3rd June: The Pyramids

On this date in 1853 Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, English Egyptologist who excavated at the pyramids and temples of Giza, was born.

What better excuse to present you with 10 facts you didn't know about the pyramids in Egypt.

When we think of "The Pyramids" the image that comes to mind is the three on the Giza plateau including the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops; the other two are called Chephren and Mycerinus. There are more than 130 pyramids in Egypt altogether though, and even more in Sudan. Mexico has some, too, but since the bloke whose birthday it is excavated Giza, the following facts relate to the Great Pyramid and its two companions.

1. The Great Pyramid was the tallest building in the world for getting on for four thousand years. It was built between 2589 BC and 2504 BC and was 146.5 meters (481 feet) tall (it's only 138.8 meters (455 feet) tall now due to erosion and earthquakes). It wasn't until 1311 that people built anything taller - which happened to be Lincoln Cathedral in England. It's now thought that the workers who built the Pyramids may not have been slaves, but highly skilled people who were being paid.
2. The Great Pyramid has four sides, right? Wrong. It actually has eight, because all four faces are slightly concave. It is very difficult to see this. You can't tell from the ground at all, it's only visible from the air, and even then only when the light conditions are absolutely right - which happens to be at dawn and sunset on the Spring and autumn equinoxes. What's more, the curvature of the concave faces of the pyramid is exactly the same as the curvature of the Earth.
3. That's not the only amazing mathematical connection between the pyramids and the properties of the planet. Here are a few more. The average land height above sea level is 5,449 inches. The exact height of the Great Pyramid is 5,449 inches. The pyramid is aligned with true north more accurately than any other structure in the world. It's slightly off, even so, but that is because the North Pole has moved slightly over the millennia. When it was built, it was exactly right. Finally the pyramid stands on Earth's geographical centre, at the intersection of the longest land parallel and the longest land meridian. There is only about a one in three billion probability that it could have been built in that exact spot by chance.
4. The Great Pyramid was built from about 2,300,000 stone blocks weighing from 2 to 30 tons each with some blocks weighing over 50 tons. That's probably about 6 million tons of stone, or enough to build the Empire State building thirty times over. The only reason it's still there and hasn't sunk into the ground is because the Giza Plateau is basically a mountain of solid granite under the ground.
5. There are a couple more reasons why this structure has survived and become the only ancient wonder of the world still standing - and also the oldest. One is that the builders used a ball and socket design in the cornerstone foundations which would help it withstand earthquakes and heat expansion. The other is the mortar used to cement the stones together. This stuff is actually stronger than the stones themselves and nobody knows where it came from or how to make it. Scientists have worked out exactly what its chemical composition is, but they have no idea how to reproduce it.
6. When they were first completed, the Great Pyramid was covered in an outer mantle of White limestone casing stones - 144,000 of them. They were polished and flat to an accuracy of a hundredth of an inch; they were 100 inches thick and each weighed about 15 tons each. This outer mantle would reflect the sun's light and would have made the structure quite dazzling. The ancient Egyptians called the Great Pyramid “Ikhet”, meaning the “Glorious Light”. The pyramid could be seen for miles - from the mountains in Israel and, some theorists believe, from the Moon. A few of the casing stones remain today near the base of the pyramid. Most were removed after an Earthquake in the 14th century and the rest were used to build mosques.
7. The temperature inside the Pyramid is a fairly constant 20 Celsius (60 F), no matter how hot it gets outside. This happens to be the average temperature on earth.
8. Inside the Great Pyramid is a a granite coffer, made out of one solid piece of granite which is much too big to fit down the passageway into the chamber it sits in. Which is probably why it's the only thing in there - the only thing plunderers couldn't carry off. It's thought the entire pyramid must have been built around it. That's not all that's remarkable about the coffer. It would have taken bronze saws 8-9 ft. long set with teeth of sapphires and tubular sapphire drills capable of a drilling force of 2 tons to make it. The other interesting thing about the interior is that there are no hieroglyphics anywhere inside. Unless you count some which were found in about 2011 in the air shafts above the King’s Chamber - which are probably fake. It's thought an Egyptologist called Colonel Howard Vyse was so desperate to become famous through making a significant discovery that he painted some symbols himself. We know the symbols can't be authentic because whoever did paint them got the symbol for the sun god Ra wrong, and no Ancient Egyptian would dare make a mistake like that.
9. In the 12th century. Al-Aziz, a Kurdish ruler and the second Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt tried to knock the Pyramids down. Thankfully he failed. It was too big a task and he gave up, but not before creating a huge vertical gash in the north face of Menkaure's Pyramid.
10. These pyramids, and all the others in Egypt, are built on the west bank of the River Nile, where the sun sets and where the realm of the dead is to be found. The god of the afterlife, Osiris, is associated with the constellation of Orion, which suggests it's no coincidence that the relative size and alignment of the three Pyramids exactly mirrors the three stars of Orison's belt and their orientation to the Milky Way mirrors the orientation of the Pyramids to the River Nile.

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