MSNBC News Services Updated: 8:35 p.m. ET March 30, 2007
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- A French architect says he has cracked a 4,500-year-old mystery
surrounding Egypt’s Great Pyramid, claiming that it was built from the
inside out. Scientists
have long wondered how the Egyptians placed the Great Pyramid's 3
million stone blocks, which each weigh about 2.5 tons. Previous
theories have suggested that the tomb of Pharaoh Cheops (Khufu), the
last surviving example of the seven great wonders of antiquity, was
built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape
around the exterior to haul up the stonework. But
flouting previous wisdom, Jean-Pierre Houdin said advanced 3-D
technology has shown that the main ramp used to haul the massive stones
to the apex was contained 30 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) beneath the
outer skin, tracing a pyramid within a pyramid. According to his theory — shown in a computer model http://www.3ds.com/khufu - available on the Internet
— the builders put up an outer ramp for the first 140 feet (40 meters),
then constructed an inner ramp in a corkscrew shape to complete the
450-foot-high (137-meter-high) structure.“This
is better than the other theories, because it is the only theory that
works,” Houdin said Friday after unveiling his hypothesis in a lavish
ceremony using 3-D computer simulation. To
prove his case, Houdin teamed up with a French company that builds 3-D
models for auto and airplane design, Dassault Systemes, which put 14
engineers on the project for two years. Now an international team is
being assembled to probe the pyramid using radars and heat-detecting
cameras supplied by a French defense firm, assuming that Egyptian
authorities will agree. “This goes against both main existing
theories. I’ve been teaching them myself for 20 years, but deep down I
know they’re wrong,” Egyptologist Bob Brier told Reuters at the
unveiling.“Houdin’s
vision is credible, but right now this is just a theory. Everybody
thinks it has got to be taken seriously,” said Brier, a senior research
fellow at Long Island University. Egypt’s
Supreme Council of Antiquities was not immediately available for
comment. Dassault said Brier and other Egyptologists attending the
ceremony were supporters of Houdin’s theory but had no financial links
to him or the firm. Flash of intuition
Houdin
began working full-time on the riddle eight years ago after a flash of
intuition passed to him by his engineer father, and five years before
actually visiting the site.He
found that a frontal, mile-long ramp would have used up as much stone
as the pyramid, while being too steep near the top. He believes an
external ramp was used only to supply the base. An external corkscrew ramp would have blocked
the sight lines needed to build an accurate pyramid and would been
difficult to fix to the surface, while leaving little room to work.“What
characterized the Egyptians was their sense of perfection and economy.
We talk of durable development now, but it was the Egyptians who
invented it. They didn’t waste a single stone. They relied purely on
intelligence,” Houdin said. Yet another enigma
Houdin also claimed to have shed light on a second enigma surrounding the purpose of a Grand Gallery inside the pyramid. The Frenchman believes its tall, narrow shape
suggests it accommodated a giant counter-weight to help haul five
60-ton granite beams to their position above the King’s Chamber.He
thinks that no more than 4,000 people could have built the pyramid
using these techniques, rather than the 100,000 or so assigned by past
historians to the task of burying the pharaoh. Houdin,
56, brushed aside concerns about the popular curse that is supposed to
punish those who penetrate the secrets of the pyramids, dating back to
the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. “Why
should I be worried? I’m just explaining that the people of the time
were architects of genius and that Khufu was a genius to order the
pyramid’s construction. What could happen to me, except that Khufu
would thank me?” he told Reuters. This report includes information from Reuters and The Associated Press. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17873984/?GT1=9145 - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17873984/?GT1=9145
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"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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