We Know Who Built the Great Pyramid. Nobody Knows How

In two thousand seventeen, physicists shot cosmic particles through the Great Pyramid and found a hollow above the Grand Gallery, at least a hundred feet long. No passage leads to it. Nobody has been inside, and that includes us. So this video does the only honest thing left: it shows how the building went up, and who put it there. The stone was not hauled in from far away. Most of the two million three hundred thousand blocks came out of a quarry cut into the plateau about two hundred yards from where they finally sat. The average block weighs about two and a half tons. The whole machine was twenty men, a wooden sledge and rope braided from grass. A man walked ahead pouring water on the sand. That was long read as a religious offering. It is engineering: physicists in Amsterdam measured it in two thousand fourteen, and wet sand at the right dampness cuts the pulling force by about half. The Egyptians drew it themselves, in the tomb of a governor named Djehutihotep. One man from that operation left a diary. Merer was a boat inspector with a crew of forty, hauling the white casing stone from Tura. His logbook, dug out of a Red Sea harbour in two thousand thirteen, records the trips and the nights and nothing else. It is the oldest inscribed papyrus we have, and it is a delivery record. The base, thirteen acres of bedrock, is level to within about an inch, and all four sides face true north to within a tenth of a degree. There was no compass anywhere in the world yet. HOW THIS WAS BUILT From the Wadi al-Jarf papyri published by Pierre Tallet, Mark Lehner's excavations at the workers' town, Flinders Petrie's survey, the Hatnub ramp found in two thousand eighteen, and the two ScanPyramids papers in Nature and Nature Communications. Four things here are unsolved and stay unsolved. Subscribe if you would rather have four honest theories than one confident answer. WHAT IS INSIDE The quarry and the copper chisel that goes blunt every few minutes. Sledges and wet sand. Merer and the river. Four ramp theories and the one real ramp anyone has found. Levelling thirteen acres with water and a rope. The town that fed the site. Eighty tons of Aswan granite and a hundred and forty feet of air. WHAT THIS VIDEO REFUSES TO GET WRONG They were not slaves. The excavated town has bakeries, breweries and enough cattle bone to feed several thousand people a day. The workers were buried beside the pyramid with healed, splinted fractures, and there are women and children in that cemetery. The hundred thousand figure is Herodotus, written two thousand years later from hearsay. The current estimate for the whole town is around twenty thousand, working in shifts. The ramp is not settled. Straight, zigzag, outside spiral, inside spiral. Every one of them is a proposal and none of them has been found. ON THE IMAGES Every shot of the site is a reconstruction made with artificial intelligence, built from excavation reports, survey measurements and one surviving logbook. The objects, drawings and documents on screen are real and are credited below. The inside of the hollow is not shown anywhere in this video, because nobody knows what it looks like. What is in there? #history #ancienthistory #egypt #greatpyramid #ancientegypt #archaeology #documentary #engineering SOURCES Pierre Tallet, Les papyrus de la mer Rouge, the Wadi al-Jarf logbooks of Merer. Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, and the AERA excavations at the workers' town of Heit el-Ghurab. Zahi Hawass, the workers' cemetery at Giza. Richard Redding, analysis of the animal bone from the settlement. W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 1883. A. Fall, D. Bonn and others, Sliding Friction on Wet and Dry Sand, Physical Review Letters, 2014. Yannis Gourdon and Roland Enmarch, the Hatnub haulage ramp, reported 2018. Kate Spence, on the astronomical orientation of the pyramids, Nature, 2000. K. Morishima and others, Discovery of a big void in Khufu's Pyramid, Nature, 2017. S. Procureur and others, on the corridor-shaped structure in Khufu's Pyramid, Nature Communications 14, 1144, 2023. Percy Newberry, El Bersheh, 1895, the Djehutihotep sledge drawing. Karl Richard Lepsius, Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, the work gang graffiti. Image credits, all via Wikimedia Commons: Mark Lehner CC BY 4.0; Iry-Hor CC BY-SA 3.0; Underwood and Underwood CC BY-SA 2.5; Diego Delso CC BY-SA 4.0; Peter van der Sluijs CC BY-SA 3.0; Hannah Pethen CC BY-SA 2.0; Andrew Currie CC BY 2.0; CaptMondo CC BY 2.5; Keith Adler CC BY-SA 4.0. Cut view of the Great Pyramid, Procureur et al., Nature Communications 14, 1144, 2023, CC BY 4.0. Four of the things in this video have no answer yet, and they are labelled that way on screen. Nothing was smoothed over to make a better story.