The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind by Graham Hancock; Robert Bauval

simple reason that building shafts on an incline would not save time or work at all. Quite the contrary: no construction engineer or builder could possibly agree that the ‘shortest route’ is the best route in this case—even though it may seem so to those looking only at the geometry. The truth, as Egyptian architect Dr. Alexander Badawy first noted in the 1960s, is that to build inclined shafts rather than to have simple horizontal channels leading to the outside of the Pyramid would create many difficulties—and especially so when we consider the high precision and rigid consistency of the inclinations. [110]

    11. The King’s and Queen’s Chambers and their four shafts. Note that the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber were not originally cut through into the chamber but stopped short several inches from the inner walls. The shafts were opened in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon.
    To build inclined shafts rather than horizontal ones entails five tedious operations. First, the base course must be prepared; this calls for the shaping of special blocks with their upper faces sloping to serve as the ‘floor’ of each shaft. Secondly, more special blocks have to be prepared with U-shaped inner faces to form the profile, i.e., the ‘walls’ and ‘ceilings’ of the shafts. Thirdly, yet more special blocks have to be cut with their undersides inclined in order to cover the sides of the shafts. Fourthly, the tops of the shafts must be covered with other special blocks with sloping undersides. Fifthly, the main masonry courses of the Pyramid have to be integrated with these special design features along the entire lengths of the shafts.

    12. Details of the Queen’s Chamber and its shafts.
    If ventilation was really the objective then the question that must be asked is this: why opt for such complications and difficulties when an effective flow of air could have been provided for the chambers in a much simpler way? From an engineer’s point of view the obvious solution would have been to leave a masonry joint open—say 20 cm.—running horizontally from the top of each chamber right to the outside of the monument. In this case no special cutting of blocks would have been necessary, nor indeed any tedious alignments or levelling work.
    In other words the ‘shortest route’ is not by any means the best route for the practical purposes of ventilation and, besides, it should be obvious that the Pyramid builders were not interested in time/energy-saving schemes—otherwise they would not have favoured such gigantic, multimillion-ton monuments in the first place. It therefore follows that we are unlikely to be rewarded in seeking an explanation for the precise north-south alignments of these steeply inclined shafts in terms of a time/energy-saving rationale based on quaint geometrical figures.

    13. Queen’s Chamber wall and shaft mouth.
    Any doubt over this issue can be resolved by a close study of the shafts of the Queen’s Chamber. Unlike the King’s Chamber shafts, those in the Queen’s Chamber (a) do not exit on the outside of the monument and (b) were not originally cut through the Chamber’s limestone walls. Instead the builders left the last five inches intact in the last block over the mouth of each of the shafts—thus rendering them invisible and inaccessible to any casual intruder. With the help of a steel chisel, they were finally discovered in 1872 by the British engineer Waynman Dixon, a Freemason whose curiosity had been aroused by the shafts in the King’s Chamber and who decided to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber.

    14. Construction details of the Great Pyramid’s shafts. At least four different kinds of blocks (A, B, C and D), continuing the full length of the shafts, were required for the successful completion of these mysterious features of the Pyramid. The engineering problems would have been immense. The notion that the primary purpose of the shafts was for