It was inscribed with the name of Khufu. NARRATOR: Now, after four decades of investigation, Mark Lehner has become one of the world’s leading authorities on the Giza pyramids. But for them, such special effects were not entertainment, for them they were, they were religious, they were magical. NARRATOR: The papyri also revealed the name of the man in charge. So really it was in the interests of Khufu to have a happy, well-fed, well-organized and healthy workforce. MARK LEHNER: So, we now know that the major influx of material, both gigantic stones, timber, wood, grain to feed the people, happened during the flood season, when the Nile rose and covered the valley and filled the deep channel, where it rose more than seven meters. From an engineering point of view, when you come to a place like this, you look down, because the clues of how they built the pyramid are written in stone, on a scale of acres here. Glen has a theory. Join researchers as they delve into the logbook of a work crew and discover how the massive project transformed Egypt. And who were the thousands of laborers who raised the stones? His was one of several ships delivering fine quality limestone to the construction site from the quarries of Tura, 10 miles from Giza. Its last and most enduring mystery is that the mummy of the god-king Khufu has never been found. NARRATOR: The amazing discoveries of the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, the workers’ city and the preserved boats reveal the phenomenal planning operation that built the Great Pyramid and unified the people of Egypt into one of the world’s first nation states. How is that possible? Join researchers as they delve into the logbook of a work crew and discover how the massive project transformed Egypt. There are so many sidebars that you aren't sure what to read as you turn each page. If one were to base his/her decision on the previous two customers reviews of this book they might clearly miss out on a very interesting read. Such theories drew a young would-be archaeologist to Egypt, in the 1970s. NARRATOR: How did the Egyptians engineer this enormous monument with such extreme precision, using only the most basic of tools and brute human power? NARRATOR: But this was before ancient Egypt had the wheel. Unable to add item to List. NARRATOR: But the ceiling of the King’s Chamber is flat, a potential structural weak point. At the heart of the pyramid is a granite tomb where the dead king’s mummified body would lie for eternity. NARRATOR: Today, the Giza Plateau sits on the edge of modern-day Cairo. NARRATOR: These are the world’s oldest papyrus texts. This masterful full color study of the prophetic powers of the Great Pyramid of Giza brings more than a hundred visuals to enhance and expand the text inot a highly commerical examination of man'skind greatest hertiage. Egyptologists like Mark Lehner believe this story is too simplistic. Yet, 4,500 years later, it is still intact. For people like Merer, it was a privilege to be involved in the king’s grand construction project. The author has done a great job putting together historical ideas related to the Great Pyramid. MARK LEHNER: Sneferu was the most prodigious pyramid builder of all time. The exterior was an outer casing of high-quality white limestone, concealing a much rougher inner core of coarse common limestone, and then, deep within the pyramid, the complex of granite chambers reserved for the sacred tomb of the king. MARK LEHNER: There’s another void, and that void exists right through this granite wall. How did the Egyptians engineer the mighty pharaoh Khufu’s tomb so precisely, with none of today’s surveying and power tools? MARK LEHNER: The whole thing looks like an early version of institutional buildings like our hospitals, schools, prisons. And so, here we have this big sledge that would have been used to take la… the large rocks on them, and pulled by teams of men, up through the causeway, up the ramps to build the Great Pyramid. Inside are three chambers, joined to the outside by a network of passageways. This is a great book, well written and the glossy colored pictures and whole page subject oriented glossy watermark drawings and pictures make this book worth more than the asking price. MARK LEHNER: So, he had his workers blast their way up, making a vertical tunnel. NARRATOR: By using ropes instead of nails, teams could dismantle their boats and transport them across the desert to where they were next needed. PIERRE TALLET: You have the name of “Akhet-Khufu,” the “Horizon of Khufu.”. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. Dating to the Old Kingdom, it played a crucial role in the pharaoh’s monumental building projects. Traces of the artificial basins recorded by Merer have been found underneath these streets. In the book, the appendices are the best part for the text. NARRATOR: These holes weren’t cut for wooden or metal fasteners, because ancient Egyptian ships were held together with rope. According to Egyptologist Salima Ikram, each evening, the sun and the king’s soul travelled together to the underworld. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. They’re moving rocks. Decoding the Great Pyramid Stunning new archaeological evidence provides clues about the Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid of Giza--and how they did it. NARRATOR: Archaeologist Richard Redding estimates that enough cattle, sheep and goats were regularly slaughtered to feed thousands, providing a diet much better than slave rations. Many Egyptologists believe it was cleared out by tomb robbers in ancient times. The silent enigma of the pyramids can be like a blank canvas, ready to accept the latest outlandish theory about its builders. GLEN DASH: You simply take a stick, and you stick it in the ground. SALIMA IKRAM: I think that, certainly, there are state projects where people try to get this feeling, a sense of national pride and achievement. And Merer’s handwritten notes record how he and his crew of 40 men sailed the Nile. An advanced scanning technique, called “muon tomography” identified a large cavity, the size of a 747 fuselage, approximately parallel with the King’s Chamber. SALIMA IKRAM: This tiny statue is the image of the man who made one of the largest buildings in the ancient world. Please try again. And they did it all with just the most basic of equipment. I was looking for a book that gave me the facts, drawings, figures and historical data about the pyramid itself. In 2017, Pierre Tallet published the first volume of his analysis of these ancient writings. They made the slope too steep, and the structure kept threatening to collapse, so twice, they changed their plan and reduced it to a safer angle. Join researchers as they delve into the logbook of a work crew and discover how the massive project transformed Egypt. So, it’s a complete network; everything fits together like this. We don’t really do wheeled vehicles. MARK LEHNER: They used big limestone beams and they put them in a gable pattern to, we think, so that the weight of the pyramid would be thrust away from this stack of chambers and from the King’s Chamber below. Decoding The Great Pyramid of Giza Investigation and scientific study of the Great Pyramid in modern times began in 1637 by an astronomer at Oxford University, continued in 1798 by Napoleon's engineers, and in 1830 by an archeologist and an astronomer, later by a mathematician, and through the 1950s by astronomers and archeologists and mathematicians. In 2017, scientists detected a mysterious void deep inside the Great Pyramid. NARRATOR: Pottery and clay seals suggest that this debris comes from an earlier period of the lost city, dating back to the time that Khufu was building the Great Pyramid. NARRATOR: Remarkably, archaeologists in Giza have discovered the remains of two boats from the time the artificial waterfront at Giza was at its zenith. NARRATOR: …and achieve the greatest feat of precision engineering of the ancient world. And, of course, without the sun, the world doesn’t function. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the David H. Koch Fund for Science, the NOVA Science Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers. For this pyramid: base * height = 200 * 125 = 1000 * 25 (1000 is the scale of the Giza pyramids layout and 25 is the scale of the 3rd pyramid). And, as that, you were a son of the sun god, and you allied to the sun god. The stick doesn’t have to be straight, it doesn’t have to be vertical. Season 1. All of the weight of the stone between this ceiling and the top of the pyramid would be bearing down on this flat surface with no support in the chamber below to hold it up. NARRATOR: The gabled roof on top of the secret stack of chambers relieved the downward stresses on the sacred tomb’s flat roof and, instead, deflected the weight of the pyramid away from the King’s Chamber. When the Nile floods filled this manmade pool, a navigable path opened between the river and the Giza Plateau. NARRATOR: Pierre and his team began to excavate around the boathouses where ships were stored when not in use. Most were farmers, working the fertile banks of the River Nile. Super book. So, the…I think I’ve got an estimate of over 1,500 individuals directly involved in raising sheep, there were another 500 directly involved in raising cattle. And so, for that, the Great Pyramid, although it’s the classic pyramid in the popular imagination, is actually the most unusual. It mirrored the Pharaoh’s own supernatural alignment with the sun god, Ra. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. GLEN DASH (Giza Plateau Mapping Project): It’s perfectly level. GLEN DASH: But that still wasn’t good enough to build the perfect pyramid. Now, if you were a king, you had responsibilities, because you were not just a human being, you were a god. But as the pyramid grew, how did the builders manage to raise the blocks up the rising and sloping sides of the monument? MARK LEHNER: They’re trying again and again and again; they’re doing successive drafts, until they get it right. Their solution was well suited to the desert terrain. NARRATOR: But why put so much effort into aligning the pyramids so accurately? Well worth the knowledge contained in it. To address this book as a mere outlet for a crazed religious lunatic is an ignorant arguement, and is in my opinion perpetuated by even more ignorant readers such as two of the reviewers previous. CLAIRE MALLESON (Ancient Egypt Research Associates): In this storage space, we have all of the artifacts, all of the material culture that’s come from the excavations. The tables drone on and on, and the reader is left wondering where he has been and where he is going. Mohamed believes these timbers reveal a cunning design feature that allowed Merer and others like him to use the same boat on bodies of water separated by 150 miles of desert. And this is part of the evidence that they’re doing things on a really massive industrial scale, ’cause this would have fed six or seven men, just the bread made in this one mold. And that meant millions of tons of stone had to be shipped to the site. This book is really fantastic! There's a problem loading this menu right now. Many were crowning achievements of the Old Kingdom, the first great flowering of Egyptian art that began 4,500 years ago. This is a beautiful book, brimming with colour plates and with plenty of numerical data - although I cannot attest to its reliability. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2015. NARRATOR: He built three great monuments known as the Meidum Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid. It was an operation that would strain even a modern supply chain. PIERRE TALLET: It was a real surprise. MARK LEHNER: I realized I had to turn my back to the pyramids to properly understand them, because to properly understand them you need to know about the people who built them, their civilization, their society. Others speculate that Khufu was never buried in his tomb at all. MARK LEHNER: It must have made sense in a magical way, what we would call magic. NARRATOR: Among the entries, are records of meetings with senior officials and the time it took to deliver a cargo. To cut massive stones, the builders needed high quality metal tools. Who were the thousands of laborers who toiled for decades on this massive project? We were excited. February 10, 2021 NARRATOR: Everything about the Great Pyramid is exceptional. Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2003. 2021-02-01T20:00:00-05:00: Antiques Roadshow: Vintage Tucson 2021 Hour 2: 2021-02-01T21:00:00-05:00: Antiques Roadshow: Celebrating Black Americana Amazingly, they offer the only firsthand record of the building of the Great Pyramid. He then refers repeatedly to the 'Messianic Capstone' I found Eric von Daniken's alien theories more convincing than this one-track nonsense. Super book. Probably they enveloped the entire pyramid with big embankments like this. There was a problem loading your book clubs. Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2000. It requires intelligence and a willingness to follow up on the points made by the author and seek further knowledge about the subject matter. MARK LEHNER: We’re in the King’s Chamber, more or less in the heart of the pyramid. You had wood rollers, you had rope, you had hard stone on soft stone and you had a few metal tools, and, most importantly, you had the brains and the brawn of human beings. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. SALIMA IKRAM: Herodotus wrote about the Great Pyramid as, of course, who wouldn’t, because he came here as a historian and a tourist. SALIMA IKRAM: Like the space program, there was a sense of national pride and achievement. NARRATOR: Pierre believes Merer may have had several meetings with Ankh-Haf, and the papyri note that Merer’s team was part of an elite, perhaps because their cargoes of fine Tura limestone were highly prized. NOVA | Episode | Decoding the Great Pyramid. In this barren landscape, archaeologists have discovered a unique written record. RICHARD REDDING (Ancient Egypt Research Associates): So, they’re getting a lot of food, but they’re requiring, their bodies are requiring a lot of protein. NARRATOR: With only simple tools, the ancient engineers carved an almost perfectly level, flat foundation into the sloping Giza Plateau. MARK LEHNER: They’re trying again and again and again, until they get it right. By today’s standards, it may have been an excessively cautious solution, but they couldn’t afford to take risks. It’s extraordinary that someone who has left us the Great Pyramid, which is still standing nearly 5,000 years after it was built, we still don’t have that much of the man himself. NARRATOR: The artifacts unearthed suggest that while many laborers took on heavy lifting jobs, thousands more were involved in other ways. NARRATOR: Merer’s records give Egyptologists a unique insight into how this sophisticated operation worked. 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