Δευτέρα 22 Μαρτίου 2010

The Amazing Great Pyramid of Egypt


 By Tom Valentine

No other structure on earth defies our comprehension as thoroughly and impressively as does the Great Pyramid of Egypt. When was it built, by whom, why and how? Said to have been constructed by people who are claimed by establishment historians to have been little more than one step removed from the Neolithic, this magnificent edifice and the entire Giza complex contain many a “how in the world did they manage to do that?” puzzle. For hundreds of years, archeologists, mathematicians and historians have only compounded the mystery as they discovered more questions—but never answers.
The Great Pyramid is almost beyond comparison with all the other structures in both ancient Egypt and Central America. In fact, nothing else made by man, including the Great Wall of China, can compare in the precision of construction, the size and placement of stones.
However, to deepen the mystery, before we even begin to consider the incredible stone construction features, let’s pause for a simple exercise. Get a piece of string and approach a globe of our world. Run the string down from the north pole through the meridian at Cairo and on down to the south pole. You will see that this particular meridian appears to travel through more land mass than any other line of longitude on the globe. Now, outline the latitude of the Great Pyramid around the entire globe with the same piece of string. Does it not ap pear that you once again pass over more land mass than at any other latitude on earth?
There are those who say the builders of the Great Pyramid selected that particular building site because they were aware it marked the “central point” of the earth’s continental mass.
That’s a delicious conversational oddity, isn’t it? But it proves nothing and only adds to the intrigue. We are now traveling the yellow brick road of all who try to place the Great Pyramid neatly into the accepted view of ancient history.
First of all it is a 40-story building on a base of 13 1/2 acres. The huge cathedrals of Milan and Florence, plus St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome and West minster Abbey in England could all be fitted within the confines of the Great Pyramid’s base. Were we to grind the estimated 2,300,000 blocks of limestone into gravel we could lay a roadbed 16 feet wide and a foot thick all the way from New York City to San Francisco, a distance of 3,000 miles.
The smallest of the 2.3 million building blocks weighs about three tons. Virtually all of these “plain” limestone blocks were quarried from nearby rock and transported somehow to their present site. We don’t know by whom, when or how.
The square base is aligned almost perfectly to the four cardinal points of the compass, which is a remarkable accident of orientation, or else historians are thousands of years in error about the beginnings of navigation and the first compass. Later we shall see that the unidentified builders evidently knew a great deal more about planet earth than the cardinal points of the compass. It is also said that the design provides a practical way for “squaring the circle” and the Great Pyramid actually defines (pi), the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
Although scholars today prefer to ignore the advanced geometric de sign and the apparent unit of measure favored by the unknown designer and builder, the facts have been etched in stone for thousands of years, so to speak.
The four-sided exterior (22 acres total) was covered by magnificent white Tura limestone casing stones, weighing an estimated 15 tons each. These stones were cut from a quarry on the other side of the Nile River. They had to be cut, polished into a glistening finish, transported across the Nile and up to the plateau site, where they were placed with astounding precision. Some of the casings are still in place today. You cannot fit a business card into the space between the stones, as less than a fiftieth of an inch separates the blocks.
How were these blocks cut? Leaving aside the miraculous precision of the cuts, the smoothness of the surface, the tightness of the fittings, what tools were used to fashion these gigantic stones? According to today’s scientists, when the pyramid was constructed, “primitive man” had no steel and perhaps not even bronze, and would have had to use stone and soft copper to quarry and craft these building blocks.
The cement used to join the casing stones is so fine and so amazingly strong that it boggles the minds of stone masons today. Most of the polished limestone casing blocks were looted centuries ago, but it is known that the stone will fracture before the adhesion of the cement will give.
The Great Pyramid is located at the apex of the Nile delta and part of the mythology that has built up around the structure is that the polished, pure white Tura limestone casings covering the exterior would catch the sunlight and reflect a “glorious light” that served as a massive sundial allowing Nile delta residents to note the passing of the days as well as the time of the day.
Turn-of-the-century pyramidologist David Davidson demonstrated that the exterior surface was actually very precisely concave or indented slightly from top to bottom right down the middle of each exterior face. Many years later, an aerial photograph verified this fact by catching the outline of the shadow cast across the indentation. This feature is not incorporated into any of the other pyramid structures in the vicinity. The precise indentations were obviously not accidental. It simply serves to heighten the mystery surrounding the great structure, its builders and its purpose.
Even without such detailed refinements, there isn’t a construction company in the world today that could bid and complete this job. The change orders and cost overrides would doom the project to failure even if it were backed by the Federal Reserve.
For example, an Indiana limestone quarry expert was once asked to estimate delivery time for just the 2 million or so rough limestone blocks of about three tons each. He estimated that the 33 Indiana quarries could deliver the stone FOB their own rail siding in 27 years, providing nothing went wrong.
With that in mind, remember, we were once told by conventional historians that Pharaoh Khufu (called Cheops by the Greeks) had the pyramid built, probably with slave labor, during his historically alleged (best guess) reign of 23 years around 2600 B.C. Apparently, establishment scholars chose to accept the notion that disgruntled slaves can quarry and move stone blocks with primitive tools far more efficiently than modern quarry operations.
Frankly, along with the casing stones, the really impressive part of the Great Pyramid’s construction is the interior chambers. Any visitor to the “first wonder of the ancient world” today may clamber inside to visit the “King’s Chamber,” which is located well up near the geometric center of the huge structure. The actual entrance, hidden be neath the Tura limestone surface blocks, was finally located by Muslim explorers sometime in the middle ages. Today there is a gaping hole about 55 feet up the north face of the structure, but not quite in the center of the face. The entrance was deliberately offset to the east of dead center by about 24 feet—more precisely, offset by exactly 286.1022 “pyramid inches” to the east, a displacement factor we will discuss later.
Originally, the entrance descended at approximately a 26 degree angle for about 60 feet before an “ascending passage,” going upward into the interior at the same angle, could be reached. In another of those magnificent mysteries, the original ascending passage is plug ged with three, tightly fitting, five-ton granite blocks. These blocks are still in place.
Since it is considered a physical impossibility to simply slide a heavy square block of solid granite down a 26-degree incline made of softer limestone while having less than a quarter-inch clearance all the way around, it seems apparent the builders plugged the passage during construction. Therefore, if a pharaoh’s mummy were going to inhabit the chamber, it and all its associated paraphernalia would have to be placed in the chamber before the rest of the structure was finished.
Is it possible that the pyramid was not intended as a tomb, as conventional Egyptology would have us believe?
History teaches us that the first people to crack the casing and enter the structure after it was sealed ages ago worked for the caliph of Dar-al-Salam (Baghdad), a highly educated and competent ruler known as Abdallah al-Mamun (c. A.D. 786-833). His father was Harun Er-Rashid, hero of many of the stories in A Thousand and One Arabian Nights (in which, as you will recall, Sheherazade told tale after spellbinding tale to the Sultan Shariar to avoid having her head chopped off the next morning, as was his wont with his numerous one-night wives). Mamun himself was a very accomplished lea der—so much so that his work on the Great Pyramid is only a minor part of his contributions to science and the arts.
The eighth- and ninth-century Arabs, however, were inferior stonemasons compared with whoever built the pyramids, and they could not penetrate the smooth limestone casings with metal drill bits. So they simply bashed and ground a tunnel through the limestone in the center of the north face by heating the casings with bonfires, then pouring vinegar on the hot limestone to make it crack. They missed the en trance by about 24 feet, and tunneled for about 100 feet into the structure before a stroke of luck signaled a possible hollow place to the east of them, which turned out to be the descending passageway, discovering the subterranean chamber called by some mystics “the chamber of chaos.” Through another bit of luck and several weeks of backbreaking labor, they finally broke into the narrow ascending passage and thence to the two best-known interior rooms, the Queen’s and King’s chambers.
Today when you visit the Great Pyramid, you can see the granite plugs; and then to go up into the interior you must crawl on your hands and knees 129 feet up the 26 degree incline inside a claustrophobically narrow square passageway.
Suddenly you may stand upright in a “grand gallery,” 28 feet in height and 153 feet in length, ascending upward at the same 26 degree angle, to a point where it ultimately reaches the floor level of the so-called “King’s Chamber.” Visitors also pass the floor level of a chamber known arbitrarily as the “Queen’s Chamber,” which is impressive enough, but not quite as impressive as the main room, somewhat higher up, the equally arbitrarily named King’s Chamber.
There is also a curious antechamber to the King’s Chamber, a subterranean chamber, and a small “grotto” in the “Well Shaft,” so-called, as well as five “air spaces” above the King’s Chamber, and some so-called air shafts emanating from the King’s and Queen’s chambers. There may well be other passageways and chambers that have yet to be discovered. The actual function of any of these features cannot be said to be known to modern man.
The “King’s Chamber” remains an utterly unexplained mystery. The walls, floors and ceilings of both interior chambers are made of huge blocks of a rose-colored granite. However, it is the massive size of nine granite blocks making up the ceiling of the King’s Chamber that boggles the engineering mind. These blocks weigh more than 85 tons apiece.
To get an idea of how heavy 85 tons is, consider this: In order for modern construction teams to lift and place a piece of equipment weighing a mere 65 tons, the crane capable of lifting it would need to be broken down and trucked in on 15 semi trailers and then reassembled. So how on earth did the pyramid builders move a stone of such mass? Ropes and log rollers? Were there that many trees available to the ancient Egyptians, or that much hemp? Maybe that’s what happened to all the trees in that desert; clear-cutting, to get enough logs for rolling all those stones. Of course, such an “explanation” is preposterous.
The only explanation seems to be that the ancient builders were in possession of a knowledge of levitation, or anti-gravity, a knowledge avidly sought today by scientists who construct space vehicles.
It is known that the huge granite blocks were quarried more than 200 miles from the site of the Great Pyramid and floated down the Nile. These perfectly cut blocks of granite were hauled up the plateau, then up the steep sides, or up a ramp covering the steep sides, and gently, perfectly, neatly and precisely placed as the walls, floors and ceilings of the interior chambers.
Did you ever try to place a rectangular block of stone between or into a position next to other rectangular blocks? How do you get your fingers out of the way? How do you get the ropes out of the way? How do you do it without chipping or rounding the perfect edges? Remember, each stone weighs 85 tons.
The King’s Chamber, built entirely of finished granite blocks, is 34 feet 4 inches from east to west and 17 feet 2 inches from north to south. Near the west wall rests a huge, open, lidless rectangular granite “sarcophagus” or coffer. It is claimed by the establishment that this was the resting place of the mummy of Pharaoh Khufu. But while this is possible, there is no evidence to support the theory.
The once finely hewn stone has been vandalized over the centuries since the pyramid was opened, but it remains an impressive piece of masonry nonetheless. The sarcophagus is bigger than the ascending passage, so it had to have been placed in the room during construction. Experts have been unable to identify the area from which the sarcophagus rock might have been quarried.
Here is a detailed description of this chamber’s ceiling structure fromThe Pyramids of Egypt (by I.E.S. Edwards):

The roof of the King’s Chamber has no exact architectural parallel. Above its flat ceiling, which is composed of nine slabs weighing in aggregate about 400 tons, there are five separate compartments, the ceilings of the first four being flat and the fifth having a pointed roof. The purpose of this construction, it appears, was to eliminate any risk of the ceiling of the chamber collapsing under the weight of the superincumbent masonry. Whether such extreme precautions were required by the character of the building may be debatable; they have, however, been justified by subsequent events. Every one of the massive slabs of granite in the ceiling of the chamber and many of those in the relieving compartments [has] been cracked—presumably by an earthquake—but none has yet collapsed.
Now, if we are to believe our modern scholars, the slave laborers had to first build the structure up about one/third of its finished height in order to construct the inner chambers in the center of the mass of stone. It was tough enough for relatively fresh bronze age humans to lug and perhaps roll the million or more limestone blocks into place to reach the chamber level—now they had to haul and exactly place those massive blocks of granite, without damaging them in the process. Was this possible?
The truth is, professors of Egyptian antiquity don’t have a clue about who built the Giza pyramids, or how, or what their exact purpose was in building these particular structures, despite the fact scholars have a pretty good data bank regarding all other pyramids, which were evidently tombs for rulers.
The accepted theory that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu about 2600 B.C. has no good evidence behind it at all. In fact, the hard evidence points to Khufu “adopting” the grand structure that was already there by building his family tombs around its base. The speculation about Khufu stems from a roughly painted “cartouche” found on the back side of one of those big granite slabs making up the ceiling. What scholars aren’t telling is that the cartouche for Khufu could just as easily, if not more so, been interpreted “khuti,” which translates as “glorious light,” which may have been the name of the Great Pyramid, which glistened in the desert sun like a glorious light when all four sides were coated with those polished white limestone blocks fitted precisely together.
The painted cartouche on the back of a finished block is most logically interpreted as a worker’s mark stating something like “take this one to the pyramid.” Thus, the obvious facts of the construction make the anointed version of ancient Egyptian history difficult to accept.
The designer and builder of the Great Pyramid knew much more about physics, mathematics, geometry and astronomy than can be attributed to the ancient Egyptians. We know this be cause of a great debate that raged about 150 years ago in the hallowed halls of England’s Royal Society. One group of scholars came to believe God had to design and direct the construction of this remarkable monument, because ancient Egyptians surely could not have done so.
At the dawning of the 19th century, one of Napoleon’s savants suggested that whoever the builders of the Great Pyramid were, they apparently knew a great deal about the size and shape of the earth and may have embodied an “earth-commensurate” unit of measure. French scholars tried and failed to make the “meter” fit their thesis.
However, across the channel were a people using the inch as a unit of measurement, and no one could explain from whence this practical unit derived. Well-educated fundamentalists in Lon don and Scotland, faced with the sweeping changes being brought about by the writings of Charles Darwin, tried to prove that God designed the Great Pyramid and that His faithful living on the British Isles had inherited His perfect unit of measure.
John Taylor, a London journalist was the first to question the unique slope of the angle from the Great Pyramid’s base to its apex—51 degrees, 51 minutes of arc. A 60 degree angle would have been a priori more sensible, he reasoned, because that is the angle of an equilateral triangle. This curiosity propelled Tay lor to be the first to discover that the Great Pyramid monumentalizes the fabled relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
Fascinated by this geometric discovery, Taylor had an idea that the number of “British inches” in the published per imeter of the structure (36,600) somehow related to the number of days in a year. He took his concepts to C. Piazzi Smyth, astronomer royal of Scotland, who was renowned as a mathematician. Smyth did not make fun of Taylor but began to tinker with the geometry of the structure. When Taylor died, Smyth made a trip to Cairo and measured the remains of the edifice. He published his findings in a book titledOur Inheritance in the Great Pyramid.
Smyth had determined that the ancient Egyptians could not have built the Great Pyramid, so he gave the credit to God and the Bible. He claimed his measurements of the structure showed that the “sacred cubit” of the Bible and the pyramid builders, virtually 25 modern British inches, was used deliberately by the builders.
After he published his “findings,” Smyth was suddenly hailed as “the world’s biggest pyramidiot,” and Sir Flinders Petrie, acknowledged as the father of modern archeology, decided to visit Egypt and measure the Great Pyramid himself. Petrie also had to admit his own amazement at the precision of the ancient building.
A later reconstruction by David Da vid son, verified by a British government-sponsored survey in 1925, provides the following statistics:
1. The Great Pyramid’s height (projected for the missing apex) to its base plus the interior design would, indeed, monumentalize the geometry of a circle.
2. The polar-diameter inch, which is a hair larger than the present inch, was postulated by Astronomer Royal Sir John Herschel as one ten-millionth the distance from the center of the earth to the surface at the north pole. It could very well have been a “basic unit of measure used by the Great Pyramid designer,” and a “cubit” of 25 pyramid inches appears to have been used as well.
3. A precise measuring of the “original design” will give 365.242 cubits as the length of each side at the base from corner to corner, without accounting for the indentation. The number 365.242 is precisely the number of days in a solar year—which is determined by measuring the exact time between two successive vernal or autumnal equinoxes. Using the “indentation” in each face, the geometrical design also gives the exact number of days in the sidereal or star-time year, which is 365.256 the time of earth’s orbit as measured by a fixed star. And the anomalistic year of 365.259 is also monumentalized. The difference of about 20 minutes each year is due to the earth’s axial wobble.
4. A special “displacement factor” of 286.1022 pyramid inches is monumentalized in the design in three distinct ways. That is the exact difference in height between the ascending passage and the grand gallery; it is the precise offset to the east of the entrance and interior passage system and it is the height that would be covered by the missing apex stone. The factor 286.1022 has a number of special mathematical uses, one of which is calculating the rate of astronomical precession.
5. Precession refers to the apparent motion caused by the earth’s “wobble” as it spins on its axis. Projecting imaginary lines (the path of the earth’s ecliptic, the equator and a meridian at a particular time of day each day) into space can mark the “precession of the equinoxes” traveling through the constellations (signs of the zodiac), starry symbols which man has used since ancient times—another “how did they know that?” mystery.
Additionally, the sum of the base diagonals of the Great Pyramid equals 25,826.5 pyramid inches; modern astronomy confirms that the complete cycle of precession is 25,826.5 years. It is amazing to note that the perimeter measurement of the 35th course of masonry, which was constructed at a greater width than all the other courses of block, thus calling attention to it, also measures 25,826.5 pyramid inches.
It is no more mind-boggling to contemplate the incorporation of solar astronomy, geometry and earth-commensurate measure into this huge stone monument than it is to merely consider how they managed to construct it.
The Great Pyramid has always fascinated man and always will—until some future generation unravels its final mysteries. It is fitting to note the words of David Davidson, the agnostic architect, engineer, astronomer and mathematician who set out to disprove the “zany notions” of the Bible-based pyramidologists and then later embraced them:
These ancient pyramid builders used a system of geometry in a graphical demonstration of natural law, defining the linear and angular measurements of the earth and its orbit; defining the annual rates and periods of the cyclical motions of the earth and its orbit; and defining a system of astronomical chronology that can be the basis of related reference for every period or highly developed stage of civilization in the world’s history.
It seems that a former civilization was more highly skilled in the science of astronomy—and therefore in the mathematical basis of the mechanical arts and sciences—than our modern civilization. And what does this mean? It means it has taken modern man thousands of years to piece together his discoveries (via experiments) facts he had originally come to know by another surer and simpler method. It means, in effect, that the whole empirical basis of our modern civilization is a makeshift collection of hypotheses compared with the knowledge of natural laws which governed an advanced civilization of the past.
Davidson’s science was quite sound, but logic later forced him to attribute the Great Pyramid to some divine or supernatural intervention, and thus he became as fanatical in advancing his own theories as the fundamentalist thinkers he originally set out to disprove.
It all boils down to this: there are few things more humbling than to consider the mortals who lived and toiled to de sign and construct the Great Pyramid.
http://www.barnesreview.org

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