Pyramid Quest (8 page)

According to the late hydraulic engineer Edward J. Kunkel of Warren, Ohio, who wrote a 1962 book called
Pharaoh’s Pump,
the Great Pyramid served primarily to harness the power of water in moving great weights. The unique passages and chambers of the Great Pyramid’s interior had nothing to do with transmitting the soul of the departed pharaoh into the next world. Instead, they created a huge pump that could spew water at tremendous pressure.

Kunkel’s speculation began where many pyramid writers start out: Just how did the ancient Egyptians, who had no draft animals besides oxen and little metal other than copper and meteoritic iron, move stones weighing many tons? Pondering the 80-ton stone door to the Temple of Karnak, Kunkel decided that the answer had to be water. His idea was that the builders constructed a lock around the area where the door was to go, floated the monolith into place—presumably on some kind of barge—then let the water out to allow the stone door to sink into place. It was a simple solution, Kunkel declared, and because it was simple, it had to be correct.

Kunkel reasoned further that terraces at the Temple of Karnak were walled in to hold water and form a series of locks. Building blocks were moved up the terraces in much the same way that locks on canals like the Suez and the Panama fill or drain to raise or lower ships passing between bodies of water at different elevations.

Even though Kunkel offered no evidence to support this hypothesis other than its alleged simplicity, he stretched his line of reasoning farther. Monolith moving would take a great deal of water. Of course, water is a scarce commodity in a desert country like Egypt. Therefore, all building had to occur when the Nile was in flood stage and the river flowed close to the riverside building sites. Still, much more than a massive bucket brigade would be required to move water in the needed volume out of the river and into the system of canals, lakes, channels, and locks needed to bring stones up the sides of the pyramids and float them into place. Then he took another look at the internal architecture of the Great Pyramid.

“I contend,” Kunkel wrote in an article published in the
Rosicrucian Digest,
“that the interior passages and chambers of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh were designed to be a water pump to provide water for the pools and locks whereby the immense blocks of stone could be floated into position and fixed.”
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In Kunkel’s view, two fountains spewed from the pyramid, one from its north side and one from its south, once the structure had been completed above the level of the King’s Chamber. The fountains’ spray formed a pool whose water spilled into a set of zigzag locks that extended down to the banks of the Nile—which was, of course, in flood stage and therefore close to the building site. Stone blocks brought down the Nile on barges could rise up the series of locks to the level under construction and be floated into place.

The key to Kunkel’s water pump is the two diagonal tubes in the body of the Great Pyramid. The first, the Descending Passage, extends down through the body of the pyramid into the limestone bedrock below, where it ends in an apparently unfinished room. The Ascending Passage forms the second diagonal. It angles up from the Descending Passage, intersects with a horizontal passage to the Queen’s Chamber, then continues on through the Grand Gallery in the direction of the King’s Chamber. In terms of the hydraulic function of the diagonals, the Queen’s Chamber serves as a compression chamber for the upper diagonal, and the bedrock chamber plays the same role for the lower.

By Kunkel’s calculation, the lower diagonal tube of the Descending Passage could hold about 80 tons of water, the upper in the neighborhood of 300. A fire at the top of the tube would create a vacuum that caused the water to rise, and this rise continued because of the upward force of compressed air in the compression chambers. Eventually the water would reach the King’s Chamber and travel up and out to the fountains through the misnamed airshafts—which were really water conduits.

In a laboratory, it is easy to demonstrate the basic physics of Kunkel’s model. Fashion a diagonal tube with an air compression chamber at the bottom, then start a fire in an enclosure at the top. As a vacuum forms because of the fire, the compressed air at the bottom will push the water up. The movement will continue until the forces of vacuum, gravity, and air compression balance.

That’s in the lab, however. Would the same hydraulics have worked inside the Great Pyramid of Giza?

Well maybe, if it were supplied with the necessary (and apparently now missing) valves, seals, and other apparatus. Still, many questions remain, and I am far from convinced that the pump theory is the best explanation for the Great Pyramid. Where was the fire built to create the vacuum? I have spent many hours exploring the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramid, and I would expect to find telltale damage to the stone in the passage or chamber where the fire was kept, yet I have failed to observe any such evidence in my investigations of the Great Pyramid (although I have observed fire damage to the stone walls of various ancient Egyptian temples elsewhere in Egypt, where, because they were inhabited as shelters, cooking fires were lit against the walls). And how was air supplied to the Queen’s Chamber and the subterranean rooms to maintain air pressure? The shafts close to the Queen’s Chamber never reach the chamber itself and could not have provided an air supply.

There is also the matter of the Great Pyramid’s uniqueness. Kunkel argues that the interior of the pyramid is all about practical engineering, not religious significance. If that were true, and if the water pump worked as well as he said it did, why was it never repeated in another pyramid?

All of this points to the core problem with Kunkel’s idea: a lack of compelling evidence. Theoretically, the Great Pyramid could probably be retrofitted to turn it into a monstrous water pump, but that does not mean it was either designed or used as a pump. There is simply no indication that the Great Pyramid ever contained the kinds of seals, valves, floats, and other devices a water pump requires. Kunkel’s water pump theory is just a guess, and a highly speculative one at that.

Christopher Dunn, a master craftsman and engineer, follows another speculative path, developing an idea no less intriguingly outlandish than Kunkel’s. Dunn’s proposal, advanced in his popular 1998 book
The Giza Power Plant,
is that the Great Pyramid sat at the center of ancient Egypt’s electrical grid. That’s right: electrical. And this was not simply your usual smoke-spewing, coal- or gas-fired generator or water-damming hydroelectric turbine. Rather, it was a visionary, Jules Verne-worthy high technology that used hydrogen to convert the earth’s own vibrations into microwaves, which were then beamed—by orbiting satellites, no less—across the Two Lands and beyond, perhaps even to the waiting machines and appliances of Atlantis.

The fantastical workings of Dunn’s electrical power plant began in the Queen’s Chamber, which produced hydrogen, the very same fuel many analysts are now proposing as the best replacement for gasoline, oil, and other fossil fuels. The hydrogen arose from a chemical reaction. Diluted hydrochloric acid was placed in one of the two Queen’s Chamber shafts, and hydrated zinc chloride solution in the other. When the two compounds mixed in the Queen’s Chamber and reacted, hydrogen gas filled the pyramid’s passages. Waste materials from the spent chemicals flowed along the Horizontal Passage, then down the Well Shaft into the bedrock below the pyramid.

Meanwhile, unknown and now-missing equipment in the Subterranean Chamber primed the power plant by setting off vibrations tuned to the resonant frequency of the Great Pyramid. Once primed, the pyramid vibrated more and more in response, until its oscillations hit the same level as the earth’s. Once synchronized, the pyramid drew vibrational energy from the planet itself and sent it up through the Great Gallery, which was also filled with now-missing equipment—vast arrays of Helmholtz resonators—to convert the vibrational energy into sound. An acoustic filter in the Antechamber ensured that only sound frequencies in harmony with the resonant frequency of the King’s Chamber entered that room.

It was the King’s Chamber where the heart of the Giza power plant beat. Quartz crystals in the chamber’s red granite vibrated in sympathy with the incoming sound, stressing the crystals and setting up a flow of electrons through what is known as the piezoelectric effect. At this point, both acoustical and electromagnetic energy filled the King’s Chamber, which had been previously pumped full of hydrogen gas from the ongoing chemical reaction in the Queen’s Chamber. The gas absorbed this abundant energy, which vibrated at frequencies harmonic with the resonance of hydrogen. In response, the single electron in each atom of hydrogen rose to a higher energy state.

Even more energy was added to this potent mix from outside the pyramid. Originally lined with metal, in Dunn’s scenario, the northern shaft in the King’s Chamber channeled a microwave signal—possibly from the constant bombardment of the earth by atomic hydrogen—through a crystal amplifier and into the King’s Chamber. There it interacted with the energized hydrogen atoms and forced them back into their natural, or unenergized, state. Happening over and over again billions and trillions of times, the energy released by the hydrogen atoms’ reversion to their natural state was collected in a microwave receiver in the chamber’s south wall, then beamed out of the pyramid through the southern shaft—which, like its northern counterpart, was also originally lined with metal.

As to how this power was distributed across Egypt to power machines and appliances, even Dunn admits uncertainty. He hypothesizes that electrical transmission was not a matter of the towers and insulated wires we know. Rather, Egypt got its power through a wireless system of the sort once envisioned, but never built, by Nikola Tesla, a contemporary of Thomas Edison. Electricity traveled across Egypt in much the same way satellites relay signals to television sets across the globe. And the Egyptians, Dunn is willing to argue, had satellites (where is the evidence? the critics ask), which bounced the energy beamed up from the Great Pyramid to the homes, factories, and commercial structures of the Old Kingdom’s Two Lands.

Dunn even maintains that evidence in the cult temple of the cow-headed goddess Hathor in the Nile River town of Dendera in Upper Egypt actually depicts the ancient Egyptians’ electrical technology. Wall carvings in the temple’s lower crypt show three men holding transparent vessels supported on what are known as a
djed
pillars and decorated either with snake images or enclosing live serpents. A tether or rope connects the vessels to small statues of the god Atum-Ra, identified by the sun disk on his head. A baboon holds an upraised knife with the sharp side of the blade facing one of the vessels.

Dunn maintains that this carving represents not the symbolism of ancient Egypt’s religion but a graphic record of a Crookes tube, also known as a cathode ray tube, a device developed in the 1870s by the Englishman Sir William Crookes. A Crookes tube consists of a partially evacuated glass tube or bulb with an anode and a cathode set into it. When an electrical source is properly connected to the tube, a stream of electrons will pass from the cathode to the anode. When the electrons hit a phosphorescent surface or screen in the tube, they form a visible image. The principle of the cathode ray tube formed the basis for a great deal of twentieth-century electronics, including old-fashioned radar tubes, oscilloscopes, and the tubes in certain televisions and computer monitors. As Dunn sees it, the Dendera wall carving is not a collection of religious symbols but the depiction of an electrical experiment.

He points to more evidence as well, phenomena that Dunn contends can be explained only if the Egyptians had access to electrically powered devices—some of which may represent a technology so advanced we can’t even imagine it. Examples include the precise machining and polishing of very hard rock, such as the granite sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid’s King’s Chamber, and the ability of the ancient Egyptians to raise huge monoliths to great heights and maneuver them into place.

As great as these accomplishments are, they prove only that the Egyptians were clever and adept. They by no means make it certain, or even likely, that the Egyptians had and used electricity. And the evidence that they did fails to hold up to even casual scrutiny. One of the founders of modern Egyptology, Sir William Flinders Petrie, long ago called attention to the amazing stoneworking abilities of the ancient Egyptians,
⁵
yet seemed satisified that it was within their capacity to have made such objects with their known technological level.

Consider the Dendera wall carving, for example. None of the symbols depicted in the relief, such as the snakes and the baboon, are unusual in Egyptian religious art. As a goddess of the sky, which was feminine in Egyptian mythology, Hathor became the deity of women, fertility, and sexual love. The Egyptians, like many cultures ancient and modern, connected snakes with fertility—because they renew themselves whenever they shed their skins—and with sexuality, because the body of a snake rising to strike is reminiscent of the penis hardening and erecting. As a result, carved images of snakes are hardly anything unusual or unexpected in the temple of Hathor.

Dating is also a major problem. Although the oldest foundation stones at Dendera date to 2600 B.C. and the Old Kingdom, the manifest temple was built and the carving made during the Ptolemaic period, which began with Alexander the Great’s invasion in 332 B.C., more than two millennia later. It is a grand assumption to decide, without evidence, that the Ptolemaic builders followed the details of the original building at Dendera and replicated an earlier image accurately depicting a technological wonder over 20 centuries old. In our time, the equivalent would be a detailed engineer’s drawing for a Roman catapult carved into a remake of the Coliseum.