PYRAMID MYSTERY UNEARTHED:

January 12, 1984

On this day, an international panel overseeing the restoration of the Great
Pyramids in Egypt overcomes years of frustration when it abandons modern
construction techniques in favor of the method employed by the ancient
Egyptians.Located at Giza outside Cairo, some of the oldest manmade structures
on earth were showing severe signs of decay by the early 1980s. Successful
repair work began on the 4,600-year-old Sphinx in 1981, but restoration of the
pyramids proved destructive when water in modern cement caused adjacent
limestone stones to split. On January 12, 1984, restorers stopped using mortar
and adopted the system of interlocking blocks practiced by the original pyramid
builders. From thereon, the project proceeded smoothly.The ancient Egyptians
built nearly 100 pyramids over a millennium to serve as burial chambers for
their royalty. They believed that the pyramids eased the monarchs' passage into
the afterlife, and the sites served as centers of religious activity. During the
Old Kingdom, a period of Egyptian history that lasted from the late 26th century
B.C. to the mid-22nd century B.C., the Egyptians built their largest and most
ambitious pyramids.The three enormous pyramids situated at Giza outside of Cairo
were built by King Khufu, his son, and his grandson in the Fourth Dynasty. The
largest, known as the Great Pyramid, was built by Khufu and is the only one of
the "Seven Wonders of the World" from antiquity that still survives. The largest
single building ever erected on the planet, the Great Pyramid was built of
approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone and stood nearly 50 stories high upon
completion. Its base forms a nearly perfect and level square, with sides aligned
to the four cardinal points of the compass.The Great Pyramid is composed
primarily of yellowish limestone blocks and was originally covered in an outer
casing of smooth light-colored limestone. This finer limestone eroded and was
carried away in later centuries, but the material can still be found in the
inner passages. The interior burial chamber was built of huge blocks of granite.
It is believed that construction of the pyramid took 20 years and involved over
20,000 workers, bakers, carpenters, and water carriers. The exact method in
which this architectural masterpiece was built is not definitively known, but
the leading theory is that the Egyptians employed an encircling embankment of
sand, brick, and earth that was increased in height as the pyramid rose.In
addition to Khufu's mummy, interior rooms of the pyramid held objects for the
deceased to use in the afterlife. Many of these items were valuable, and tomb
robbers had long ago robbed the pyramids of their treasures before modern
archeologists began studying the structures in the 17th century.King Khafre, the
grandson of Khufu, built the Great Sphinx, which was carved from a single block
of limestone left over in a quarry used to build the Pyramids. The Sphinx has
the body of a recumbent lion and a human face meant to represent Khafre. There
are no known inner chambers in the structure.