2023-10-02 10:14:25
The last great mystery of the Cheops pyramid was revealed in December. It was revealed by Zahi Hawas, head of the scientific committee of ScanPyramids, announcing that a hidden corridor, unknown until that time, had been discovered that could lead to the secret chamber of Pharaoh Khufu. The expectation multiplied when the famous Egyptologist, leading the research team, presented his ambitious theory. “In my opinion, because of how this passage is built, it could hide or protect Khufu’s burial chamber,” he told ABC.
The room has not yet been found, although the archaeologist noted that, from then on, the Ministry of Ancient Egyptian Antiquities was going to lead the investigations that are being carried out below and at the end of this passage to see what can be found. “We aspire to discover the pharaoh’s treasure,” said the Egyptian official. But this one, however, It is nothing more than one of the many secrets that the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that still stand.
The main of its secrets
The main one, which the world’s leading historians, architects, archaeologists and researchers have been asking themselves for centuries, is to find out how it is possible that that huge structure was built 4,500 years ago, with the rudimentary means that we assume there were. in the reign of Cheops.
Halfway through the mandate of this pharaoh, who ruled Egypt between 2584 and 2558 BC. C., a crew of approximately forty workers organized a new shipment of limestone every day that was sent from the port of Wadi al Gurf, facing the Red Sea, to Giza. Once there, on the famous plateau located 20 kilometers from Cairohundreds of other people gave their lives to the construction of what was one of the most important monuments of Antiquity.
It took 27 years to build it.
They remained like this, day by day, for around 27 years, until reaching its 146 meters of height, which They make it the tallest of the three pyramids of Giza. It is also the one that continues to arouse the most fascination among archaeologists, scientists, architects and historians from around the planet, four millennia after its inauguration.
Every so often, in addition, a new study tries to solve the mystery of the construction of the gigantic pyramid, although the question remains unanswered. Some theories are as surreal and implausible as that it was erected by inhabitants of Atlantis, that it was built to guide aliens, that a city was hidden inside, that its authors were giants of the Old Testament and Genesis who lived on Earth before Universal Flood and, finally, that its purpose was to store grain during a great famine. The latter was formulated by none other than Ben CarsonRepublican candidate for the Presidency of the United States in 2016, who also said he was based on the Bible.
“The pyramids are known throughout the world because they are the most complex, most famous and most important construction in history,” commented the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mustafa Waziri, in 2017. In the same press conference, however, he also acknowledged that “there are many holes in them that we cannot classify as cameras, but we do not know” where they are located or what they were used for. A new mystery to add to the tallest stone building in the world for 3,800 years, only superseded in the 19th century by the spire of the church of San Nicolás, in Hamburg.
The size of the Sun
In 2015, Miquel Pérez-Sánchez’s ten-year research allowed computer reconstruction with great accuracy. the pyramid of cheops and determine that it was crowned by a sphere 2.7 meters in diameter. The Catalan architect presented the discovery in the book that contained his doctoral thesis and explained that the hitherto unknown ball symbolized the Ojo de Horus and that its dimensions were proportional to the size of the Sun and Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. The researcher had the support of a multidisciplinary team that allowed him to draw the monument by computer with an accuracy of 4 decimal places and discover its original measurements.
Just a year later, a group of Egyptian experts made public a new theory by discovering energy particles inside the pyramid that, they said, could explain the construction system and reveal other secrets. The announcement was made by the director of the Institute for Heritage Preservation and Innovation, Madi Tayubi, as part of the preliminary results of the current proyecto ‘Scan Pyramids’which was based on the detection of muons (energy particles that penetrate objects) to discover if there are hidden cameras.
The main objective was to advance towards the formula that allowed the builders of the time to place the heavy and enormous stones, one on top of the other, and raise them to almost 150 meters in height. The riddle has not yet been solved, but a year later a great stir was unleashed when the magazine ‘Nature’ published one of those ‘Scan Pyramids’ studies that revealed the existence of a “large hole” eight meters high, two meters wide and 30 meters long. The Egyptian authorities denied its existence, but the team of French, Egyptian and Japanese scientists insisted that it was the first discovery inside the pyramid since the 19th century and constituted a “great advance” in understanding its structure. One more mystery.
The oldest theory: Herodotus
All archaeologists and researchers agree that the pyramid of cheops It was built during the period of greatest apogee of pharaonic power in the Ancient empire. Its size shows the great capacity for organization at work and the knowledge acquired by the architects of the time to erect such stone masses with supposedly simple means. How could it be, obviously excluding the hand of aliens and biblical giants?
The oldest known theory was written down Herodotus in his Book II, in which he reflected what the Egyptian priests had told him when he visited the pyramid in 450 BC. C. The historian assured that “twenty years were spent in its construction” and tens of thousands of slaves were used. The method was described in the following way:
«The pyramid was built so that there were steps in it that some call ladders and others call altars. Done this way from the beginning, the already worked stones were raised and raised with a certain machine made up of short logs that, lifting them from the ground, placed them in the first order of steps. From there, another machine took them up to the second order, where they were loaded onto another similar machine and continued in the same way. It seems that the number of machines was equal to the number of scales. The facade began [después] to be polished from above, then descending consecutively, so that the lower part, which rested on the same floor, was the last to receive the last coat.
19th century, the century of great theories
During the 19th century more ‘symbolic’ theories proliferated, but all were discarded or transformed at the beginning of the next century with the advancement of archaeology. In 1928, for example, German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt He exposed the hypothesis of large perpendicular ramps on one of the faces of the pyramid to raise the large stone blocks. Three decades later, archaeologist Zakaria Goneim He assured that they had found the traces of the retaining walls of said ramps.
Next, Dows Dunham He discarded this idea as impractical and suggested that the same pyramid was the one that provided its own working platform, growing at the same time as it. He also argued that work during the Fourth Dynasty was more complicated and laborious than modern engineers imagined in the middle of the last century, since “there is no evidence that the wheel, the pulley or the crane were known.” “And we know that the Egyptians in the pyramids did not have pack animals and the force used had to necessarily be that of man pulling ropes,” he noted.
In 2007, the french architect Jean-Pierre Houdin He also got on the bandwagon of this mystery after eight years of investigations and put forward another controversial theory, according to which the pyramid was built from the inside out. His thesis was presented that year with a three-dimensional projection at the Geode cinema in Paris, after which he argued that the Egyptians raised the blocks via an internal ramp that formed a spiral tunnel inside the structure. “It’s better than the other theories, because it’s the only one that works,” she explained. Houdin considered that with his system no more than 4,000 men were needed and that the Egyptians also managed not to waste a single block.
Two years ago, the architect and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Adolfo Alonso Durá, supported this hypothesis: «Is this theory real? Do such galleries exist? Houdin investigated a temple from a century after Cheops that was destroyed in the 19th century, and that technique was indeed used there. Therefore, It is not unreasonable that it was made in the time of Cheops. Houdin thinks of an interior ramp in the pyramid, a straight ramp that goes up with a 7% slope to the end. As you go up levels, they left the gaps in each level and covered them, without it being necessary to add material that would later have to be lowered. The passage would be up to a kilometer long from the base to the end.. How many blocks were uploaded each day? It was not necessary for them to be well polished, since this was only requested for the exterior. There would be people who extracted blocks, others who moved them, others who raised them and others who organized them upstairs.
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