The Ancient Egyptians’ ability to build the Great Pyramid of Giza in the absence of modern machinery and technology has amazed – and baffled – experts for decades.
But now the mystery surrounding the monument’s construction may have been solved by researcher Vicente Luis Rosell Roig, who presents mathematical evidence in Nature that an ingenious system of spiralling, indented ramps were used to deliver the stones used in its construction.
The vast structure – the largest Egyptian pyramid – built around 2,560 BCE as the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu, contains an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks, weighing between 2.5 and 15 tonnes each.
For the monument to have been completed within the 27 years of Khufu's reign, a block would have to have been placed at an average rate of one every three minutes. Debate has raged, however, over how the giant structure could have been completed in this time frame.
Some researchers have suggested that external ramps were used. But such ramps would themselves have required vast quantities of material, and no clear archaeological evidence of them has ever been found.
Another idea suggests a single ramp was built into the pyramid, spiralling upwards through the structure before being filled in from the top down as construction progressed.
But Roig’s mathematical modelling found that it would have taken nearly half a century to complete the pyramid using just one ramp.
Instead, he argues that four indented ramps spiralled around the pyramid simultaneously, each beginning from a different point near the base. Once the main structure was complete, these ramps could then have been filled in. His computer-generated model suggested this method would have allowed construction to have been completed in the 27-year time frame.
“This is a very interesting explanation for the pyramid’s construction,” said Dr Roland Enmarch, a reader in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. “It will need to be verified with more evidence – more scans of structural abnormalities that we would expect to see at the corner points, where the ramp would suddenly have changed direction.
“But it does seem very plausible. The Great Pyramid of Giza wasn’t the oldest or the last of the pyramids, so it might also shed light on how others were built.”