While musing on the Great Pyramid’s four mysterious narrow shafts for my last cipher post, I was struck by an entirely different explanation for them. Since then, I’ve read through a whole load of web-pages (I know, I know) and haven’t yet seen anything similar, so I thought I’d share the idea with you all, see where it leads. Please feel free to tell me if I’m reinventing a wheel or talking nonsense, I really don’t mind. 🙂
To quickly recap just about everything important about the Great Pyramid (aka the Pyramid of Khufu, or his Greek name Cheops) that I know…
* The Great Pyramid was constructed on top of a pre-existing hillock.
* All the rooms and passages in the Great Pyramid lie in (broadly speaking) a single vertical plane.
* The lowest chamber is an unfinished underground chamber carved into the hillock.
* The next highest chamber is known the “Queen’s Chamber”, though there’s no evidence a queen (or indeed anyone else) ever used it.
* The highest chamber is known as the “King’s Chamber”, and contains a large (but poorly finished) sarcophagus.
* The King’s Chamber has five large cavities above, thought to protect it against being collapsed by earthquakes.
* The King’s Chamber has two narrow shafts that extend diagonally upwards to the exterior of the pyramid.
* The Queen’s Chamber has two (originally concealed) narrow shafts that go sideways for about two metres and then diagonally upwards, but don’t obviously go to the exterior of the pyramid (i.e. where all the robot crawlers have gone a-trundling)
* The Queen’s Chamber lies immediately below the pyramid’s central axis, but the King’s Chamber is offset to one side.
Your Intellectual History challenge here is to explain the function of the two narrow shafts in the Queen’s Chamber. Here’s my answer:-
I suspect the Great Pyramid was built in two major stages of ascending grandeur / pharaonic megalomania. That is, I think that the Queen’s Chamber was to the originally planned pyramid as the King’s Chamber is to the final pyramid. For the following image, I’ve taken a West-facing CAD image from Rudolf Gantenbrink’s exemplary website, inverted its colours, shrunk it and overlaid an arbitrarily-placed missing “virtual inner pyramid” outline in red:-
That is, I suspect that the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft terminates early because the pyramid itself was planned to terminate early, perhaps either at something like the red line I mark, or indeed directly at the current end of the shaft itself. Hence, it might be that what is beyond the “door” is simply the second stage of construction, the “outer virtual pyramid” if you like: the shaft stopped roughly where it was supposed to, but the construction plans changed around it.
Why, then, was the Queen’s Chamber’s northern shaft any different? My suspicion is that the south end of the pyramid may have been built up first, with the north end lagging behind. Then, when the construction plans changed, the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft was left (quite literally) high and dry.
Alternatively, it could be that an earthquake during the first phase of building made it clear that the Queen’s Chamber was not going to be strong enough to survive the centuries in the way originally intended. Hence the decision may have been taken to add extra blocks to the North and South walls (if not the East and West walls as well), bringing the walls roughly two metres inwards. This could be why there is a two-metre horizontal section at the start of the Queen’s Chamber’s two shafts: that they were built diagonally up from the original walls, but that the walls were then thickened (for whatever reason): the shafts were similarly extended horizontally with the walls.
With all this in mind, I think I should note it’s entirely possible that Khufu’s pyramid may have originally started life as a smaller in-progress pyramid being built for (say) one of his predecessors, who intended to be interred in the (originally larger) Queen’s Chamber: but that Khufu’s architects saw the opportunity of extending it all into an humungous des res fit for a king (or, rather, Pharaoh). So, the burning question is: might the Great Pyramid ultimately turn out to be the loft extension to end all loft extensions? Just a thought! 😉
Necessity is the Mother of Invention. (?) Do we know who died first? Mom? Child? Dad?
Great “overlay/diagrams — and as good a theory as any I’ve read so far!
ps: how can I change my name entry on these posts to bdid1dr ?
Bobbi: I don’t know, I’m only a cipher historian wearing an ill-fitting Egyptologist hat, nothing as Indiana Jones-like as Zahi Hawass’s. 😉 As to how to change your name on the posts: fill it in by hand? I don’t really know, try stuff, see what works (that’s what I normally do). 🙂
It’s a plan.
Hi, a similar theory was proposed by Andrew Bayuk some time ago on his Guardian’s Egypt website discussion board.
The problem with this is that the Queen’s northern shaft bends around the Grand Gallery, so the route to the King’s chamber was under construction whilst the Queen’s shafts were just being started – why did they continue with these if they had changed their plans?
Also, the Queen’s southern shaft stops just at the height of the King’s chamber roof, so they continued to build this shaft even though the King’s chamber was at completion and its own shafts already started. However, this does hint that perhaps the Queen’s chamber and shafts was a backup plan in case the King’s chamber construction proved too difficult or the King died before it was completed – so, more of a top floor executive suite designed from the start with a plan B lower floor, rarher than a loft extension afterthought?
Sometimes these thoughts lead to the right and simple answer. Good thinking!
The only thing I’ve seen similar to this is here:
http://www.guardians.net/egypt/pyramids/A_New_Angle_on_the_Great_Pyramid_of_Khufu.htm
Perhaps they thought the royal spirits might like a chance to commune, occasionally. Separate chambers, but with adjoining passageway.
(Trying to think like an Egyptian of several millenia ago is surely headache-making.)
Any idea how they circulated breathable air through the nethermost passages while the pyramids were being built? What kind of lighting system was used (if any)?
Hello All : )
On You Tube, I watched a fascinating documentary detailing Elio Diomedi’s research as to how Khufu’s pyramid could have been built. Though Diomedi doesn’t address the pyramid’s interior oddities, this documentary is still watch worthy. Besides, Dr. Hawass gave it two thumbs up!
The Cheops Pyramid Mystery @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylmCri6dC4E
Bobbi: I’m afraid you’d have to ask an Egyptologist for a definitive answer on these, I don’t know. 🙁
Joel & random: thank you both for pointing me to Andrew Bayuk’s theory, which is basically a more well-thought-out version of what I suggested. 🙂 I’ll go through this all again in a few days’ time and see if I can come up with a slightly tweaked synthesis of the two: I’ll add a link in here if/when I do…
Has there already been Q and A as far as the possibility that the narrow shafts may have simply been the “rope shafts” for dropping the “doors” into place and pulling the ropes back out to the surface of the pyramid before placing the outermost finiishing blocks?
Bobbi: I think so (and I think it was disproved), but I’d need to double-check…
A number of items in this article puzzle me, such as the author’s not identifying the Winding Waterway with the galaxy (ie Milky Way). However, if you have easy access to JSTOR, the article’s relatively recent. Can’t say it seems to have been taken up widely.
Anthony P. Sakovich, ‘Explaining the Shafts in Khufu’s Pyramid at Giza’
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt , Vol. 42, (2005/2006), pp. 1-12.
Of course you could always shoot off an email to one of the University Museums; they more or less have to respond.
That article doesn’t distinguish between the shafts of the greater and the lower chambers and ends
“The shafts are not star shafts, sun shafts, spirit shafts, not are they ventilationshafts. These shafts serve as one singe canal linking the southern end of the Great (celestial) waterway through Khufu’s sepulchral chamber, to the northern end of the same counterpart of the Nile”.
op.cit. p.12
Which idea has its echo in Reader’s article,
Colin Reader, ‘On Pyramid Causeways’ The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology , Vol. 90, (2004), pp. 63-71
The idea of the kings channeling waters directly from heaven, via the shafts and roofed causeways may be linked with the increasing dessication of the land, probably blamed on hostile intent by people upstream. That article by Faulkiner mentions similar attitudes in the Sudan, even in his own time. But perhaps this is a digression. Not really about the door-step symbols.
The empty chambers (or are those solid blocks of staone?)directly above the Queen’s Chamber look suprisingly similar to a Bronze Age technology involving towers and rooms which were filled in a bit to “tune” in order to create some sort of resonance with the Earth according to the author of a monograph from the “University of the Trees”. The author claimed to have found the reason for pagaoda like stuctures, menhirs, and other towers in an artificial ramping up of the telluric currents in the ground which stimulated plant growth. Author was the founder of that institution.
Hi Nick! Interesting idea. There were other pyramids, notably the earlier Step Pyramid, if memory serves. Could they have been loft extensions as well?
Walk like an Egyptian…
Cheers, Dennis
PS: On Facebook, see my song, ‘Bug off, Egyptian!’ for the Tahrir Square Revolution, which sadly appears not to be going well.
Hi
I’m Petros Petrosyan.
I now live in Chicago.
Attention please!
1. The pyramid is not a sepulcher of Pharaoh and the purpose of its construction was not on this plane.
2. The huge volume of the information is ciphered with use of the geometrical form of a pyramid.
3. The basic model of the Pyramid cipher was established.
The basic model of the code of a pyramid is formed of 365 small pyramids which consist at 14 steps of model of the code.
Pyramid is ciphered message, It is simply improbable.
Please Go to: http://www.world-mysteries.com/pex_PPetrosyan1.htm
Full Article: http://files.mail.ru/H5RKPO ;
Thanks, Petros M.Petrosyan
Nick, and all,
Several years ago (that long?!) when Dr Hawass and Gantenbrink were posting the first robot photos, there appeared on the WWW some commentary (bibliotecapleiades?) regarding marks/carving anomilies on the walls of the first shaft. It interested me then; I shall backtrack verify my “memory” of his painstaking “take” on what he saw in the photos. Interesting!
Would highly recommend this web post for most of the readers on this page. http://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/2012-and-the-pyramids-at-giza/
The great pyramids at Giza are well beyond the 10’s of thousands of years old, no friggin’ jew slaves built them!
Another fabulous documentary called Revelation of the Pyramids and narrated by veteran actor Brian Cox can be viewed here for free; http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-revelation-of-the-pyramids/
I recommend a very simple theory.
Check next link:
http://blog.world-mysteries.com/mystic-places/the-great-pyramid-and-transport-of-heavy-stone-blocks/
Just as a point of interest; the term ‘Jew’ was first used in the Roman era, describing people in the Roman province of Judaea.
If the outside perimeter was laid first – as is commonly believed that the exterior casing stones were placed first – then the size was already established prior to construction.
Amigos no sean tontos eso de pensar que las pirámides eran tumbas o templos, son cosas del profesional del pasado. Las Pirámides en su interior no contienen salones ni espacios amplios como capillas ni nada que tenga que ver con alojamientos funerarios. Ni siquiera tenían puertas de entradas.
Los conocedores de las ciencias de la actualidad tienen ya definido que las pirámides no eran más que dispositivos eléctricos a gran escala. Solamente tienen en su interior espacios específicos para colocar el componente eléctrico necesarios para una función especifica que construyeron civilizaciones con conocimientos avanzados que estuvieron aquí en el pasado.
Algunas funcionaban como antenas de telecomunicaciones, y otras hacían la función DOMOS que contrarrestaban las radiaciones electromagnéticas que despide el sol. que es la causa del deterioro de las células y los tejidos orgánicos. (evitaban el envejecimiento rápido del cuerpo) cosa que no les iba bien a esos visitantes que llamaban Dioses por sus conocimientos y sus características Sobrehumanas. en escritos antiguos se dice que mientras estaban en el mundo tenían que tomar bebidas que ellos mismos preparaban basadas en átomos de oro que los rehabilitaba.
casi siempre cerca de una pirámide existen otras más pequeñas o medianas que con tienen escalones la cual estas servían de bases de aterrizaje para sus naves.
Pero posteriormente esos visitantes galácticos tuvieron que partir quizás porque cumplieron su misión, y esas edificaciones las tomaron civilizaciones terrestres para darles el uso que hoy en día conocemos. Aunque cuando hoy vemos los planos de una pirámide es evidente que no era un templo.