ABSTRACT

While recognizing the immensity of Cheops’ genius31 I hold that his authoritarian attitudes and his hubris led him to commit a serious mistake in the construction of his exceptional pyramid.

Myths refuse to die; there will always be people with a boundless admiration for the Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid.They see the monument as the superposition of magnificent stones cut to the tenth of a millimetre on each of their six faces. Others, without having ever been inside the pyramid, go further and claim that these stone parallelepipeds, like giant sugar lumps, were made of concrete poured into moulds 32.What a mistake! The Egyptians of the time were far from knowing everything and had no idea about recent techniques of cast concrete. Slender in build and with a life expectancy of only about twenty years, the Egyptians could not possibly cast and then drag some five million tonnes of stones. One has only to see a few of the corridors inside the pyramid to find evidence of the inaccuracy of these assertions. On the contrary, we find two quite different kinds of masonry side by side, a masonry of the rich and a masonry of the poor.The latter unexpectedly ends up by causing damage to the former.