Much has been written about the Egyptian Pyramids.
Some of it is based on “science”, some on “interesting speculation” and much on pure fantasy.
Perhaps it is with a little arrogance that I suggest that unless you’ve been to these ancient sites it’s very difficult to get a sense of the scale of, not only the pyramids themselves but the area in which they are situated. No matter how many documentaries you may have watched or books you have read it is only by seeing each of these awe-inspiring sites in their geographical and cultural contexts that can you ever get an appreciation of them.
It is generally accepted that the first pyramid in Egypt was built by the pharaoh Djoser, who reigned nearly 4,700 years ago. More than a millennium later, ancient Egypt's last pyramid built for a pharaoh was constructed for Ahmose I around 3,500 years ago. After that, Egyptian rulers were buried in underground tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
This means that the ancient Egyptian pyramids were built between about roughly 2700 B.C. and 1500 B.C. This makes the earliest pyramids about the same age as Stonehenge, which was initially built between 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Djoser’s pyramid is pictured at the top of this page.
Notice that it is a “stepped” pyramid.
Before this pyramid rulers and high-ranking officials were buried in a single-story, lozenge-shaped structure known as a Mastaba. To me, it seems clear that Djoser’s pyramid can be viewed as a series of stacked Mastabas.
Ancient inscriptions indicate that a man named Imhotep directed the step pyramid's construction. "Imhotep is usually regarded as the first architect in Egypt to build in stone and is credited with the building of Djoser's step pyramid complex" Marc Van De Mieroop, a professor of history at Columbia University."There's an inscription with his name combined with that of Djoser in which he is called chief of sculptors. In later ancient Egypt he was considered a sage," (Van De Mieroop as reported in Live Science)
The next step in the evolution of pyramid design comes with what is known as the “bent pyramid.”
The pharaoh Sneferu ( 2575 to 2551 B.C.) built the first true pyramids (pyramids with flat sides) at Dahshur.
These consisted of the Bent Pyramid (so named because of its unusual angle) and the Red Pyramid (named after its colour).
Much has been written about the “bent pyramid” and suggestions have been made as to it being the result of “poor construction”.
However, it seems likely that it was built this way.
Archaeologists tend to believe that the Bent Pyramid represents a transitional form between step-sided and smooth-sided pyramids. It has been suggested that due to the steepness of the original angle of inclination, the structure may have begun to show signs of instability during construction, forcing the builders to adopt a shallower angle to avert the structure's collapse
However, recent ideas speak against a connection between the change in slope and structural defects since It is rather doubtful that a weight reduction was a relevant criterion for a structure of almost closed mass.
The early decision against the 60° inclination initially envisaged rather suggests that geometric aspects were the decisive factor in the gradient change.
Following the assumption that the stones used to construct the pyramids were hauled up ramps constructed (and later removed) alongside the building it is obvious that the angle of the ramp itself is of importance.
Ramps inclined up to 10° as the simplest form of ramp, became smaller as the height increased. This made it increasingly difficult to keep their gradient low. This could be compensated for by reducing the ramp width to around 3 m, which was sufficient for pairs of train crews, but even for such narrow ramps the geometric volume could not provide enough space when the gradient was too steep.
It must therefore have become clear to the construction managers halfway up that ramp structures would not be feasible when maintaining this gradient.
All completed pyramids (first the Red, then the Great Pyramid) never exceeded the maximum gradient of 53°.
Remember the initial inclination of this pyramid was 54 degrees and was altered mid-construction to 43 degrees. This is what gives the pyramid its distinctive shape.
The Great Pyramid at Giza, the only one of the seven ancient wonders of the world that still stands, was built by Khufu (reign circa 2551 to 2528 B.C.) while Khafre (reign circa 2520 to 2494 B.C.) built another large pyramid, along with the Great Sphinx, at Giza.
The Aliens Built Them!
One of the “conspiracies” about the pyramids is that they were built by some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Ummm..
Some of the proponents of this idea have clearly never visited some of these sites to see the remains of the nearby worker’s complex - home of those skilled folks who built these temples of the dead.
I was taught in school that it was “slaves’ who built these structures under the watchful eye of an army of warriors.
We now know that this was not the case. Whilst there may have been some prisoners of war at work in the quarries, it is clear that much of the masonry and crafting was undertaken by highly skilled Egyptians.
The fact that we, as modern people, can’t grasp the amount of effort, time, and skill that was put into the creation of these wonders is, I think, a testament to our lack of imagination.
It is a logical fallacy to believe that you or I cannot believe how something was created it must be the result of divine or extraterrestrial agencies. For me, it’s also a denial of humankind’s creative potential.
Why Build Them?
The incredible amount of time and resources that were invested in the Pyramid Projects implies that they were important.
One of the key suggestions is that since the Pharaohs were buried with a vast amount of valuable possessions, the pyramids would deter any grave robbers.
This may be one of the reasons, but the other, I believe, was because of a shift in the spiritual focus of the Egyptians.
There was an active and evolving solar cult, something we can see echoed in many places. Alongside this came the ideas of death and rebirth and the importance of the “after-life”.
To the Pharaohs, it seems that the afterlife was as important as their physical life - if not more so.
There was also the evolving belief that there was both a physical and a spiritual body which though separated at the time of death needed to be reunited after the soul’s journey through the “darkness”.
Thus the body needed to be preserved and earthly goods stored.
Mummification and the building of secure tombs were therefore required.
The early mastaba were mud constructions, the pyramids were stone.
When Djoser came to power, the influence of the sun cult and the sun god Ra (also spelled Re) was increasing, Verner wrote in his book "The Pyramids: The Archaeology and History of Egypt's Iconic Monuments" (American University in Cairo Press, 2021).
The sun cult's growing influence may have led to a desire to build structures that reached higher into the sky. Verner noted that a passage from a text dating back around 4,400 years said "may the sky make the sunlight strong for you, may you rise up to the sky as the Eye of Re" (translation by Raymond Faulkner).
The stepped pyramid was a stairway to the sun perhaps?
Sources cite at least 118 identified "Egyptian" pyramids. Approximately 80 pyramids were built within the Kingdom of Kush, now located in the modern country of Sudan.
Whatever the reasons for building pyramids, Egyptian pharaohs constructed them for more than a millennium.
Egyptian pyramids were plundered in ancient times, and pharaohs may have hoped that building their tombs in the Valley of the Kings would make them harder to ransack.
Celestial Alignments.
There have been various “conspiracies” suggesting that there are some “secret celestial” alignments that were important to the Egyptians.
True, the ancient Egyptians were 'sky watchers’ and following on the knowledge inherited from earlier civilizations, had developed some understanding of the visible night sky. Stars and star designs are common on the ceilings of tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
But the celestial alignment of the pyramids is in question.
I remember reading Robert Bauval’s book, The Orion Mystery, and being taken with his ideas.
He suggested that the three main Pyramids of Giza aligned precisely with the three stars making up Orion’s Belt in the Constellation of Orion.
He further suggested that the Milky Way was the celestial representation of the River Nile which today flows a short distance from the Giza Plateau.
The oft quoted Graham Hancock writes in his book The Mars Mystery…
..we have demonstrated with a substantial body of evidence that the pattern of stars that is "frozen" on the ground at Giza in the form of the three pyramids and the Sphinx represents the disposition of the constellations of Orion and Leo as they looked at the moment of sunrise on the spring equinox during the astronomical "Age of Leo" (i.e., the epoch in which the Sun was "housed" by Leo on the spring equinox.) Like all precessional ages this was a 2,160-year period. It is generally calculated to have fallen between the Gregorian calendar dates of 10,970 and 8810 BC.
Alignments are of interest to astronomers and two of them examined the claims made by Bauval, Hancock and others.
Ed Krupp of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and Tony Fairallof the University of Cape Town, South Africa, using planetarium equipment independently investigated the angle between the alignment of Orion's Belt and north during the era cited by Hancock, Bauval, et al. (which differs from the angle seen today or in the third millennium BC, because of the precession of the equinoxes).
They found that the angle was somewhat different from the "perfect match" thought to exist by Bauval and Hancock in the Orion correlation theory. They estimate 47–50 degrees per the planetarium measurements, compared to the 38-degree angle formed by the pyramids.
Krupp pointed out that the slightly bent line formed by the three pyramids deviated towards the north, whereas the slight "kink" in the line of Orion's Belt was deformed to the south, and to match them up one or the other of them had to be turned upside-down.
Indeed, this is what seems to have been done in the original book by Bauval and Gilbert (The Orion Mystery), which compares images of the pyramids and Orion without revealing that the pyramids' map had been inverted.
Krupp and Fairall found other problems with their arguments, including noting that if the Sphinx is meant to represent the constellation of Leo, then it should be on the opposite side of the Nile (the "Milky Way") from the pyramids ("Orion"), that the vernal equinox c. 10,500 BC was in Virgo and not Leo, and that in any case the constellations of the Zodiac originate from Mesopotamia and were completely unknown in Egypt until the much later Graeco-Roman era. Ed Krupp repeated this "upside down" statement in the BBC documentary Atlantis Reborn (1999).
Another major problem is that there is nothing in Egyptian texts to suggest that pyramids were intentionally designed with that alignment. As we now know there is a wealth of textual evidence from archaeological finds which outline beliefs and attitudes to life and death.
What seems to be generally accepted by archaeologists is alignment of the Great Pyramids to the cardinal points of the compass.
Although it's slightly lopsided, overall the square sides of the 138.8 meter (455 foot) Great Pyramid of Giza – also known as the Great Pyramid of Khufu – are aligned almost perfectly along the cardinal points, north-south-east-west.
"The builders of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aligned the great monument to the cardinal points with an accuracy of better than four minutes of arc, or one-fifteenth of one degree," archaeologist and engineer Glen Dash explained in a study published in 2017 in The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture.
While many hypotheses exist as to how they did this – using the pole star to align the pyramids, or the Sun's shadow – it's never been fully clear how these worked.
All three of the largest Egyptian pyramids – two at Giza and one at Dahshur – are remarkably aligned, in a way you wouldn't expect to see from an era without drones, blueprints, and computers.
"All three pyramids exhibit the same manner of error; they are rotated slightly counterclockwise from the cardinal points," Dash
While many hypotheses exist as to how they did this – using the pole star to align the pyramids, or the Sun's shadow – it's never been fully clear how these worked.
Dash came up with another, simpler idea.
His study suggested that the Egyptians roughly 4,500 years ago could have used the autumnal equinox to achieve perfect alignment.
The equinox is regarded as the moment twice a year when the plane of Earth's equator passes through the centre of the Sun's disc, and the length of day and night are pretty much equal.
Previously equinox measurements had been overlooked as a possible alignment method, as it was assumed it wouldn't provide enough accuracy.
We know of other ancient alignments to equinoxes so this idea could carry some weight.
"On the equinox, the surveyor will find that the tip of the shadow runs in a straight line and nearly perfectly east-west," wrote Dash.
He also showed that the degree of error is slightly counterclockwise – which is similar to the slight error found in the alignment of the Khufu and Khafre pyramids at Giza, and the Red pyramid at Dahshur.
It’s easy when looking at these amazing structures to wonder how they were built.
Statements like “we couldn’t do that with todays technology” are, as far as I am concerned simplisitic at best and downright wrong at worst.
The logical fallacy, “argument from incredulity’ is a statement of our own ignorance and arrogance.
Having seen, touched and felt these stones, I am humbled by the skill, patience and dediction these ancient builders had.
Estimates put the construction time of the Great Pyramid at Giza at around 26 - 30 years.
With this timescale it means that these monuments to the Pharoes began they construction very early in their reign.
The Great Pyramid initially rose about 481 feet, making it the world’s tallest man-made structure for thousands of years until it was surpassed in the early 1300s by England’s Lincoln Cathedral. Due to erosion, the pyramid now stands around 455 feet tall.
Covering an area of 13 acres, this monument was designed to align with the points of the compass and built with an estimated 2.3 million stones, each weighing a ton or more on average.
The workforce is thought to have consisted of thousands of skilled tradesmen and paid laborers, as opposed to slaves, and estimates suggest the project took about two decades to complete.
Many of the craftspeople lived on site and would have be augmented by agricultural workers when crops had been planted or the Nile had flooded.
It’s been speculated that workers created ramps in order to move the stone building blocks into place on the pyramid.
It was human ingeniuty, hard work and purpose that built these monuments not the zap and laser cutters brought by aliens (extraterrestrials).
Imhotep
Imhotep (the one who) comes in peace"; was an Egyptian chancellor to the Pharaoh Djoser, possible architect of Djoser's step pyramid, and high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Very little is known of Imhotep as a historical figure, but in the 3,000 years following his death, he was gradually glorified and deified.
One of the few non-royal Egyptians who were deified after their deaths, and until the 21st century, he was one of nearly a dozen non-royals to achieve this status.
The center of his cult was in Memphis.
The location of his tomb remains unknown, despite efforts to find it. The consensus is that it is hidden somewhere at Saqqara.
As scholar, thinker and archetect he could be seen today s a symbol of our ability to lear, master, innovate and inspire.
It seems likely that he and his fellow contemporaries used their energies to achieve what some choose to see as the work of others beyond our world.
It is these people, master of their craft, who need to be celebrated.
Some spiritual traditions acknowledge these folk as the original keepers of ancient knowledge and later gave rise to the Guilds of the early middle-ages.
The original Master Masons?
Alan /|\
Our Next Moot
We will delve a little deeper into the history and mystery of the Pyramids.
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Alan /|\
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Thank you so much for this fascinating analysis. We should never underestimate the abilities of our ancestors who I have always thought were rather more able than we give them credit for. I believe their knowledge of mathematics and related sciences was extremely advanced. They were doubtless great observers of everything about them. As attractive as it sometimes is, it is easy to credit external intelligence rather than recognising that the human ability to achieve is huge provided it is directed away from war. M