The First and Second Pyramids

The “Great Pyramid” presents, moreover, many other marvels besides its size.

Continuing Pyramid Builders of Egypt,
our selection from Ancient Egypt by George Rawlinson and by Arthur Gilman published in 1886. The selection is presented in easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Pyramid Builders of Egypt

Time: c 2500 BC

The “Second Pyramid,” which stands to the north-east of the Third, at the distance of about two hundred and seventy yards, was a square of seven hundred and seven feet each way, and thus covered an area of almost eleven acres and a half, or nearly double that of the greatest building which Rome ever produced–the Coliseum. The sides rose at an angle of 52° 10′; and the perpendicular height was four hundred and fifty-four feet, or fifty feet more than that of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. The cubic contents are estimated at 71,670,000 feet; and their weight is calculated at 5,309,000 tons. Numbers of this vast amount convey but little idea of the reality to an ordinary reader, and require to be made intelligible by comparisons. Suppose, then, a solidly built stone house, with walls a foot thick, twenty feet of frontage, and thirty feet of depth from front to back; let the walls be twenty-four feet high and have a foundation of six feet; throw in party-walls to one-third the extent of the main walls–and the result will be a building containing four thousand cubic feet of masonry. Let there be a town of eighteen thousand such houses, suited to be the abode of a hundred thousand inhabitants–then pull these houses to pieces, and pile them up into a heap to a height exceeding that of the spire of the Cathedral of Vienna, and you will have a rough representation of the “Second Pyramid of Ghizeh.” Or lay down the contents of the structure in a line a foot in breadth and depth–the line would be above 13,500 miles long, and would reach more than half-way round the earth at the equator. Again, suppose that a single man can quarry a ton of stone in a week, then it would have required above twenty thousand to be employed constantly for five years in order to obtain the material for the pyramid; and if the blocks were required to be large, the number employed and the time occupied would have had to be greater.

The internal construction of the “Second Pyramid” is less elaborate than that of the Third, but not very different. Two passages lead from the outer air to a sepulchral chamber almost exactly under the apex of the pyramid, and exactly at its base, one of them commencing about fifty feet from the base midway in the north side, and the other commencing a little outside the base, in the pavement at the foot of the pyramid. The first passage was carried through the substance of the pyramid for a distance of a hundred and ten feet at a descending angle of 25° 55′, after which it became horizontal, and was tunneled through the native rock on which the pyramid was built. The second passage was wholly in the rock. It began with a descent at an angle of 21° 40′, which continued for a hundred feet; it was then horizontal for fifty feet; after which it ascended gently for ninety-six feet, and joined the first passage about midway between the sepulchral chamber and the outer air. The sepulchral chamber was carved mainly out of the solid rock below the pyramid, but was roofed in by some of the basement stones, which were sloped at an angle. The chamber measured forty-six feet in length and sixteen feet in breadth; its height in the center was twenty-two feet. It contained a plain granite sarcophagus, without inscription of any kind, eight feet and a half in length, three feet and a half in breadth, and in depth three feet. There was no coffin in the sarcophagus at the time of its discovery, and no inscription on any part of the pyramid or of its contents. The tradition, however, which ascribed it to the immediate predecessor of Men-kau-ra, may be accepted as sufficient evidence of its author.

Come we now to the “Great Pyramid,” “which is still,” says Lenormant, “at least in respect of its mass, _the most prodigious of all human constructions_,” The “Great Pyramid,” or “First Pyramid of Ghizeh,” as it is indifferently termed, is situated almost due north-east of the “Second Pyramid,” at the distance of about two hundred yards. The length of each side at the base was originally seven hundred and sixty-four feet, or fifty-seven feet more than that of the sides of the “Second Pyramid.” Its original perpendicular height was something over four hundred and eighty feet, its cubic contents exceeded eighty-nine million feet, and the weight of its mass 6,840,000 tons. In height it thus exceeded Strasburg Cathedral by above six feet, St. Peter’s at Rome by above thirty feet, St. Stephen’s at Vienna by fifty feet St. Paul’s, London, by a hundred and twenty feet, and the Capitol at Washington by nearly two hundred feet. Its area was thirteen acres, one rood, and twenty-two poles, or nearly two acres more than the area of the “Second Pyramid.” which was fourfold that of the “Third Pyramid,” which, as we have seen, was that of an ordinary London square. Its cubic contents would build a city of twenty-two thousand such houses as were above described, and laid in a line of cubic squares would reach a distance of nearly seventeen thousand miles, or girdle two-thirds of the earth’s circumference at the equator. Herodotus says that its construction required the continuous labor of a hundred thousand men for the space of twenty years, and moderns do not regard the estimate as exaggerated.

The “Great Pyramid” presents, moreover, many other marvels besides its size. First, there is the massiveness of the blocks of which it is composed. The basement stones are in many cases thirty feet long by five feet high, and four or five wide: they must contain from six hundred to seven hundred and fifty cubic feet each, and weigh from forty-six to fifty-seven tons. The granite blocks which roof over the upper sepulchral chamber are nearly nineteen feet long, by two broad and from three to four deep. The relieving stones above the same chamber, and those of the entrance passage, are almost equally massive. Generally the external blocks are of a size with which modern builders scarcely ever venture to deal, though the massiveness diminishes as the pyramid is ascended. The bulk of the interior is, however, of comparatively small stones; but even these are carefully hewn and squared, so as to fit together compactly.

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