In the last episode, I traced the development of numerology from the ancient Greek Pythagorean cult’s number mysticism to modern day hucksters and pseudohistorians. Among the claims made by modern day numerologists and neo-neo-Pythagoreans is the idea that Pythagoras’s number magic extended to distant cultures, all the way to the Americas, where by measuring the statues at Easter Island, one can discern hidden numerological significance. Likewise, in my recent patron exclusive on Patreon, I looked at similar outlandish claims made by numerologists that measure and seek arcane alignments at Stonehenge. One such unconvincing claim is that the megalithic stones at Stonehenge align in some meaningful way with the pyramids at Giza. And here, after all, we find perhaps the most fruitful playground for numerologists, such that they have invented an entire field of study for themselves: pyramidology. This field of study should in no way be confused with the legitimate academic field of Egyptology, which comprises the scholarly study of Egyptian history, religion, literature, language, art, and yes, architecture. What is pyramidology, then, you might ask? Also called pyramidism, it is a pseudoscience that makes insupportable claims about the occult significance of the design and measurements of the pyramids. The nonsense of pyramidology seems to have begun with John Herschel, son of the famous astronomer William Herschel, who while brilliant also perpetuated some misguided notions of his own, such as that Mars, the moon, and even the sun were inhabited by living beings. Much as was done with Stonehenge, John Herschel attempted to date the Great Pyramid by imagining that it had been built with an eye toward alignment with the heavens. The entrance was a steep shaft, which must have seemed to him inclined toward the heavens in the same way that his telescopes were, and so he performed calculations to determine what it might have been constructed to align with, since it didn’t seem to align with anything much at the time. He figured that if the Great Pyramid had been built in 2160 BCE, then it would have lined right up with alpha Draconis, a binary star in the constellation Draco. Why this star? Because it was the only one he could find that lined up, and he was wrong, as we now know the Great Pyramid is far older. But Herschel had unwittingly started something—the act of searching for measurements and alignments in the Great Pyramid that could be claimed to have occult significance: aka pyramidology. In an 1859 book by one John Taylor called The Great Pyramid, Why Was it Built and Who Built it?, the notion became fully formed. Notwithstanding the fact that we have had convincing answers to the questions of his title since antiquity, Taylor sought different answers in numbers. He thought of the Great Pyramid as a benchmark for certain important measurements. Everywhere in its measurements, he believed that the irrational number phi, the golden ratio, had been planned into the pyramid’s dimensions, and he believed that its height related in some wise to the circumference of the Earth. Taylor’s book would likely have come and gone with little impact had it not caught the fancy of the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, who wrote his own book, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, taking Taylor’s ideas even further, finding that dimensions of the Great Pyramid also showed that ancient Egyptians had knowledge of pi to many decimals. Of course, Smyth made it easier for himself and future pyramidologists to establish their claims by imagining a whole new system of measurements that would be needed for his calculations to work, so-called “pyramid meters” and “pyramid inches,” unable even to reconcile these units with one system of measurement, metric or Imperial. Although they did not know it at the time, a certain papyrus was then in the possession of a Scottish antiquarian named Alexander Rhind, and this papyrus, which was in fact a collection of Egyptian arithmetic problems and algebraic equations, would convincingly disprove all their theories by demonstrating that ancient Egyptians had no knowledge of the golden ratio or pi, at least not in the manner that pyramidologists claim—that they purposely used both in the construction of the pyramids. While pyramidologists claim they knew the numbers to many decimal places, when we see them actually approach the numbers in their mathematical calculations, they often miscalculated them, with pi being more like 3.16. But none of that matters to pyramidologists, who gleefully massage the numbers of every angle and every passage in the Great Pyramid, pretending they are far more exact than they really are. Perhaps the most absurd pyramidologist claim came in 1925, when Basil Stewart, author of numerous works on pyramidology, made the wild assertion that the Great Pyramid’s interior served as a kind of three-dimensional chart of future history, kind of like the Torah code was said to be a hidden record of all things to come. And since Egyptians could not have accomplished this themselves, then again, it must have been some supernatural power, a god or perhaps aliens. As absurd as the claims of pyramidologists were and are, for they are again on the rise with the emergence of a new generation hucksters, they are far from the first baseless claims made about the Pyramids. Rather, they are just the tip of a massive pile of such claims stretching back through history.

The topic of the Pyramids and all the nonsense that surrounds them has been one that I have wanted to tackle for a long time, and one that I confess to being more than a little intimidated to take on. However, when it arose in my reading on numerology, I thought that this was as good a time as any, and it helps that I’ve found a great book covering the topic by Jason Colavito, The Legends of the Pyramids: Myths and Misconceptions about Ancient Egypt, that is serving as a great guide as I try to navigate the topic. What makes me perhaps even more leery of taking this topic on than I might otherwise be is that I am myself guilty of having accidentally spread a myth about pyramids. Back in my episode The Deluge and the Ark Seekers, in addition to making a weird error about hybrid species, I made a comparison between the construction of the pyramids and the supposed building of Noah’s ark, saying that it involved a great number of slaves. This is what happens when I rely on somewhat out of date resources without double checking everything. It was long believed that slaves were employed in the construction of the pyramids, since some of the earliest written records of the pyramids suggested this was so, but archaeologists, examining the graves of pyramid workers, the port city where supplies for the building of the pyramids were landed, and the graffiti left by laborers have concluded that this was inaccurate, and that the pyramids were built by Egyptians who were paid and fed for their work, perhaps in rotating tours of service if they were pressed into their labors. Egyptian and other pyramids have long been lightning rods for myths, misconceptions, and misinformation, the exploding of which is the central purpose of this podcast at this point. They have come up time and time again. Think of the hyperdiffusionist claims of those who believe all pyramids the world over, in the Americas and in Africa, for example, must have been built by the same peoples, as discussed in my series Before Columbus, about Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories. And other pseudohistory that we’ve seen rearing its head in many an episode will come up as we delve more deeply beneath the pyramids, like connections to Atlantis and ancient astronauts. The pyramids are a mainstay of conspiracy claims about hidden histories, and because of that, as we will see, false claims about them are the stock in trade of grifters, some of whom you may know, like Graham Hancock, and some of whom you may not know, like Billy Carson. But the grift has a long history when it comes to the pyramids in Egypt, which we will see.

Charles Piazzi Smyth, popularizer of pyramidology

When we begin to look at the history of pyramid misinformation, it becomes clear why so much false information appeared and spread. It is simply because, for a very long while, little was known from historical records about the ancient Egyptians that built it. Indeed, this was the case for the majority of human history, by which I mean recorded history. If we compare Egyptian civilization to ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, Western knowledge of their culture was minimal, but this was not due to a lack of historical documentation or the destruction of historical records by invaders, as was the case in the Americas. Ancient Egyptians kept extensive records in the form of countless inscriptions and papyri. The problem was that, by the Middle Ages, there was no one who could still read the ancient hieroglyphs, even among Egyptians themselves. For around 2 thousand years, Egyptology and all knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization relied on very few sources, such as the writings of an Egyptian priest named Manetho whose work survived in Greek, but not in its entirety. But Manetho wrote during the third century BCE, the Hellenistic period, long removed from the time of the pyramids’ construction. Josephus says of Manetho that he relied on “nameless oral tradition” and “myths and legends,” which isn’t so much a criticism as it was simply the practice of historians of the era. There is some sense that Manetho was influenced by Greek writings about Egypt, that he attempted to reconcile his dates with claims already circulated. He worked from ancient king lists, and his work was principally just a listing of deities and pharaohs. What fragments of his work that survive record only the general age of pyramid building, that it began with the architect of the first step pyramid, Imhotep, in the third dynasty. Of the pyramid king himself, Khufu, whom Manetho called Suphis and whom the Greeks called Cheops, who is credited with constructing the Great Pyramid at Giza, Manetho only says that he reigned 63 years, built the Great Pyramid, and “conceived a contempt for the gods,” and composed a certain sacred book. That’s it. Nothing about how or why the pyramid had been built, almost as if such questions were unimportant. Beyond this, the records of Egypt were inaccessible to historians until French adventurer and Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, who reportedly always kept a copy of Manetho on hand, finally deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s using the Rosetta Stone, a recently discovered trilingual inscription, written in both Egyptian and Greek, that would serve as the key to finally understanding Egyptian scripts.

Nevertheless, even with Egyptian writings inaccessible to us, we still were able to learn a great deal about the pyramids simply from the archaeological record, and what can be learned from archaeology goes a long way toward debunking the wildest of claims about the building of the pyramids. For example, notions that the pyramids were built as repositories of ancient knowledge or advanced technology or as some kind of puzzle box whose measurements and angles reveal some advanced understanding of the universe can be convincingly refuted with a look at the development of pyramid building. The archaeological record demonstrates that pyramids were always built as tombs for pharaohs. There is a clear evolution of pyramid technology, starting with the earliest funeral mounds, which were just a burial pit covered with a tumulus mound such as might be seen in many cultures all over the world. From there, we see the emergence of stepped mounds, when rather than just a pit, the mound was reinforced with mudbrick structures, called mastabas, in which rooms could be filled with the belongings of the dead. From this point, the development of a more permanent mound in the form of a step pyramid, such as the one found at Saqqara for the burial of Pharaoh Djoser, was inevitable. Not until much later, with the ability to read ancient Egyptian scripts, would we be able to ascertain the symbolic meaning of the pyramids and their connection to Egyptian belief about the resurrection of the dead, identifying the earthen mound with the sprouting of new life after the annual flooding of the Nile. Nevertheless, the funerary purpose of pyramids was exceedingly clear, as was the reason for the eventual size of the Great Pyramid, as we see the tombs of pharaohs growing over time, such that each king seems to have desired to outdo his predecessors. And the desire of powerful men to leave a lasting monument behind needs no explanation. As much as the Egyptians were preoccupied with immortality, and as much as everyone wants to make their mark on the world, men like the Pharaoh, Khufu, who is credited with the building of the Great Pyramid, especially want to be remembered. And as we have seen, the building of his Great Pyramid has ensured that his memory will live forever.

A *mastaba*, the forerunner of pyramidal structures, likewise used to cover a burial pit.

If the question of why they were built should never have really been a question, neither, perhaps, should have been the question of how, for while the writings of Egyptians were long unreadable, the writings of Greeks were not, and the earliest known mention of the pyramids describes their construction in surprising detail. In the 5th century, BCE, after the Athenians had come to Egypt to aid a revolt against the Persian Empire, the “Father of History” himself, the Greek historian Herodotus, traveled to Egypt, saw the Great Pyramid at Giza, spoke with Egyptians about its history, and recorded what he learned. Indeed, Herodotus’s account was perhaps the most important work on Egyptian history for something like 200 years, until Manetho, who regarded Herodotus’s account as so important that he refers to it several times, correcting the Hellenized names that Herodotus used—calling Khufu Cheops—to different Hellenized names of his own—calling Khufu Suphis. But regardless of the name Herodotus used, he was clearly talking about Khufu. He says that he spoke with Egyptian priests who traced Egyptian history back 10,000 years, and they painted the picture of Khufu as a tyrant who closed the temples and forced all his subjects into back breaking labor, building the Great Pyramid for him. This is sometimes cited as the beginning of the myth about slave labor building the pyramids, but Herodotus says he “bade all the Egyptians work for him,” and that they were only made to work “for each three months continually,” indicating more of a national service scenario. The priests apparently also told Herodotus about the great expense Khufu took to feed well all the workers, a hundred thousand of them at a time, for more than thirty years. Considering this, surely keeping the populace busy and therefore unlikely to rebel under his authoritarian rule can be added to the list of reasons for the Great Pyramid’s construction. As for the mysterious process by which the massive structure was assembled with stone blocks so huge that, as any pyramid huckster today will tell you, they would have been impossible to move, it didn’t seem so impossible to Herodotus, who described the stone quarries in which the blocks were cut—quarries that have been located and stand as clear evidence for rational explanations of pyramid construction. And he described in detail how the stones were transported on boats, and how they were raised by “machines”—likely meaning crude ancient devices like shear legs—and that such machines were easily moved—as shear legs would be—and placed on every step of the pyramid in order to pass blocks up to where they would be set. It would seem that every answer we might seek about the pyramids was given nearly two and a half millennia ago, and with more recent discoveries, like the Rhind mathematical papyrus described at the top of the episode, which showed that much of Egyptian mathematics related to pyramids, and the determination by Egyptologists that they used such mechanisms as wedges, ramps, pivots, and pulleys, the idea that they could develop simple machines to raise and move stone blocks is not only believable but certain, considering we can see the fruits of their labors. As for the frequent protest by pyramidiots that if it were so simple to build so great a structure, why is it the only one of its size, this can be simply answered. First, some Egyptologists believe the Great Pyramid was built atop a natural rock outcropping, as it certainly stands on some kind of hillock, and that this location was chosen in order to minimize the work required for so great a structure. If true, this certainly would account for why other pyramids were smaller. But actually, there is another pyramid almost as large as Khufu’s, just beside it, built by his son Khafre, and it too is believed to have been built using a natural rock outcropping. But there is no need to speculate about outcroppings, because the question’s underlying assumptions are flawed. Clearly it wasn’t simple. It was a tremendous effort, of unimaginable expense, requiring the compliance and labor of many hundreds of thousands workers, made possible through what seems to have been ruthless oppression. And anyway, was it a wonder that it was ever built in the first place or a wonder that more of them were not built? Pyramid nuts cannot have it both ways.

But of course, there is sound reason to take Herodotus’s report with a dash of salt. After all, he was visiting Egypt thousands of years after the construction of the pyramids. It’s not like he actually saw its construction himself, and his account is only as trustworthy as were his sources, who appear to have led him astray in several regards. First of all, their claims of ten thousand years of history are dubious, as in the 10th millennium BCE, Egypt saw only the earliest transition from hunter gatherers to crop growing cultures. There is no indication of a centralized society until around 6000 BCE, when tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River Valley and began to establish an agricultural economy. And these chronological misconceptions were passed on to Herodotus, whose timeline relating to the reign of Khufu and the building of the pyramids was off, and he even got the order of some pharaohs reigns all wrong. Moreover, Herodotus says that the priests told him that the inscriptions on the Great Pyramid recorded all the foodstuffs that Khufu had to buy to feed his workers, making it the very largest receipt in human history, rivaled only by those really long pharmacy receipts—you know the ones. Of course, this didn’t turn out to be true. And also untrue was the story they told him that Khufu had to prostitute his own daughter to help pay for the pyramid’s construction, and that she demanded an extra block of stone from each of her “clients” so that she could build her own pyramid, which is not only inaccurate but also kind of dumb. Was Herodotus to believe she took payment in massive stone blocks. It’s unclear if Herodotus actually credited this or merely repeated it, as he was known to repeat many a myth. Indeed, because of these inaccuracies and the unreliability inherent in much of his work, some scholars have suggested he never went to Egypt in the first place, but that seems insupportable now. In the 19th century, the Westcar Papyrus revealed that Herodotus’s claim about Khufu being a despot does appear to have been an Egyptian tradition, whether true or not. Moreover, the priests had told Herodotus that beneath the Great Pyramid was a burial chamber on an island in the middle of an artificial lake fed from the Nile via an underground channel. As it turns out, the subterranean chambers beneath the Great Pyramid, where the burial chamber would traditionally be located, were not completed, so Khufu’s sarcophagus was placed in an interior chamber, so this tale about a lake and an island tomb seemed entirely false, suggesting again that Herodotus was making things up or had been egregiously lied to. However, the discovery of the nearby Osiris Shaft, which was not explored until 1999 and revealed a symbolic sarcophagus for the god Osiris that had been placed within a flooded chamber, suggests that this may have been what Herodotus was referencing. The fact that his stories about Khufu and the secret chambers he had constructed may have been true, are signs that point to Herodotus actually having visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE and actually having talked to priests there, and though they may have misinformed him of some particulars, it would seem they were in a better position to have known details about the construction of the pyramids than any later writers, and the account transmitted to us from them depicts a very plausible process. Why even jump to incredible notions of giants and aliens and ancient advanced technology then?

Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who gave a rational and plausible relation of the building of the pyramids thousands of years ago.

While the work of Herodotus and Manetho may be viewed as instructive and, in some regards at least, accurate records of Egyptian history, the same cannot be said of the work of other ancient Greek writers who made mention of Egypt. And there were many. The Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder named a dozen writers to touch on the topic, but most of their work does not survive, and even if it did, it seems to have mostly been preoccupied with the amount of food it took to feed all the builders. What does survive are works that indicate how mythologized the history of Egypt was already becoming. Around a hundred years after Herodotus visited Egypt, Plato wrote Timaeus, the dialogue in which he first teases the story of Atlantis. He does so by having one of the characters, Critias, tell the story of Athenian sage Solon, who is said to have journeyed to Egypt and there been told by priests who traced the history of their land back nine thousand years, about the forgotten kingdom of Atlantis, which like so many others had been destroyed in a cataclysmic disaster. It sounds suspiciously like a retelling of Herodotus’s own meeting with Egyptian priests, and as Plato would go on to fill in the Atlantis myth in his next dialogue, it is very clearly an amalgamation of flood myths, with notions of divine punishment by deluge. In the end, it was not ostensibly about Egypt, but it set the stage for many later connections drawn between Egypt, its pyramids, Atlantis, and antediluvian civilizations—that is, civilizations destroyed in the Flood. And this kind of syncretism, of mashing together different histories and mythologies, would prove to be the general character of ancient Greek works that mention Egypt. In the first century BCE, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus repeated much of what Herodotus had written, including the inaccuracies, but added the choice fabrication, which would live on long after him and be believed by many a pyramidologist and pseudohistorian, that the construction of the pyramids was simply too perfect to have been accomplished by mere human beings.

It is astonishing how much of what the Western world understands about Egypt actually comes from ancient Greece. Even the word Egypt comes from the Greek aigyptos, which is not an approximation of ancient Egyptians’ own word for their home. No, they called their country Tawy, meaning two lands, referring to Upper and Lower Egypt, or Kemet, “the black land,” referring to the dark and fertile soil of the Nile Valley. Aigyptos means “burned faces” and refers to the skin color of the land’s inhabitants, and that is enough to make you not want to even use the word. After Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persian-controlled Egypt, it came under the rule of his general, Ptolemy, and this was the beginning of the end for Egyptian history. It was during this Hellenistic convergence of Greek and Egyptian culture, which saw an increased interest in Egyptian history, that syncretism led to cultural erasure. Manetho wrote his history of Egypt during this time, but he wrote it for the Greeks, and most of the works of this period focused on mythology, reconciling Egyptian gods with the Greek pantheon, identifying one as the other, Horus becoming Apollo, Isis Aphrodite, Osiris Dionysus. It was in this period that the Egyptian god Thoth was interpreted as the Greek Hermes, setting in motion the evolution of the alchemical legend of Hermes Trismegistus. In what today we might call “cultural appropriation,” the Greeks embraced aspects of Egyptian belief and history, but rewrote them, interpreting them according to their preferences, interpretatio graeca, interpretation according to Greek models. The Ptolemies used what aspects of Egyptian religion and tradition suited them and exploited social orders and political structures to increase their wealth and power. Greek was made the official language, myths and traditions changed, original forms were forgotten, and the number of Egyptians who could still read the old scripts dwindled. A few centuries into the Common Era, there was no longer anyone who could read hieroglyphs, the ancient sacred writing of Egypt which adorned the greatest works of their country. Their world had become obsessed with new religions and with new notions about magic and alchemy, and they came to believe that the inscriptions on their monuments were ancient formulae for magic. Views on the Pyramid had shifted forever. They had become, even to those who lived in their shadow, a supernatural mystery.

Pyramidiocy - Part One: Khufu's Tomb.

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