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ERECTED SOME 4,500 years ago outside Giza, a city still standing on the west bank of the Nile, it is no surprise that structures as impressive as the pyramids have provoked so much debate over how they were built and exactly who it was who laboured on their construction. The largest of the three, the 481-foot Great Pyramid commissioned by the Fourth Dynasty King Cheops, was for nearly 4,000 years the tallest manmade structure on the planet. The completion of Lincoln Cathedral in the first decade of the fourteenth century finally surpassed it when its main spire reached 520 feet above the ground, but the Great Pyramid reclaimed its title in 1549 when that usurper was blown down in a storm.
The Great Pyramid alone comprises something in the region of 2.3 million blocks of stone, the majority of which are limestone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons, but with several internal granite blocks, weighing anything from 15 tons to a staggering 70 tons. So, how did a pre-Iron Age people cut so many limestone blocks with such precision as to allow a tolerance of less than 2 mm, no matter how non-symmetrical the stones’ respective interfaces? The only metal the Egyptians had at the time was copper, which is far too soft to perform such tasks. Next, we have the problem of how such stones were transported from the quarry and hauled up the sides of the ever-increasing pyramid-in-progress; the Egyptians had no pulleys or wheeled vehicles. They were certainly aware of the principle of the wheel as they had potters’ wheels and irrigation wheels but even had they thought of using animal-drawn carts to move the stones they would have needed iron axles to take such weights; copper ones would have buckled or snapped at the first load.
The most popular theory about the method of construction maintains that the workforce must have been divided up into four main groups. The first in the supply chain were those who cut and shaped the limestone blocks in the nearby quarries. The second group used wooden rollers or ox-drawn sledges to haul the stones to the site, where the third team are presumed to have built massive ramps up the sides of the pyramid, enabling them to drag the stones up to the fourth team, who levered or otherwise manhandled them into position for eternity. Once the job was completed, the external ramps were removed to reveal the finished structure, standing ready for its final cladding in the white tiling slabs so long disappeared. All very neat and tidy to be sure, but this still fails to address the problem of how the millions of limestone blocks were cut in the first place or how they were ‘trimmed’ to abut so tightly, each taking into consideration the irregularities of its neighbours (if indeed the pyramids were built of natural stone blocks – not everyone accepts that they were).
PYRAMIDOLOGY
The mysticism ascribed the pyramids was born of the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of pyramidology, with Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, spending the 1870s measuring every aspect and angle of the Great Pyramid to prove that it was an astronomical calculator.
Having documented all his measurements, Smyth worked backwards to his self-invented baseline of a presumed Sacred Inch, equivalent to 1.00106 British inches, and then worked forwards again to ‘establish’ that the perimeter of the Great Pyramid, as measured by himself, was exactly 36,524.2 Sacred Inches, or one-hundred times the number of solar days in the year. Dividing the height in Sacred Inches of any one side of the structure by 25 to arrive at his Sacred Cubit, the answer was a matching 365.242, and so forth.
In 1883, the Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie established beyond any doubt that all of Smyth’s measurements of the Great Pyramid were wildly inaccurate, and had been stretched or shortened to make them fit the procrustean bed of his Sacred Inch or Sacred Cubit theory.
The granite blocks from quarries at Aswan were most certainly the product of laborious cutting and shaping by labourers using hand-held wedges of extremely hard igneous rock to chip away the comparatively softer granite. Cut to form the lintels over access points and the galleries and chambers within, these were then shipped the 500-odd miles up the Nile and then through manmade canals to bring them as close as possible to the construction site, where they could only have been hauled into position by sheer weight of numbers. But this simply could not have been the case for the limestone blocks. The Great Pyramid was about twenty years in the making, which would have called for the production and installation of over 400 blocks per day. Estimates as to the size of the labour force working on the Great Pyramid have varied wildly over the years, with some placing it as high as 100,000 plus, but in 2002 this question at least was answered by the Giza Plateau Mapping Project.
Run by the universities of Chicago and Harvard, the project was led by archaeologist Mark Lehner, who uncovered a complex of individual dwellings and communal areas which, informally named Pyramid City, proved to be the township erected to accommodate that workforce. Estimated by Lehner to have accommodated no more than 20,000, if we eliminate wives and children we could then be left looking at a hands-on workforce of about 10,000. Although this core force was augmented by some of the agricultural workers rendered idle by the Nile’s annual flood – from July to September – such a number would square with estimates as to how many men could physically fit onto such a construction site without, quite literally, falling over each other – the Great Pyramid at its base is only 230 metres square. So, could a workforce of such size produce, transport and instal 400 stone blocks a day? It’s unlikely in the extreme. But there is a more recent theory that cuts through the Gordian knot of all the mysteries surrounding the construction of the pyramids.
Professor Joseph Davidovits, a French materials scientist of international recognition who is also acknowledged to be the founder of geopolymer chemistry, was first intrigued by the absence of any chippings and broken blocks at any of the limestone quarries either uphill from the Great Pyramid or at the wadi (a dry gully or valley) downhill from the site. Limestone is notorious for splitting when worked, so from the production of nearly three million blocks one would expect to find millions upon millions of chippings and shattered blocks. But he could find none. As a member of the International Association of Egyptologists, Davidovits started to look at the composition ‘signature’ of the limestone in the blocks of the Great Pyramid and soon established that this matched perfectly the ‘signature’ of the limestone at the wadi, leaving him to question the sanity of the ancient Egyptians’ decision to source their limestone blocks from a quarry that lay downhill, which would make their transfer to the construction site all the more arduous. Once at the wadi, he immediately recognized this source to be one of soft limestone that bore no evidence of quarrying or carving, but of a gentler process of erosion and scouring to leave smooth and undulating surfaces. Next in his chain of discovery were hieroglyphics mentioning ‘liquid stone’ alongside drawings of men who seemed to be tamping down the contents of wooden boxes. So he again turned his attention to the blocks making up the Great Pyramid and realized that the fossil-shell deposits so typically found in limestone were not lying neatly as in natural sedimentary deposit, but all higgledy-piggledy as if they had been mixed up in fluid form. There was also irrefutable evidence of chemical reaction. Could the ‘stones’ actually be manmade blocks?
Davidovits theorized that limestone dust and rubble was brought up from the wadi to be dissolved in massive Nile-fed pools before being mixed with natron – a form of soda ash found in abundance in Egypt, where it was also used in the embalming of mummies. As the water evaporated the builders would have been left with a form of limestone cement to be carried up the structure in baskets for packing into moulds made of thin wooden slats, well-oiled on the inside so as not to stick to the block during the drying process. Once these initial blocks had quickly set under the Egyptian sun, they themselves would form the walls of the moulds for the casting of other blocks. As these new blocks set, each would undergo infinitesimal shrinkage to leave a 1 mm or 2 mm line between its formative neighbours to look for all the world like a finely crafted joint, which, to be fair, was exactly what it was. Moving on to the experimental stage, Davidovits made a few limestone blocks in this manner and not only did they present identical joint-lines to those on the Great Pyramid, but his blocks were indistinguishable to the naked eye from natural limestone.
In 2009, the Geopolymer Institute published Davidovits’s revised Why the Pharaohs Built the Pyramids with Fake Stone, a book giving all the scientific data to back up his theory. In the same year, Michel Barsoum, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science at Drexel University and previously of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, decided to scan a few stones at the Giza pyramids with an electron microscope in an effort to prove his colleague wrong. Barsoum was more than a little surprised when his scan revealed air bubbles and natural fibres within the structure of his study blocks, two things that are never found within natural limestone. And so to who actually built the pyramids.
During his 1979 goodwill visit to Cairo, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin upset his hosts by casually observing at the Pyramids, ‘Of course, we built them.’ Only in the Judaeo-Christian culture does the myth of Jewish slave labour’s involvement stand prominent, which is surprising as the structures are not mentioned in the Bible or the Torah. Compounded into a widely accepted truth by countless movies and other media ventures, the myth was started by the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus, who, flourishing in the first century AD, used the fourth-century BC writings of Herodotus as his springboard.
With both men writing to their own agendum, Herodotus, who visited Egypt between 449 BC and 430 BC, deliberately set out to further denigrate the already tarnished reputation of Cheops, better known in his time as Khufu and the man who commissioned the Great Pyramid. Listing Khufu’s many and mostly imaginary cruelties, Herodotus went on to say he was hated by his own people for pressing them into slavery to build the Great Pyramid as a monument to his own vanity.
Josephus’s axe was altogether subtler and more complex in its grinding. Born Yosef ben Matityahu, he had been the commander of the Jewish forces in Galilee during the First Jewish–Roman War (AD 66–73) but was captured by the Emperor Vespasian, who kept him handy as a translator and advisor. Eventually assuming Roman citizenship, he wrote several works about the history of his own people, determined to present them to his adoptive nation as a noble and resourceful people with a devout and justified faith in one god. With the Romans by then having brought Egypt into their empire and so many of them travelling to see the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was easy to turn the ‘slaves’ mentioned by Herodotus into Jewish slaves to present them to the Roman reader as engineers of unbounded ability. But even Herodotus was wrong in that no slaves ever worked on the pyramids, as established by Lehner when examining the workers’ complex he had discovered during the Giza Plateau Mapping Project. The rubbish dumps near the canteen-like dining areas showed they had a rich and varied diet and the burial chambers of the more elevated of their number indicated a reverential and respectful send-off that would never have been wasted on a slave. The arrival of the first Jews on Egyptian soil is noted in the Elephantine Papyri, a collection of 175 scrolls unearthed across the last part of the nineteenth century at the ruins of the ancient fortresses at Elephantine, an island in the Nile near Aswan, and at the fortress of Syene in Aswan itself. These note the local reaction to the arrival on the island of a significant number of Hebrew mercenaries in 650 BC when they took occupation of the fort before setting their Egyptian slaves to work on the building of a synagogue.
So, evidence does suggest that the pyramids were built by a dedicated and free Egyptian labour force who, if Professor Davidovits is right, cast their own ‘Lego’ bricks from limestone cement in ever-decreasing numbers as the structure rose higher and higher.