There has been a rash of books and TV programmes on ancient Egypt and the Pyramids, many of them seeking to overturn the views of conventional Egyptologists. Ideas have ranged from the delightful and romantic to the downright incredible. Public appetite for such books and films seems endless.
"The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" is a book for the expert and the interested layman alike. "The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" explores many of the modern myths; it looks, not just at one pyramid, but across the range of pyramids built during the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt to establish ground truth. As so often, truth turns out to be stranger than fiction - and modern myth.
There is a romantic notion that the 4th dynasty pyramids of ancient Egypt were laid out to mimic the stars in the constellation of Orion. "The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" shows this appealing idea to be incorrect, and instead uses hard evidence still visible today, to show just why the pyramids are located and aligned as they are.
The conventional view is that the pyramids were tombs, or resurrection machines, intended to restore the dead pharaoh to life. The ancient Pyramid Texts support this view and it is undoubtedly correct. However, there seems to be more, at least to some of the pyramids. One idea seemed to be to project the dead pharaoh's soul to a particular star in the sky, from where he could preside over - even take part in - heavenly fertility rituals each year. The book examines the astronomical basis for such beliefs, using modern computer-generated models of the ancient skies plus virtual reality flythroughs to identify the particular star.
"The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" looks briefly at ancient Egyptian mathematics: they added and subtracted as we do, but multiplication and division were binary, as in computers. Their numbers were imbued with magic. They did not know pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, although this modern myth has been repeatedly "proved". Instead they found their own unique method of estimating the area of a circle, as recorded in the Rhind Papyrus in the British Museum. They also had an arcane approach to fractions, which finds echoes in modern electronics and optics. The ancient Egyptians had units of measurement for pyramid slopes and, curiously, for food quality, too.
Building the pyramids was a phenomenal undertaking. But how were they built? How was the workforce organized? How were the enormous stones raised? Did they use ramps, or "contrivances made of short timbers" as Herodotus was told? "The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" compares and contrasts the various theories for building the massive structures and identifies a radical new, or should it be old, construction method, needing no ramps, levers, A-frames or pulleys, yet consistent with Herodotus.
"The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" introduces a new "pyramid calculator" which brings together the physics of the work to be done with the biology of the work output from each builder, based on their then diet. Using this method it is possible to work out the number of people involved in building at any stage during the construction, the amount of food and drink they consumed, even the acreage of cornfields needed to sustain the workforce. This is a novel method, apparently never used before, and it produces unexpected, yet verifiable, results.
Finally, "The Pyramid Builder's Handbook" looks at the people who built the pyramids, to find what made the people "tick". After all, they could build structures 4,500 years ago that we could not construct today. What did they have that we lost..?
Last updated: Sep 2005