Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (2 page)

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We were in Egypt on a hunch.

One of us had visited the country dozens of times; the other had never been here before. We were both interested in the pyramids but they had never loomed large in our personal researches – until now.

Now there was a chance, a small chance, that the precious location we were sure had once existed might just have survived the ravages of sandstorm, baking sun and human abuse across the millennia. We had studied maps and photographs back in England but quickly realized that we needed to be on the spot as soon as possible. The problem was that, from the aerial shots we had studied, it looked as though ground clearance of some kind had started – all around our chosen target zone. After 4,500 years – and now we had to rush? It seemed crazy but two weeks later we were closing in.

Ahmed looked entirely relaxed as he skilfully slotted his taxi through yet another impossibly small gap – this time between a battered, rust-coloured truck on our left and a boy on a straw-laden donkey, who was happily traversing the roundabout the wrong way. It was Friday and nearly midnight yet the entire city was buzzing in a chaotic manner that made a rush hour in New York or London look positively sane. Every now and again we would come across an intersection with flat tarmac and some road markings, but they were of little interest to the thronging hordes of drivers who would instinctively form four haphazard columns where only two lanes were marked out beneath the sea of wheels.

Cairo is a crazy and exciting city. Its smells, sounds and vistas linger in the memory of visitors but, for natives, life is hard. Some 18 million souls occupy Africa’s largest city where there is huge competition for work – and little or no aid available from the state. It is often said that the average Egyptian had a higher standard of living at the time of the Pharaohs than he or she does today; a fact probably not unconnected with the unimaginable population explosion that has occurred over recent times. Every mile or two, roadside hoardings announce the city’s current birth rate. ‘A baby is born every 24 seconds’ reads the sign, and Ahmed informed us that it was 26 seconds last year and 30 seconds not long before that.

‘The problem is Viagra,’ Ahmed announced, as he looked for our reaction in the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s Cairo’s favourite drug. Men can do “it” more now and that means more babies. The government are not happy – but we are!’ He laughed as he pressed his palm onto the horn to let the donkey and cart in front know he was coming through. ‘And I’m doubly happy because I have two wives – one here in Cairo and one back home in Luxor!’

We finally arrived at our hotel and after parting with a hefty tip (one, we were told, that would help support each wife), we headed for our rooms after arranging a time to be picked up in the morning to begin our search for a possible unknown archaeological site some 7 km out into the desert.

As we rose the next morning the view from the balcony was particularly spectacular. Across the still solidly packed road was the huge pyramid attributed to the ancient king, Khafre, standing proudly against Egypt’s brilliant blue sky. And the tip of Menkaure’s pyramid could just be seen behind it.

Ahmed was waiting in reception for his new English friends and as soon as we had shaken hands he began to outline his plan for giving us a first-class tour of the pyramids and the sphinx. His almost permanently smiling Nubian face fell for a moment and his brow furrowed quizzically as we explained that we would rather have a trip to an anonymous patch of desert.

We showed Ahmed the map of our intended destination and with a shrug of his shoulders he led us to his car. The Toyota weaved through a network of backstreets at an alarming pace, and then, suddenly, the suburbs of Cairo ended as abruptly as the sea hits the shore. In the blink of an eye the mile after mile of tumbling brick and concrete boxes, teaming chaotically with human and animal life, were suddenly behind us. Gone were the jams of horses, beaten-up trucks, suicidal pedestrians and ‘demolition derby’-grade taxis. Suddenly everywhere was sand.

The reality of the underlying landscape, where only the hardiest of tiny grizzled bushes hold out, was intimidating. How, we wondered, did the world’s most famous early culture come to settle and flourish so spectacularly in this barren land? Nile or no Nile, this place is totally unforgiving.

Ahmed kept his ageing but relatively roadworthy Toyota pointing south. His eyes seemed to be fixed to the rear-view mirror as he chatted away – espousing the virtues of various ‘establishments’ he could recommend – whilst reassuring us that he never, ever took a cut for himself. We are not normally nervous passengers but it can only have been a highly developed sixth sense that kept the vehicle on the rough tarmac strip that he well knew would eventually lead to his hometown of Luxor.

We put our faith in the fact that the man had survived some 40 years – so we relaxed a little and peered out of the windows, searching for some kind of landmark that could correspond to the dots on our printouts of aerial views of this unremittingly khaki landscape. We knew from our researches back in England that close to the point where the roads to Luxor and Alexandria diverge there might be ‘something’ of great interest to us. We passed a lonely mosque we could recognize and, some 100 m or so to the west of the main road, we knew we were close.

We asked Ahmed to pull off the highway at several points until we could be as certain as possible that we had arrived at the place we intended. It was a desolate spot with flat stretches of sand and a few low walls near to the road. We found evidence of recent underground concrete structures and, together with the periodic piles of rubble, it soon became all too clear that this part of our mission was not going to be immediately fruitful. Ahmed explained that this area was scheduled to be a huge new development in the expanding ‘6th October City’ – named after the day in 1981 when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated while viewing a military parade. Even if there had been some fourth-dynasty remains on the site it is quite likely the pragmatic developers would have bulldozed them away – Egypt has quite enough ancient monuments to keep the tourists coming.

Despite our failure to find any indication of ancient workings, we were still excited at the very new approach to unravelling the secrets of the pyramids that we had almost accidentally discovered. As we stood on a mound of sand under the hot morning sun we turned towards the northern horizon to admire the most famous historical objects in the world – the three massive pyramids of the Giza Plateau. Those distant pinnacles were, we still felt, connected to the spot beneath our feet.

We had always known that finding anything ancient at this location in Egypt’s desert was a very long shot indeed, just as the corresponding location, nearly 4,000 km away, that had brought us here, was itself no longer discernible at ground level.

It had been just 16 weeks since we stood in a freshly ploughed field on the huge Newby Hall estate in North Yorkshire, England with our civil engineer friend, Edmund Sixsmith and the estate manager Peter Greenwood. We had had no luck in gaining permission to visit the location until Edmund rode in to our lives on his folding Brompton bicycle. Edmund, who runs an engineering consultancy in London, contacted us after reading about our work on prehistoric British units of measurement whilst he had been travelling on a train in Sweden. After our first meeting on the North Wales island of Anglesey, he became a significant member of our small, extended team of people with practical rather than purely academic expertise in the field of making sense of ancient engineering.

In conversation we had told Edmund of our difficulty in gaining access to the Newby Hall Estate – and we were quite amazed at his response.

‘No problem. I’m pretty sure I can sort that out for you. The estate owner, Richard Compton, is a good friend of mine.’ This was an extraordinary but most welcome coincidence and, true to his word, Edmund duly arranged a meeting at the estate manager’s office at the end of February in 2008.

Peter Greenwood could not have been more helpful. He had pulled out old maps of the relevant parts of the estate and copied them for us. After giving us a brief of everything he knew, we stepped into Peter’s four-wheel-drive and began a tour of the locations that interested us.

The most important spot was a sloping field that had no crop growth at this early part of the year. Notwithstanding the clear view of the soil we could detect nothing of the structure we knew had been built here nearly 1,000 years before the Giza pyramids. However, we had aerial photographs with us, which gave a clear view of the shape of the original artefact, thanks to differences in the subsoil.

Peter had shown us old maps that revealed the 5,500-year-old structure had been clearly visible until it was ploughed out sometime in the early 20th century. We had deduced its location and its importance from three other similar structures that were very much intact – just 10 km to the northwest. Fortunately there was sufficient evidence available to identify the size of the absent structure and pinpoint its precise centre. This was to prove to be incredibly important.

As we left the cold, windswept hilltop that morning we knew that we would have to travel to Egypt because something extraordinary was appearing out of the mists of time. A completely unexpected picture of the past had presented itself. Against all sense and apparent credibility, it seemed from everything we now knew possible – or to be honest – highly likely that Hem-iwnu, King Khufu’s principal architect had stood in this same English field before he began his ambitious project to create something wonderful on the west bank of the Nile.

As we passed between Khufu and Khafre’s man-made mountains we felt that sense of total awe that can never quite be captured by photographs or communicated though cinematography. The scale and shear solid mass of these objects creates an impression such that your entire body can feel their gravitational field. Close your eyes and they are still there.

Even today, without their original brilliant white limestone coverings, the pyramids are soul-stirringly beautiful, sculpted by the brilliant glow of the Egyptian summer sun. These geometrically perfect structures now stand rather battered but proudly aloof on the raised outcrop known as the Mokkatam Formation, where in ancient times, the Nile had washed its eastern-facing cliff during the annual inundation. But today the rocks mark the limits of the crazy cacophony that is Cairo’s urban sprawl.

To say that the three pyramids of Giza have been studied in minute detail would be an understatement. The largest of them, known alternatively as the ‘Great Pyramid’, the ‘Pyramid of Khufu’, or sometimes by the Greek name ‘Pyramid of Cheops’, is the only remaining and certainly the largest of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Even without its original gilded ben-ben or capstone it is 138.8 m in height with an estimated internal volume of 2.5 million m
³
– (equal to 1,000 Olympic swimming pools). Strangely, the average block of stone is 1 m
³
. Facts and figures are impressive enough but not nearly so inspiring as standing at the base of Khufu’s pyramid and staring up at the unbelievable dimensions of something so huge it is hard to comprehend how anyone could have conceived its creation, let alone brought such an idea to reality.

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the pyramid attributed to King Khufu took around 20 years to build from start to finish. Quite what sources Herodotus had for this claim is unsure, but despite the fact that he was writing two full millennia after the event, he does have a good track record of getting his facts broadly right. If it is truly the case that the Great Pyramid was constructed so quickly, the implications are staggering. It means that working seven days a week and throughout the year for two full decades, the craftsmen and labourers involved must have cut, squared off, dragged to the site and erected 342 stones every single day. The average stone weighs two and a half tonnes, though many are far heavier. If Herodotus is to be believed a stone block must have been added to the pyramid every two minutes or so!

Anyone who has stood on the Giza Plateau between 11 am and 3 pm on any day between May to September will appreciate how physically draining it is simply to walk around the area. It seems impossible to imagine anyone continuously cutting, dragging and raising huge stone blocks under the unremitting glare of the desert Sun. Herodotus may have been proven correct about many of his writings, but we doubt he was correct on this occasion and we remain convinced that the Khufu pyramid must have taken much longer than 20 years to complete.

The other two pyramids in the sequence of three are smaller. The second pyramid, standing a little to the southwest of the Great Pyramid, is attributed to Khufu’s third son, Khafre. It is almost as large as the Great Pyramid and unlike the other two it still has its higher faces covered in the original white casing, although it is now pitted and dulled with sand. Further still to the southwest is the pyramid of Menkaure, which looks almost ‘modest’ when set against its much larger companions, though it is still 61 m in height and is mightily impressive in its own right.

It is strange to reflect that these three amazing structures, as familiar as they are to people in every corner of the world, are almost as mysterious now as they were to the 18th-century European explorers who first started a bout of ‘pyramid’ fever. Orthodox accounts suggest that the Great Pyramid of Khufu was the first of the three to be constructed, most likely around 2500
BC
. Since deep within the pyramid there are three chambers, one of which contains what is taken to be a sarcophagus, it is generally accepted that the Great Pyramid was intended to be tomb – built specifically to house the body of King Khufu, the first of the great kings of fourth-dynasty Egypt. Khufu cannot be rightfully termed a Pharaoh because this was a title that came much later in Egyptian history.