The great πramids "The Great Pyramid has lent its name as a sort of by-word for paradoxes; and, as moths to a candle, so are theorisers attracted to it. The very fact that the subject was so generally familiar, and yet so little was accurately known about it, made it the more enticing; there were plenty of descriptions from which to choose, and yet most of them were so hazy that their support could be claimed for many varying theories."
Sir Flinders Petrie
The
Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest and largest of the three
pyramids in the
Giza Necropolis bordering what is now
Cairo,
Egypt in Africa, and is the only remaining member of the
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It is believed to have been built as a tomb for
Fourth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh
Khufu (hellenized as Χεωψ, Cheops) and constructed over a 20 year period concluding around 2560
BC.
[1] The tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, it is sometimes called
Khufu's Pyramid or the
Pyramid of Khufu.
[2]
[Wiki]The Great Pyramid (the Pyramid of Khufu, or Cheops in Greek) at Gizeh, Egypt, demonstrates the remarkable character of its placement on the face of the Earth.
The Pyramid lies in the center of gravity of the continents. It also lies in the exact center of all the land area of the world, dividing the earth's land mass into approximately equal quarters.
The north-south axis (31 degrees east of Greenwich) is the longest land meridian, and the east-west axis (30 degrees north) is the longest land parallel on the globe. There is obviously only one place that these longest land-lines of the terrestrial earth can cross, and it is at the Great Pyramid! This is incredible, one of the scores of features of this mighty structure which begs for a better explanation.
Related local link:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/alignments/mpl_al2b.htm#Pyramids
"The pyramids at Giza—descendants of primitive 'stepped' prototypes built in superimposed layers—are gigantic prisms unique in world architecture, mathematics at an ultimate scale. It is quite possible that Cheop's Great Pyramid consumed more dressed stone blocks than any structure ever built, an estimated 2,300,000 of them, averaging 2.5 tons each. It is generally thought that the blocks were moved on log rollers and sledges and then ramped into place."
— from G.E. Kidder Smith. Looking at Architecture. p8.
It's 756 feet long on each side, 450 high and is composed of 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each averaging 2 1/2 tons in weight. Despite the makers' limited surveying tools no side is more than 8 inches different in length than another, and the whole structure is perfectly oriented to the points of the compass. Until the 19th century it was the tallest building in the world and, at the age of 4,500 years, it is the only one of the famous "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" that still stands. It is the Great Pyramid of Khufu, at Giza, Egypt.
---
Papyrus documents[citation needed] and existing cubit measuring rods give us the units of measure used to specify the plan of the pyramid and so it is thought that, at construction, the Great Pyramid was 280 Egyptian royal cubits tall (146.6 meters or 480.9 feet), but with erosion and the theft of its topmost stone (the pyramidion) its current height is 138.8 m. Each base side was 440 royal cubits, with each royal cubit measuring 0.524 m (20.6 inches).[9] Thus, the base was originally almost 231 m on a side and covered approximately 53,000 square metres (13 acres) with a slope angle of 51°50'40" (seked = 5½).
Today each side of the pyramid has an approximate length of about 230.4 meters (755.8 feet). The reduction in size and area of the structure into its current rough-hewn appearance is due to the absence of its original polished casing stones, some of which measured up to two and a half metres thick and weighed more than 15 tonnes.
In the 14th century (1301 AD), a massive earthquake loosened many of the outer casing stones, which were then carted away by Bahri Sultan An-Nasir Nasir-ad-Din al-Hasan in 1356 in order to build mosques and fortresses in nearby Cairo; the stones can still be seen as parts of these structures to this day. Later explorers reported massive piles of rubble at the base of the pyramids left over from the continuing collapse of the casing stones which were subsequently cleared away during continuing excavations of the site. Nevertheless, many of the casing stones around the base of the Great Pyramid can be seen to this day in situ displaying the same workmanship and precision as has been reported for centuries. Regarding this uncanny workmanship, Sir Flinders Petrie remarked;
"Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joints seems almost impossible: it is to be compared with the finest opticians' work on a scale of acres"[10]A construction management study (testing) carried out by the firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall in association with Mark Lehner and other Egyptologists, estimates that the total project required an average workforce of 14,567 people and a peak workforce of 40,000. These numbers were derived as the study claims by the company's pre-existing program management approach and "informed guesses". Without the use of pulleys, wheels, or iron tools, they speculate the Great Pyramid was completed from start to finish in approximately 10 years.[7] Their critical path analysis study estimates that the number of blocks used in construction was between 2-2.8 million (an average of 2.4 million), but settles on a reduced finished total of 2 million after subtracting the estimated area of the hollow spaces of the chambers and galleries.[7] Most sources agree on this number of blocks somewhere above 2.3 million.[8] Their calculations suggest the workforce could have sustained a rate of 180 blocks per hour (3 blocks/minute) with ten hour work days for putting each individual block in place. They derived these estimates from modern third-world construction projects that did not use modern machinery, but conclude it is still unknown exactly how the Great Pyramid was built.[7] As Dr. Craig Smith of the team points out:
-
- "The logistics of construction at the Giza site are staggering when you think that the ancient Egyptians had no pulleys, no wheels, and no iron tools. Yet, the dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and the site was leveled within a fraction of an inch over the entire 13.1-acre base. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laser leveling. That's astounding. With their `rudimentary tools,' the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt were about as accurate as we are today with 20th century technology."[9]
[Wiki]
The Concave Faces of the Great Pyramid
Aerial photo by Groves, 1940 (detail).
In his book The Egyptian Pyramids: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Reference, J.P. Lepre wrote:
One very unusual feature of the Great Pyramid is a concavity of the core that makes the monument an eight-sided figure, rather than four-sided like every other Egyptian pyramid. That is to say, that its four sides are hollowed in or indented along their central lines, from base to peak. This concavity divides each of the apparent four sides in half, creating a very special and unusual eight-sided pyramid; and it is executed to such an extraordinary degree of precision as to enter the realm of the uncanny. For, viewed from any ground position or distance, this concavity is quite invisible to the naked eye. The hollowing-in can be noticed only from the air, and only at certain times of the day. This explains why virtually every available photograph of the Great Pyramid does not show the hollowing-in phenomenon, and why the concavity was never discovered until the age of aviation. It was discovered quite by accident in 1940, when a British Air Force pilot, P. Groves, was flying over the pyramid. He happened to notice the concavity and captured it in the now-famous photograph. [p. 65]
This strange feature was not first observed in 1940. It was illustrated in La Description de l'Egypte in the late 1700's (Volume V, pl. 8). Flinders Petrie noticed a hollowing in the core masonry in the center of each face and wrote that he "continually observed that the courses of the core had dips of as much as ½° to 1°" (The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 1883, p. 421). Though it is apparently more easily observed from the air, the concavity is measurable and is visible from the ground under favorable lighting conditions.
The purpose for the concavity of the Great Pyramids remains a mystery and no satisfactory explanation for this feature has been offered. The indentation is so slight that any practical function is difficult to imagine.[http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_2.htm]
From BBCnews:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7296224.stm
Pi can be found in the design of the pyramids at Giza
Interesting facts:The most recent attempt, by a Japanese computer scientist in 2002, found 1.24 trillion digits of pi. To put all this in perspective, even an astrophysicist, attempting to measure galaxies, would never need more than 10 or 15 digits of precision. But pi beckons us on further. Some mathematicians believe that if we could only find some pattern in pi, even some hint that there were more fours than sevens, it could lead to a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.
Every time we ask our computer to generate a random number (which might show up, for example, as a random letter or word, or as random movements in a game) we are using pi. A computer on its own cannot create a truly random number so it uses the apparently random sequence of digits in pi to produce a very good approximation of randomness.
Tony Palmer, Watford, UK ( his comments on the pi BBCnews).
>Very interesting to know indeed!A must read: http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_2.htm
http://www.unmuseum.org/kpyramid.htm
http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_2.htm << amazing mathematics site putting the pyramid in perspective.
[aerial view from Google Earth]>>
