Pyramid Quest (11 page)

Some of these curious findings may be due to the technical difficulty of carbon-14 dating. The concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is not constant, and samples can be contaminated with carbon from the environment that is younger or older than they are. It can also be the case that the organic materials do not in fact date from the same time period as the inorganic object being studied. For example, wooden beams used in the tracks over which stones were hauled to build the pyramids at Lisht were much older than the Twelfth Dynasty, during which those pyramids were built. Apparently the pyramid builders were using wood from trees felled long before, possibly taking advantage of the same timbers over and over again, a recycling strategy that makes eminent sense in a country as little forested as Egypt. It is possible that the same pattern was followed at Giza, with charcoal being made from wood that was already a few hundred years old when the mortar surrounding it was mixed. However, the researchers involved in the project noted that at least some of the samples used to arrive at dates included reeds and other short-lived materials, which would be unlikely to yield the same results as presumably old wood.

The David H. Koch Pyramids Radiocarbon Project,
³
the detailed results of which have still not been released, undertook a second radiocarbon survey of the Giza Plateau in 1995. Preliminary reports, however, suggest that while the discrepancies are not as great as in the 1980s study, radiocarbon dates from the Old Kingdom pyramids are generally a century or two older than the traditionally accepted dates. The researchers involved in this latest study concluded that the Old Kingdom Egyptians must have utilized massive quantities of wood, so they took whatever they could find, including wood that was already hundreds of years old. This, they suggested, gave the anomalously old dates.

But other explanations for the curious carbon-14 findings are possible. Many of the Giza samples from the 1980s study are much older than the pharaohs who supposedly commissioned the monuments. If we take the results of the radiocarbon dating at face value, the charcoal-tainted mortar at the top end of the margin of error in the upper course of the Great Pyramid was put into place over 1,400 years before Khufu became pharaoh. In the case of Khafre, the difference is almost seven centuries. There is also the matter of the long span of dates within individual monuments, which reaches almost a millennium for the Menkaure and Khufu pyramids. And there is the curious finding that the samples from the area toward the top of the Great Pyramid are older than those at the bottom. If we assume that the Great Pyramid was built all at once, then this finding implies that the structure was constructed in an unlikely top-down order.

The older samples at the top do make sense, however, if we assume that the Great Pyramid was built, rebuilt, and rebuilt yet again in stages. While there is yet no definitive proof that this is the case, various pieces of evidence suggest that the major pyramids were purposely constructed over something older.

The pattern begins with the Red Pyramid at Dahshur. Although the body of this pyramid is dated confidently to the reign of the Third Dynasty pharaoh Sneferu, the pyramid appears to be built around a room or chamber composed of very ancient (older than the Third Dynasty), weathered megalithic stonework. Completely enclosed within the pyramid, this chamber should not have weathered appreciably since the pyramid was built. Indeed, other Red Pyramid chambers, and even the more recent roof of this chamber, do not show the same weathering. I believe the Red Pyramid of Dahshur was constructed to enclose, house, and protect a much older, highly sacred structure.

The same pattern extends to Giza. My research suggests that the lowest layers of the Khafre Pyramid may well predate the Old Kingdom. Close examination shows that the courses close to the pyramid’s base differ distinctly in style from the upper tiers. Furthermore, the Second Pyramid’s base or foundation is faced with red granite, which appears to date to no later than the Fourth Dynasty. The rest of the pyramid, however, was faced with fine white limestone, so that in Khafre’s time a horizontal red stripe ran around the base of the otherwise-white pyramid. Why this difference in color and material? The answer may come from the ancient Egyptians’ preference for granite to renew or refurbish older structures. Possibly the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians were rebuilding and adding to a much older, preexisting structure, with the red granite demarcating the older, refurbished from the newer, white-limestone pyramid above.

Likewise, the Menkaure Pyramid has a surviving outer casing of granite on its lower courses. Was it, too, refurbished, either by generations after the Fourth Dynasty (during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, c. 600 B.C., according to one suggestion) or possibly by Fourth Dynasty Egyptians working on a site and structure that predated their own time? Furthermore, after studying the Tomb of Queen Khentkaus at Giza (late Fourth Dynasty), I believe that this tomb is built on and incorporates an older structure dating from very early dynastic or predynastic times.

Robert Bauval, the author of
The Orion Mystery
and a serious scholar of Giza, is of the opinion that the same pattern holds true of the Great Pyramid, an idea he shared with me when I spoke with him in Cairo in May 2004.

It has long been known that the Great Pyramid was erected around and atop a mound of bedrock. Egyptologists argue that the strategy of incorporating the mound into the pyramid’s structure served purely practical reasons—saving the Fourth Dynasty builders the work and expense of filling in that portion of the monument with courses of stone. An engineer by training, Bauval scoffs at the idea. From an engineering point of view, a flat, level site is far easier to build on, because it distributes weight evenly and allows clear lines of sight for surveying—no small issue with the Great Pyramid because of its precise orientation to the cardinal directions. Bauval told me that it would have made much better engineering sense to excavate the mound, level the site, and then build the pyramid.

According to Bauval, the builders of the Great Pyramid built around and atop the mound—and the Descending Passage and Subterranean Chamber that lie within and beneath it—because the complex was an already existing holy site. The Fourth Dynasty builders wanted to incorporate it into their structure; for the same reason, they located the Great Pyramid dangerously close to the cliff that marks the northern edge of the Giza plateau. Moving the site 100 meters south would have made the pyramid a less risky building project, but then incorporating the mound and placing the Subterranean Chamber directly under the pyramid’s apex would have been impossible. Putting the pyramid where it is makes better sense, though, if for religious purposes it needed to be located over an already existing sacred spot.

Bauval’s ideas make sense, particularly when we consider the strongest evidence that Giza served as a holy site well in advance of Pharaoh Khufu and the Great Pyramid: the Great Sphinx.

The immense Great Sphinx of Giza—66 feet high, 240 feet long, and with a headdressed human face 13 feet wide, all carved from solid limestone bedrock—has been dated since the 1950s to Khafre, the second pharaoh after Khufu. A number of lines of evidence support this attribution.

For one, the Great Sphinx fits into a ground plan that also includes the Sphinx Temple, the Valley Temple, Khafre’s Causeway, and the Khafre Pyramid. Given the artistic unity of this portion of the Giza site, the assumption is that one builder assembled the entire complex. In addition, an exquisite sculpture of Khafre was discovered in the Valley Temple in 1860. The sculpture, it is argued, adds to the likelihood that Khafre was the pharaoh responsible for the temple and, by association, for the Great Sphinx as well.

Further evidence is provided by the Dream Stela, an inscribed pillar of granite that was carved and set between the Sphinx’s paws by the New Kingdom pharaoh Tuthmosis IV (Thutmose IV) in approximately 1400 B.C. A significant legend surrounds the stela.

The body of the Great Sphinx lies below the level of the Giza Plateau in a pit—the so-called Sphinx enclosure—from which limestone was quarried to build other structures. Sand carried into the enclosure by the constant desert winds gradually fills the enclosure if it is not removed regularly. This is exactly what happened in the social and political breakdown that followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom in about 2150 B.C. After a few decades, only the head of the Sphinx, as enigmatic as ever, protruded above the sand.

Late-nineteenth-century photograph of the Great Pyramid, Great Sphinx, and partially excavated Valley Temple. Photograph by Frank M. Good. (
From Good, no date [1880?].
)

The story goes that a young prince of Egypt riding in the desert paused for a nap in the shade of the buried Sphinx. While he slept, Khepera, a form of the sun god Ra and the divinity that occupied the Sphinx, came in a dream and told the prince that if he cleared away the sand, he would ascend to the throne of Egypt. The prince did as the Sphinx bade him, and he, although not the natural heir to the throne, did become pharaoh. To honor the vision that brought him to power, Thutmosis IV had the Dream Stela carved and placed in front of the Sphinx.

Unearthed in the nineteenth century, the Dream Stela was reported to contain the first syllable of Khafre’s name. Unfortunately, this particular part of the inscription has flaked away and can no longer be studied except from reports made at the time of the discovery. Even if Khafre’s name did appear on the stela, however, its presence does not prove that he was the Sphinx’s creator. He may simply have been associated with a preexisting Sphinx, just as Thutmosis IV was over a thousand years later.

The next line of evidence comes from Mark Lehner, of the University of Chicago, and other Egyptologists who maintain that the face of the Sphinx is a sculpted portrait of Khafre. Using a computer program to reconstruct the damaged face of the Sphinx, Lehner claimed the image “came alive” when he gave it Khafre’s features.
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This likeness-to-Khafre argument is the weakest proof of the three. For one thing, it amounts to circular reasoning. When Lehner made the face look the way he thought it should look, then it looked the way he thought it should look. Lehner’s notion has been further refuted by Frank Domingo, then a forensic officer with the New York City Police Department, who went to Egypt in October 1991 to do what forensic officers do—develop an image of the Sphinx’s damaged face as if he were reconstructing a criminal’s likeness from the victim’s fractured memory. Domingo concluded that Khafre and the Sphinx are not only different people but different races. Khafre had a distinctly European face, yet the Sphinx looks African, with a heavier jaw positioned at a different angle and a wider nose.

While the other lines of evidence ascribing the Sphinx to Khafre are marginally better, it remains the case that there is no direct, unassailable, physical evidence linking the monument to that particular pharaoh. Indeed, my own research into the best physical evidence available, and corroboration from other scientists, indicates that the Great Sphinx of Giza is much older than the Fourth Dynasty and even the Old Kingdom. It all comes down to how weather affects rock and when that weather happened.

As the Alsatian mathematician and philosopher René Aor Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) first noted, the monuments of the Giza Plateau are subject to two kinds of weathering. In Egypt the wind blows steadily during certain parts of the year and propels sand that scours and wears. Wind-driven sand often weathers stone unevenly, abrading away the softer layers and leaving the harder ones, sometimes yielding a pronounced steplike profile. Water from rain and runoff weathers stone differently, typically creating a rolling, undulating surface that gives the rock a coved appearance, often with pronounced vertical fissures that are wider at the top than the bottom.

Different monuments at Giza display different patterns of weathering. For example, structures dated unambiguously to 2600-2300 B.C.—the early and middle Old Kingdom—and built from the same limestone as the Sphinx show prominent weathering by wind and relatively little by water. That pattern fits with the current Egyptian climate, in which arid, windy conditions are broken only by rare, scant rainfall.

The Sphinx too shows wind weathering, particularly on the head, which lies above the level of the plateau and receives the full force of every breeze and gale that blows in off the Sahara. Below that level, on the body of the Sphinx, there is little wind weathering. However, weathering by rainfall, with its striking coved appearance and deep vertical fissures, is marked and obvious on the walls of the surrounding Sphinx enclosure, particularly the one to the west. This was the anomaly that caught Schwaller de Lubicz’s eye.

Assume for the moment that the Sphinx and its enclosure were excavated at the same time as the indubitably Old Kingdom structures, and you’ll realize that something very strange must have been happening at Giza. Some structures weathered one way, and others weathered another, both at the very same time. That just doesn’t make sense—unless, of course, different structures were built at different times under different climatic conditions.