While musing on the Great Pyramid’s four mysterious narrow shafts for
my last cipher post, I was struck by an entirely different explanation for them. Since then, I’ve read through a whole load of web-pages (
I know, I know) and haven’t yet seen anything similar, so I thought I’d share the idea with you all, see where it leads. Please feel free to tell me if I’m reinventing a wheel or talking nonsense, I really don’t mind.
To quickly recap just about everything important about the Great Pyramid (aka the Pyramid of Khufu, or his Greek name Cheops) that I know…
* The Great Pyramid was constructed on top of a pre-existing hillock.
* All the rooms and passages in the Great Pyramid lie in (broadly speaking) a single vertical plane.
* The lowest chamber is an unfinished underground chamber carved into the hillock.
* The next highest chamber is known the “Queen’s Chamber”, though there’s no evidence a queen (or indeed anyone else) ever used it.
* The highest chamber is known as the “King’s Chamber”, and contains a large (but poorly finished) sarcophagus.
* The King’s Chamber has five large cavities above, thought to protect it against being collapsed by earthquakes.
* The King’s Chamber has two narrow shafts that extend diagonally upwards to the exterior of the pyramid.
* The Queen’s Chamber has two (originally concealed) narrow shafts that go sideways for about two metres and then diagonally upwards, but don’t obviously go to the exterior of the pyramid (i.e. where all the robot crawlers have gone a-trundling)
* The Queen’s Chamber lies immediately below the pyramid’s central axis, but the King’s Chamber is offset to one side.
Your Intellectual History challenge here is to explain the function of the two narrow shafts in the Queen’s Chamber. Here’s my answer:-
I suspect the Great Pyramid was built in two major stages of ascending grandeur / pharaonic megalomania. That is, I think that the Queen’s Chamber was to the originally planned pyramid as the King’s Chamber is to the final pyramid. For the following image, I’ve taken a West-facing CAD image from
Rudolf Gantenbrink’s exemplary website, inverted its colours, shrunk it and overlaid an arbitrarily-placed missing “virtual inner pyramid” outline in red:-
That is, I suspect that the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft terminates early because the pyramid itself was planned to terminate early, perhaps either at something like the red line I mark, or indeed directly at the current end of the shaft itself. Hence, it might be that what is beyond the “door” is simply the second stage of construction, the “outer virtual pyramid” if you like: the shaft stopped roughly where it was supposed to, but the construction plans changed around it.
Why, then, was the Queen’s Chamber’s
northern shaft any different? My suspicion is that the south end of the pyramid may have been built up first, with the north end lagging behind. Then, when the construction plans changed, the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft was left (quite literally) high and dry.
Alternatively, it could be that an earthquake during the first phase of building made it clear that the Queen’s Chamber was not going to be strong enough to survive the centuries in the way originally intended. Hence the decision may have been taken to add extra blocks to the North and South walls (if not the East and West walls as well), bringing the walls roughly two metres inwards. This could be why there is a two-metre horizontal section at the start of the Queen’s Chamber’s two shafts: that they were built diagonally up from the original walls, but that the walls were then thickened (for whatever reason): the shafts were similarly extended horizontally with the walls.
With all this in mind, I think I should note it’s entirely possible that Khufu’s pyramid may have originally started life as a smaller in-progress pyramid being built for (say) one of his predecessors, who intended to be interred in the (originally larger) Queen’s Chamber: but that Khufu’s architects saw the opportunity of extending it all into an humungous
des res fit for a king (
or, rather, Pharaoh). So, the burning question is: might the Great Pyram
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