Pyramid Quest (41 page)

Inside Campbell’s Chamber, the fifth and final Relieving Chamber above the King’s Chamber. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch.

So to me the question is not whether or not the inscriptions are genuinely ancient—clearly, in my opinion, they are—but what do they tell us? I agree with the general assessment that they are workmen’s marks, most likely painted on at the quarries (see Lepre, 1990, p. 108; S. Birch in Vyse, 1840, 1:279). Birch in particular suggested that these marks are found only on certain blocks transported from the Mokattam Quarries across the Nile, and are not found on blocks quarried locally on the Giza Plateau—this makes sense to me, and would explain why such quarry marks are not generally found throughout the Great Pyramid. Further, according to Birch, several of the marks found on the blocks are numbers indicating where the blocks were to be positioned. Some of the blocks have straight lines on them, oriented both horizontally and vertically, that were probably used in positioning the blocks correctly. According to Lepre (1990, p. 108), the hieroglyphics on some of the blocks can be interpreted as names of construction gangs or crews, and he cites as examples “The crew, the White Crown of Khnum-Khuf (Khufu) is powerful” and “The crew, Khufu excites love.” Lepre (1990, p. 190) also says that one of the hieroglyphic lines refers to the seventeenth year of the reign of Khufu.

It seems that the inscriptions in the relieving chambers do support the attribution of at least this portion of the Great Pyramid to the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu, or at least a “Khufu.” I also have to question whether or not the lower portions of the Great Pyramid are actually contemporary with the Relieving Chambers and the upper portions of the pyramid. Could the base, and possibly up through the Grand Gallery, be earlier? This would be the case if Richard Proctor were correct in his assessment of the Great Pyramid as an observatory before it was “closed over.”

Among the inscriptions in the Relieving Chambers are a number of cartouches, taking three different forms. There is one complete cartouche in Campbell’s Chamber, and there are four relatively complete cartouches in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber. There are also fragments of other cartouches, not complete enough to read alone but apparently partial versions of the complete cartouches found in the Relieving Chambers.

In the complete cartouche found in Campbell’s Chamber, the name “Khufu” is easily read, on the basis of standard transliterations (see, for instance, Collier and Manley, 1998). Reading from bottom to top in the cartouche as it is found in the chamber, the round sieve symbol is transliterated as “kh” or a hard “ch,” the bird is “w” or “u,” the snake is “f,” and the second bird is again “w” or “u.”

Photograph of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khufu found in Campbell’s Chamber. (
Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch.
) Inset: Drawing of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khufu found in Campbell’s Chamber. (
From Vyse, 1840, vol. 1, plate following p. 284; also reproduced in Kingsland, 1935, plate 2.
)

Photograph of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khnum-Khuf found in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber. The inscription is shown upside down, the same way it appears in the chamber. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch. Inset: Drawing of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khnum-Khuf found in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber. The inscription is shown upside down, the same way it appears in the chamber. (
From Vyse, 1840, vol. 1, plate following page 278; also reproduced in Kingsland, 1935, plate 3.
)

In one of the complete cartouches from Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber we have, from left to right (viewing the cartouche as it is
in situ,
upside down), what have been interpreted as a jug and ram (Birch in Vyse, 1840, 1:281) followed by the sieve (“kh”), snake (“f”), and bird (“w” or “u”). The latter three make “Khfu” or “Khuf,” which, given that the “w/u” was a weak sound and, according to Collier and Manley (1998, p. 127) “often not written,” is basically the equivalent of “Khufu.” The jug may be represented as issuing forth its contents as a libation (compare a similar hieroglyph in Collier and Manley, 1998, p. 140), and the jug and ram have been interpreted by Birch (in Vyse, 1840, 1:281) as the name of the god known variously as Chnoumis or Amoun-ra (or any of many other names). Amun (Amoun) is known from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts (Lurker, 1980, p. 25), and Amun could appear in the form of a ram and was worshiped under the name “Khnum” (Lurker, 1980, p. 99). Thus this cartouche can be read as “Khnum-Khuf,” which is one of the names of the pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty (see Lepre, 1990, p. 61, where he spells it as “Khnum-Kheuf” and “Khnem-Kheuf,” and p. 108, where he spells it “Khnum-Khuf”). Two of the other cartouches found in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber also seem to read “Khnum-Khuf,” although one is incomplete and the other seems to be either incomplete or a very crude version of this name.

Photograph of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khnum found in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber. The inscription is shown upside down, the same way it appears in the chamber. Photograph courtesy of Robert M. Schoch. Inset: Drawing of a hieroglyphic inscription that includes the cartouche of Khnum found in Lady Arbuth not’s Chamber. The inscription is shown upside down, the same way it appears in the chamber. (
From Vyse, 1840, vol. 1, plate following page 278; also reproduced in Kingsland, 1935, plate 3.
)

A final complete cartouche found in Lady Arbuthnot’s Chamber consists of a jug followed by an unclear form followed by a ram. This has been interpreted simply as the name “Khnum” (“Khnem,” see Kingsland, 1935, p. 5).

On May 20, 1837, Mr. J. R. Hill, working under Howard Vyse, found a flat piece of iron measuring approximately 12 by 4 inches by ⅛ inches in a joint in the masonry near the exterior mouth of the southern “air passage” originating in the King’s Chamber. J. R. Hill wrote (quoted in DeSalvo, 2003, p. 64) that the iron plate “was taken out by me from an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening of any sort was connected with the above-mentioned joint by which the iron could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid” (italics in the original). The iron plate was sent to the British Museum. Petrie (1883, pp. 212-213) says:

In 1989 tests were conducted on this iron plate to determine if it was composed of meteoritic iron. The results were negative (although this may not prove definitively the origins of the iron), but traces of gold were found on its surface, suggestive of gold plating. If in fact this iron is from the middle third millennium B.C. and is nonmeteoritic in origin, it has the potential to change our views of how early and how extensively iron was smelted and utilized. Gold plating on this particular piece of iron, assuming it is genuinely ancient, could indicate that iron was a rare commodity and highly valued. Bonwick (1877, p. 46) suggested that this iron may have come “from the iron mines of the Wady Maghara, near Sinai,” but he may have confused the copper and turquoise mines of this area of the Sinai with iron mines (no Old Kingdom iron mines are known from the Sinai).

In 1872 when Waynman Dixon discovered and opened the shafts in the Queen’s Chamber, he found three objects in the northern shaft: (1) a granite ball weighing 1 pound and 3 ounces; (2) a piece of cedar about 12 centimeters long with notches cut into it that may have been some kind of measuring rod; and (3) a bronze instrument that had a double “hook” on the end (sort of like a snake’s tongue) with a portion of a wooden handle still adhering to it (DeSalvo, 2003, p. 66; Bauval in DeSalvo, 2003, p. 218, with nineteenth-century illus.). Robert Bauval interprets the double hook object as a “Pesh-en-kef ” instrument that was used in the ancient Egyptian “opening of the mouth” ceremony, and Bauval believes the same instrument, when used in conjunction with a plumb-bob, served as a sighting device for aligning a structure such as the Great Pyramid with the polar stars. These three items long remained with the Dixon family, until being donated to the British Museum in the 1970s, where they lay in obscurity until rediscovered in the 1990s, at which time the wooden artifact was missing (DeSalvo, 2003, p. 66).

In 1993, while exploring the northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber, Rudolf Gantenbrink discovered, via video from the robot, a metallic hook-like object and a long, thin piece of wood in the shaft beyond where W. Dixon had found the aforementioned three objects (DeSalvo, 2003, p. 67).

A major point of contention is how the ancient Egyptians moved massive blocks of stone, whether it was for building pyramids and temples or raising obelisks. A novel approach has been suggested the amateur Egyptologist Maureen Clemmons: that the Egyptians may have harnessed wind power via kites and pulleys to raise large stones and set obelisks upright (Tindol, 2001; Wright, 2001). This controversial theory has received some support from experimental studies by researchers at California Institute of Technology demonstrating that using kites to raise large stones is possible. In several tests, for instance, they were able to lift a 3.4-ton obelisk off the ground in 25 seconds with a wind of only 15 miles per hour (Association for Research and Enlightenment, 2004). However, some Egyptologists have argued that there is no direct evidence for the use of either kites or pulleys in ancient Egypt. On the other hand, images of winged deities abound in Egypt, and it is certainly not inconceivable that the ancient Egyptians made and used kites.