MARGINALIA
Astronomy and the Great Pyramid
J. Donald Fernie
Anatomy of a Pyramid
Whatever the excesses of its advocates, the Great Pyramid is one of
the most remarkable structures ever made, if only in terms of sheer
workmanship: The fact that it is the only standing remnant of the
seven ancient wonders speaks for itself. Built roughly 4,500 years
ago, it towers over the Giza plain some 16 kilometers west of Cairo
amid several smaller pyramids, 60 or more of which stretch down the
western bank of the Nile. The base of the Great Pyramid covers 13
acres, or about seven midtown blocks in Manhattan. It rises in 201
stepped tiers comprised of more than two million pieces of limestone
and granite, averaging two or three tons apiece (with some a good
deal more), to the height of a modern 40–story building. It
was the tallest construction in the world until the Eiffel Tower was
erected in the 19th century.
For the first 3,000 years or so of its history, the Great Pyramid
was encased in brilliant polished limestone—about 22 acres of
it. The slabs were up to 2.5 meters thick and were fitted together
with joints so fine they could scarcely be seen, according to
Herodotus, who visited in 440 B.C. This must have been a dazzling
sight in the Egyptian sun! Unfortunately, the covering was stripped
in medieval times to build palaces and mosques in Cairo, and now we
can only see the rough building blocks.
Under this shining canopy lay the interior structure. Strabo, after
a visit in 24 B.C., described an entrance on the north face of the
pyramid made of a hinged stone that could be raised but was
otherwise indistinguishable from the stones around it. So
indistinguishable, in fact, that its location was lost during a
period of neglect in early Christian times. Much later, in the early
9th century, an Arab potentate named Al–Mamun, following
rumors of vast, hidden wealth, forced a new entrance near the base
of the north side. So impregnable was the structure that his
engineers could proceed only by building fires against each huge
stone in their path and, having heated it to a high temperature,
dousing it with cold vinegar to shatter it. The residue was cleared,
and they repeated the process on the next stone. Inching forward in
this way for some 30 meters, and almost at the point of giving up,
they broke through into a pre–existing tunnel, later termed
the Descending Passage because it started high on the north face and
sloped smoothly into the pyramid's depths below ground level. Unlike
the ragged tunnel gouged by Al–Mamun's men, the Descending
Passage, about a meter square, was astonishingly straight. It was so
exact that in 1881, Flinders Petrie, an experienced, professional
surveyor and skeptic, using the best equipment then available, found
that the average departure from a perfect line over the full length
of some 100 meters was less than 7 millimeters.
Of less interest was the discovery of another tunnel, the
so–called Ascending Passage, which led off of the Descending
Passage and headed up to what the potentate's henchmen called the
King's Chamber because it had a flat ceiling, which was an Arab
custom for male deceased. An offshoot of the Ascending Passage led
to the Queen's Chamber, so called for its gabled ceiling. The
dimensions of these rooms, along with the overall dimensions of the
pyramid itself, provoked endless discussion among luminaries such as
Isaac Newton and John Herschel, who speculated that the measurements
might hold the key to converting biblical units to their modern
equivalents. Although this numerical Rosetta Stone never emerged,
Newton did conclude that the builders must have employed more than
one unit of length.
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