Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

34 How Did the Pyramid Builders Spell Relief?

Do We Really Know Why the Ancients Used Such Giant Stones in the Pyramid’s So-Called Relieving Chambers?

Christopher Dunn

While conducting explorations in the Great Pyramid in 1836, the British military man Colonel William Richard Howard-Vyse was in a crouched space above the King’s Chamber examining a mysterious layer of granite beams that were similar to the granite beams that formed the ceiling of the King’s Chamber beneath him. The crouched space is named Davison’s Chamber, after Nathaniel Davison, who had discovered it in 1765.

Howard-Vyse, who reportedly had received £10,000 from his family for this exploration and, more important, to liberate themselves from his presence, was intent on making a significant discovery and thus far was not having any luck. The granite layer over his head posed a tantalizing clue that something might be lying behind it. Noticing a crack between the beams of the ceiling, Howard-Vyse mulled over the possibility of yet another chamber existing above. Being able to push a three-foot-long reed into the crack, without obstruction, seemed an indication that there must be some other space beyond.

Howard-Vyse and his helpers made an attempt to cut through the granite to find out if there was another chamber above. Discovering in short order that their hammers and hardened steel chisels were no match for the red granite, they resorted to gunpowder. A local worker, his senses dulled by a supply of alcohol and hashish, set the charges and blasted away the rock until another chamber was revealed.

Similar to Davison’s Chamber, a ceiling of monolithic granite beams spanned the newly discovered chamber, indicating to Howard-Vyse the possible existence of yet another chamber above. After blasting upward for three and a half months and to a height of forty feet, they discovered three more chambers, making a total of five.

The topmost chamber had a gabled ceiling made of giant limestone blocks. To construct these five chambers, the ancient Egyptians had found it necessary to use forty-three pieces of granite weighing up to seventy tons each. The red-granite beams were cut square and parallel on three sides, but were left seemingly untouched on the top surface, which was rough and uneven. Some of them even had holes gouged into their topsides.

In this article we will look at the evidence and attempt to explore reasons for this phenomenal expenditure of resources from both the conventional perspective and the alternative perspective. Considering the enormous effort that must have gone into delivering to the Giza plateau these enormous monoliths, we will ask, “Within the framework of the established hypothesis on the Great Pyramid, was all of this work really necessary?”

By today’s standards, quarrying and hauling five hundred miles for just one of the forty-three granite beams that are placed above the King’s Chamber would not be a simple task. Yet the ancient Egyptians accomplished this task not just once, but many times. The seveny-ton weight, however, is not the limit of what the ancient Egyptians were capable of. Large obelisks of up to four hundred tons were also quarried, hauled, and erected. Howard-Vyse surmised that the reason for the five superimposed chambers was to relieve the flat ceiling of the King’s Chamber from the weight of thousands of tons of masonry above.

Although most researchers after Howard-Vyse have generally accepted this speculation, there are others, including the world’s first Egyptologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie, who have not. Important considerations cast doubt on this theory and prove it to be incorrect.

What needs to be considered is that there is a more efficient and less complicated technique in chamber construction elsewhere inside the Great Pyramid. The Queen’s Chamber negates the argument that the King’s Chamber’s overlying “chambers of construction” were designed to allow a flat ceiling. The load of masonry bearing down on the Queen’s Chamber is greater than that above the King’s Chamber, due to the fact that this chamber is situated below the King’s Chamber.

If a flat ceiling had been needed for the Queen’s Chamber, it would have been quite safe to span this room with the kind of beams that are above the King’s Chamber. The construction of the Queen’s Chamber employed cantilevered limestone blocks that transferred the weight of the masonry above to the outside of the walls. A ceiling similar to the one in the King’s Chamber could have been added to this design and, as with the beams above the King’s Chamber, the beams would be holding up nothing more than their own weight.

When the builders of the Great Pyramid constructed the King’s Chamber, they were obviously aware of a simpler method of creating a flat ceiling. The design of the King’s Chamber complex, therefore, must have been prompted by other considerations. What were these considerations? Why are there five superimposed layers of monolithic seventy-ton granite beams? Imagine the sheer will and energy that went in to raising one of the granite blocks 175 feet in the air! There must have been a far greater purpose for investing so much time and energy.

I made the above argument in my book, The Giza Power Plant. Since its publication, the contrary opinion that I had articulated had evidently become a point of discussion on a message board because I received an e-mail from Egyptology student Mikey Brass, within which was a link to a translation of a German magazine article. The question was posed to Frank Dörnenburg, a participant in the discussion: Why so many layers? He writes:

I have been debating elsewhere, the Kings Chamber, and the question of why five ‘Relieving’ Chambers were needed to be used to spread the massive weight above the King’s Chamber. My answer to this was I simply did not know. A good answer to this question can be found in Göttinger Miszellen 173: “The old method of corbelling channeled the weight force directly to the walls of a chamber. The new, and here for the first time used, gable-roof redirects the force down AND sideways. If the Egyptians had put the gable roof in the King’s Chamber directly on the ceiling like in the Queen’s Chamber, the sideways force would have damaged the great gallery. So they had to put the gable above the upper layer of the gallery’s construction. The easiest way to do this was to stack small chambers. And if you look at a cross section you will see that now the sideways force of the roof goes well over the roof of the gallery.”

Superficially, what is proposed in the above hypothesis may seem plausible. It is, however, a construct founded on flawed assumptions and an incomplete analysis of the entire King’s Chamber complex. Before accepting it as factual, we need to consider the following.

The hypothesis assumes that dynamic lateral forces would follow the direction of the angled blocks and that these lateral forces would accumulate as more stone was piled on top of the gabled blocks. According to the hypothesis, the consequence of each block added above the King’s Chamber causes additional lateral thrust to push against the southern end of the grand gallery.

The drawing on page 253 represents a mechanical setup with which many manufacturing technologists are intimately familiar. It is a steel plate resting in a V-block. If we allow that the above hypothesis is correct, the plate would push on surface A, causing lateral movement.

At rest, the plate will put more pressure on the opposite surface due to the center of gravity of the piece. Except for gravity, there are no dynamic forces at work. There is only dead weight, which is distributed according to each member’s center of gravity. When an object is placed on an inclined plane, it has the potential to move down that plane by gravitational forces acting upon it. This movement continues until an obstruction is encountered, at which time the kinetic energy that causes lateral motion ceases.

The gabled ceiling blocks above the King’s Chamber are situated on an inclined plane cut into the core blocks. Assuming that, like the Queen’s Chamber, the center of gravity of these blocks lies outside the chamber walls, the blocks may be described as cantilevered, whereas there is no archthrust at the apex where two opposing blocks meet. The entire weight of the block is borne by the blocks that form the inclined plane, with some weight being carried by the block that holds the lower end.

Without knowing for sure what design features were employed, I can envision a design that would be sound and not damage the grand gallery. The rough measurement between the ends of the gabled blocks and the grand gallery south wall is about nine feet. Considering the width of the gallery (between forty-two and eighty-two inches), it is reasonable to assume that the blocks that form the gallery south wall extend outside the inside surface—but to what distance? I don’t know. However, considering that the King’s Chamber’s northern shaft bends around the grand gallery, it gives rise to the speculation that the blocks that form the gallery walls are deeper than four feet. (This is a significant point to make, and probably in itself worthy of a discussion. The northern shaft could have more easily been a straight shot to the sky, without the extra bends. It would have clearly missed the inside wall of the grand gallery by about four feet.)

With the grand gallery southern-wall blocks butted against the gallery east- and west-wall blocks, any lateral forces that might affect it from the King’s Chamber’s gabled ceiling blocks would give less cause for concern than, say, the forces acting on the roof of the horizontal passage from the pressure of the Queen’s Chamber’s gabled ceiling blocks—or the pressure of the blocks bearing down on the roof of the grand gallery.

Moreover, building on top of gabled ceiling blocks does not necessarily mean that they must bear a tremendous accumulation of weight. As described in the drawing above, the distribution of load does not necessarily have to bear down on the gable.

Perhaps the most significant argument against what has been proposed in Göttinger Miszellen, and the simplest to understand, can be made by pointing to a plan view of the Great Pyramid. As we can see, the King’s Chamber is thirty-four feet in length. The grand gallery is forty-two to eighty-two inches wide—barely the width of one gabled ceiling block.

Therefore, when looking at a side view of the chambers, the hypothesis may appear plausible, but it falls apart under scrutiny, for even if we allow that there would be undue pressure on the south wall of the grand gallery, it would not necessitate five chambers being built across the entire thirty-fourfoot length of the King’s Chamber. Also, why five layers of beams? Why not a large open space with the gabled ceiling above?

In cutting these giant monoliths, the builders evidently found it necessary to craft the beams destined for the uppermost chamber with the same respect as those intended for the ceiling directly above the King’s Chamber. Each beam was cut flat and square on three sides, with the topside seemingly untouched. This is significant, considering that those directly above the King’s Chamber would be the only ones visible to those entering the pyramid.

Moreover, it is remarkable that the builders would exert the same amount of effort in finishing the thirty-four beams, which would not be seen once the pyramid was built, as they did the nine beams forming the ceiling of the King’s Chamber, which would be seen. Even if these beams were imperative to the strength of the complex, deviations in accuracy would surely be allowed, making the cutting of the blocks less time-consuming—unless, of course, they were either using these upper beams for a specific purpose, and/or were using standardized machinery methods that produced these beams with little variation in their shape.

Why five layers of these beams? To include so many monolithic blocks of granite when constructing the King’s Chamber is obviously redundant. To get an idea of the enormity of such a task today, my company, Danville Metal Stamping, recently acquired a hydroform press. The main body of the press weighs one hundred tons and had to be shipped more than one hundred miles to our plant. Because of weight distribution considerations, the Department of Transportation dictated that it be hauled on a special tractor-trailer with the weight distributed among nineteen axles. The length of this trailer approached two hundred feet and it required two additional drivers, positioned at key points along its length, to pivot it around corners.

The reason for describing this scenario is to point out that even using today’s efficient, high-tech methods, there would have to be a damn good reason to move even one heavy load. The forty-three giant beams above the King’s Chamber were not included in the structure to relieve the King’s Chamber from excessive pressure from above, but rather to fulfill a more advanced purpose. Without a conventional explanation that makes sense, we must look for other answers to the mystery of these granite beams. When these granite beams are analyzed with a more utilitarian perspective, one can discern a simple yet refined technology operating at the heart of the Great Pyramid that makes more sense. The ancient Egyptians, or Khemitians, were brilliant in applying natural laws and using natural materials to enable this ancient power plant to function. The granite beams above the King’s Chamber were an essential and integral part of making this pyramid machine hum.