Was the Great Pyramid of Giza sabotaged before its completion?
Contents
- The architecture of the Egyptian pyramids
- The internal environments of the Cheops pyramid
- The defense mechanism
- The closing operations of the pyramid
- Lifting and transporting marble blocks
- The excavation of tunnels and the quarrying of blocks
- The sabotage of the Great Pyramid
- Who is responsible?
- The sabotage operation
- The Pyramid of Chephren and the Sphinx
- Other clues
- The mystery of the secret chamber
- Granite processing
- Dynastic successions in ancient Egypt
- The extraction of gold in the mines
The architecture of the Egyptian pyramids
The pyramid of Cheops, the oldest and only one remaining of the seven wonders of the world, is still, after millennia, the largest monument ever built in the history of humanity.
Together with the other major pyramids, it continues to arouse our wonder, and we still struggle to understand how and why it was built, with how much manpower, with what organization of work.
The main goal of the Pharaoh Cheops however was not so much to amaze posterity, but rather to create an inviolable otherworldly home, and thus ensure his immortality. The internal chambers were certainly designed to meet the needs of burial rituals, which should more correctly be defined as resurrection rites, but the shape and layout of the access corridors were arranged in such a way as to be transformed into insurmountable barriers at the time of closure.
Before Cheops, the defense mechanism against thieves' incursions consisted of a small-section corridor which, starting from one of the facades, usually the North side, descended with a slope of 26 or 27 degrees towards the subterrain chamber, located at the bottom and in the center of the monument. After the corridor had been used to bring the pharaoh's mummy inside with the treasure and funerary furnishings, it was filled with marble blocks pushed from the outside onto the inclined plane of the floor. In the end the entrance was camouflaged with a final marble slab that blended in with the cladding stones. An apparently inviolable closure system but in reality rather naive, given that to penetrate inside it would have been sufficient to dig a simple tunnel in the body of the pyramid, in a period in which most of the tombs were environments dug into the rock.
The corridors connecting to the chambers have a very small section in order to reduce the size of the cap blocks, and are inclined to ensure that they can easily slide downwards.
The design of the internal environments had to overcome many problems, which were no less than those that the Egyptian engineers had to face to guarantee the stability of the entire construction.
Pharaoh Snofru, the father of Cheops, linked his name to three pyramids, the first of which, known as the Meidum pyramid, collapsed while it was still under construction.
Until then the pyramids were stepped and had internal buttresses made of well-squared and well-connected blocks of marble, arranged in the shape of successive casings increasingly distant from the center. The last marble casing constituted the external covering, while the intermediate space was filled with non-square blocks.
In the pyramid of Meidum, perhaps begun by Pharaoh Huni and continued by Snofru, the last casing would have given the monument a pyramidal geometric shape for the first time. But the collapse, which occurred when construction was almost finished, demonstrated the unreliability of this structural solution.
Since then the stability of the construction has been entrusted to a more regular internal masonry made with large blocks, and to a single external shell built with even larger and better positioned elements on which the marble cladding would have been laid.
A more regular masonry also allowed the chambers to be built in the body of the massif rather than underground, chambers which however had to resist the enormous weight of the masonry above.
Solving the structural problems of the internal spaces was achieved gradually. The second pyramid attributed to Snofru, the double-sloped one, has serious signs of instability inside, which have been evident since it was under construction. The gentler slope of the upper part has been interpreted by many as an attempt to reduce the weight weighing on the internal environments. Hence, perhaps, the decision to build another pyramid, better designed and more solid pyramid.
The third pyramid attributed to Snofru, the red pyramid, has a slope as low as the top of the double-slope pyramid. But, despite this, this too shows some signs of instability inside.
The internal chambers of the Cheops pyramid
Cheops had to solve these difficulties and thanks to the experience gained up to then (he had almost certainly held positions of responsibility on the construction sites of his father's pyramids), wanted to build the chambers inside the structure. He adopted a defense system from thieves' incursions, consisting of a small descending corridor intended to be filled with cap blocks upon closing. But he decided to create two corridors. In this way he would have been able to build the chambers very high up in the body of the monument, an important thing, as we will see, to make the thieves' work more difficult.
However, the addition of a second locking mechanism would have forced the architects to design a much larger pyramid, which would not only have entailed more work in itself, but also greater difficulties in the construction of the internal environments.
This is precisely what makes the pyramids astonishing: not only its colossal dimensions, but also the incredible difficulty and perfection of its internal spaces.
The architects had to fight against two problems: on the one hand, building the largest possible pyramid; on the other hand, ensuring maximum strength and stability of the internal structures, a task that become more difficult the larger the dimensions of the monument is. Driven by these two opposing needs, the engineers, architects and workers of the pyramid made a superhuman effort to satisfy Khufu's claim to immortality. The result was the largest monument ever built in the history.
Yet much of this work had to solve a very simple problem: avoid even the slightest instability of the corridors, so that the cap blocks, at the right moment, could slide downwards smoothly. A simple "mechanical" need, but on which the very safety of the pyramid depended.
On the north facade, now that the white marble cladding no longer exists, we can see the beginning of the small descending corridor. This passage, with a section of one meter per 1.19 meters, has a slope of 26 degrees, crosses the pyramid wall for 28 metres, continues underground for another 77 metres, continues on level ground for around ten metres, and ends in a large room dug into the rock but left in its state raw.
As can be seen from the drawing, 25 meters from the entrance, an uphill corridor opens onto the ceiling, always of the same section and of the same slope. It is the "ascending" corridor, 39 meters long which leads to the "large gallery". Continuing uphill through the large gallery we arrive at the king's or sarcophagus chamber. Instead, following the flat path wee enter a corridor 1 meter wide and 1.17 meters high which after 33 meter leads to the "queen's chamber".
The ascending corridor and the grand gallery is the second internal defense mechanism. The ascending corridor was intended to be filled at the time of closure by a row of cap blocks, which had to be stored for this purpose on the floor of the large gallery. The large gallery has the same slope as the ascending corridor and constitutes its continuation. It is 46 meters long, 100 m wide and 8.50 meters high. At the base its width is about one meter, because on the two sides there are two platforms about sixty centimeters high and half a meter deep. It is right on the floor, between the two platforms, that the cap blocks had to be preserved.
Immediately above the docks, on both sides, small vertical niches were dug (18 cm wide, 20 cm deep and 60 cm high) to insert the beams that were supposed to hold the cap blocks in place. From the number and arrangement of these niches we know that 23 plugs were planned, each one and a half meters long. The first two niches present in the large gallery, at the point where the floor is flat, probably had to serve for a beam on which to place planks with which to connect the beginning of the tunnel itself with the top of the cap blocks when transporting the funerary objects to the king's chamber.
On the surface of the platforms next to the wall and in correspondence with the niches, and also in the four corners of the corridor, there are dimples which were probably initially used to erect scaffolding, and then to fix pegs for the ropes during the transportation of the heaviest objects to the king's chamber.
The first five meters of the large tunnel do not have an inclined floor between the two platforms, which instead is flat and leads to the entrance to the horizontal corridor, which is thus located exactly under the rising floor of the large tunnel. The first 5 meters of the large tunnel are then covered.
To complete the description, on one side of the "landing" there is a passage that leads to the "service well", which opens at the end of the descending corridor. Finally, on the sides of this first flat segment, there are 5 pairs of recesses for the insertion of the beams with which the continuity of the floor between the ascending corridor and the large gallery was to be restored at the appropriate moment.
All these environments were built with large blocks of perfectly squared stone, and are protected from the overlying weight by a very robust protective structure, as can be deduced from the fact that in general they are very little damaged.
The entrance door to the pyramid, now that the marble cladding is missing, allows you to see a section of the descending corridor. This tiny passage is surmounted by two thick overlapping architraves, then by an enormous triangular-shaped block which has the function of unloading the weight on the lateral masonry, and finally by two orders of colossal marble slabs up to two meters thick arranged in a truss. Furthermore, thanks to a tunnel that opens at the highest point of the ceiling of the large gallery, it was possible to observe the impressive protection system of the sarcophagus chamber, made up of five exhaust chambers made with a hundred colossal marble architraves and of granite weighing up to 50 tons each. But we must imagine an equally solid and robust protection system for the queen's chamber, the great gallery and the other corridors.
The construction of these megalithic environments was extremely challenging. But the very small and yet gigantic downward corridors and the large tunnel led to further problems. In fact, due to the inclination, the weight of the entire corridor concentrate in the lowest part.
The descending corridor was built by first creating a solid inclined plane on which to lay the paving blocks, then by sliding the blocks that act as walls over these, and finally the architraves as a ceiling, always sliding them from above along the inclined plane. Since this corridor ends on the basement rock, it is not at risk of collapse due to its inclination.
But the ascending corridor, in order not to burden too much the lower corridor on which it rests, was built by alternating blocks arranged along the inclined plane with enormous monoliths arranged on a vertical plane, subsequently sculpted on site to restore the continuity of the floor surfaces, walls and ceiling. All this with the aim of preventing the weight of the entire corridor from ending up weighing on the lowest part. Even in the large tunnel there are solutions to avoid an excessive load in its lowest part; some of these are visible, while the others can only be imagined.
But why was it so important to build an effective defense system against thieves' incursions, and therefore such a large pyramid? Cheops wanted his pyramid to be absolutely safe, so that his body could be preserved for the fateful five thousand years needed to achieve immortality. Cheops built his immense pyramid because he wanted to become immortal!
It is surprising to note that this superhuman feat (the construction of the pyramid, not the conquest of immortality) was actually completed. Even today it is difficult to understand how, but the fact is that Cheops achieve it because this impressive monument proves it.
Lifting and transporting marble blocks
The ancient Egyptians had refined various techniques to make work more productive and reduce fatigue as much as possible.
To explain how they managed to lift and transport such a large number of stone's blocks, numerous hypotheses have been made, and many have proposed crane models that should have facilitated the task. But these are almost always wild hypotheses. The Egyptians didn't have cranes, but even if they had they would certainly not have used them, because they would have had to operate them with their arms. The blocks, however, were transported by dragging them with wooden sleds along slightly uphill slopes or ramps. This system, once the friction of the sled on the track was reduced, was much more efficient than any crane, because it exploited the strength of the legs which are many times more robust and resistant to fatigue than the arms.
To reduce friction, wooden sleepers (something similar to the sleepers that support train tracks) were fixed at regular distances on the tracks and greased with grease. The very heavy sleds could slide effortlessly on these grease-smeared wooden sleepers.
Furthermore, the ancient Egyptians were very skilled, much more than we can imagine today, even in the work of extracting blocks from quarries and excavating rock tunnels.
The excavation of tunnels and the quarrying of blocks
If a man today wanted to do the same job of excavating or squaring marble blocks by blasting off splinters with chisels of hard and resistant stone, his work could be even a few dozen times slower. It is not so much a question of resistance to fatigue - the Egyptian workers certainly put a lot of effort into it - but rather of glance and sensitivity of hand.
The Egypt of the pyramids, despite the level of organization reached by the state, still had one foot in prehistory, or rather, better said, in the Stone Age. The Egyptians of that time did not know the iron. The dishes were made of earthenware, and the knives, as in the Stone Age, were made of flint. In the Cairo museum you can still admire some wooden sickles for grain which have inside, instead of the blade, a groove in which small, sharp splinters of flint have been inserted.
Making stone knives by blasting flakes from hard siliceous stones requires consummate skill. It is necessary to understand at a glance where and how to strike, and also know how to strike with the necessary precision. The blow must be delivered with sufficient force, in the exact point and with the exact inclination, in order to obtain the detachment of the desired splinter. A skill and sensitivity that in modern times only a few experts in prehistoric techniques have managed to conquer, and only after many years of practice.
This ability, however, was common in ancient Egypt, because everyone had to be able, exactly as in prehistory, to make their own stone tools. This skill that they had, and that we no longer have, made rock excavation, and the digging of trenches for the extraction of blocks in quarries, much quicker than what we can imagine today.
The result that Cheops aimed for, however difficult, tiring and ambitious, was therefore achieved, at least from a constructive point of view. Because for the rest, as we will see later, the operation ended in total failure. In fact it is clear that the entire complex mechanism designed to defend the pyramid was sabotaged.
The defense mechanism
The Cheops pyramid is the only one to have the two chambers higher than the entrance, and this entails a very particular situation regarding the problem of air circulation.
For the ancient Egyptians it was quite normal to carry out excavation operations: most of their tombs were dug into the desert rock that borders the Nile valley. A rock excavation can only proceed downwards or on level ground, not uphill. This is due to the fact that the warm, less dense air rises upwards and the cold air sinks downwards. During the digging of a well, for example, the physical activity of the workers and the oil lamps heat the air which can freely rise upwards, continuously replaced by cooler air. In this way the replacement is ensured. But if we imagine the excavation of a tunnel going uphill starting from a rock wall, the heated and oxygen-depleted air, rising upwards, accumulates right at the point where it is being excavated, and soon becomes unbreathable. And that's not all: as the oxygen content decreases, the flame of the lamp begins to produce carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas.
It is for this reason that in all of Egypt there is not a single tomb dug from the bottom up. For example, most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are corridors up to 70/80 meters long, dug into the mountain wall and ending with rooms. These environments are always located lower than the entrance or at most at the same level, never higher.
There is therefore no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were perfectly aware of the impossibility of excavating from the bottom up. And the architects of the great pyramid were certainly well aware of this as they, having designed two rooms higher than the entrance, were forced to equip them with ventilation ducts, which not surprisingly face upwards. The Cheops pyramid is the only one to have ventilation ducts. Not for magical reasons or to make work a little more convenient, but because they were absolutely indispensable: without them no one would have been able to enter the two chambers and carry out work there, and no one could enter them today for a tourist visit.
When the pyramid was closed, the entrances to the two chambers would have been sealed, preventing the circulation of air from that moment on. At this point it is difficult to believe that in the design of the defense apparatus and the maneuvers necessary to close the pyramid, the particular situation of air circulation was not taken into account. Probably whoever designed the two rooms so high up also counted on the fact that the thieves, having emerged into the large gallery with a tunnel dug starting from the bottom, would have found a completely closed environment in which the renewal of air was impossible. The exchange would have been made even more difficult by the first downward journey (first 25 meters of the descending corridor) and then uphill that the air would have had to travel.
As long as the ventilation ducts ensured circulation during the works, there were no problems; but when the sarcophagus chamber was sealed, the workers responsible for the closing operations could only have counted on the oxygen contained in the large gallery, which perhaps also for this reason had such a high ceiling.
Also for not having considered the problem of air circulation, several Egyptologists have thought that during the construction of the pyramid there were second thoughts. Initially it was decided to build the sarcophagus chamber in the underground room, then in the queen's chamber and finally in the king's chamber. But the architecture of the internal environments, also aimed at the construction of rooms very high up in the body of the pyramid, seems instead to be the result of a unitary and coherent project, in which air circulation plays a leading role. The service well was also an integral part of this project, which is an essential element of the defense mechanism, and which served in its time to improve ventilation in the underground room while it was being excavated. As regards the latter, it cannot be ruled out that it was conceived as a sarcophagus chamber, because the access corridor was not designed to be covered with marble slabs. It could still have served as a burial chamber in the event that the pharaoh died before the pyramid was completed; once the pyramid was completed, however, it only served as a convenient rubble dump.
But even the so-called Queen's Chamber cannot be the result of an afterthought. In fact it contains a large niche, which certainly had a precise ritual function: it probably had to contain the golden statue of the pharaoh mentioned in the Pyramid Text. If there had been an afterthought, the king's chamber would presumably have contained, in addition to the sarcophagus, also the same large niche.
The queen's chamber is located exactly under the top of the pyramid, while the king's chamber is moved a little towards the south. Since the entrance is to the north, the defense apparatus thus has a little more space, occupied by the room with the locking shutters, and this could be the explanation for the non-central position of the sarcophagus chamber.
But how was the entire defense mechanism supposed to work?
The closing operations of the pyramid
After the death of the pharaoh, once the mummy, the treasure and the funerary furnishings had been brought inside, the long and complex operations of closing the pyramid could begin. First it was necessary to close the corridor leading to the queen's chamber.
This corridor is a bit special. Corridors of small section usually have side walls made up of a single block. In this case, however, shortly after the entrance and for about twenty meters, the walls are made up of two orders of superimposed blocks just over half a meter high and one meter long. Furthermore, their vertical edges are also overlapped rather than staggered, and correspond to the two sides of the corridor. This arrangement has puzzled archaeologists, but there may be an explanation. As we know, if these corridors are so small it is not to force visitors to proceed stooped or kneeling, but because it was intended that they would have to be closed with cap blocks or walled up. Given that the corridor leading to the queen's chamber is not sloping but level, perhaps it had to be filled with smaller blocks, placed side by side with those of the walls and of the same dimensions, that is, half a meter high and wide and one meter long, so to confuse thieves. A tunnel dug in the queen's chamber showed that beyond the walls of the room for several meters there is a wall made up of perfectly squared marble blocks, so it is probable that all the internal rooms are surrounded by a casing of this type.
So hypothetical thieves, whether digging to the right or to the left or forward, would probably have found blocks of the same size for many meters, and would have had difficulty understanding if there was a corridor.
The blocks could have been stored in the large tunnel, placed on the platforms in the space left empty between the cap blocks and the walls. Their dimensions of approximately a quarter of a cubic meter would have been such as to allow them to be moved and placed in their definitive position.
Since there is room for 23 blocks on the floor of the large gallery, 46 blocks could have been placed on the side platforms, plus perhaps a few more in the lowest and highest parts. Of these, perhaps 8 were intended for the access corridor to the sarcophagus chamber, while the remainder must have been used to close the horizontal corridor, which could therefore have been walled up for a dozen meters.
Once the queen's chamber was sealed, it would be time for the main chamber. The sarcophagus chamber is built entirely with large blocks of granite (floor, walls and ceiling) with a thickness of one and a half to two meters, and is preceded by the room with shutters also made of granite. It has a single entrance of just over one meter on a side created in a granite wall which at that point is two and sixty meters thick. This door too, with the same characteristics as a small-section corridor, was certainly destined to be walled up with granite blocks, of such dimensions that they could be moved there from the large gallery. In fact, even if sometimes the way of thinking of the ancient Egyptians is different from ours, it would have been beyond logic to thicken the wall at that point, if the entrance did not then have to be closed.
The moment the entrance to the sarcophagus chamber was sealed, the circulation of air was interrupted, and from this moment the workers could only breathe the air present in the tunnel. The subsequent operations involved the lowering of the granite shutters (three slabs half a meter thick each), and the closing of the shutter room.
Once the two chambers were closed, the workers would have had to release the 23 cap blocks from their stops to slide them one by one along the inclined plane of the floor until they filled the entire ascending corridor. Once this operation was completed, they could finally exit into the open air through the service shaft, the narrow tunnel that starts from the "landing" and ends almost 60 meters below, at the end of the descending corridor.
Once out, other workers would have proceeded to wall up the outlet of the service well, to close and camouflage the beginning of the ascending corridor (which opens onto the ceiling of the descending corridor) with a marble slab, and to fill the part from the outside. of this corridor dug into the rock with rubble, and the rest with marble blocks. At this point the pyramid could finally be sealed with the installation of the last slab to camouflage the entrance between the covering stones.
To get to the treasure the thieves would have had to locate the entrance, demolish the cap blocks and get to the end of the descending corridor. Having realized that the underground chamber was empty, they should have discovered the entrance to the ascending corridor and, digging a tunnel along the path of the corridor, reached the large tunnel.
This operation alone would have entailed great difficulties, given that the excavation would have had to take place from the bottom up. This is also demonstrated by the observation that, when in 1817 Giovanni Battista Caviglia attempted to free the service shaft cluttered with rubble from below, he was forced to interrupt the work due to the lack of air, despite the fact that the duct was not completely clogged.
However, if the thieves, after a few years of hard work, had still managed to emerge into the large tunnel, they would have found themselves in a completely sealed environment in which air circulation was impossible, and they would therefore not have been able to carry out any activity there.
In essence, the pyramid was designed as a kind of enormous safe, and hypothetical thieves, assuming they were unaware of the layout of the internal rooms, would have had to face three sets of problems. First of all, they would have had to do an enormous amount of excavation and demolition work, and what's more, much of it uphill, and therefore already in very difficult conditions. Then, once they arrived in the large tunnel they would still have to do a lot of work which included the demolition of a thickness of granite several meters thick; finally, this work would have to be done in conditions of total lack of air.
The sabotage hypothesis is based on a better understanding of the defense mechanism, which, thanks to the particular situation of air circulation, would have made the pyramid inviolable for thousands of years. And then on the observation that only those elements of this complex apparatus were implemented that could be easily demolished or circumvented, while precisely those that would have been insurmountable were not implemented.
First of all, only three of the 23 planned granite plugs were placed at the bottom of the large tunnel, and with these only the beginning of the ascending corridor was closed, where they can still be seen today. According to the archaeologists, it cannot be ruled out that in addition to the granite blocks, a row of marble blocks were also pushed into the corridor, and that the latter were then demolished by predators, because there are no clues to suggest this. The cap blocks could only be placed at the bottom of the large tunnel when it was still open-air. For this reason it can be said that the event, if it was sabotage, occurred when the pyramid was still a third of its height.
It is worth remembering that the entire pyramid was built around the ascending corridor and the large gallery. The addition of a second internal defense system of adequate dimensions is the element that forced the designers to design such a large pyramid.
In the descriptions of the Cheops pyramid we never read the word sabotage, yet the situation is the same as someone who has a very expensive safe built, made with indestructible materials, but then forgets to buy the key or doesn't buy it to save money.
For a situation like this there are no reasonable explanations. At the moment of closing that large stone safe that is the great pyramid, after all the work it had required, someone "forgot" to turn the key in the lock: truly strange! Suffice it to say that just 20 rough blocks of granite or even just marble would have been enough, when over 100,000 were needed for the cladding, cut with great precision and carefully sanded.
But the way in which the entrances to the two chambers were closed also suggests sabotage. The queen's chamber is preceded by the horizontal corridor. As stated above, it certainly had to be walled off for much of its length, but there are no signs that this occurred.
And then the king's chamber. Like all passages of small section, the entrance created in the granite wall must have been closed by a wall, but this too was certainly never walled up.
As regards the room with the shutters, the two pilaster strips that delimit the seats of the three mobile blocks have been demolished, and the upper edge of the granite door of the sarcophagus chamber has been broken, showing a large fracture for three quarters of its length. Some fragments of granite with traces of holes found in the lower part of the pyramid which suggest that the three portcullises were regularly installed and lowered at the time of closure.
Furthermore, the passage from the large gallery to the room with the shutters, which opens into a marble wall one meter thick, had certainly also been walled up. Here the signs of the chisel are evident, which demolished the entire right side of this door seen from the large gallery.
In addition to the way in which the two chambers were closed, there is yet another element that supports the sabotage hypothesis, and it is the observation that the thieves demonstrated that they knew the layout of the internal rooms very well. They also knew that only the beginning of the ascending corridor had been blocked. They therefore limited themselves to digging a horizontal tunnel about thirty meters long that reaches the height of the three granite plugs, they climbed over them and penetrated inside.
This horizontal tunnel connected the large tunnel with the outside, and also connected it in a more direct way, cutting a path that first forced a descent and then an ascent.
Thanks to the fact that only the beginning of the ascending corridor had been blocked, the predators were able to reach the large tunnel without the need for a long and uncomfortable uphill excavation. But would this more direct connection have been sufficient to ensure adequate air exchange? Now the entrance to the king's chamber was located thirty-five meters higher than the entrance, and was 110 meters away from it. Furthermore, the one dug by the thieves was then only a narrow tunnel, and not the wide passage that tourists walk through today. The problem is: was there now sufficient air exchange in the large gallery for all the work necessary to demolish the marble and granite barriers that should have been in front of the two chambers?
It is difficult to evaluate in the abstract the speed with which air exchange occurs (if it occurs) in similar conditions, but this could be verified with a simple experiment. The entrances to the king's and queen's chambers (and also the access to the exhaust chambers) should be temporarily closed with plastic sheets, and the ascending corridor should be connected to the outside via a rubber tube with a diameter of about eighty centimeters, which simulates the tunnel dug by predators, closing the rest of the section of the tunnel with a sheet of nylon. Then in the large gallery you could organize a party for chain smokers, and send the guests home when the air begins to become unbreathable. At this point we should wait enough time for the air temperature to lower to that of the rest of the pyramid, and then measure the speed with which the air exchange occurs. But it seems truly impossible that in similar conditions the predators could have broken through a granite thickness of at least 2.6 meters. The lack of oxygen would have soon forced them to go out, and beyond the archaeological evidence, this consideration also leads to the exclusion of the possibility that the sarcophagus chamber was closed by a wall of granite blocks as was certainly foreseen.
Anyone wishing to argue the opposite would have to explain how predators in the First Intermediate Period would have managed to demolish such a granite barrier in those conditions, and without using fire. In fact, the looting of the cladding blocks had already begun, demonstrating that the pyramid had been conquered by thieves. But the thieves, who in that period penetrated inside all the other pyramids, avoided in every way attacking the granite directly, precisely because of its extreme hardness. And if they did, it was only with the help of fire.
Granite processing
The ancient Egyptians had different techniques for processing hard and tough materials such as granite, quartzite, basalt or diorite. They could cut granite blocks (like marble ones) using copper saws, consisting of a long toothless blade that was slid inside guides that ensured maximum cutting precision. While two workers alternately pulled the saw back and forth, a third poured water and abrasive sand from above the block. The action of the saw slowly cut into the stone due to the abrasion of the sand pressed by the blade onto the cutting surface. The ancient Egyptians were also able to drill holes of all diameters with drills or hand-operated copper perforating cylinders plus abrasive sand. Furthermore, the curved and hollowed surfaces were always shaped with abrasive stones. It is with these techniques that the hard stone vases found in large numbers in the basement of Djoser's pyramid in Sakkara were made, and that statues such as the famous one of Pharaoh Chephren were "carved". But how did the ancient Egyptians extract from the quarry the granite blocks?
In the Aswan quarry you can still see a large obelisk abandoned because it cracked during the work to extract it. To define the contours of this forty meter long obelisk, there are two trenches one meter wide and three meters deep. How did Egyptian workers dig such trenches in a material as hard as granite? They used fire. The fire expands the stone and causes microfractures on the surface. After heating the rock with fire, the most superficial layer could be removed thanks to the work of heavy spherical dolerite mallets, which can still be seen in large numbers in the granite quarries of the pharaohs.
So how would the predators, with the techniques at their disposal, have managed to enter the sarcophagus chamber if the entrance had been walled up? They could have demolished the granite only with fire, which however would have immediately consumed all the oxygen present in the large tunnel. The only possibility would have been to dig a tunnel very high up the side of the pyramid to connect it to the outside (a job which of course was never done).
Who is responsible?
But who and why could have sabotaged the Cheops pyramid? The sabotage of the pyramid protection system, documented by the state of the monument, must be related to the problems of dynastic succession.
Dynastic successions in ancient Egypt
In ancient Egyptian society the transmission of inheritance, and also of the throne, did not occur through the father, but through the mother. In other words, to have the right to the throne you had to be the son of the pharaoh's main wife (the one who was first in the line of succession), or have married her daughter. This explains the large number of marriages between blood relatives, and in particular between brother and sister. In fact, often the brother was married to the sister in order to maintain the throne within the family.
Prince Kanab should have succeeded Cheops, both because he was the son of the pharaoh's main wife, the "great queen" Meritites, holder of the right of succession, and because he had married her daughter and sister Hetep-heres II, holder of the right of inheritance in the next generation. But Kanab never became king because he was buried in a "simple" mastaba which is located, like the tombs of other family members, at the foot of the great pyramid.
Instead, Djedefrè succeeded to the throne, despite him being the son of a secondary wife, and despite the other sons of Meritites who preceded him in the right of succession. Djedefrè procured the right to reign by marrying Hetep-heres II, Kanab's widow and her half-sister.
Since he bypassed all other princes of royal blood, historians think that Djedefrè was a usurper, and that he obtained the throne thanks to a palace conspiracy, in which he may have killed the crown prince Kanab and forced Hetep-heres to marry him.
The hypothesis that Djedefrè is a usurper finds further confirmation in the fact that he built his pyramid far from Giza, as if he no longer felt part of the same family. Furthermore, the statues of him appear to have been intentionally broken, and his name has been deleted from the inscriptions, or does not appear in the lists of pharaohs of the time. That is, he was the object of a real "damnatio memoriae", a particularly serious condemnation to oblivion in Egypt, because erasing his name meant magically canceling the very existence of a person.
Djedefrè reigned for only eight years, and was perhaps killed by Chephren.
Also the son of a secondary wife, Chephren became pharaoh by in turn marrying his half-sister Hetep-heres II, at that time twice widowed (of Kanab and Djedefrè), thus bringing the throne back into the family. Not only that: to avoid other risks for the crown, Chephren also married his wife's daughter, Meresankh, to prevent anyone else, by marrying her, from having rights to the throne.
As Cheops' immediate successor, it was Djedefrè who presided over the closing operations, and he is therefore the only candidate for being responsible for the sabotage of the pyramid and the looting of the treasure contained therein.
The hypothesis is that Djedefrè had responsibility for the work in the internal rooms, which would have allowed him to secretly implement his sabotage plan, which ended with the usurpation of the throne. Upon Cheops' death, he probably formally carried out all the operations foreseen for the closure of the pyramid, and as soon as he consolidated power he had the tunnel dug to penetrate inside and steal the treasure. But by now the theft must have been discovered, and Djedefrè was killed and condemned to be forgotten.
Here's what could have happened.
The sabotage operation
At the bottom of the large tunnel, Djedefrè's workers had previously prepared only three stopper blocks. The space of the missing blocks and blocks was filled with different materials, and everything was covered and kept hidden for years by a wooden boarding, necessary in any case to make the comings and goings of the workers safe in the semi-darkness, and for the transport of the funerary objects.
When closing the pyramid, the queen's chamber was left open, or the beginning of the corridor was closed by a simple marble slab that was easy to demolish.
As regards the king's chamber, the saboteur workers left the entrance to the sarcophagus chamber open, then lowered the three granite slabs one by one, but first they had arranged things so that this device could be easily bypassed. For this reason, before lowering the three mobile blocks, they demolished the two pilasters that demarcated the locations of the shutters with chisels, a very simple operation that may have taken a maximum of half an hour. Then the passage from the large gallery to the shutter room was regularly walled up. This last operation demonstrates that the work inside was in some way observed or controlled by officials unrelated to the sabotage, who however were cleverly deceived. At this point most of the workers left, and the remaining ones freed the three granite plugs and lowered them so as to close the beginning of the ascending corridor. On the other side it could only be understood that the corridor had been blocked, but not whether it had been filled completely or only partially. Whoever was in the descending corridor could therefore not notice the deception. Having done this they went down the service shaft and emerged at the end of the descending corridor, and from there they exited.
The other closing operations followed normally, to make people believe that the pyramid was sealed as expected: the outlet of the service shaft was closed and camouflaged, as was the beginning of the ascending corridor, and finally the descending corridor was closed by filling it of rubble and the last meters with marble caps. As a final operation, the entrance to the pyramid on the north wall was camouflaged with a slab identical to the other covering stones. From the outside one could only see that all the closure operations were taking place regularly, without realizing that the entire defense mechanism had been expertly sabotaged.
Once the new pharaoh had installed himself on the throne, a few workers were enough to dig a tunnel about thirty meters long starting very low on the side of the pyramid, hidden from view by the surrounding wall. Once they entered the large gallery, the thieves had to reopen the entrance to the shuttered room, an operation that must have required no more than a day or two of work.
Then, having climbed above the shutters, they inserted a large wooden wedge between the first mobile block and the external wall of the sarcophagus chamber, and by pushing the wedge with a few blows of the mallet, they tilted the three shutters to the opposite side. In this way they opened a gap of about thirty centimeters between the shutters and the upper edge of the entrance door, and to widen it they demolished the same edge with a few more blows. Thus in a few minutes they were able to enter the sarcophagus chamber, and if the air duct had been closed, they could immediately reopen it. Once the air circulation had been restored, later and more calmly, using drills, chisels and sledgehammers, they demolished the three granite blocks over many months in order to completely open the passage. The fragments of the portcullises were eventually disposed of through the service shaft, and some of them with traces of holes have been found by modern archaeologists. A few years later someone will have noticed that the pyramid had been violated, Djedefrè was killed by Chephren who took his place, the treasure was recovered and the usurper pharaoh was condemned to oblivion.
Once the dividing pilasters had been eliminated, the predators were able to open a passage by tilting the three mobile blocks with a large wooden wedge. Then they broke the upper corner of the granite door to widen the passage.
The Pyramid of Chephren and the Sphinx
If the sabotage hypothesis were true, and the probability is high because the figure of Djedefrè given to us by historians overlaps with the archaeological evidence, then Chephren, at the moment in which he ascended the throne and began the construction of his personal pyramid, would have had to ask himself the problem of giving his father Cheops a new burial. After all, Cheops himself, a few years earlier, had had to do the same thing towards his mother.
The second richest tomb ever found in Egypt after that of Tutankhamun, is that of Queen Hetep-heres, wife of Snofru and mother of Cheops. Her tomb was found still sealed, and contained a rich set of furniture, funerary furnishings and jewels, while nothing remained of the mummy (a completely empty sarcophagus was also found in the tomb).
According to archaeologists this was the second tomb of Hetep-heres. The first, given the importance of the character certainly surmounted by a small pyramid, must have been sacked while Cheops was still alive. Cheops then had a second tomb built, no longer surmounted by a pyramid to signal its presence, which therefore escaped the thieves' searches.
Now Chephren also found himself in the same situation: he could not escape the pious duty of giving his father a second burial. But his father was a pharaoh, a god-pharaoh, not an ordinary mortal. For a pharaoh, a simple tomb was not enough. And this tomb could no longer be the great pyramid, not only because it had been violated by a sacrilegious act, but also because it could no longer be closed. It is almost obligatory to think that this second tomb must be located within the sacred enclosure of the Chephren pyramid. Moreover, the second tomb of Hetep-heres was also found within the enclosure of the secondary pyramid built for one of Cheops' wives, Queen Henutsen.
Djedefrè was certainly only interested in the treasure and not in the rest of the equipment. When Chephren decided to give her father a second tomb, she had everything left in it removed from the pyramid. Perhaps for this reason, and not only because it is the most visited of all, the largest of the pyramids is also the only one in which no trace of what it contained has been found. To take these objects out, some of which were very heavy, pegs were probably once again inserted into the ditches on the sides of the large gallery, and the niches were closed with blocks because they would have been in the way.
But if this is the case, is it possible to say that Cheops found his definitive home in the pyramid of Chephren? A clue in favor of this hypothesis is the presence of the Sphinx.
It may be a simple coincidence, but the fact is that the only Egyptian pyramid with two temples is the pyramid of Chephren. Chephren - archaeologists agree on this - next to the temple downstream of his pyramid, had the Sphinx built with his temple. That the temple of the Sphinx was built by Chephren can be deduced from the fact that the two buildings have the same external dimensions, are closely placed side by side and aligned, and are technically built in the same way. The Sphinx and its temple have always been considered one body with the Chephren pyramid complex, and for this reason many have thought that the Sphinx represents this pharaoh. In reality this is a hypothesis based only on the lack of other hypotheses, but for various reasons it is rather unlikely that these two very close temples were dedicated to the cult of the same sovereign.
Even the physiognomic features, for what is left of them, do not seem to resemble those of Pharaoh Chephren. In official Egyptian statuary it is always possible to recognize the characters represented. It is quite strange, therefore, that the Sphinx and the Chephren statues do not look much alike. Unfortunately, however, there are no official portraits of Cheops with which to compare. The only image we possess is an ivory statuette of the seated pharaoh, five centimeters high, which does not necessarily represent the official iconography, and whose features, inevitably, are a bit approximate. But they do not seem entirely incompatible with those of the Sphinx.
Perhaps the temple of the Sphinx was built in honor of the pharaoh Cheops, who was also buried in the pyramid of Chephren. Perhaps there is a still unknown chamber inside the pyramid. Perhaps the Sphinx, with its enigmatic face, has protected this secret for thousands of years!
Other clues
There are still other arguments in favor of the hypothesis of a second tomb of Pharaoh Cheops within the second of the pyramids. In particular, some rather strange and so far unexplained peculiarities could finally be explained: for example the fact that the floor of the main chamber has not been finished, and the same applies to the sarcophagus which has not been smoothed and finished on the outside.
Indeed, the sarcophagus is quite an oddity even if, in the absence of any explanation, no one has ever explicitly addressed the problem. It is enough to think of this monument which required immense work. At the center of the pyramid is the sarcophagus room, built entirely with large blocks of pink Aswan granite with a perfectly smooth surface (except for the floor). In the center of this room, in the center of the center of the pyramid, is a sarcophagus of black granite, the outer surface of which has been left in its rough state, while the inner surfaces are polished. But to say so is still an understatement. Someone has hypothesized that the "rustic" external appearance is due to ritual needs unknown to us, for example that it should symbolize a return to mother earth. But the exterior of the sarcophagus is not in the state of natural rock, because the signs of the saw with which the stone was cut can be recognized: it is simply a job left half done. For comparison, in the Chephren pyramid there is a sarcophagus of the same type which has also been finished on the outside, despite having been buried in the floor. In reality it is normal that the sarcophagus was brought inside the pyramid when the outside had not yet been finished. During the transport of such a heavy object the external parts could have been damaged. As in other cases, the external surface should have been smoothed inside the pyramid, but this work was never done. But if the sabotage hypothesis is true, then we can explain why some finishing touches were neglected: whoever sabotaged the pyramid's defense system with the intention of looting it certainly couldn't have been interested in completing these works.
Another unexplained oddity is that the Chephren pyramid, despite being smaller, is several meters higher than that of Cheops. It is taller not because it is larger, but because it rests on a base located ten meters higher, and also because it has greater verticality. A fact that does not seem random, as if the architects designed the pyramid precisely so that it was higher than that of Cheops.
Why this disrespectful competition? Why this offense to the prestige and memory of the father who, thanks to these "tricks", would no longer be the owner of the greatest of the pyramids? However, everything would be explained if the pyramid of Cheops had been violated by a sacrilegious act, and if the second tomb of Cheops had also been created in that of Cheops, who would thus have found a home again in the largest of the pyramids.
Georges Goyon argued that the Sphinx is the work of Djedefrè, given that it seems to pre-exist the construction of the Chephren pyramid. In fact, the ceremonial route almost has to take a detour to get around it.
The observation is not far-fetched because, if at the time of starting the works there had only been a shapeless rocky relief, it would probably have been demolished to allow the ceremonial road to pass through there. So the decision to build the Sphinx must have been made earlier. But it cannot be the work of Djedefrè: as we know, he went to build his pyramid elsewhere. Therefore it can only have been Pharaoh Chephren who built the Sphinx at the beginning of his reign.
The mystery of the secret chamber
If the hypothesis of a second Cheops tomb were true, it could be an inaccessible room, which would not have needed to be connected to the outside by corridors or particular defense mechanisms. A room that could have been built inside, or more likely, under the pyramid, without any major construction work to stand out, and without leaving any memories among the thousands of workers involved in the construction.
And a tomb with treasure worthy of a pharaoh. Chephren had almost certainly recovered the entire treasure stolen from his father's pyramid, and at least a large part of it would have been allocated to his second tomb. The availability of this immense treasure, in addition to that amassed by Chephren himself during his rule, could explain the unusual size of his sarcophagus chamber, and also his willingness to allocate resources for a second temple honoring his predecessor within the dynasty.
The extraction of gold in the mines
A characteristic of Egyptian civilization has always been the notable availability of this precious metal.
Gold is still a rare and precious metal today, but it was much more so in ancient times. For almost all of its history, ancient Egypt was the only country facing the Mediterranean to possess gold mines. Other countries could only obtain gold through trade. Even in the late era, under the reign of the Ptolemies, Egypt remained the country with the most abundant issues of gold coins.
But how did the ancient Egyptians get gold? They obtained it from alluvial sands and gravels, and also from gold-bearing quartz mines.
The extraction of gold from these rocks required long and tiring work, to which several hundred slaves were permanently employed. The work consisted of digging the rock to extract the mineral. The quartz rock was then crushed with stone mallets, and then reduced to a fine powder with mortars of the same type as those used to grind grain. To separate the small quantity of gold contained in the quartz powder, a layer of it was spread on a large wooden board covered with transversal grooves over its entire surface. By holding the axis inclined, a little water was poured which washed away the quartz dust, while the heavier gold remained trapped in the grooves.
Given the modest percentages of gold present in the mineral, many hours of laborious work were needed to obtain just a few grams. Yet in this way the pharaohs obtained many tens of kilograms of gold every year, an astonishing quantity for the ancient world. Proof of ancient Egypt's gold wealth is given by the treasure of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose reign lasted just nine years. If his reign had lasted long enough, his gold tomb might have held a few tons of it.
Another clue that the Cheops pyramid may have been violated at the time of its closure is the finding that, from Chephren onwards, no more chambers were built inside the massif, as if this were the logical consequence, on the one hand of the prohibitive cost of such a solution, and on the other of a resounding failure that would have demonstrated its uselessness. The fact is that the chamber of the Chephren pyramid was excavated in the base on which the construction was erected, and only the "roof" enters the body of the pyramid, almost certainly with the protection of several orders of colossal marble slabs resting on the rock floor. The access corridor starts very low on the side of the pyramid and runs only a few tens of meters inside the massif, on the external edge of the monument, where the weight of the mass above is still relatively modest. The pyramid of Menkaure also proposes a similar solution: two underground chambers and an access corridor that starts very low on the facade of the monument.
A further element of this change of strategy consists in the fact that the pyramids of Chephren and Menkaure have the part of the corridor that passes through the masonry entirely in granite, almost as if they wanted to avoid what had just happened, that is, that the thieves, after having dug a tunnel, could penetrate inside by demolishing one of the walls of the corridor. Furthermore, the Menkaure pyramid had been covered up to a certain height with granite, with the obvious aim of preventing the excavation of tunnels in the lowest and out of sight part, and this could be precisely the reason for its more modest proportions. In fact, if one had wanted to cover a pyramid as large as that of Chephren with granite, perhaps too large a quantity of this difficult-to-work stone would have been needed. Finally, even the newly sketched pyramid of Djedefrè himself, if it had been completed, would have had the underground chamber of the sarcophagus and the access corridor entirely of granite, would have been covered on the outside again with granite and would have had the same dimensions as that of Menkaure.
Therefore a chamber created in the body of the pyramid, even if without an access corridor, does not seem compatible with this radical change in strategy which began with Chephren's pyramid. Furthermore, building a tomb in the body of the pyramid would have meant leaving the pharaoh unburied for several more years. In theory nothing is ruled out, but this seems a rather unlikely hypothesis. It would seem more logical to think instead that the second tomb of Pharaoh Cheops could be found either under the pyramid or inside its enclosure, where however it would have already been found.
In reality there is already an environment under the Chephren pyramid which could, perhaps, be the tomb we are looking for. Excavated entirely into the rock, a few meters deep, there is a second chamber with a gabled ceiling left in its raw state. It is accessed through a deviation that opens onto the lower access corridor to the sarcophagus chamber.
It is difficult to believe that this room was originally intended as the main chamber: its dimensions are too modest. Furthermore, it does not appear to be part of a coherent project, but rather appears to be the result of a late decision that another room was needed.
If the decision was made after the pyramid had already begun, a new chamber could only be created at a certain depth and would have required the construction of another corridor which had to have an entrance outside the base of the pyramid. The fact that the two corridors are superimposed and connected to each other leads one to think that this second room is accessory to the first, and not an independent tomb. Finally, it can be stated with certainty that a sarcophagus has never been placed in this underground environment.
Almost certainly Djedefrè had respected the mummy of Cheops, who after all was his father. An opinion that cannot be proven, but strengthened by the observation that the damnatio memoriae did not last long, and that soon the family members of the usurper pharaoh were readmitted into the royal family as if the wrong had been repaired.
The small room excavated under the pyramid of Chephren is affected by stagnation of water, and therefore it can hardly have been used as a tomb and even less without a sarcophagus, necessary, as the second tomb of Hetep-heres would demonstrate, even if the mummy had not been preserved. But the very fact of the stagnation of water that the builders of the pyramid tried in vain to remedy means that this chamber remained open for a long time after being excavated, and this seems to be definitive proof that it could not have become the tomb of Pharaoh Cheops.
Where then could his second tomb be located? Chephren could have dug an underground chamber, buried his father there along with a rich grave goods, and built his pyramid on top. Such a tomb, not connected to the outside by corridors or other signs indicating its presence, would certainly have escaped the thieves' searches.
One final note. A scarab with an inscription referring to a "Southern Tomb of Cheops" was reportedly found in 1952. Perhaps there really is a secret chamber yet to be discovered!
