Inside the Great Pyramid

Smithsonian Mag ^ | 01 Sept 2011 | Mike Dash

[P.O.E.]

Under the Pyramids By H. P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini) tells Houdini's tale of being abducted, dropped into the Great Pyramid, and eventually finding his way to a temple underneath the Sphinx.

[elcid1970]

Geez I hate to nitpick but that’s a C-47 Gooney Bird, the military version of the Douglas DC-3.

The C-46 was a much larger fuselage twin engine A/C, vastly more complex than the C-47 which explains why C-47/DC-3s are flying to this day and forever, but the C-46 is a museum piece though it did a great job flying The Hump in the China Burma India theater during WWII.

Anyway, it’s spooky reading the posts of guys who tried to climb the great pyramid and freaking out halfway up though I heard as a kid it was like climbing oversize stairs and at the summit the Red Cross would be serving coffee and donuts! Good story, I guess.

[Red_Devil 232]

No problem I agree it is a C-47.

[Red_Devil 232]

I have been to Chichen Itza and climbed that pyramid - it is very steep with high steps, not an easy trek.

[Recon Dad]

Got half way up and looked back down. The steps as you say were narrow and high, I thought my nuts were in my mouth.

[SunkenCiv]

Hate to pick nits, but that photo with the plane is mirror image. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Palter. Egypt's Brotherhood Declares War on the Bikini (and the Pyramids too) Egyptian Islamists Target Bikinis, Pyramids wildbill: Strange that there are few hieroglphs inside. Most burial sites are covered in them. The Great Pyramid was formerly somewhat covered with writing on the outside -- this info is from surviving sources from classical antiquity -- but those facing stones were stripped off to build Cairo. Inside the Great Pyramid, one of the great Egyptologists (may have been Flinders Petrie, but I don't know now) found a small section of the originally plastered wall surface, and on it was an inscription which referred to "year of the cattle drive" from the reign of Khufu. And of course, the best-known is the construction crew graffito in one of the relieving chambers over the King's chamber, "how mighty is the Great White Crown of Khufu (work gang)". I wouldn't have hopped right on, but these threads often get filled up with kooky talk and pyramidiocy. There's also a four-character inscription above the entrance to Khufu's pyramid, carved during the Hellenistic times or later, in an obscure script. There's a topic about it in the FRchives, of course. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[SunkenCiv]

Oh, hate to pick nits, but the picture is fine, the angle threw me off. The photo’s from the north.

[bigheadfred]

I have!

Ah, but did you take a bottle of Jack Daniels with you and have a toast to the sunrise???

[bigheadfred]

Strange that there are few hieroglphs inside.

Strange anyone one would believe koofoo built one. Or was it porkchops?

[tarheelswamprat]

“All men fear Time, but Time fears the pyramids” - ancient Egyptian saying

[Fred Nerks]

No one seems to know what the inscription means and it has never been deciphered

The few solitary casing stones at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. These too would have been removed were it not for the good fortune that they were covered in tons of sand and inaccessible to those who plundered the Pyramid's stone to build the city of Cairo. These beautiful white limestone casing stones once sheathed the entirety of the Great Pyramid on every face, all the way up to its 44' X 44' flat floor altar on the top of the pyramid.

source

[Bellflower]

Not everyone believes the status quo theories as to why the pyramid was built or even when it was built.

[Lancey Howard]

The Mayan pyramids were more stylish.

[SunkenCiv]

Since his architect was buried nearby, and his role and name and the pharaoh he served are preserved there, we may have a clue. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Fred Nerks!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1331709/posts?page=83#83

[bert]

Given the extreme mathematical precision of the structure, I think such effort would not be wasted on a mere tomb. I follow thw thoughts of Peter Tompkins that the pyramids are multipurpose structures.

They are geodesic in nature and can be used to survey land by plotting and measuring angular distances from afar. The so calledthe royal sarcophagus is a standard for volume and weight. The content of the vessel stored under the standard temperature and pressure becomes the standard for a weight and measure of volume.

The structure had astronomical uses as well when specific stars were viewed in specific dates. The alignment provided a calendar by measuring or marking shadows as they progressed across the shadow plane.

and on and on..... As an engineer who has lived and died by measuring and constructing buildings to those measurements, I am awed by the precision of such an effort. We don’t waste such effort on a mere tomb. Those are in the Vally of the KIngs.

[Bellflower]

It is thought that Khufu was assigned to repairing the pyramid at one time and therefore was allowed to put his stamp (name engraved) upon it or that it was a forgery placed there by Richard Howard-Vyse. Here is an article, with interesting facts, but I do not subscribe to many of it's conclusions, but it is certainly a fun read and I would be interested in how some of you react to it:

http://www.s8int.com/greatpyramid.html

The Great Pyramid by Martin Gray

The Great Pyramid is the most substantial ancient structure in the world - and the most mysterious. According to prevailing archaeological theory - and there is absolutely no evidence to confirm this idea - the three pyramids on the Giza plateau are funerary structures of three kings of the fourth dynasty (2575 to 2465 BC).

The Great Pyramid, attributed to Khufu (Cheops) is on the right of the photograph, the pyramid attributed to Khafra (Chephren) next to it, and that of Menkaura (Mycerinus) the smallest of the three.

The Great Pyramid was originally 481 feet, five inches tall (146.7 meters) and measured 755 feet (230 meters) along its sides. Covering an area of 13 acres, or 53,000 square meters, it is large enough to contain the European cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's.

Constructed from approximately 2.5 million limestone blocks weighing on average 2.6 tons each, its total mass is more than 6.3 million tons (representing more building material than is to be found in all the churches and cathedrals built in England since the time of Christ).

The Great Pyramid was originally encased in highly polished, smooth white limestone and capped, according to legend, by a perfect pyramid of black stone, probably onyx. Covering an area of 22 acres the white limestone casing was removed by an Arab sultan in AD 1356 in order to build mosques and fortresses in nearby Cairo.

Herodotus, the great Greek geographer, visited in the fifth century BC. Strabo, a Greco / Roman historian, came in the first century AD. Abdullah Al Mamun, son of the Caliph of Baghdad, forced the first historically recorded entrance in AD 820, and Napoleon was spellbound when he beheld the fantastic structure in 1798.

According to our present knowledge the Great Pyramid is mostly solid mass, its only known interior spaces being the Descending passage (the original entrance), the Ascending passage, the Grand Gallery, a mysterious grotto, an equally mysterious subterranean chamber, and the two main chambers. These two chambers, called the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber, have unfortunately retained the misleading names given to them by early Arab visitors to the pyramid.

It is an Arab custom to bury men in tombs with a flat roof and women in rooms with a gabled roof; therefore, in the Great Pyramid, the flat-roofed granite chamber became the King's Chamber, while the gabled, limestone chamber below became the Queen's.

Even those archaeologists who still stubbornly subscribe to the tomb theory of the pyramid do not believe that a queen or anyone else was ever buried in the limestone chamber. The King's Chamber is 10.46 meters east to west by 5.23 meters north to south by 5.81 meters high (a series of measurements that precisely expresses the mathematical proportion known as the Golden Mean, or Phi).

It is built of enormous blocks of solid red granite (weighing as much as 50 tons) that were transported by a still-unknown means from the quarries of Aswan 600 miles to the south. Within the chamber, in the western end, sits a large, lidless coffer (7.5 feet by 3.25 feet, with sides averaging 6.5 inches thick) of dark black granite estimated to weigh more than three tons.

When the Arab Abdullah Al Mamoun finally forced his entry into the chamber in AD 820 - the first entry since the chamber was sealed in some long ago time - he found the coffer entirely empty. Egyptologists assume that this was the final resting place of Khufu, yet not the slightest evidence suggests that a corpse had ever been in this coffer or chamber. Nor have any embalming materials, any fragments of any article, or any clues whatsoever been found in the chamber or anywhere else in the entire pyramid that in any way indicates that Khufu (or anyone else) was ever buried there..............

[silverleaf]

Egyptologist Petrie expressed his astonishment of this feat by writing, "Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians' work on the scale of acres."
Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BC, reported that inscriptions of strange characters were to be found on the pyramid's casing stones.
In AD 1179 the Arab historian Abd el Latif recorded that these inscriptions were so numerous that they could have filled "more than ten thousand written pages."
William of Baldensal, a European visitor of the early fourteenth century, tells how the stones were covered with strange symbols arranged in careful rows.
Sadly, in 1356, following an earthquake that leveled Cairo, the Arabs robbed the pyramid of its beautiful casing of stones to rebuild mosques and fortresses in the city. As the stones were cut into smaller pieces and reshaped, all traces of the ancient inscriptions were removed from them. A great library of ageless wisdom was forever lost.

Allu akhbar. Remind me again of the contributions of islam to the world?

[bert]

The dimensions of the chamber in royal cubits is 20 x 10 x 11 high to within 2 decimals or the precision of the metric measurements.

If interested in the mathematical relationships of the various elements read The Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins. He reviews the various theories in detail (except the Orion's belt layout plan) and the use of pi and psi. He also gives a review of the ancient measurement systems in detail