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Building the Great Pyramid Today

As long as there is strong institutional resistance to challenging and revising the orthodox theories, it is unlikely that the scientific community, as a whole, will get involved in the debate.

Therefore, I am not optimistic about the prospect of a concerted and rigorous scientific investigation into the Giza Plateau now or in the future.

That said, it is then incumbent on independent thinkers and researchers to conduct their own investigations despite the positions that various institutions embrace.

This, of course, means facing the accusations of members of the status quo who hurl charges of pseudoscience and fringe archaeology. This is a social hazard that all pioneers face.

Under the present rules of scholarship, the ruins of the ancient cities of Nineveh and Troy would not have been found by the men who did find them because they lacked academic pedigrees. What is an archaeologist, in the final analysis, but a pedantic grave robber with a college degree?

That barb is especially aimed at the forerunners of modern archaeology like Colonel Richard William Howard Vyse, who used dynamite to “investigate” the Great Pyramid.

Those issues aside, it is very tempting to try to answer the question as to the purpose and use of the Great Pyramid.

In fact, the speculative theories on this subject are so numerous that listing and describing them would require an entire book. It is not within the scope or intent of the present work to address, review, or analyze the plethora of theories.

Fig. 6.1. Construction of Three Gorges Dam

My reasoning is simple: (1) none of the various theories can be tested, proved, or falsified, and (2) that being the case, it is more important to persuade the public and the scientific community that there are strong, viable, science-based objections to the orthodox scenario.

That said, Christopher Dunn’s book The Giza Power Plant actually addresses the latter issue before presenting his plausible theory as to the Great Pyramid’s end purpose.

His engineering background and experience lend a lot of weight to the objections he raises, as well as to the speculative conclusions he arrives at. That book and his articles are well worth reading.

Dunn concluded that the Great Pyramid could only have been constructed with the use of equipment at least equal to our modern machinery.

Could the pyramid have been built to function as a power-generation plant? Is it, in fact, a machine whose modus operandi remains invisible to us?

In general, I would answer maybe to the first question and yes to the second.

However, Dunn would also add that he has no idea as to how the Great Pyramid might have been used as some type of machine. It would seem to me that only an engineer can really pass judgment on Dunn’s premise.

It is interesting to entertain various theories on that subject, but they remain in the realm of pure speculation. One thing is certain: it was not a tomb.

A more productive line of inquiry would appear to be summed up by the following question: Could we build the Great Pyramid today? We do have the possibility of answering that question through combining the knowledge and methods of a number of disciplines.

Unfortunately, the conclusions of any investigations will have to remain in the realm of logical inference and statistical probability. No one would take the proposal that we build an exact duplicate of the Great Pyramid seriously, and we have seen the results of smaller-scale projects.

The costs of doing so would be astronomical, and the project would probably grind to a halt as soon as time and budget constraints were exceeded. But there is another, more serious reason it will never be undertaken.

Nobody would see any economic utility in such a project.

Lacking any verifiable understanding of the end use of the structure, there is no apparent economic benefit to attempting such a massive project.

Proving definitively that we have the capability of building the Great Pyramid today is not in the cards. However, there is one little-known feature of the Great Pyramid that can only be appreciated from an aerial perspective. It reveals what few casual observers understand, that this pyramid is an engineer’s nightmare.

The Great Pyramid is not a simple four-sided structure but a slightly concave, octagonal edifice, in fact. Each side is divided exactly in half by a seam that bends slightly inward (see fig. 6.2 below). That adds an almost alarming degree of difficulty to the engineering challenges.

Now, even though we have noted this previously, it bears repeating here that in order to ensure that the pyramid had true edges, was plumb, and could come together at the top to form a perfect apex, each tier had to be as level as the base.

Fig. 6.2. Aerial view of the Great Pyramid

That, of course, is why the base itself was precision engineered to the point where there is virtually no significant deviation over a thirteen-acre area.

To achieve the eventual seamless surface of the outer cladding required that the final blocks—which received the cladding stones—had to be arranged so that they maintained the 51:50° angle that the outer casing blocks were beveled at.

The Japanese team that tried to duplicate this engineering feat on a tiny scale model found they could not achieve it even with the aid of helicopters. Note that they did not include the additional concave features of the sides (shown in fig. 6.3) into their design.

The seam that divides each of the four sides in half is not apparent from the ground level, but it is obvious from an aerial perspective.

Of course, creating this added architectural twist complicated the engineering challenges greatly, as did the inclusion of the four interior ducts that had to snake through many tiers of the masonry from the King and Queen’s Chambers.

Why the builders would have added this enigmatic feature remains a mystery. But there is no doubt that modern engineers faced with the challenge of duplicating the edifice would prefer to exclude the slightly concave sides.

Could they achieve it? I respond with a very qualified yes, but doing it would add much time to the construction process.

Many people are not aware of this concave feature. However, we have included it and now proceed to examine the evidence both for and against the prospect of its being within the current capabilities of modern architects and builders.

Fig. 6.3. The Great Pyramid (at top). Note the concave features.

First, we do now have the capability of quarrying, lifting, transporting, and raising much larger obelisks than the NOVA team’s thirty-five-ton granite obelisk. In fact, our modern machinery could handle the fifty- to seventy-ton blocks as well. In recent years, a massive mobile crane was built to lift an 850-ton bridge.

We have bulldozers to level the plateau and laser surveying equipment to ensure that the base is as flat as an iron frying pan. In addition, we also possess pulleys, hoists, steel guy wires, cables, and cranes capable of lifting and carefully positioning the blocks of limestone and granite.

But the Egyptians had none of this machinery.

Furthermore, modern architects and engineers have a century of experience designing and building skyscrapers, dams, and other large-scale structures.

Moreover, computer-aided-design technology (CAD) allows for the creation of models and statistical analysis as well as virtual simulations. In sum, we have the technology and the infrastructure to theoretically duplicate the project.

On the con side, most of our modern buildings are constructed out of wood, steel, and glass. Heavy blocks of limestone and granite are seldom used and never as the main components of skyscrapers.

There is little demand for fifty-ton blocks of granite; they are something that our construction crews rarely quarry, and stone-cutting and dressing operations are relatively unaccustomed to dealing with them.

Consider the following story:

Volga-Dnepr Airlines’ new IL-76TD-90VD has carried its heaviest shipment to date; a 39 ton press for the paper industry transported from Finland to the United States. Loading and unloading of the 39-ton single piece of cargo required special equipment, including cranes and trailers, both in Jyvaeskylae in Finland and on its arrival at Rockford International Airport in Chicago. Organized in partnership between Procargo Ltd/Finland and Air Partner, the shipment—a replacement part for a paper machine—was destined for a pulp and paper plant.¹

This random sample makes it abundantly clear that a thirty-nineton load is still considered heavy, even when using modern machinery to manipulate it. That proved true when Egyptologists failed to adequately manipulate the obelisk weighing thirty-five tons.

Modern buildings are mostly space that is enclosed by a rather lightweight shell composed of wooden or steel supports, beams, crossbeams, and windows. There are no forty-story almost-solid-stone modern structures.

In addition, though pyramidal-shaped structures have been built, none of these is remotely on the scale of the Great Pyramid and all are mostly internal space enclosed by a thin shell.

If any single firm on the planet could duplicate the Great Pyramid, it would be the Bechtel Corporation, which is a privately held company responsible for building some of the largest projects on the planet. They have the brainpower, machinery, skills, management, labor, infrastructure, and global resources that are perhaps equal to the task.

The firm was involved in the construction of the massive Hoover Dam project. Since a dam wall is a solid edifice, building one is a fair comparison to the construction of the Great Pyramid, though not at all an exact equivalent.

Work began on the Hoover Dam in 1931, during the Great Depression. The challenges that the engineers and workmen faced were prodigious. First, the Colorado River had to be diverted away from the dam construction site. To achieve that, tunnels—as wide as a four-lane highway—were blasted through the canyon walls.

At its base, the Hoover dam is 660 feet thick, 110 feet less than the sides of the Great Pyramid; it is 726 feet tall, more than 200 feet taller than the Great Pyramid. Though the dam did not require the quarrying, cutting, and transporting of millions of limestone blocks, it did require the making of huge blocks of concrete to shore up the base and millions of tons of concrete to build the dam’s enormous wall.²

The project was put on a strict deadline that included the imposition of fees for any cost overruns or any failure to finish it on schedule; as a result, work on the project proceeded on a 24/7 basis.

It took an estimated eight thousand men using state-of-the-art equipment, machinery, and building techniques five years to complete the project, two years ahead of schedule.

The Hoover Dam serves as a good benchmark to use to establish whether our current civilization is capable of duplicating the Great Pyramid. On the basis of an objective analysis, I come down on the positive side with a few, but serious, reservations.

This conclusion differs from that of many independent investigators who think that the construction of the Great Pyramid still lies beyond our current capacity.

Given that the Hoover Dam was built more than eighty years ago and our machines and building techniques have improved since then, I am more or less convinced that we could build it today. The Chinese are currently constructing a much larger dam at Three Gorges.

Duplicating the Great Pyramid would still pose many challenges, but it is certainly feasible and within the realm of possibility, but only at this point in time.

While that tells us something about the progress our civilization has made, it also ought to make it very clear that no earlier civilization, including those of the Greeks or Romans, could have accomplished it. (We will examine that fact below.)

Now, if we can only claim that capability at this point, after thousands of years of continuous technological development, then it is a lead pipe cinch that the ancient Egyptians never built the Great Pyramid, any more than they could have built the Aswan Dam.

Every investigative pathway leads to the same conclusion: some civilization built the Great Pyramid, but it certainly was not the ancient Egyptian culture that existed 4,500 years ago.

To claim otherwise is to stand common sense and the whole notion of progress on their respective heads.

CONCLUSION

Though it may be possible, using modern equipment, to build the Great Pyramid today, the ancient Egyptians could not have done so. Modern architects and engineers have built dams that rival the size and mass of the ancient edifice; however, such dams still may not equal the overall complexity of the Great Pyramid.

Nonetheless, though no human culture could have built the Great Pyramid in the past, it may be possible to achieve that feat today or certainly in the future.

There are those who argue that the Greeks and Romans moved megalithic blocks of stone. They contend that this shows that the ancient Egyptian civilization surely could have achieved this feat.

The problem with that argument is that we are closer to the Roman Empire today than that empire was to ancient Egypt. Indeed, 2,500 years is a very long time in terms of the life of a human civilization. Most have lasted less than one thousand years.

Trying to imply that if the Romans could build the Coliseum and lift megalithic blocks of stone, then so could the Egyptians is a premise that simply will not fly.

It is like saying that since we build stadiums and so did the Romans, then they too could have sent rockets into space and deciphered the DNA code. That is a non sequitur.

A lot has happened over the last two thousand years since the time that ancient Rome collapsed. Well, a lot happened between the days of Rome’s peak and 2,500 years earlier when the Great Pyramid was supposed to have been built.

There is such a thing as progress and technological development or there is not. If the ancient Egyptians built the pyramid, then progress is a falsehood.

We can examine another set of tests that were performed by the Romans two thousand years ago to better grasp what I am arguing.

At the height of Rome’s imperial power, the leadership decided to show the world just how advanced the Roman Legion and its engineers were. How?

They decided that the best example would be to remove the ancient obelisks from Egypt, transport them down the Nile to Alexandria, and then ferry them, on ships, to Rome, where they would be reerected.

This would demonstrate to the citizens of the empire that Rome was indeed the global superpower. Who else would dare to accomplish the marvelous feats that the ancient Egyptians had accomplished? No one . . .

In fact, the Romans had a simple winch and even a basic crane apparatus. Their engineers had devised many sophisticated techniques and had constructed many very solid buildings, canals, walls, and so forth.

Roman architecture stands to this day in many parts of Europe.

They did manage to remove a number of obelisks from Egypt and to transport and erect them in Rome. But it proved to be a very difficult challenge that was not mishap-free.

Before going into that process a bit, I need to establish the exact nature of the challenge: the Romans never quarried an obelisk weighing two-hundred-plus tons, they did not try to carve hieroglyphics into them, and they did not have to plane down the obelisks so that they tapered, very symmetrically, from bottom to top.

All that the Roman engineers had to do was to take the obelisks down, ship them to Rome, and then reerect them there.

Though the Roman Legion had to keep records, we do not have details of exactly how they achieved their mission. However, we do know that to transport the largest obelisk ever attempted, they had to build the largest ship they had ever constructed. It was appropriately enough dubbed “the obelisk ship.”

As I have noted previously, the real difficulty is not in the transport operation but in lifting the rock out of the quarry. This is why the Romans never tried to build granite obelisks from square one and inscribe them with Latin.

This clearly shows that even after several millennia, the Romans, at that time the most sophisticated, technically advanced civilization on Earth, could not have built the Great Pyramid. They never even imagined such an undertaking.

Moving sixteen centuries forward from Roman times, we find a detailed account of a successful attempt to reerect one of the obelisks.