Hi guys, today I want to answer a few questions I received on my pyramid theory. In previous
videos, I proposed that the stone Egyptian pyramids were not the work of dynastic Egyptians,
but remnants of a lost highly-advanced civilization. The tool marks at the subterranean chamber
of the great pyramid, the multiple underground shafts and some megaliths near the Giza pyramids
are all very similar. They resemble modern mining machine marks. Were they all parts
of an ancient mining system? If so, what kind of role could the pyramids have played in
this mining operation?
All the Egyptian pyramids are almost completely solid structures built with millions of tons
of blocks, such as the two smaller great pyramids on the Giza Plateau, the Khafre and the Menkaure.
The Great pyramid has the most elaborate interior design but its opening is only 0.014% of its
entire volume. It’s like a glass of water in a pool. From a construction point of view,
it make zero sense to use so much building material to construct these enormous solid
pyramids with so little usable interior space; unless the goal was to pack as much material
together as possible. These reasons lead to my theory that if the Giza shafts were excavated
for mining, then the pyramids might be carefully designed and executed cemented mine tailing
and waste rock storage piles.
Please don't underestimate the importance of mine waste storage - just because "they
are piles of waste" doesn’t mean they weren’t created with great accuracy. Through history,
failed waste piles, slag heaps and spoil tips have caused devastating disasters. If we don’t
want to see this happen again, then we need to understand the paramount importance of
effectively planning, designing and building mine waste storage sites.
Today's mine waste storage sites are usually designed to "permanently" store potentially
harmful materials thus extra care and consideration must be included in their design. Various
simulations are utilized to compute data to study the sustainability of mine waste piles
so they might be able to have service lives as long as a few hundreds of years without
causing major environmental and public health problems. This is not an easy task. By comparison,
most of our modern constructions can last 40 to 60 years, sometimes longer. The 100-year
service life typically applies only to main structural components of a bridge. Who can
say something will last 100 years? Architects or engineers can’t guarantee that only based
on calculations or simulations. To be sure, you’d have to wait 100 years to check. That’s
why there are no consensus-based standards of long-term infrastructure performance in
today’s construction industry.
Now, mine waste storage sites need to have an even longer service life than infrastructures
and they don’t get the same level of maintenance. Plus, we have just started to realize that
mine wastes needed to be treated and stored away only a few decades ago, before that dumping
waste in rivers and lakes was the norm. Our understanding on how to deal with mine waste
is quite elementary. Maybe that’s why we can’t visualize how the super impressive
and seemingly timeless pyramids can be related to something as unglamorous as mining waste.
Because of our limited knowledge on mine waste treatment and storage, we are facing the great
challenge of waste pollution and acid mine drainage. When the water and air seep through
the mine waste and when sulfide minerals in mine waste are exposed to oxidizing conditions,
this process produces sulphuric acid and causes acid mine drainage. Acid mine drainage is
a global crisis with long-term detrimental effects to our groundwater and environment.
Researchers have done many studies on how to reduce acid drainage and mitigate its negative
environmental impact. Cemented mine waste is a new concept with very promising potential
since this method can solidify mine waste into concrete/ geopolymer thus minimizing
the chances of mine waste being in direct contact with water and oxygen, hence it produces
much less acid mine drainage. Multiple scientific papers have provided results of material studies
on pyramid blocks and casing stones being man-made concrete. So, it’s conceivable
that the pyramids might be built with cemented mine waste blocks and finessed with a protective
layer of dense casing stones to limit the amount of oxygen and water getting inside
the pyramids, thus it would have generated relatively small amounts of acid mine drainage.
Regarding the various interior systems of Egyptian pyramids, I proposed that these systems
might be seepage water drainage and treatment systems to maintain structural stability and
to minimize and neutralize acid mine drainage. Since the 1st modern investigation, efflorescence
salt deposits inside chambers have been seen and reported, which means there has been long-term
on-going moisture accumulation. This intrinsic feature might indicate that these chambers
were designed to collect moisture and water.
The air shafts might act as perforated concrete drainage channels which collect and direct
water towards chambers. The interior chambers might work like the drainage galleries; the
underground chambers might be either anoxic limestone drains or a successive alkalinity
producing system, which is also called a vertical flow system with multiple treatment rooms
on different levels. Because this drainage system would collect and move seepage in designated
channels, fewer pyramid blocks would be exposed to seepage and therefore wouldn’t generate
acid mine drainage, which is dangerous to the living environment.
I’m putting a list of my previous pyramid videos in the description section if you want
to check out how my theory has developed. Now let’s start with the questions I received
from my last video. I decide to address four questions among the many because these have
been asked repeatedly.
1: If the pyramid interiors were to treat acid mine drainage, are there signs of this
inside the pyramids? I think there might be evidence of acid mine
drainage inside the great pyramid but we didn't look for or recognize it. Now I’m going
to show you photos of the Great Pyramid’s interior. Please pay close attention to the
orange colors since they could be signs of iron oxide and acid drainage. I didn’t color
touch any of these photos. Here are some shots of the Grand Gallery “entry” before it
got covered up. There appears to be water or acid drainage erosion. The walls of the
Grand Gallery also show orange colored drainage stains.
There are some dark spots on the high ceiling of the grand gallery; some have said these
could be explosion or scorch marks. But these spotted marks indicate close-range small explosions
or scorching and it’s hard to explain why small explosions and torches were deployed
all the way up to the top of the gallery which is over 8m or 26’ tall. Is it possible that
these marks are actually drainage stains, like the ones we see in some unfortunate water
leaking situations? Just a thought.
On the ceiling of the relieving chamber, we can see graffiti written on top of orange
stains which means the stains existed before the graffiti. The air shafts in the King's
chamber seem to have water erosion marks and the interior looks darkened which could be
signs of acid drainage. The stone surfaces in the Queen's chamber look rough with dark
patches and might have been eroded. Some photos taken from inside of the air shafts show that
the shafts’ bottoms are darker than the walls. Were these damages caused by passing
time, man-made wear and tear or acid erosion? Hard to say. The interior spaces are periodically
cleaned so traces of iron oxide might be removed occasionally. Furthermore, certain areas in
the passages also show a slight orange color. In the subterranean chamber, we can see some
orange or reddish residues on walls and rock channels. In this photo, the color contrast
between the grey ceiling and the reddish rock channels is visible. I think these might be
signs of acid mine drainage.
2: Now that the casing stones are mostly gone. If the pyramids were really mine waste storage,
without this protective layer, why don’t we see acid drainage onsite?
Let’s see some exterior photos of pyramids. On the Giza plateau, many exposed pyramid
blocks have slight orangey color that look like drainage stains. These stains are darker
than regular limestone. We can also see the darker stains on other pyramids such as the
Bent. Are they caused by acid mine drainage? I’m not sure but it could be a distinct
possibility. If pyramid core stones were cemented mine waste blocks, being exposed to the elements,
they would eventually break down. The sulfide minerals which were previously bounded to
the concrete blocks would degrade and react with the environment thus there should have
formed acid mine drainage on block surfaces.
The red pyramid got its name from the warm hues of the iron-rich limestone blocks. Though
under similar sunlight, the red pyramid doesn’t seem redder than the Giza pyramids, right?
In a prior video, I cited a research paper which contains a material analysis of the
Giza pyramids. According to this paper, the core stones of the three great pyramids all
have iron oxide. Therefore, the Giza pyramid blocks would have generated some acid drainage
on the surface when exposed to oxygen and water, like what we see on the pyramids. Of
course, this is my conjecture and scientific investigations on this subject are needed.
3: How can air shafts be drainage channels if they are not watertight? Also, the shafts
in the Queens chamber have doors, wouldn’t that block the drainage flow?
Certain drainage channels actually don't need to be watertight - they are designed to be
perforated and that’s how they collect water. A perforated pipe or channel allows water
to seep from the surroundings into the pipe through small holes or slots along the pipe.
This kind of pipe can make a great underground drainage system since it absorbs excess water
and drains it out of the way.
Here are a few perforated drainage channels and pipes. A French drain sits at ground-level
and covered with gravel. A curtain drain is an underground trench and it usually begins
around two feet below ground level. In concrete gravity dams, their internal drainage systems
consist of a series of vertical or vertically-inclined wells or boreholes of porous concrete pipes
that facilitate draining water away. I think the air shafts in the great pyramid might
have acted as perforated drainage channels - kind of similar to the porous concrete drain.
Now about the doors inside the air shafts. The air shafts from the King's Chamber were
found to exit to the outside of the pyramid, and it’s possible that they used to be covered
with casing stones. The Queen's Chamber air shafts do not lead to the outside and both
have "doors" about 200' or 61 m into the shafts, which means they are unobstructed for 200'
to allow seepage water to drain into the chamber. I did a rough measurement to show how far
200’ is into the air shafts and it turns out that the shafts end fairly close to the
exterior layer. The so-called doors might not open to anything and are just the beginning
of the drainage channels. This matches the fact that the shafts are empty and there is
nothing behind the doors but a rough looking block a short distance away. I know some may
ask if they are not real doors then why they have handles. Here is what I think: the mysterious
copper handles at the ending slabs of the air shafts might work like today’s concrete
pipe caps or plugs which could also have handles. Don’t they look similar? These air shafts
might have served utilitarian purposes by functioning as drain pipes. Btw in the use
of perforated pipes, holes can be placed either face up or face down depending on the design
preference.
4: Are there other ancient sites with mine waste storage like the pyramids? Megalithic
sites are all over the world, why would this practice only have been seen in Egypt?
I think there might be other mine waste "pyramids" around the world, for example the Bosnian
Pyramids might belong to this category. They are really large pyramids with complex underground
tunnel systems. According to excavators, some man-made stone walls were underneath the Neolithic
and Roman cultural layers which mean the tunnels are potentially older than Neolithic time.
Also, some tunnels were backfilled - this is common practice in underground mining operations.
That could be another subject to research in the future.
Ok, in summary, I believe there appears to be signs of acid mine drainage inside and
outside the pyramids. Therefore, my theory of the pyramids being mine waste storage sites
with their interior structures acting as seepage water and acid drainage treatment systems
could be a real possibility and worth serious consideration. Of course, there are more questions
to be answered. One such question is why the giant great pyramid only has 4 air shafts
as drainage channels? These shafts are merely 9 inches or 23cm square. Weren’t they too
small to act as the drainage channels in the massive pyramid? This question is directly
related to when and in what kind of climate the pyramids were built. Today’s structures
are usually built to be suitable for their local climates and the construction of the
pyramids was likely no different. Were the pyramids created during the Green Sahara period
which ended 5,000 years ago, or a dry time similar to today? I will discuss my findings
on this subject in my next video. If you have any insights, please leave me a comment. If
you like my video, please give me a thumbs up and subscribe. Don’t forget to hit the
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me – my patreon link is below. I have a wide range of topics that I want to share
with you. This is Curious Being, I’m Tina. Thanks for watching and see you next time.