OF THE SEVEN WONDERS of the ancientworld, only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains.

An estimated 2 million stone blocks weighing anaverage of 2 1/2 tons went into its construction.When completed, the 481-foot-tall pyramid was theworld’s tallest structure, a record it held for morethan 3,800 years, when England’s LincolnCathedral surpassed it by a mere 44 feet.

We know who built the Great Pyramid: thepharaoh Khufu, who ruled Egypt about 2547–2524B.C. And we know who supervised its construction:

Khufu’s brother,Hemienu. Thepharaoh’s right-handman, Hemienu was“overseer of allconstruction proj-ects of the king”and his tomb is oneof the largest in acemetery adjacentto the pyramid.

What we don’tknow is exactlyhow it was built, aquestion that hasbeen debated formillennia, The ear-liest recorded theo-ry was put forwardby the Greek histo-rian Herodotus,who visited Egyptaround 450 B.C.,when the pyramidwas already 2,000

years old. He mentions “machines” used to raise theblocks and this is usually taken to mean cranes.Three hundred years later, Diodorus of Sicily wrote,“The construction was effected by mounds”(ramps). Today we have the “space alien” theory—those primitive Egyptians never could have builtsuch a fabulous structure by themselves; extrater-restrials must have helped them.

Modern scholars have favored two basic theo-ries, but deep in their hearts, they know that neitherone is correct. A radical new one, however, may

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How to Build a Pyramid

Hidden ramps may solve the mystery of the Great Pyramid’s construction.

BY BOB BRIER

“How to Build a Pyramid” by Bob Brier. Reprinted with permission of ARCHAEOLOGYmagazine, Vol. 60 , #3, www.archaeology.org. Copyright © The Archaeological Institute of America, May/June 2007.

The 5th- century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus suggested that cranes wereemployed to life the blocks of the Great Pyramid in the same way that the shadouf,seen in a tomb p ainting from Deir el-Medina, was used to lif t water for irrigation.

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provide the solution. Ifcorrect, it would demon-strate a level of planningby Egyptian architects andengineers far greater thananything ever imaginedbefore,

THE EXTERNAL

RAMP AND

CRANE THEORIES

The first theory is that aramp was built on one sideof the pyramid and as thepyramid grew, the rampwas raised so that through-out the construction,blocks could be movedright up to the top. If theramp were too steep, themen hauling the blockswould not be able to dragthem up. An 8-percentslope is about the maxi-mum possible, and this isthe problem with the sin-gle ramp theory. With sucha gentle incline, the rampwould have to be approxi-mately one mile long toreach the top of the pyra-mid. But there is neitherroom for such a long rampon the Giza Plateau, norevidence of such a mas-sive construction. Also, amile-long ramp wouldhave had as great a vol-ume as the pyramid itself,virtually doubling theman-hours needed to buildthe pyramid. Because thestraight ramp theory justdoesn’t work, severalpyramid experts haveopted for a modified ramptheory.

This approach sug-gests that the ramp

According to the new theory , anexternal ramp was used to build thelower third of the pyramid and wasthen cannibalized, it s blocks t akenthrough an internal ramp for thehigher levels of the structure.

How to Build a Pyramid 3

corkscrewed upthe outside of thepyramid, muchthe way a moun-tain road spiralsupward. Thecorkscrew rampdoes away withthe need for amassive mile-long one andexplains why noremains of such aramp have beenfound, but thereis a flaw with thisversion of thetheory. With a

ramp corkscrewing up the outside of the pyra-mid, the corners couldn’t be completed until thefinal stage of construction. But careful measure-ments of the angles at the corners would havebeen needed frequently to assure that the cor-

A microgravimetry survey of theGreat Pyramid in the 1980s yieldedthe enigmatic image at right. Lessdense areas (indicated in green)seem to correspond to an internalramp proposed by Jean-PierreHoudin (diagram). Below , woodenhoist s on notches lef t in the edge ofthe pyramid could have been used toturn blocks onto the next p art of theinternal ramp.

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ners would meet to create a point at the top. DieterArnold, a renowned pyramid expert at TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, comments in hisdefinitive work, Building in Egypt: “During thewhole construction period, the pyramid trunk wouldhave been completely buried under the ramps. Thesurveyors could therefore not have used the fourcorners, edges, and foot line of the pyramid for theircalculations.” Thus the modified ramp theory alsohas a serious problem.

The second theory centers on Herodotus’smachines. Until recently Egyptian farmers used awooden, cranelike device called a shadouf to raisewater from the Nile for irrigation. This device canbe seen in ancient tomb paintings, so we know itwas available to the pyramid builders. The idea isthat hundreds of these cranes at various levels onthe pyramid were used to lift the blocks. One prob-lem with this theory is that it would involve atremendous amount of timber and Egypt simplydidn’t have forests to provide the wood. Importingso much lumber would have been impractical.

Large timbers for shipbuilding were imported fromLebanon, but this was a very expensive enterprise.

Perhaps an even more fatal flaw to the cranetheory is that there is nowhere to place all thesecranes. The pyramid blocks tend to decrease in sizehigher up the Great Pyramid. I climbed it dozens oftimes in the 1970s and ’80s, when it was permitted,and toward the top, the blocks sometimes provideonly 18 inches of standing room, certainly notenough space for cranes large enough to lift heavyblocks of stone. The crane theory can’t explain howthe blocks of the Great Pyramid were raised. Sohow was it done?

THE INTERNAL RAMP THEORY

A radical new idea has recently been presented byJean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect who hasdevoted the last seven years of his life to making

The complexities of the Great Pyramid’ s design and construction could not have been deciphered withoutthe aid of 3-D imaging sof tware

How to Build a Pyramid 5

detailed computer models of the Great Pyramid.Using start-of-the-art 3-D software developed byDassault Systemes, combined with an initial sug-gestion of Henri Houdin, his engineer father, thearchitect has concluded that a ramp was indeed usedto raise the blocks to the top, and that the ramp stillexists—inside the pyramid!

The theory suggests that for the bottom third ofthe pyramid, the blocks were hauled up a straight,external ramp. This ramp was far shorter than theone needed to reach the top, and was made of lime-stone blocks, slightly smaller than those used tobuild the bottom third of the pyramid. As the bottomof the pyramid was being built via the externalramp, a second ramp was being built, inside thepyramid, on which the blocks for the top two-thirdsof the pyramid would be hauled. The internal ramp,according to Houdin, begins at the bottom, is about6 feet wide, and has a grade of approximately 7 per-cent. This ramp was put into use after the lowerthird of the pyramid was completed and the externalramp had served its purpose.

The design of the internal ramp was partiallydetermined by the design of the interior of the pyra-mid. Hemienu knew all about the problems encoun-tered by Pharaoh Sneferu, his and Khufu’s father.Sneferu had considerable difficulty building a suit-able pyramid for his burial, and ended up having toconstruct three at sites south of Giza! The first, atMeidum, may have had structural problems and wasnever used. His second, at Dashur—known as theBent Pyramid because the slope of its sides changesmidway up—developed cracks in the walls of itsburial chamber. Huge cedar logs from Lebanon hadto be wedged between the walls to keep the pyramidfrom collapsing inward, but it too was abandoned.There must have been a mad scramble to completeSneferu’s third and successful pyramid, the distinc-tively colored Red Pyramid at Dashur, before theaging ruler died.

From the beginning, Hemienu planned threeburial chambers to ensure that whenever Khufudied, a burial place would be ready. One was carvedout of the bedrock beneath the pyramid at the begin-ning of its construction. In case the pharaoh haddied early, this would have been his tomb. When,after about five years, Khufu was still alive andwell, the unfinished underground burial chamberwas abandoned and the second burial chamber,commonly called the Queen’s Chamber, was begun.Some time around the fifteenth year of construction

Khufu was still healthy and this chamber was aban-doned unfinished and the last burial chamber, theKings Chamber, was built higher up—in the centerof the pyramid. (To this day, Khufu’s sarcophagusremains inside the Kings Chamber, so early explor-ers of the pyramid incorrectly assumed that the sec-ond chamber had been for his queen.)

Huge granite and limestone blocks were need-ed for the roof beams and rafters of the Queen’s andKing’s Chambers. Some of these beams weigh morethan 60 tons and are far too large to have beenbrought up through the internal ramp. Thus theexternal ramp had to remain in use until the largeblocks were hauled up. Once that was done, theexternal ramp was dismantled and its blocks wereled up the pyramid via the internal ramp to build thetop two-thirds of the pyramid. Perhaps most blocksin this portion of the pyramid are smaller than thoseat the bottom third because they had to move up thenarrow internal ramp.

There were several considerations that wentinto designing the internal ramp. First, it had to befashioned very precisely so that it didn’t hit thechambers or the internal passageways that connectthem. Second, men hauling heavy blocks of stonesup a narrow ramp can’t easily turn a 90-degree cor-ner; they need a place ahead of the block to standand pull. The internal ramp had to provide a meansof turning its corners so, Houdin suggests, the ramphad openings there where a simple crane could beused to turn the blocks.

There are plenty of theories about how theGreat Pyramid could have been built that lack evi-dence. Is the internal ramp theory any different? Isthere any evidence to support it? Yes.

A bit of evidence appears to be one of theramp’s corner notches used for turning blocks. It istwo-thirds of the way up the northeast corner—pre-cisely at a point where Houdin predicted therewould be one. Furthermore, in 1986 a member of aFrench team that was surveying the pyramid report-ed seeing a desert fox enter it through a hole next tothe notch, suggesting that there is an open area closeto it, perhaps the ramp. It seems improbable that thefox climbed more than halfway up the pyramid.More likely there is some undetected crevice towardthe bottom where the fox entered the ramp and thenmade its way up the ramp and exited near the notch.It would be interesting to attach a telemetric deviceto a fox and send him into the hole to monitor his

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movements! The notch is suggestive, but there isanother bit of evidence supplied by the French men-tioned earlier that is far more compelling.

When the French team surveyed the GreatPyramid, they used microgravimetry, a techniquethat enabled them to measure the density of differ-ent sections of the pyramid, thus detecting hiddenchambers. The French team concluded that therewere no large hidden chambers inside it. If therewas a ramp inside the pyramid, shouldn’t the Frenchhave detected it? In 2000, Henri Houdin was pre-senting this theory at a scientific conference whereone of the members of the 1986 French team waspresent. He mentioned to Houdin that their comput-er analysis of the pyramid did yield one curiousimage, something they couldn’t interpret and there-fore ignored. That image showed exactly what Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory had predicted—a ramp spi-raling up through the pyramid.

Far from being just another theory, the internalramp has considerable evidence behind it. A teamheaded by Jean-Pierre Houdin and Rainer

Stadlemann, former director of the GermanArchaeological Institute in Cairo and one of thegreatest authorities on pyramids, has submitted anapplication to survey the Great Pyramid in a nonde-structive way to see if the theory can be confirmed.They are hopeful that the Supreme Council ofAntiquities will grant permission for a survey.(Several methods could be used, including powerfulmicrogravimetry, high-resolution infrared photogra-phy, or even sonar.) If so, sometime this year wemay finally know how Khufu’s monumental tombwas built. One day, if it is indeed there, we mightjust be able to remove a few blocks from the exteri-or of the pyramid and walk up the mile- long rampHemienu left hidden within the Great Pyramid.

Bob Brier is a senior research fellow at the C. WPost Campus of Long Island University and a con-tributing editor to ARCHAEOLOGY. For moreon how the Great Pyramid was built, visitwww.archaeology.org.