Khufu’s pyramid on the Giza plateau, Fourth Dynasty, conventionally dated around 2560 BC. Its thirteen-acre base is level to within about 7/8 inch and its sides are oriented within roughly four arcminutes of true north; Flinders Petrie measured minus 3’43” and Glen Dash’s 2015 resurvey returned 3’54” ± 44”, confirming him. The interior runs Descending and Ascending Passages, the Queen’s Chamber and its two narrow shafts, the Grand Gallery, and the King’s Chamber under five relieving chambers. No original burial has ever been found in it or in any of the eighty-odd Egyptian pyramids, which Egyptology attributes to three thousand years of robbery and reuse. Muon imaging has since added a large void above the Grand Gallery (Nature, 2017) and a corridor behind the north face chevrons (Nature Communications, 2023); both are real and unexplained, and neither has any machine-like character. Zecharia Sitchin gives the building a third reading, as a landing beacon fitted with directional crystals, stripped by Ninurta around 8670 BC and left standing empty as a marker of its defenders’ defeat; and the only inscription naming its builder sits among the red-paint marks Howard Vyse recorded in the upper relieving chambers in 1837, which are themselves disputed. Two documents date the monument from outside that dispute: the Inventory Stela, read at face value as putting the pyramid before Khufu but dated by Egyptology to the Saite period, and the Wadi al-Jarf Papyri, the harbour records of Khufu’s twenty-seventh year, which name it Akhet-Khufu.
Connections
King’s Chamber · Christopher Dunn · Flinders Petrie · Giza Power Plant Theory · Djedi Project · Core No. 7 · Howard Vyse · Zecharia Sitchin · Inventory Stela · Wadi al-Jarf Papyri · Heit el-Ghurab · ScanPyramids · Piazzi Smyth · Vyse Cartouche Forgery Claim