Around 820 AD, the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma’mun set his men to cut into the north face of the Great Pyramid. He was after treasure and secret books. According to the historian Al-Masudi, they followed a sign on the wall, spent a fortune forcing a tunnel through the stone, and eventually broke into the passages. The hole they made is still the way tourists go in today.
So, were the pyramids tombs? Mainstream Egyptology answers yes: the pyramids of Giza were royal burial monuments at the centre of temple complexes, and the Great Pyramid held Khufu’s body in the granite sarcophagus of the King’s Chamber before robbers emptied it. In Echoes of History I answer no. I argue the Great Pyramid was built for preservation, a vault for knowledge and organic material designed to outlast the Flood, and that later Egyptians borrowed the idea of the tomb from it.
In this article
- Were the pyramids tombs? What Egyptologists point to
- What the Pyramid Texts show, and what they don't
- Why Echoes of History rejects the tomb theory
- Preservation: the purpose of the Great Pyramid
- The numbers in the stone
- The Book and the Egyptologist in the King's Chamber
Were the pyramids tombs? What Egyptologists point to
The tomb case rests on context more than on any single object.
A pyramid at Giza does not stand alone. Each has a valley temple by the edge of the cultivation, a causeway, and a mortuary temple against its east face where offerings were made to the dead king. Beside the Great Pyramid, in 1954, Kamal el-Mallakh found a dismantled cedar boat, now rebuilt and known as the Khufu ship. In 1925, George Reisner’s team found the burial goods of Hetepheres, Khufu’s mother, in a shaft near the pyramid. The plateau around is crowded with the tombs of Khufu’s relatives and officials.
There is also a sequence. Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara had a burial chamber under it, and Sneferu, Khufu’s father, built three pyramids at Meidum and Dahshur, adjusting angles as he went. Giza, in this view, is the peak of a funerary tradition.
Why no mummy? Egyptologists say almost every royal tomb in Egypt was robbed in antiquity, most of them long before Al-Ma’mun.
What the Pyramid Texts show, and what they don’t
People often assume the pyramids are covered in writing. The Great Pyramid has none in its chambers. The first religious texts carved inside a pyramid appear in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, roughly 2350 BC. Gaston Maspero’s workers entered it in 1881. These Pyramid Texts are spells and recitations for the king’s ascent to the gods, and they continued in the pyramids of Teti and later rulers.
Egyptologists see them as proof that pyramids were funerary settings. I read them differently. In the book I note that the texts of Unas and Teti show priests guiding the dead king along the path of the gods, and describe “a society that believed in myths and magic. This doesn’t really match what we’d expect from an advanced civilization.” To me they are the work of Late Egyptians, who inherited the monuments and the form, then added their own beliefs.
Both sides have to face one gap. The texts are later than Giza. They tell us what Unas believed, not what the builders of the Great Pyramid intended.
Why Echoes of History rejects the tomb theory
I wrote that “the tomb theory, widely embraced by Egyptologists and historians, stands as the most prevalent yet weakest explanation.” My reasons:
- No burial was found. No mummy, no grave goods, no funerary text in the King’s Chamber or on its sarcophagus. Compare the Valley of the Kings, where tomb walls are covered with spells.
- No culture buried its dead without writing on the tomb. The silence of the Great Pyramid’s chambers is the opposite of Egyptian funerary practice as we know it.
- The timing makes no sense. No ruler would risk dying before so vast a tomb was finished. The boy king who died suddenly and was buried in a hurry shows how unpredictable death was.
- The tombs we know are copies. When I compare Giza with pyramids that really were tombs, the tombs look like cheap imitations, and even attempts to build a smaller version of the Great Pyramid failed.
Then there is the subterranean chamber, cut into bedrock far below the pyramid. Egyptologists call it unfinished. I say it is complete, shaped as intended, reached by a descending passage that only one man could have cut, in darkness, without fire, since fire would have suffocated him.
Preservation: the purpose of the Great Pyramid
If not a tomb, what? “These structures are like encyclopedias of knowledge,” I write. The builders made them to withstand any natural disaster and to carry a message to future generations.
I am certain they built secret chambers to hold manuscripts on organic material and stone. Some were found and their contents lost, the Emerald Tablet among them. Others are waiting. The design, in my view, gathers energy from the Earth’s magnetic field into the chambers, creating a sterile space where bacteria and mould cannot grow. That is why Al-Ma’mun’s men, by Al-Masudi’s account, found bodies so well preserved they looked recently dead. It is also, I argue, where later Egyptians got the idea of mummification.
The modern ScanPyramids project, led by Hany Helal of Cairo University and Mehdi Tayoubi, used muon detectors to look inside without drilling. Its team reported a large void above the Grand Gallery, published in Nature in 2017, and in 2023 confirmed a corridor behind the chevron stones on the north face. Egyptologists treat these as construction features. I think the void behind the chevron may be the way into a hidden chamber.
The numbers in the stone
The builders built universal constants into the Great Pyramid. The book lists them: the golden ratio, where the slant height of a face divided by half the base comes close to 1.618; pi, where the base perimeter divided by twice the height comes close to 3.14; Pythagorean geometry in the faces; an alignment with north, south, east and west so exact it still impresses surveyors; and measurements that some researchers link to the size of the Earth.
Above the King’s Chamber sit five layers of granite. Egyptologists say they relieve stress. I think a V-shaped void would have done that better, and the voids around the chamber suggest Ahmad Adli’s theory: that sound at certain frequencies made the chamber vibrate safely.
Behind all of it sits the sequence 3, 6, 9. “Everything about the pyramids, from their shapes to their precise measurements and ratios, is based on these three numbers,” I write.
Egyptologists reply that one design choice explains the pi and phi results together. Egyptian builders set slopes by a seked, a run of so many palms per cubit of rise, and the mathematical problems in the Rhind Papyrus use exactly this method. A seked of 5½ palms gives the Great Pyramid’s angle of about 51.8 degrees, and that angle happens to produce both ratios. On the alignment, Kate Spence argued in Nature in 2000 that it was achieved by sighting stars around the celestial pole.
The Book and the Egyptologist in the King’s Chamber
The Book: You keep saying tomb. Show me the body.
The Egyptologist: I can show you the sarcophagus, sitting in the chamber it was built into. The room was finished around it, because it’s too wide to pass through the entrance. That’s a burial chamber designed for a coffin.
The Book: Or a box designed for something that needed protecting. An empty granite box with no inscription is the strangest coffin in Egypt.
The Egyptologist: It’s not unusual for the Fourth Dynasty. Sneferu’s and Khafre’s burial chambers are plain too. Decorated burial chambers come later, with Unas.
The Book: So the oldest and greatest pyramid is the one without a word in it, and the writing turns up when the building gets worse. Doesn’t that tell you something about who came first?
The Egyptologist: It tells me religious practice changed. You’d need evidence of an older builder, and there’s none at Giza. There’s the boat pit, Hetepheres’s burial goods, the mortuary temple. Those are the furniture of a royal funeral.
The Book: They are the furniture of kings who wanted to be buried beside something holy. I don’t deny later kings used Giza. I deny they built the Great Pyramid.
The Egyptologist: And your preservation chambers? ScanPyramids found voids. Nobody found books.
The Book: Al-Ma’mun’s men found preserved bodies, if Al-Masudi is right. And ScanPyramids found a space of hundreds of cubic metres that nobody can enter. You call it a construction gap. You haven’t been inside it either.
The Egyptologist: Fair. Neither of us knows what’s in it. I’d only say that a void in a pyramid is expected; builders left them to reduce load.
The Book: Then explain pi and phi in the same building.
The Egyptologist: A seked of five and a half palms. One practical slope gives you both.
The Book: And who chose that slope, out of all the slopes available? A practical builder doesn’t land on two of the universe’s constants by accident. Whoever chose it knew what it meant.
FAQ
Were the pyramids tombs for the pharaohs?
Most Egyptologists say yes. They point to the mortuary temples, causeways and boat pits around each pyramid, the cemeteries of royal relatives, and the long sequence from Djoser to Sneferu to Giza. Echoes of History disagrees, noting that no mummy, grave goods or funerary text was found in the Great Pyramid.
Why was the Great Pyramid built, according to Echoes of History?
The book argues it was built for preservation. Its builders meant it to survive natural disasters, including the Flood, and to protect manuscripts and organic material in sealed chambers. It describes the pyramids as encyclopedias of knowledge and suggests their design concentrates Earth’s energy to stop decay.
Are there Pyramid Texts inside the Great Pyramid?
No. The Great Pyramid’s chambers are uninscribed. The earliest Pyramid Texts are in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, around 2350 BC, about two centuries after Khufu. Egyptologists read them as royal funerary spells. Echoes of History reads them as the beliefs of later Egyptians who inherited older monuments.
Does the Great Pyramid encode pi and the golden ratio?
Its proportions come close to both. Echoes of History treats this as deliberate, part of a sacred science built on the numbers 3, 6 and 9. Egyptologists explain both ratios with one slope measure, the seked of 5½ palms per cubit, which produces an angle near 51.8 degrees.
Sources
- Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (Thames & Hudson, 1997)
- James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL Press, 2015)
- UCL Digital Egypt for Universities, “Pyramid Texts”
- Morishima et al., “Discovery of a big void in Khufu’s Pyramid by observation of cosmic-ray muons,” Nature 552 (2017)
- Kate Spence, “Ancient Egyptian chronology and the astronomical orientation of pyramids,” Nature 408 (2000)
Keep Reading
- Who Built the Pyramids of Giza?
- The Emerald Tablet and Hermes Trismegistus: The Ancient Wisdom Decoded
- Ancient Egyptian Religion: Gods, Afterlife and a Hidden Unity
- The Serapeum of Saqqara: What Were the Giant Boxes For?
Echoes of History gives the whole case for the pyramid as a vault of knowledge, along with the sacred science behind its numbers. It is written for readers who would rather weigh an argument than accept one.
Go deeper: explore our full guide in this topic hub, read a free sample, or get the complete argument in Echoes of History.