Khufu, who was a son of Sneferu, built the first pyramid at Giza. Although there are Early Dynastic tombs at Giza, it was a new location for the royal cemetery - considerably north of Saqqara. Perhaps the Giza plateau was chosen because its limestone bedrock (called the Muqattam Formation) provided a solid base for the construction of such a huge monument. Khufu’s pyramid complex contained the by then standard elements: a valley temple (unexcavated and probably mostly destroyed because it lies under a modern village), covered causeway, and mortuary temple on the pyramid’s east side. Much of the mortuary temple is destroyed, but it originally had a courtyard paved in black basalt, some of which is still there, and columns of red granite. Three subsidiary pyramids belonging to queens are southeast of the mortuary temple, and another small pyramid, perhaps for the king’s ka, was discovered by Zahi Hawass outside the southeast corner of the pyramid’s enclosure wall. Four boat pits lie along the eastern and southern enclosure wall and a fifth one is to the north of the causeway. Two small boat pits are also located between the three queens’ pyramids.
The pyramid itself is one of the most impressive structures of the ancient world. It is even more impressive when its statistics are given. Zahi Hawass estimates that the Great Pyramid originally contained about 1,300,000 blocks of stone. In weight these blocks averaged about 2.5 tons, although some blocks, such as the base stones, weighed much more. During construction the limestone blocks were laid in horizontal courses, with packing blocks and gypsum mortar placed in between the fairly irregular core blocks. When completed, the pyramid was covered with casing stones of fine Tura limestone, now mostly gone, with an outer angle of incline slightly less than 52°.
The base of the pyramid covers an area of 5.3 hectares. The great accuracy of the surveying required for the pyramid’s construction has been confirmed by the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, under the direction of Mark Lehner. The pyramid’s sides are aligned to the cardinal points, with only a slight deviation on each side (3'6" of arc). Each side is 230.3 meters long, with a deviation in accuracy of only 4.4 centimeters, and its original height was 146.7 meters. The level of the base on each side deviates by only 2.1 centimeters.
The interior of Khufu’s pyramid is more complex than any other Egyptian pyramid (see Figure 6.6). Reached by a descending passage from the north side of the pyramid, the original burial chamber was carved in the bedrock beneath the pyramid, but was never completed. An ascending passage leads to a horizontal passage, at the end of which is the so-called Queen’s Chamber, and to the Grand Gallery. Built in the body of the pyramid, the Queen’s Chamber may have been planned for the king’s burial after the subterranean tomb was abandoned. With a corbelled roof 8.74 meters high, the
Satellite pyramid and boat pit
Eastern boat pit
Descending passage
Magnificent Grand Gallery ascends close to 50 meters up into the pyramid. At the top of the Grand Gallery and leading to the king’s burial chamber is a short passage designed with three portcullis blocks to seal off the tomb. Another, almost vertical passage leads from the bottom of the Grand Gallery down to the subterranean descending passage. The vertical passage may have been used as the escape route for pyramid workers who sealed the tomb and passages after the king’s burial.
Khufu’s burial chamber is lined with huge blocks of red granite from Aswan. A granite sarcophagus is all that remains of what must have been an elaborate burial. Nine granite roof slabs estimated to weigh 25-40 tons each cover the ceiling, spanning the width of the chamber - 5.2 meters. Above the burial chamber are five stress-relieving chambers, air spaces with more granite roof slabs designed to check any possible collapse of the weight of the pyramid so that the burial chamber would remain intact. These chambers were first recorded in 1837 by Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-1853), an English army officer, who used dynamite to reach them. (He also blasted his way into Khafra’s pyramid, and blasted off part of the back of the Great Sphinx.) Hieroglyphic graffiti of the names of the workgangs, which include the king’s cartouche, are still visible in the top relieving chamber.
Unique so-called “air shafts” extend outward from both the Queen’s Chamber and the burial chamber, and may have been symbolic routes for the king’s spirit to travel outward. German archaeologists sent a robot probe up one of the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber (only 20 cm wide and 20 cm high). About 65 meters up the shaft the probe was stopped by a limestone plug with two copper pins attached to it. When a hole was later drilled through this plug a second plug blocked further exploration. Since this shaft was blocked, it (and probably the others) could not have been for air.
To the south of the pyramid are two boat pits which are rectangular in area, not boat-shaped as are the other ones in the pyramid complex. Roofed with huge limestone slabs, both of these boat pits contained real boats of cedar, disassembled and resting on the floor. The first boat was discovered in 1954 and it took many years to reassemble and restore the 1,223 pieces. Shaped as the model of a small craft of papyrus reeds, the reassembled boat is huge - 43.3 meters long. It can now be seen in a specially built museum in front of the pyramid (see Plate 6.3). The boat’s hull was made of huge planks of cedar, each carved to fit the curved form. It was not held together by nails or joints, but was lashed together by ropes drawn through slots carved in the wood. The oars were also lashed to the side of the boat. On top of the hull are an enclosed cabin and canopied tent.
In 1987 a team of scientists led by Farouk El-Baz (Director of Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing) investigated the still closed second boat pit through a specially drilled hole in a ceiling block (see Figure 6.7). This boat was not as well preserved as the one found in 1954. After photographs were taken and atmospheric monitors were left inside, the boat was left in its pit.
Older boat burials have been excavated at Abydos, near the funerary enclosure of a 2nd-Dynasty king (see 5.6). Possibly Khufu’s boat burials are symbolic, for an afterlife voyage such as is depicted in later images of the sun-god Ra. But a better explanation is offered by Mark Lehner, who thinks that Khufu’s preserved boats were used in a real funeral voyage, and afterwards had to be ritually buried.
Figure 6.7 Disassembled boat, which was investigated in 1987 and is still in a boat pit next to Khufu’s Great Pyramid, Giza. Claude Petrone/National Geographic Image Collection
Box 6-B Constructing the Great Pyramid at Giza
The best description of how a Giza pyramid was constructed is to be found in Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids (1997), from which most of the following information has been taken. Lehner has excavated and worked at Giza for much of his adult life, and he also supervised a very instructive experiment to construct a small pyramid for the PBS television series Nova, which can be seen on the video “This Old Pyramid.”
Before construction began the base of Khufu’s pyramid was surveyed, and I. E. S. Edwards (British Museum) suggested that the very accurate alignment of its four sides to the four cardinal points was achieved by observing the rising and setting of a star and then bisecting this angle to find true north. This could also have been calculated using the shadows of the rising and setting sun. One north-south side of the pyramid could then be surveyed, possibly using vertical markers set in place with a plumb bob, and the lines of the other sides could be calculated by making a right angle. After the surveying, a foundation platform of fine limestone blocks was laid out and leveled with great accuracy. Tools used for surveying and leveling were very simple: a set square (two planks of wood forming a right angle); a plumb bob attached to a rod (for vertical measurements); and a square level (a plumb bob hanging from an A-shaped frame for leveling surfaces).
The large limestone blocks that were used to construct the core of Khufu’s pyramid were quarried locally, from a quarry which Lehner has located southeast of the pyramid. Quarrying was done along a narrow channel cut in the bedrock by a workman, and blocks were removed with the use of wooden levers. A finer quality of limestone from the Tura quarries, across the river and to the south of Cairo, was used on the outermost casing blocks covering the pyramid. The huge granite blocks of interior chambers and passages were quarried at Aswan and brought downstream by barge, which then moved through canals to the harbor near the pyramid site. Tools of stone, wood, and copper were used for quarrying limestone, but the much harder granite had to be quarried by creating channels with large hand-held pounders of dolerite, a very hard stone.
Stone blocks were dragged from the quarry site or harbor on a wooden sledge. Even though the Egyptians knew about the wheel, they continued to use this method to move large stone blocks and statues. Different theories have been suggested for a construction ramp(s) up the side(s) of the pyramid, but Lehner thinks that the ramp wrapped around the pyramid. He has also excavated walls southeast of the pyramid that were the retaining walls of a ramp or roadway from the quarries.
The construction ramp was made of stone chips and mortar, reinforced on top with wooden beams, as suggested by evidence of a transport road at a Middle Kingdom pyramid site at Lisht. This road was covered with a layer of limestone chips and gypsum plaster, and Lehner suggests that for the pyramid ramp a top layer of Nile mud, lubricated with water to decrease the friction, would have provided a good surface for pulling a stone block up on a sledge. The use of water is depicted in a scene from a Middle Kingdom tomb at el-Bersha, of the transport of a large statue on a sledge (see Figure 7.7).
At the Great Pyramid the stone blocks were laid in horizontal courses, frequently with small stones and debris filling irregular spaces between the blocks. The outermost casing stones of Tura limestone were cut on one side at the angle of the pyramid’s slope. As the construction ramp was disassembled, the exterior sides of casing blocks were dressed with copper chisels.
Lehner has calculated that the Great Pyramid could have been constructed with two work crews, each with 2,000 workers, for quarrying, hauling, and setting the stones. More workers were needed to construct the ramp. These unskilled workers would have been conscripted from the peasant farmer class. Carpenters, metal workers, potters, rope makers, and other specialists were also needed to make the tools and supplies used by the construction workers. Bakers and brewers working at the production facility that Lehner has excavated at Giza would have provided food and drink for the workers, who also needed to be supplied with clothes and possibly sandals (see Figure 6.11). Additionally, architects/builders and skilled artisans were probably permanently employed by the king. A total of 20-25,000 skilled and unskilled workers may have made up the entire pyramid work force. If the workers’ families were also there, possibly as many as 150,000 people were living at Giza - a huge city that probably sprawled over a very large area.
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