The pyramids in general, and the Great Pyramid in particular, attract the attention of “explainers”, who range from serious scholars just a little outside the mainstream of Egyptology to raving nutjobs. The explanations are concerned with “why” and “how” the pyramids were built.

In the “why” department, the mainstream theory is as tombs for Pharaohs; the exotic hypotheses include landing beacons for alien spacecraft, sonic power plants, and universal standards for measurement. The “how” theorists have something of an advantage over the “whys”; while Egyptologists have solid, evidence-supported explanations of why they think the pyramids are tombs, they are reduced to the very verge of arm-waving trying to explain “how”.

At the simplest level, “how” is pretty obvious; pile big blocks on top of each other until they make a pyramid. It’s getting the blocks there – particularly getting them up to the top - that’s the problem. Explanations group into woowoo, machines, and ramps.

Woowoo includes ancient aliens with laser rock cutters; poured concrete (search the forum for “Egyptcrete”); and sonic levitation. “Machines” are somewhat more plausible and have the imprimatur of the “Father of History”, Herodotus; his tour guide told him the pyramids were built with a machine made of “short planks of wood”. Various enthusiasts have drawn up plans for such a machine, and the better financed have actually built some and shown that they can lift blocks of an appropriate size to an appropriate height. The catch is that other than Herodotus – who was writing 2000 years after the fact – there is no evidence for such machines – no papyri describing them, no wall paintings showing them, no little bits and pieces of wood that were parts of one. In fact, there’s precious little evidence for any sort of ancient Egyptian machine, much less a block-lifting one; the most complicated machines the ancient Egyptians had were chariots (which don’t show up until after the Pyramid Age) and ships. Until recently it wasn’t even thought the Egyptians had the pulley; now a few examples are known. To be fair, there are no documents or wall reliefs showing pyramid building, either; tomb paintings show things the occupant would have in the next life: banquets, sports, exotic dancers. There was no need to show tomb construction – the immortal soul wouldn’t need one – yet it’s obvious tombs were built.

That brings up to ramps, which are more or less the current pyramid construction paradigm; blocks were loaded on sledges and dragged up a ramp by the construction gangs. Egyptologists can point to the remains of a construction ramp – but it’s at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor which wasn’t built until long after the pyramid age – and wall painting of a gang hauling something on a sledge – but it’s a statue, not a stone block. What’s more, there are some logistic problems with ramps; for the large pyramids a straight ramp with a reasonable slope and shoring (1:8 is estimated as the steepest practical) would have a larger volume than the pyramid itself. That’s countered by the square spiral ramp; this parallels the faces of the pyramid and can reach the top while retaining a reasonable slope and not requiring unreasonable amounts of material. The ramp would be removed from the top down as the final casing stone was applied. The objection to the square spiral is it covers the pyramid faces; the pyramid architects and engineers can’t tell if the stonework is properly aligned until the ramp is removed and it’s too late to fix any errors.

That, finally, brings us to the book under review: The Secret of the Great Pyramid, by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin. (Not to be confused with Secrets of the Great Pyramid, by Peter Tompkins) Both authors are interesting. Houdin is a French professional engineer who became obsessed with the Great Pyramid to the extent that he quit his job, sold all his belongings, and moved into a studio apartment to devote full-time effort to explaining the Great Pyramid (apparently with the approval of his wife, avant-garde artist Bulle Plexiglass). Brier is an American professional Egyptologist who’s advocated the not-quite-mainstream theory that Tutankhamen was murdered and who achieved some notoriety for mummifying a donated cadaver using what were assumed to be ancient Egyptian techniques. Brier is an authority on mummification, not on pyramids, but he was the only Egyptologist who responded to Houdin’s letters. And Houdin’s theories of pyramid construction have some evidence and are testable.

Houdin’s main proposal is an internal square spiral ramp; i.e. a covered, sloping, wrap-around passage inside the pyramid (he allows for an initial outside ramp, abandoned and disassembled once it reached an inconvenient height). As it ascended and reached a corner, the spiral internal ramp would open to the outside in a sort of platform – a “notch” – with enough space to allow the block being hauled to be turned 90° to enter the next ramp segment. With the ramp inside the pyramid, there would be no problem maintaining sightlines to keep the pyramid “true”; on completion the ramp could be filled in or simply abandoned, as it didn’t intersect any passages that would provide access to the burial chambers. The evidence is tentative but interesting; in the 1980s French Egyptologists did a “microgravity” study of the Great Pyramid trying to find hidden rooms; a “printout” of that study (Brier and Houdin don’t explain how the microgravity data were converted to a graphic display) shows what’s plausibly a square spiral pattern inside the pyramid. A second datum is a “notch” at one edge of the pyramid, supposedly right where Houdin predicts it. The proposed test would use thermal imaging – if there are hollow passages close to the surface, or even passages filled after the rest of the pyramid was built, they should conduct and lose heat differently than the rest of the mass and would show up on thermal infrared as the pyramid cooled down after sunset. Brier and Houdin have proposed such a thermal infrared survey; it has thus far been tied up in Egyptian red tape and national disorder.

While the idea is intriguing and the evidence interesting, there are some questions. The one that occurs to me first – and that Brier and Houdin don’t mention – is what about the other pyramids? The Great Pyramid of Khufu Is the largest Egyptian pyramid – but not by much. The second pyramid at Giza (Khafre) is only slightly smaller (interesting, the ancient Egyptian name for this pyramid was “The Great Pyramid”; Khufu’s pyramid was “The Horizon of Khufu”). And there has been a test for internal chambers at Khafre’s pyramid; in the 1960s a team from Caltech set up cosmic ray detectors in the burial chamber. (Khafre’s pyramid has a simple interior; a single passage descending to a burial chamber at ground level. The other pyramids at Giza – Khufu and Menkaure – have more complicated interiors; therefore it seemed reasonable to check Khafre’s pyramid for hidden chambers or passages). The idea was that differences in cosmic ray “density” would show any hollow spaces; none were discovered. Thus if there were ever internal ramps at Khafre’s pyramid they were filled sufficiently well to appear uniform with the rest of the pyramid to cosmic rays.

Houdin has a problem common to a lot of “explainers”; they try to explain everything; thus in addition to the internal square spiral ramp idea, he also has an explanation for the Grand Gallery. This is a internal feature unique to the Great Pyramid; a corbel-vaulted passage almost thirty feet high, with “benches” along the sides. All other passages in this and every other pyramid are low and narrow; in a few I’ve had to go on hands and knees. Houdin explains the Grand Gallery as part of a funicular system. At this stage the external ramp was still present; supposedly there was a “trolley” loaded with blocks in the Grand Gallery; with this as a counterweight blocks could be hauled up the external ramp. Once again, I’m sure the system works fine in the imagination (and there are a bunch of CGI YouTube videos out there showing it doing so; Google and take your pick). However, just as with the putative block-lifting machine there is no trace of anything this complicated in Egyptian history.

A quick read. To make the work accessible to the ordinary reader, Brier plays fast and loose with Egyptology several times; as one example he says Egyptologists use records of astronomical events “like” solar eclipses for chronology. Well, there’s no known Egyptian record of a solar eclipse but Brier probably thought it would be too hard to explain a helical rising of Sirius. Some illustrations of the Great Pyramid and some of generic cool Egyptian stuff. Excellent bibliography. I’d like to know more about the French “microgravity” study and it’s mentioned in the bibliography but is apparently privately published and this not generally available. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when Brier and Houdin get permission to do their thermal imaging study. ( )

I had to take this one back to the library before I finished it...it was really good, though, and I plan on checking it out again to finish it. I was at page 81.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have had much hope for a book called “The Secret of the Great Pyramid”. It’s rare that I read, let alone purchase a book, based on something I’d seen about it on television. Usually, what you get is "History Channel" versions of history where Nostradamus, in conjunction with the Freemasons and the Nazis worked to break the secret code of the Book of Revelations. But in this case, I was prepared for what I was getting by a special based on the book I saw on the National Geographic channel.

This theory was developed by Jean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect, and his father, Henri, an engineer. Henri was watching a television show about the pyramids and had a flash idea; that the pyramids were built from the inside out. He soon brought in his son Jean-Pierre, who then devoted years to the fleshing out of the theory through computer models and simulations. Their story is told by Bob Brier (an Egyptologist and the first man in 2000 years to mummify a body as the ancient Egyptians did) in the form of two parallel narratives, one telling the Houdin family’s quest, the other detailing the theory by following Hemienu, the Great Pyramid’s architect. Brier’s an engaging writer and at about 200 pages, it's a fast read.

The secret referred to in the title is that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built using a spiral ramp located inside the pyramid, a ramp that is still there. Classic explanations of the construction of the pyramid range from Herodotus’ cranes to the more conventional giant ramp or external spiral ramp. All of these have problems, detailed in the book. The mysterious Grand Gallery, the large hallway leading to the King’s Chamber at the heart of the Great Pyramid, has a satisfactory purpose as part of this theory. Houdin postulates that as the Pyramid rose, the Grand Gallery functioned as an open channel with a complicated system of pulleys and counterweights to lift up the massive granite slabs above the King’s Chamber. Houdin also has done a complicated series of simulations which proved that these slabs, intended to relive pressure on the roof of the King’s Chamber, cracked during construction. It seemed rather far-fetched to me that something so extensively studied as the Great Pyramid had structures on that kind of scale inside that had yet to be discovered, but after reading this, it seems plausible.

The final chapters of the book bring the quest up to 2008, with a trip up the Pyramid to the so-called “Notch”, an indention 275 feet up the side of the Great Pyramid. Houdin theorizes that this is a remnant of the open corners used to turn the block on the way up. Unfortunately, there was no trace of a smooth floor or tracks worn from the turning block, but intriguingly there is a small tunnel leading back, indicating there are some open chambers in the Pyramid. So there’s still no proof, and there may not be any in the near future, as the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities is reluctant to give permission to Brier as he is an expert on mummies, not Pyramids, and Houdin isn’t an Egyptologist at all. So for now, the case remains open. But fascinatingly so. I won’t vouch for the truth of this theory, but it’s a lot more believable, and to me, more amazing, than Atlanteans or ancient astronauts. ( )