The construction of the Great Pyramid

How Were the Stone Blocks CUT?
The Great Pyramid is constructed with approximately 2,300,000 limestone and granite blocks.
Weighing between 2.5 and 50 tons each, these stone blocks had to be quarried from the earth.

Various lifting devices and levers have been proposed by modern engineers.
Remember, no existing dynastic records, paintings, or friezes give any clue to this mystery, but none
solve the problem of how the 50-ton blocks of the main chamber were lifted and positioned using an
area where only four to six workers could stand, when the strength of at least 2000 would be needed.
The known tools would only barely cut through limestone and would be useless with granite. No archaeological examples of iron tools are found in early dynasticEgypt. The best steels today have a hardness of only 5.5 and thus are inefficient for cutting granite. It was thought that the pyramid blocks had been cut with long saw blades studded with diamonds or corundum. The cutting of millions of blocks would require millionsof rare and expensive diamonds and corundum.

We have no idea how the blocks were actually quarried.

The unsolved problem of how the 2,300,000 very heavy blocks were transported to the building site of the pyramid is even more mystifying. How were the blocks taken to the nearly 500- foot height of the pryamids' summit? It has been calculated that a ramp built all the way to the top of the pyramid would require 17.5 million cubic meters of material, this representing more than seven times the amount of material used for the pyramid itself, and a work force of 240,000 to build it .

And what of manuevering the precisely carved blocks
into place without damaging the corners?

The most extraordinary problem, that of the fashioning and placement of the highly polished limestone
casing stones that covered the entire pyramid. The finished pyramid contained approximately 115,000 of these stones, each weighing ten tons or more. These stones were dressed on all six of their sides, not just the side exposed to the visible surface, to tolerances of .01 inch. They are set together so closely that a thin razor bladecannot be inserted between the stones. Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians' work on the scale of acres.

Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BC, reported that inscriptions of strange characters were to be found on the pyramid's casing stones. In AD 1179 the Arab historian Abd el Latif recorded that these inscriptions were so numerous that they could have filled "more than ten thousand written pages."

A great library of ageless wisdom was forever lost.

There are water marks halfway up the sides of the pyramid, or about 400 feet above the present level of the Nile River. Further, when the Great Pyramid was first opened, incrustations of salt an inch thick were found inside. While much of this salt is known to be natural exudation from the stones of the pyramid, chemical analysis has shown that some of the salt has a mineral content consistent with salt from the sea. These salt incrustations, found at a height corresponding to the water level marks left on the exterior, are further evidence that at some time in the distant past the pyramid was submerged halfway up its height.


The Facts

 

 

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