The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man's Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt's Greatest Mystery

by Brier, Bob

• ISBN13: 9780061655531
• ISBN10: 0061655538
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Eight years ago, Jean-Pierre Houdin, a successful French architect, became obsessed by the age-old mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built. He renounced his architectural practice, sold his Paris apartment, and for ten hours a day labored at his computer to create exquisitely detailed 3-D models of the interior of the Great Pyramid. After five years of effort, the images rotating on his computer screen provided irrefutable evidence of an astonishing secret. Corkscrewing up the inside of the Great Pyramid is a mile-long ramp, unseen for 4,500 years. The pyramid was built from the inside. The revelation casts a fresh light on the minds that founded earth's first civilization. The narration takes place in two time frames: ancient and modern. The ancient story explains how a nation of farmers that had only recently emerged from the Stone Age could construct one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To execute something as complex and massive as the Great Pyramid, Egypt needed architects, mathematicians, boat builders, stone masons, metallurgists. It took twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. By the time its capstone was laid in 2560 BC, the innovations born of the building quest had transformed agrarian Egypt into the world's most modern, most powerful nation. As we follow the progress of Hemienu, the innovative architect who planned, organized and oversaw construction of the Great Pyramid, we also follow Houdin working to discover how and why the ancient architect designed the pyramid as he did. Houdin works as a "forensic" architect, aiming to reconstruct the lessons Hemienu had learned from construction of three previous pyramids and to visualise his blueprint for the massive stone building.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
The Man in Black	p. 1
Birth of the Pyramid	p. 7
Meeting with the Master	p. 19
Imhotep builds the Step Pyramid	p. 23
Sneferu: King of the Pyramids	p. 29
An Architect Is Born	p. 37
Architect Adrift	p. 43
A Troubled Bridge?	p. 47
Hemienu Plans the Great Pyramid	p. 49
The Underground Burial Chamber	p. 79
Modern Tomb Raiders: The Search for Hidden Chambers	p. 85
The Grand Gallery	p. 93
The Burial Chamber	p. 107
Hemienu's Solution	p. 113
First Plans	p. 125
Anomaly Rising	p. 133
The Notch	p. 137
The Internal Ramp	p. 139
The Capstone	p. 145
The Difficult Years	p. 151
The Internal Ramp Goes Public	p. 155
The Time Machine to Hemienu	p. 167
The Search for the Internal Ramp	p. 171
What's Next?	p. 185
Appendices
The Search for Imhotep	p. 191
The Lost Pyramid	p. 194
The Case of the Missing Queen	p. 196
Making Khufu's Sarcophagus	p. 199
The Pyramid's Angle	p. 201
Endnotes	p. 203
Bibliography	p. 209
Photography Credits	p. 215
Index	p. 217
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