Inside the Great Pyramid

Smithsonian Mag ^ | 01 Sept 2011 | Mike Dash

[mad_as_he$$]

First Nations Transport was operating two C-46’s up until 2009. They had bought up all the spares they could find.

[mad_as_he$$]

Here is why there are no glyphs inside the Great Pyramid:

http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/02/1015144.html

[elcid1970]

Fascinating about the C-46’s still operating. The ghosts of many other C-46’s kept them flying.

I remember near Harrisburg PA around 1964 seeing where someone had made a home out of a C-46 fuselage, set into a hillside on a cinder block foundation. As a kid I thought that was kind of neat.

There was a huge story about surplus disposal after WWII in Smithsonian. Military aircraft were sold not individually, but by entire airfields full.

The aircrews who flew them and got mustered out by the thousands felt pretty surplus, too.

[mad_as_he$$]

At the end of WW2 they were selling P-51’s with a full load of gas for $900. I have a picture of Corsairs by the hundreds standing on their propellers waiting to be scrapped. Makes me sick.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Bellflower. The only people who think that the graffito is a forgery are people who think "Stargate" is a documentary. :')

Even those archaeologists who still stubbornly subscribe to the tomb theory of the pyramid...

That would be a list of every actual Egyptologist. Not just most, every single one. I'm not sure of the number of people who stubbornly cling to the idea that the pyramids weren't constructed as pharaonic tombs.

...do not believe that a queen or anyone else was ever buried in the limestone chamber.

The smaller, lower chamber probably held grave goods, and canopic jars. It, along with the burial chamber, were probably robbed in antiquity. During construction, there was a serious structural problem of some kind. Houdin et al attribute this to a settling of one side of the pyramid due to the immense weight of the structure. The corbels at the top of the Grand Gallery were found (by Petrie I think) to be holding on by less than an inch on one end, due to the shift (whatever its cause; used to be attributed to an earthquate). The pyramid was nearing completion -- the top half of the pyramid contains, hmm, about 1/9th of the mass, uh, I'd better get someone else to look at that -- and the chief architect had an inspection shaft dug from the top of the Grand Gallery to the first of the upper relieving chambers. In modern times the other relieving chambers were tunnelled into from the lowest one.

During the New Kingdom at least one of the Giza pyramids was reused, and other construction carried out, such as Campbell's Tomb w of the Sphinx. Carved and inscribed stones of Old Kingdom date were carted off, perhaps from Giza, and incorporated into Middle Kingdom-era construction in the Fayyum and elsewhere.

Khufu's mom died during the construction of the Great Pyramid, and was buried close to the base, but her tomb was broken into and robbed (including the mummy) not long after burial; one of the jobs that had to be done, and of which the account survives, is the investigation of the robbery, and a final report to Khufu. That must have been a fun job.

Khufu's father Sneferu built three large pyramids, which have a total mass exceeding that of the Great Pyramid, although I'm not sure if any of these has ever been attributed by anyone to the last of the Ice Ages. Same goes for the Khafre and Menkaure pyramids at Giza, as well as the various queens' pyramids there -- afaik, not one has ever been given a date in the tens of thousands of years.

[SunkenCiv]

My brain hurts.

...the top half of the pyramid contains, hmm, about 1/9th of the mass, uh, I'd better get someone else to look at that...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Hmmm. I think you may have been fooled by that tricky 1/3 term in the formula for the volume of a pyramid.

V_total = (1/3) x h x B

(B, being the area of the base, h the height).

If we lop off the top half of the pyramid, the resulting solid has half the height, and the area of the base will be one fourth as great, since its two linear dimensions scale proportionally, the volume of the top half of the pyramid is

V_top = (1/3) x (h/2) x (B/4) = V_total/8

This relationship should hold regardless of shape of the base and whether or not the stack ascends vertically, think of a leaning pyramid of Pisa.

For the actual pyramid, the mass may well not be proportional to the volume, since the lower parts of it are honeycombed with passages, the upper part may well represent more than one eigth of the total mass.

[SunkenCiv]

1/8, that’s right... the pyramid is 99% solid masonry (give or take any unknown chambers or Houdin’s internal ramp theory), so the 1/8 is pretty close.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!