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The Great Pyramid of Giza has a long and fascinating history whence it has been probed and tinkered
with by civilizations over four Millenia.
It is a uniquely difficult monument to study because so many critical parts have been damaged,
altered, or given ill-advised repairs.
When examining the evidence that remains inside the Great Pyramid, one needs to read numerous
past accounts of excavations and explorations in order to understand what has occurred and
put the existing clues into context.
I find it particularly strange that the Great Pyramid as a destination doesn’t offer much
assistance to help tourists understand what they are looking at, and many visitors are
left hopelessly confused when they come across unusual features.
One of the most common points of curiosity I notice among visitors, are the isolated
granite fragments that remain inside the pyramid.
There are four substantial granite blocks that have been scattered inside the Great
Pyramid, and their shared history is a story of both incredible destruction and meticulous
preservation.
It was only 20 plus years ago that a fifth large granite fragment remained inside the
pyramid, located within the King’s Chamber.
Sadly, this fragment was removed as part of a cleaning and restoration campaign, and I
have never managed to find documentation about its current location.
Was this block part of the floor that had been dug up in the corner, perhaps now reseated
and filled in as shown here?
It seems probable, but without explicit documentation we must be cautious with our assumptions.
This rare photo shows the hole in the floor partially restored with the center portion
filled in.
Since the granite fragment is no longer visible in the room, this is the best evidence I have
that the block is now part of the floor in this place.
Whether or not this spot in the floor was the original location, remains uncertain.
You can see in these pictures that this block had been pushed around the King’s chamber
a bit here and there, and this is a good context for thinking about what surely would have
befallen the other four remaining stones.
Turning our attention to these four present granite fragments, they are located as follows:
The first and most impressive fragment is located outside the original entrance to the
Great Pyramid, just to the left as you approach the descending corridor.
The second fragment is found within the small alcove that is located at the bottom of the
descending corridor, right before the entrance to the unfinished subterranean chamber.
The third fragment is balancing on a ledge halfway down the large central pit that has
been dug within the subterranean chamber.
And the fourth fragment is partially buried within the grotto that lies along the well
shaft where the bottom of the pyramid meets the bedrock of the Giza plateau.
Written accounts of these stones begin with Howard Vyse in 1837, who mentions multiple
granite fragments in the descending corridor near the forced passage just beyond the granite
plugs.
However, Vyse does not describe the fragments with enough detail to identify them.
The first and largest fragment outside the pyramid is the earliest to be identified.
It was documented by Flinders Petrie in 1881, its location being where Vyse found it just
below the ascending corridor junction.
At this time the descending corridor was still clogged with sand and debris, and so Petrie
only observed a single bore hole and 3 dressed faces on the stone.
Presumably the other portions were obscured and Petrie did not take the time to dig out
the entire block.
A couple of decades later Lorenzo Covington of ‘Covington’s tomb’ fame, propped
the stone up and affixed an iron gate above it as a means of locking access to the inner
chambers of the pyramid.
Brothers John and Morton Edgar give additional documentation about this in their 1910 book,
“The Great Pyramid Passages Volume 1”.
The Edgars state that Gaston Maspero, the Director of the Service of Antiquities, lent
them the keys to the iron gate so that they could gain access to the inner pyramid chambers.
The gate is quite visible in these Edgar brother photos, but the granite fragment is much harder
to make out.
There is further confusion about this fragment because the Edgar brothers state that it had
5 finished faces, yet still only observe 1 single bore hole.
Notably this light-colored section in the lower eastern corner here is not the granite
fragment, the Edgars state explicitly that it is a different block made of limestone.
This block is propped against the granite gate and obscures the lower portion from this
angle.
This limestone fragment seems to have been lost to time, which is lamentable because
it appears to have remnants of a bore hole along the edge and may contain valuable clues
to the history of the Great Pyramid.
The large granite fragment in its current state has four finished faces, the front,
back, top and one lateral side.
Two bore holes are easily seen, and the third is a bit more subtle because it is only partially
intact along the break line.
So how do we reconcile that the Edgars observed only 1 hole and 5 finished faces?
Taking the dimensions of the granite fragment as it exists today, I’m fairly confident
the block is the same one that once served as the gate.
The granite piece would be slightly too wide to fit perpendicular in the corridor, and
so fitted in place it would need to be askew.
The clearly visible iron gate portion looks to be askew as well, matching the orientation
of the stone it sits upon.
The Edgars also state that the gate was only about 18 inches tall, and this closely matches
the vertical space that would be available if the block was seated with the top smooth
face against the floor and the bore holes parallel to the corridor at the bottom.
The photo shows the faintest trace of the broken side of the granite block as it tapers
downward, and presumably this small, round, light colored-section is a limestone block
placed there to fill the small gap.
Since the two fully intact bore holes would be in the deepest, lowest corner where the
fragment and corridor meet – perhaps the Edgars never fully dug out the sand here and
thus failed to notice them.
The partial bore hole along the break line would be much less likely to clog up and thus
be more easily observed.
Also, the Edgars would only be looking for a single bore hole based on the information
provided by Petrie.
As for the fifth finished face that is now missing, I can only speculate that a small
portion of the other lateral side was still intact 110 years ago and has since broken
off.
One final point of confusion about this important granite block is the documentation given by
Vito Maragioglio & Celeste Rinaldi.
Their detailed survey and 1965 publication about the Great Pyramid are perhaps the most
valuable modern resource for researchers.
It is available free on the Internet Archive at archive.org – and I will put a link to
it in the description.
I have the utmost respect for Maragioglio and Rinaldi, but they seem to have made serious
errors about the granite fragment in question.
Their figure looks nothing like block as we currently observe it, but I will try to offer
an explanation why.
I believe Maragioglio and Rinaldi never personally observed the block, but instead made a reconstruction
based on the combined descriptions of Petrie and the Edgar brothers.
Five finished faces, and the partial remains of a bore hole along the break line.
Interestingly this reconstruction looks extremely similar to the missing limestone block mentioned
earlier, so perhaps they mistook it for the granite fragment in the Edgar brothers’
photo.
This is a great reminder of why it’s so important to verify sources with all the available
physical evidence, because with every past mistake, the truth gets a little harder to
reach.
Fortunately, we live in a time where you can find quality photos of the pyramids online,
and thus anyone can research for themselves.
Now let’s travel down the descending corridor to the next granite fragment, located within
the alcove before the subterranean chamber.
This fragment has remained in its current location since it was first documented by
the Edgar brothers in 1910.
It’s the only large fragment without bore holes, but there is an interesting small groove
along a finished face.
A proper reconstruction of the block in combination with the other granite fragments could make
this groove a valuable clue, but that will have to wait until mainstream Egyptology values
the importance of these stones.
Moving into the subterranean chamber we encounter a difficult granite fragment to photograph,
located halfway down into the fenced-off pit.
It’s just visible enough to make out two distinct bore holes very close in size and
orientation to the first granite fragment located outside.
This stone was also documented by the Edgar brothers.
It was first discovered by Lorenzo Covington a little further up the descending corridor
than the bottom of the well shaft.
The Edgars write that a mishap occurred whereby a small granite shard was dislodged and plunged
down the descending corridor, striking this block and causing it to tumble nearly to the
bottom.
The small granite shard is now lost, but this block remains and was reported to be undamaged
from the incident.
Later the Edgars moved the block into the subterranean chamber to get it out of the
way, and since then someone has rolled it into the pit, where it now rests.
The final granite fragment located within the grotto has been a source of confusion
for many researchers, but its story is rather simple.
It was first written about by Nathanial Davison in 1763 who noted about 8 meters down the
well shaft a large stone nearly blocked passage through it.
Indeed, explorers of the 16 and early 1700s before him also remarked about how the well
shaft was quite plugged up with debris.
However, once you go back to 1591, a Venetian explorer, Prosper Alpini, writes that the
well shaft was:
Quote, “easily explored to a depth of seventy feet”, end quote.
So sometime in the years following 1591 a vandal rolled this granite block down into
the well where it became logically stuck shortly after the shaft makes a lateral bend.
It remained approximately in this location until 1817 when the captain Giovanni Caviglia
undertook the task of clearing the well shaft of debris.
He recorded the granite block being a little over 11 meters down the shaft when it was
found.
Captain Caviglia doesn’t explicitly record what he does with this stone, but it can be
logically deduced that it was dumped into the grotto which was less than 10 meters further
down the shaft.
From approximate measurements of the granite fragment, we can calculate its weight at 600
pounds or more.
Therefore, hauling it upwards would have been prohibitively difficult.
The bottom of the shaft was also still closed off when Caviglia began his work.
As Caviglia continued his downward excavation of the well shaft, he brought the loose debris
up to the Grotto, which remained the closest dumping spot available.
Thus, the granite block became partially buried in this loose debris that followed it.
The Edgar Brothers observed the granite stone in the Grotto in 1910, and captured a small
corner of it in their photograph.
The stone remains in this location to this day.
Now having accounted for the known whereabouts of all four remaining fragments, what can
we deduce about their journey and original purpose?
It shouldn’t be surprising that the granite stones all tended to travel downwards.
Every time an explorer rolled over a stone to examine it or simply push it out of the
way, the fragments would fall further down into the pyramid.
Other than the 3 enormous plugs that block the ascending corridor, the only other granite
currently found in the Great Pyramid is in the King’s chamber and portcullis antechamber.
The portcullis having been entirely demolished, seems like a probable location where large
pieces of granite could have come from.
The strongest clue that the fragments match the portcullis are the 4 vertical grooves
in the antechamber south wall above the entrance to the King’s chamber.
These grooves are all 8 – 9.5 centimeters in diameter.
The horizontal spaces between each groove are also precisely equal at about 17 centimeters.
The diameter of the grooves decreases slightly as you travel down them, which is typical
of tubular drill holes, and accounts for some of the minor variation in their size.
Remarkably, the groove diameters and the spacing between them are a very close match to the
dimensions of the drill holes present in the rogue granite fragments.
The blocks at the entrance to the pyramid and the bottom of the pit have had their holes
measured quite precisely.
The block inside the Grotto is not so perfectly measured, but with the Edgar brothers verifying
two drill holes, one of which seems visible in this photograph, they can be presumed to
fit these dimensions as well until someone can explicitly prove otherwise.
The reason for the holes matching the grooves is that ropes would pass through them to operate
the portcullis and facilitate the movement of the granite stones.
The grooves exist on the south wall so that the inner-most portcullis can be flush against
the wall and still allow space for the ropes to pass through.
For the granite fragment without drill holes, we can rely upon its physical dimensions and
finished faces to match it to the portcullis as well.
The key metric is that each original portcullis block had 55 centimeters of depth to fit into
its vertical housing.
This means the portcullis blocks themselves would be 1 royal cubit deep, or about 52.5
centimeters.
The granite fragment lacking drill holes matches this dimension, and the 3 other fragments
do as well.
Author Charles Rigano gives a good summary of this in his 2014 book, Pyramids of the
Giza Plateau.
Even though we now have a probable solution for the original purpose of the granite fragments,
there is still much we could learn from their reconstruction.
Khufu’s portcullis was an ingenious and complex apparatus that modern Egyptology has
neglected to study, and its importance in relation to all the pyramids of the Old Kingdom
cannot be overstated.
In future videos I will examine in great detail how the portcullis likely functioned, and
how it served as a foundation for the design of pyramid complexes for many centuries after.
We owe a great debt to explorers such as Petrie, Vyse, Caviglia, and the Edgar brothers who
were wise enough to understand that these granite fragments represented important clues
to a mystery they did not possess enough knowledge to solve.
Rather than dispose of them with the rest of the loose debris inside the Great Pyramid,
they kept them safe and relatively undisturbed so that future explorers might come upon them
to uncover new secrets held within the pyramid.
This is a lesson in humility modern Egyptology ought to learn from.
Instead of constantly patching up holes and incidentally destroying evidence with cosmetic
repairs, the pyramid should be preserved in such a manner that honors the entire history
of the monument rather than recreating a crude facsimile of its original design.
And finally, the four rogue granite fragments ought to be examined to determine how they
might be reconstructed, and rightfully hold a place of prestige inside the new Grand Egyptian
Museum.
In future videos it will be my honor to share additional discoveries about them with you
all.
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