For the past week or so, I have been rekindling my childhood fascination with the Giza Necropolis. I’ve been spending an hour or two of my free time each night reading up on the various theories concerning how and why they were constructed, and by whom. But what I can’t seem to find is a good, cohesive explanation of what is currently known or believed to be known about what the cores of the pyramids are composed of. I understand that it is now known through ultrasound techniques that sand fills a large part of the voids, and that it is theorized that the pyramids are built around smaller pyramids which are called step pyramids. However, I can’t find a good explanation of how this was achieved. It seems intuitively apparent that you can’t build up without continually filling in to support the growing exterior wall, so is that how it was achieved? Did they build up two or three blocks high, fill with sand, and repeat the process until they got to the top? And if there are step pyramids inside the Great Pyramids, what is inside of those? Are the burial chambers and the tunnels servicing them the only hollow voids inside the pyramids, or do we not know at this time? What I’m really driving at is this: is there any place where I can find diagrams which show what the pyramids would look like if we disassembled them slice-by-slice from the top down? I see that Netflix has a good assortment of Nat Geo and other videos on the subject—which ones would be good for me to rent to get more information on this subject?
The pyramids are filled with sand? That’s the first time I’ve heard that. My understanding is that they are solid sandstone, except for some passages abd chambers.
I should have created a folder and been bookmarking as I went along. Maybe I can find it again—I’ll look.
Some good information here.
The latest issue of Archaeology magazine has an article (available In Full) with updates on an interesting theory about “what’s inside” the Great Pyramid. That is: remnants of internal ramps used in its building.
You might find it interesting.
This is all I can find right now. I can’t seem to find any reference to the identities of the people who conducted these ultrasound analyses.
Curses. Pyramid curses, obviously. I came here to mention the same article that Bridget Burke beat me to.
I need to say that the article is stuffed full of speculation, ifs, caveats, theories, and suppositions. Interesting, yes, but I wouldn’t take it as any last word. However, the inner ramp hypothesis does seem to answer a lot of questions.
I can’t tell whether the “French team’s microgravemetric survey in the 1980s” referenced in the article is the same French and Egyptian teams ultrasound technology from the 1980s that’s the source of the information on the page of the book Washoe cited. Since the book was translated from Czech there may be some variation in the technical terminology, though.
silenus’s very good link talks a lot about the various stone, rubble, and mortar dumped between the backing stones and the outer casing. This may very well be what the sand is referring to in that footnote on p. 78 of the book, since it also talks about chunks of limestone and mortar. There would be a big difference between filling the pyramid with sand or rubble and filling the space between walls. The latter is more likely. It also better supports the understanding that the core is a bunch of rooms of various sizes and purposes, some not obvious that are mentioned in the Archaeology article.
At one point, me. No fooling.
I had the pleasure of being able to crawl around inside the Great Pyramid in the late 1980s. The passageways in which I traveled had stone on all four sides and were VERY tiny. Almost too small for two-way travel and I wasn’t capable of standing in them.
The rooms I entered (four, I seem to recall) were mostly high-ceiling rooms with beige and black stone walls in all directions. If there was some form of composite or filler in between it was not evident to me at the time.
As for the outside…it was not permitted to climb the pyramid but it is surprising what sort of rules get ‘waived’ with the application of American greenbacks. I managed to climb to the top. It was, all in one, both astonishing and exhausting. But it presented as solid stone all the way up.
My father climbed to the top of one of them during WWII; I don’t know which one. How much did you have to juice the locals to let you do it?
$20 American. And I think it was money well spent.
We climbed up the side of the red pyramid in Dahshur and went down inside of it to one of the chambers. It’s a long, hot, clausterphobic, and uncomfortable climb down to the room which contains…nothing. It was all moved to the museum in Cairo. It was, however, all stone all the way throughout.