The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (8 page)

All these strange features conspire to create an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere in the room that reminds the visitor of how far beneath the ground he has burrowed, and of how inescapably he could be entombed here if there were to be any serious collapse of the millions of tons of limestone above his head.

Very interesting developments

Egyptological opinion concerning the Subterranean Chamber may be summarized as follows: (1) it is not a prehistoric feature, but was built at the same time as the Pyramid (i.e. around 2500 BC); (2) it was initially intended to be the burial place of Khufu; (3) then the Pharaoh and his architects changed their minds, stopped work on it, and turned their attentions to the main body of the Pyramid—where they built first the Queen’s Chamber (also later ‘abandoned’ according to this theory) and then finally the King’s Chamber.
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If the Egyptologists are right then the excavation and removal of more than 2000 tons of solid rock in order to create the Descending Corridor—rock that first had to be mined and then hauled to the surface from increasingly greater depths through that cramped, unventilated, 26-degree channel—would all have been undertaken in vain. Vain, too, would have been the hewing out of the Subterranean Chamber itself, and also of its further shafts and pits. Indeed the whole enterprise would, in retrospect, have been entirely pointless if the end result had merely been to leave, at a depth of more than 100 feet below the Giza plateau, an unfinished, rough-walled, low-ceilinged crypt—‘resembling a quarry’
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—for which nobody would ever have any use.

This obviously defies common sense. An alternative scenario does exist, however, which has stimulated the curiosity of a number of investigators during the last two centuries. According to this scenario the Chamber was deliberately left unfinished so as to hoodwink treasure hunters into
believing
that it had been abandoned and thus convince them of the pointlessness of further explorations there—a pretty effective means of keeping casual intruders away from any other cavities or concealed passageways that might be connected to it.

With such suspicions in mind, the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia and the British adventurer Colonel Howard Vyse both felt inspired (between 1830 and 1837) to drill holes into the bottom of the pit at the centre of the Subterranean Chamber. They extended its original depth of 10 feet by a further 35 feet (now largely filled in).

More recently the French archaeologist, André Pochan, has drawn attention to a curious passage from the Greek historian Herodotus who visited Egypt in the fifth century BC and spent much time interviewing priests and other learned men there. Herodotus reports that he was told quite specifically of the existence of ‘underground chambers on the hill on which the Pyramids stand ... These chambers King Cheops [Khufu] made as burial chambers for himself in a kind of island, bringing in a channel from the Nile ....’
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Pochan has calculated that if there really is a chamber fed by Nile water under the Pyramid, then it would have to be at a great depth—at least 90 feet below the pit. Likewise the Danish architect Hubert Paulsen has argued on the basis of geometry that the most probable place for any further chamber to be found in the Great Pyramid is underneath the pit
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—a view that is also supported by the calculations of the British geometer Robin Cook.
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It is a French engineer, however, Professor Jean Kerisel, who has most vigorously pursued the quest for concealed subterranean chambers. The current President of the Association France-Egypte, he was in the pit with his assistants on 12 October 1992 when a major earthquake occurred, demolishing large parts of Cairo. This experience, he stated later, gave the researchers ‘a few very unpleasant moments some 35 metres under the plateau’.
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Happily, the Subterranean Chamber did not collapse and Kerisel and his team were able to finish their work. This involved the use of two nondestructive techniques: ground-penetrating radar and microgravimetry. The results were inconclusive in the chamber itself but extremely promising in the horizontal passageway that connects it to the end of the Descending Corridor. In Kerisel’s own words: ‘a structure was detected under the floor of the passageway, which could be a corridor oriented SSE-NNW whose ceiling is at the depth that the Descending Corridor would have reached had it been prolonged.’
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Nor was this all. A second very clear anomaly, a ‘mass defect’ as Kerisel calls it, ‘was detected on the western side of the passageway six metres before the chamber entrance. According to our calculations, this anomaly corresponds to a vertical shaft at least five metres deep with a section of about 1.40 x 1.40 metres very close to the western wall of the passageway.
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In short, what Kerisel believes he has identified off the Subterranean Chamber’s entrance corridor is something that looks very much like a completely separate passageway system, terminating in a vertical shaft. His instruments may have misled him, or, as he himself admits, he may merely have picked up the traces of ‘a large volume of limestone dissolved by the action of underground water—in other words a deep cave’.
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Alternatively, however, if the ‘mass defect’ turns out to be a man-made feature, as he strongly suspects, then ‘it may lead to very interesting developments’.
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Labyrinth

It should be obvious that a civilization that could build
up
to the height of the Great Pyramid’s summit platform, that could create giant stone statues more than 240 feet long, and that could lift the 200-ton blocks of the Valley and Mortuary Temples into place (forming intricate jigsaw-puzzle patterns at heights of 40 feet and more above the ground) would not have experienced any insurmountable difficulty in building
down
as well. On the contrary, such a civilization could, if it had so wished, have hewn out underground complexes of immense size, connected to one another by labyrinths of tunnels.

The possibility therefore cannot be ruled out that the Subterranean Chamber under the Great Pyramid could be just one of many such deeply buried features. Indeed, as the reader will recall, the seismological work carried out at Giza in the early 1990s by the American geophysicist Thomas Dobecki did indicate the presence of a large and apparently man-made hypogeum in the bedrock beneath the Sphinx. Ultimately only further excavations and research can shed further light on these matters. Meanwhile, however, there is a great deal of evidence from all parts of the necropolis which suggests that the creation of ambitious rock-hewn structures—both above and below the ground—was, indeed, part of the standard repertoire of the Pyramid builders. They also quite frequently chose to mingle rock-hewn and built-up structures—as in the case of the tomb of Khent-Khawes, a supposed Queen of Menkaure, which consists of a natural outcropping sculpted in pyramidial form surmounted by a curious sarcophagus-shaped temple.

A more spectacular and conspicuous mixture of rock-hewn and built-up features occurs at the Pyramid of Khafre. It stands on an artificially levelled 12-acre platform cut bodily out of the plateau—which slopes steeply from north-west to south-east at this point (i.e. it is higher in the west and lower in the east). In consequence the north and west sides of the Pyramid are enclosed within a trench that decreases steadily in height from about 20 feet at the north-west corner to about 10 feet at the southwest corner—and to zero at the north-east and south-east corners. The lower courses of the Pyramid itself on the north and west sides are contoured out of the central mound of bedrock that the builders left in place after hollowing out the trench. On the east and south sides, however, the slope of the plateau falls below the level chosen for the base of the Pyramid. The builders solved this problem by bringing thousands of enormous filling blocks to the site—average weight about 100 tons each—to create an unshakable horizontal foundation. They then went on to lay the first few courses of the monument on the eastern and southern sides using the same unwieldy megaliths. Thereafter they reverted to smaller blocks and in consequence a clear demarcation line is visible between the two types of construction. Like some of the characteristics of the Sphinx and Valley Temples referred to earlier, this demarcation gives the impression not just of different building techniques but actually of two distinctly different
stages
of building separated by an unknown interval of time.

The mystery of the shafts

There is one other anomalous feature of the Giza necropolis which we have not yet mentioned but with which we shall close this chapter as it leads us on to the next stage of our investigation. This feature is confined to the Great Pyramid and is unique in ancient Egyptian architecture. It takes the form of four narrow shafts—usually described by Egyptologists as ‘ventilation channels’—two of which emanate respectively from the northern and southern walls of the King’s Chamber and the other two from the northern and southern walls of the Queen’s Chamber.

The four shafts have an average cross-section of 23 x 22 cm. and lengths that vary from about 24 metres (northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber) to about 65 metres (northern shaft of the King’s Chamber). They are all inclined to the horizontal plane of the Pyramid and their angles of slope vary from 32 degrees 28 minutes (northern shaft of the King’s Chamber) to 45 degrees 14 minutes (southern shaft of the King’s Chamber). The shafts were constructed in a step-by-step manner as the Pyramid rose in height (i.e. they were not drilled through the masonry as some have supposed) and they reveal the use of very complex and sophisticated engineering and levelling techniques.

It has been suggested that the reason for their inclination was to find the ‘shortest route’ to the outside of the Pyramid and this has been taken to imply that the ancient builders wanted to ‘save’ work and time. However, such geometrical logic goes very much against
engineering logic—
for the simple reason that building shafts on an incline would not save time or work at all. Quite the contrary: no construction engineer or builder could possibly agree that the ‘shortest route’ is the best route in this case—even though it may seem so to those looking only at the geometry. The truth, as Egyptian architect Dr. Alexander Badawy first noted in the 1960s, is that to build inclined shafts rather than to have simple horizontal channels leading to the outside of the Pyramid would create many difficulties—and especially so when we consider the high precision and rigid consistency of the inclinations.
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11. The King’s and Queen’s Chambers and their four shafts. Note that the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber were not originally cut through into the chamber but stopped short several inches from the inner walls. The shafts were opened in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon.

To build inclined shafts rather than horizontal ones entails five tedious operations. First, the base course must be prepared; this calls for the shaping of special blocks with their upper faces sloping to serve as the ‘floor’ of each shaft. Secondly, more special blocks have to be prepared with U-shaped inner faces to form the profile, i.e., the ‘walls’ and ‘ceilings’ of the shafts. Thirdly, yet more special blocks have to be cut with their undersides inclined in order to cover the sides of the shafts. Fourthly, the tops of the shafts must be covered with other special blocks with sloping undersides. Fifthly, the main masonry courses of the Pyramid have to be integrated with these special design features along the entire lengths of the shafts.

12. Details of the Queen’s Chamber and its shafts.

If ventilation was really the objective then the question that must be asked is this: why opt for such complications and difficulties when an effective flow of air could have been provided for the chambers in a much simpler way? From an engineer’s point of view the obvious solution would have been to leave a masonry joint open—say 20 cm.—running horizontally from the top of each chamber right to the outside of the monument. In this case no special cutting of blocks would have been necessary, nor indeed any tedious alignments or levelling work.