and southern sides, where they formed rubble, extending hundreds of meters and occupying a space of approximately half the volume of the pyramid. During excavations at the foot of the rock, Petri found layers of desert pebbles and sand, indicating the clearing of an area of the desert necessary for construction work. In the piles of rubbish, he found fragments of containers for water and food, fragments of wood and charcoal, and even a piece of ancient twine.
The only mention of the cost of building the pyramid belongs to Herodotus, who reported that, according to the translator, the amount spent per day to purchase radishes, onions, and garlic to feed the workers is engraved at the base of the pyramid. However, this evidence looks unreliable, like another fact mentioned by Herodotus that Cheops had so much spent during the construction of the pyramid that he was forced to trade his daughter, taking the price of one limestone block for each of her services.
Kingsland calculated that if 2,300,000 blocks were stacked in 20 years, or 7,300 working days, then 315 stones would have to be stacked daily, or 26 stones per hour, for a working day of 12 hours. Mencken, who was so dismissive of the mathematical and astronomical achievements of the ancient Egyptians, was nevertheless forced to admit that, given the variety of problems that they inevitably had to face during construction, one must assume that they had better tools and more developed scientific knowledge. what is commonly believed.
Kingsland wondered what kind of lighting and ventilation the Egyptians used during their underground work. He did not consider it supernatural that the Egyptians could have tools of which we have a rather modest idea, and use methods that we today consider occult. Perhaps their methods are not as mystical as it might seem at first glance: Lockyer suggested that using one movable mirror and several stationary ones, it was possible to achieve that sunlight reached any corner of the pyramid's bowels.
Although legends attribute to the priests of Heliopolis the ability to cause storms and move stones that 1000 people cannot lift, most Egyptologists strongly reject the possibility of using such progressive methods as laser technology to cut stones or such ultra-modern mechanisms as anti-gravity machines., to lift weights, insisting that all work was carried out using primitive tools and unlimited human strength.
Nevertheless, Edwards claims: "Cheops, possibly suffering from megalomania, would never have built anything similar in size and durability to the Great Pyramid in 23 years of his reign, if technical achievements did not allow his masons to handle huge blocks of stones."
Petri speaks in favor of the unknown method, saying that the Khafrean pyramid contains a granite "lifting lattice" weighing about 2 tons, located in such a narrow tunnel that only 6-8 people could work on it at the same time. Because, indeed, to manipulate such a weight would require the force of 40-60 workers, Petrie came to the conclusion that the Egyptians had to use more advanced construction methods that have not come down to us.
Although the Danish engineer Tony Brunes demonstrated how huge blocks like the beams in the Tomb of the King could be lifted by a single person thanks to the skillful use of wedges and balancers, Petri was convinced that the ancient builders had even more advanced means of lifting and moving stones than ordinary ramps. rollers, levers.
However, perhaps one of the most intricate mysteries of the pyramid concerns the three granite fillings that sealed the exit from the Ascending Tunnel.
N. Nepomniachtchi