The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World and the only one still standing. Using state-of-the-art computer graphics, this book brings the world of IVth Dynasty Egypt to life and shows how and why this most extraordinary of human monuments was built.
No building on earth has inspired more speculation than the Great Pyramid and questions about its origins have exercised minds for more than four thousand years.
Equipped only with the most basic tools, how were Ancient Egyptian builders able to achieve such an extraordinary degree of accuracy in its construction? How were the stones, some weighing as much as 40 tons, hauled into position so precisely? What was life like for the conscripted labourers who built it and how long did it take them to complete their task? Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is it possible to provide answers.
Authors Kevin Jackson and Jonathan Stamp trace the history of the exploration of the Giza site, from the earliest Greek and Roman travellers, through the investigations of the Arabian prince Abdullah Al-Mamun in the ninth century AD, to the work of Athanasius Kircher and John Greaves eight hundred years later.
They go on to examine the origins of Egyptology: the exhaustive surveys carried out under Napoleon following the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, Jean-François Champollion's cracking of the hieroglyphic "code", and the work of scholars such as Auguste Mariette and Sir William Flinders Petrie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Links with Freemasonry and the effects of mass tourism are also explored.
Finally, the book considers the less orthodox theories of the pyramidologists, and looks at how the Great Pyramid has become a magnet for all manner of charlatans, heretics and cranks, among them the mystic, "Madame" Helena Blavatsky, and the self-styled "Great Beast" Aleister Crowley, who claimed to have spent his honeymoon inside the tomb.
