26.     THE GREAT PYRAMID

That is not quite everything – there are still a few remaining puzzles concerning the Great Pyramid.

Why was the internal structure so complex and different from all the other pyramids?

Why did it have re-usable external and internal doors?

Why did it have no apparent feasible entry or exit (the known passages are irrevocably blocked)?

Why did it have a crudely hacked post-construction vertical ‘well shaft’?

Why was the upper chamber double-vented?

Why was Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) so detested down through Egyptian history?

To answer these questions requires some physical context.

Almost all the other Old Kingdom pyramids – particularly the last ten ‘standard design’ pyramids have a single simple chamber at ground level, permanently sealed by a ‘bricked up’ passageway. It is as if they were designed for one-time use only.

Whereas the Great Pyramid has two chambers – upper and lower – within the body of the structure above ground level, and connected by a complex of narrow passages. The outer door (now missing) was vertically hinged and counter-balanced as if intended for regular use; and the inner door (of the upper chamber, now missing) was also a re-usable triple portcullis mechanism. It was clearly engineered for strength but also to allow for multiple use. Further, early explorers found the ceiling beams of the upper chamber were displaced and cracked and rudimentary attempts had been made to repair them with plaster. Another sign of intention for on-going use.

The structure was obviously designed for multiple use – but puzzlingly there was no way in and out. The only possible route was blocked at the bottom of the ‘ascending passage’ by three large granite plugs. Not just accidentally obstructed but irrevocably plugged by three perfectly fitting substantial granite blocks – plugged into a tapered shaft from the inside. Clearly part of the original design. Even if these three plugs were magically (improbably) moved up the ascending passage there was nowhere for them to go – at the top they would block the junction of the ‘horizontal passage’ with the foot of the Grand Gallery. Additionally, the descending and ascending passages have a cross-section of only about a metre square which is barely enough to allow crawling –that’s why Isis (Snow White) used a team of dwarfs.  The coffer (now in the upper chamber) could move inside the pyramid, but the ascending/descending passages were not big enough to allow transit from outside.  That’s an enigma.

Answers lie in the pyramid functions and mechanics.

The ‘body’ of the nuclear device was prepared in the lower (Queen’s) chamber where the coffer was filled with lapis lazuli (heaven) and yellowcake U-235 (earth), counted, arrayed and weighed in the balance by Thoth and Isis.Then it was ‘ferried’ along the river of the horizontal passage by sliding it on a film of water /oil.

At the base of the Grand Gallery the loaded coffer was hoisted onto a wooden framed wheeled gantry; which climbed up the slope of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to the top where the coffer was inserted through the portcullis into the upper chamber (the Cooking Pot of Horus).

The loaded coffer – weighing 3-4 tonnes – was hoisted onto the gantry, and the whole assembly was raised up the slope of the Grand Gallery by means of hydraulically mediated counter-weights in the ‘ascending passage’.  All connected by an endless rope-and-pulley system. With the granite blocks at the top of the ascending passage the water was released (into the drain to the well).

The counterweight blocks went down, the gantry went up.

That is why the block work of the ‘ascending passage’ is reinforced at regular intervals with monolithic ‘ring stones’- to withstand the internal hydraulic pressure.

All that process was detailed and illustrated in ancient texts.

At the base of the Grand Gallery the coffer was hoisted onto a wooden (Acacia) gantry (sledge) which was a ladder to heaven … let a path be made for Osiris in the Great Valley …O Lord of the Acacia tree, the Seker boat is set upon its sledge … the gods make a ladder for you that you may ascend to the sky.

The gantry climbed the slope by means of counterweights consisting of the stone plugs which were allowed to gently descend in the so-called ‘Ascending Passage’ by releasing water from two wedge-valves in the plug at the bottom – specifically described as …I know the name of its weights … the two doors of the water floods are opened for me … I open the hidden water-springs … the nurse canal is opened, the winding waterway is flooded.

The counterweights were connected to the gantry by an endless rope-and-pulley system, identified as ‘magic snakes’ which swallowed their own tails … the gods tow him along …by means of the magical power of the serpent … the serpent his job is to rise up with this image … his gods draw him along by a cord, and he entereth into his tail and cometh forth from his mouth.

Oddly the ‘magic ropes’ were specified as metal …he who is in the Hnw boat … descendest on copper cables … or is towed by ropes of iron.

 The so-called Royal ‘Seker boat’ was actually illustrated as a wheeled gantry with large wheels which ‘strideth’ up the slope to heaven … the Seker boat maketh its way in the valley … [they] go round about bearing the fiery eye of Horus  … with long strides thou strideth over heaven.

All that explains why, post-construction, a rough ‘well shaft’ was dug at the base of the Grand Gallery. When the counterweight ‘plugs’ went up and down the ascending passage there was some nuisance water leakage – so they dug a crude drain to get rid of it.

Still, none of that explains how anyone or anything got in and out. The answer lies in the doorway. Modern era visitors to the Great Pyramid go in and out via a rough tunnel hacked out by Caliph Al Mamoun around 820 AD, but the original massive doorway is much higher up, about 15 m above ground level. The door was swivelled vertically and Greek explorer Strabo. in about 20 BC. recorded that it fitted perfectly and was indiscernible when closed.

The point is that the door frame, from the step to the line of the gable, is about five meters high – of which the currently labelled ‘entrance ‘occupies only one meter at the very bottom. Why would anyone build such a massive and elaborate doorframe only to use 20% of it for a small tunnel at the bottom?

The answer is because the upper portion of the door frame has been ‘bricked up’.

The currently designated ‘entrance’ passage at the very bottom of the door frame merely goes into the ‘Descending passage’ which is just a drain. The original entrance doorway and passage was in the upper part of the door frame – which is at a direct horizontal level to emerge at the bottom of the Grand Gallery. (Fig 37)  At some unrecorded point in history, the original entrance to the Great Pyramid has been bricked up. Incidentally, the junction of the Descending and Ascending passages was also secondarily sealed with limestone, and the joint only became apparent when forcibly tunnelled by Al Mamoun. It appears that it was sealed in such a way as to mislead later intruders down the drain – in which it was moderately successful.

All that explains the mechanics of the operations of the Great Pyramid, but leaves open the question of why Cheops was so detested down through history.  As late as 445 BC, around 2000 years after the close of the Old Kingdom, Egyptian priests related to Greek historian Herodotus that Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) was still vividly detested for being ‘wicked’; and because he ‘destroyed multitudes of men and brought affliction to Egypt for 150 years’. The language is quite plain – it wasn’t just that he was oppressive or unpopular, he destroyed multitudes.

It is also reputed that Cheops’ wife was blonde with light eyes – perhaps she was the original Isis, remembered in folklore as Snow White, the manager of the dwarfs who worked the pyramid.

The answer  – to why Cheops was ‘evil’ – is because the Great Pyramid was operated multiple times and because the reactor chamber (the Cooking Pot of Horus) was vented externally. It spewed radiation from the two external vents … destroying multitudes. The most impassioned written records of the operation of the pyramid(s) specify that the expression of ‘light’ energy formed two ‘beams’ or ‘rays’ or ‘plumes’ to the height of the heavens:

… thou who riseth in thy horizon, and dost shine with golden beams in the height of heaven

…thou illuminest the Two Lands with rays of turquoise-coloured light … his beams flood the world with light’.

… thou makest the darkness light with thy double plume

Thou art exceedingly mighty …thou settest thy fear in all the world…thou slaughterest

thine enemy … the sacred form, beloved terrible and mighty in his two risings.

The apertures of the sky windows are open …the flame goes forth from the horizon.

I am he who dwells in the shining Mansion of Sunrise in Heliopolis, I am he who rises, he of the Pyramidion. The great storm goes forth from the inner horizon. By what means will he fly up …by two plumes…of the south wind, and the north wind.

The texts leave no doubt at all that the great firestorm went forth from the inner pyramid as two plumes from the apertures of the ‘sky windows’ – to the north and south. This can only have been from the Great Pyramid – it was the only one externally vented to the north and south.  Early European explorers found the inner openings of the two vent shafts in the upper chamber of the Great Pyramid were blackened and scorched, which local guides assured them was because ‘a flame of fire had darted through it’. [1]

Evidently the reactor ‘explosion’ was vented deliberately, or possibly as an emergency safety-valve mechanism. Possible explanations relate to the physical context at Giza – where the Great Pyramid is surrounded by rows of low stone ‘mastaba’ structures. In the group-think of early Egyptologists these mastabas were interpreted as secondary ‘tombs’, even though the superstructure was obvious and no attempt had been made to conceal the underground shafts which were typically 30 m deep. American George Reisner spent about twenty years systematically opening them all, to no avail. He didn’t find a single body, absolutely nothing. In the very last one he found some sticks of furniture identified with Queen Hatshesput (Cheops’ mother) and a sealed but empty coffer – upon which he made up a story that she had been buried there but was later moved. Pure fabrication. [2]

The mastabas look like military munitions bunkers – because that is what they were. Regular rows of standard design, exhibiting all the hallmarks of precise, pre-planned singular design and function. Built like brick outhouses for strength and security and safety – secure against theft and secure against accident. Whatever was in there was valuable and or dangerous. There are at least two possible explanations relating to the function of the Great Pyramid.

First – the Great Pyramid may have been some sort of central test-bed or development facility for all the other pyramids. Notwithstanding the early nuclear testing at Jebel Barkal there may still have been some need for refinement – to get the coffer loading exactly right. That is why he blast chamber was vented as safety-valves to allow for ‘accidents’? Or second, it may have been a pre-production facility for the other pyramids – none of which appears to have had identifiable structures or facilities for preparation and certification of the loaded coffer.

That scenario would be consistent with later religious rituals which portrayed that the ‘dead body’ of the Pharaoh was ferried along the Nile and delivered to his respective pyramid. That’s all speculative – accounting for multiple use of the Great Pyramid but not necessarily for the bunkers. A stronger possibility is that the Great Pyramid was a facility for armaments development and production. The bunkers were for secure storage of weapons of mass destruction.

The nuclear weapon was the royal ‘mace’, naively translated as a ‘club’; also widely referred to in later Hebrew Old Testament accounts as ‘the rod’, ‘the rod of our fathers’. The euphemistic term ‘rod’ is translated from Latin virga, also meaning ‘magic wand’. In the Old Testament it became  …The light [that] was awesome and terrible out of its holy places … made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth … taken and brought forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt. [3]

As is the case still, those dabbling in nuclear energy for peaceful purposes are unable to resist the temptation to also develop awesome and terrible weapons.

Extant museum examples of the Egyptian ‘mace’ are mostly late ceremonial copies consisting of a stone ball on the end of a slender stick – hopelessly inadequate as a physical club. But the original real mace was the ultimate royal weapon, the very emblem of supreme power. In Egyptian texts it was known as the Kherp, the ‘Sceptre of Rule’ and the ‘giver of winds’.  ‘Winds’ was the usual naive translation for ‘waves of radiation’ – so the mace was the giver of waves of radiation, it was a ray gun. A real example found in Tutankhamum’s tomb (in a tunnel in a hillside) was engraved ‘Beautiful god, beloved, dazzling of face like Aten when it shines’. It dazzled like the sun when it shone!

The real mace or rod consisted of a hollow gold sphere attached to a narrow gold tube, like a gun barrel. The hollow gold sphere enclosed and insulated a ball of ‘hot’ lapis lazuli – which was a neutron capacitor. When the device was triggered the ‘gun barrel’ focussed and released a narrow beam of neutrons – like a ray gun.

That is why very early Egyptian kings were titled nesu bity, meaning ‘he of the reed and the bee’. The ‘reed’ was the hollow tube (gun barrel) and the ‘bee’ was the buzzing sound made when it discharged. Later it was called the ‘hornet’ in Old Testament accounts where the Hebrew god said  … understand this, I sent the hornet before you as a consuming fire, which drove them out … not with the sword, nor the bow … but by an unknown astonishment, a hissing and a perpetual desolation of plagues. [4]

The nuclear mace came from earliest times- from the monogene lords of the Old Kingdom – 1^st dynasty King Menes was portrayed brandishing one on the Narmer palette. But their use continued into the Middle Kingdom and beyond – so there must have been an on-going source of production.

Around 1500 BC when Pharaoh Thutmosis III laid siege to the port-city of Joppa in Palestine, at a parley under truce his opponent asked to see ‘the great club called The Beauteous Thing’ (in translation). At which General Thutii showed him saying, ‘This is the club by which [the sun god] Amun gives strength to slay the enemy’. And he smote him dead on the spot. [5]  Likewise around 1250 BC, ‘god’ gave Ramses II a special ‘battle sword’ in the form of the sun god … and the weapon reached out without mercy so the land was full of corpses … and the enemy fled like a woman.’  The official inscription of the campaign against the Syrians records that Ramses put on his protective clothing then his ‘royal snake’ spat fire and flame  … a consuming fire smiting hundreds of thousands with his arm.[6]

The weapon of the sun [radiation] killed indiscriminately so the land was full of corpses and plagues. It was a weapon of mass destruction. The Egyptians were still using it in at least 1250 BC, so they must have had on-going production of ‘hot’ lapis lazuli, from the akhet (radiant) factory of ‘Light Land’ at Giza.

[1] Vyse, Operations carried out at the pyramids of Giza. 1840

[2] Reisner, Hatshepsut, Mother of Cheops

[3] Psalm 68,139; Deuteronomy, 4

[4] Deuteronomy 7,9; Jeremiah 19,25,29,51

[5] Erman, The Ancient Egyptians

[6] Brugsch-Bey, Egypt Under the Pharaohs