Exploring the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza.

Here we look at it, attributed to the pharaoh Khufu,

who was a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty.

What is the mystery here?

So again, pyramids are this big stack of concrete blocks in Egypt.

Why is it so mysterious?

Well, first of all, they're not concrete.

They're hewn limestone and granite.

First of all, it's mysterious for the sheer size of it.

Look, you've got roughly 750 feet along each side.

And they vary in length by only fractions of an inch.

They've got it just about spot on exact on the side length.

And you want that in a pyramid because if you get it wrong,

you're going to end up with a corkscrew rather than a pyramid.

If you get it wrong at the bottom, those errors are going to magnify and they're

going to get worse and worse and it's not going to be a pyramid at the end of the day.

Secondly,

weight calculated at about six million tons,

more than two million individual blocks of stone.

I've climbed the pyramid five times,

once I climbed it when there was an event taking place on the Giza Plateau, picnics basically,

and a lot of Kyrenes just decided to climb the pyramid.

As I said, I've climbed it four other times without other people there,

but this time there were hundreds of people on the pyramid.

That's when I realized how difficult this thing is to make because the biggest danger was the other people.

Once you're up two or three courses,

you fall, you're dead. It's a 52-degree slope,

there's no way you're going to stop.

You're going to come down, and still every year people die on the Great Pyramid.

That's why they've made it illegal to climb it now.

So there's that. Then there's the almost perfect alignment of the Great Pyramid to true north,

not to compass north, which is about 10 or 11 degrees off true north, but to astronomical north, real

north. The Great Pyramid is aligned within three sixtieths of a single degree.

I put it that way because degrees are divided into 60 minutes, so three minutes of arc.

The Great Pyramid is aligned to that level of precision,

three sixtieths of a single degree to true north.

They've done that on a six million ton monument, which is 481 feet high, if

you take account of its original height, which has a 52-degree slope, which is filled with internal corridors and spaces,

Grand Gallery,

the ascending, the descending corridors.

All of this is extremely difficult to do.

It is not impossible to do because we see it there.

Could our civilization do it? Yeah, I think we could.

But would we do it? No, I don't think we would.

The motive wouldn't be there.

People say, well, why? I mean, why do you want to align it perfectly to True North?

It's enough to ask me to build a six million ton monument,

but you want it aligned to True North as well? Come on.

I mean, that's a really difficult specification. We find that hard.

A kind of artistry was put to work on the Great Pyramid as well as skill.

Let's get rid of any notion that slaves were involved.

They were not.

There wasn't slavery in the Old Kingdom anyway, but this is a work of love from the first to the last stone.

It's a work done with great skill and care.

It's a beautiful and extraordinary thing,

both inside and out. It sits almost exactly on latitude 30,

which is one third of the way between the North Pole and the equator,

and it incorporates the dimensions of the Earth on a scale of one to 43,200 in its own dimensions.

So if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200, I'll explain why that number matters.

Multiply it by that number, you get the polar radius of the Earth.

Measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid,

multiply it by the same factor, 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth.

Archaeologists know this.

They say it's a coincidence, total coincidence, just by chance.

However, I could agree with them actually,

if the scale was not 1 to 43,200.

But the fact that it's 1 to 43,200 changes everything,

because that belongs to a sequence of numbers that is found in ancient mythology all around the world.

And those numbers are all multiples of the number 72.

And I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion,

the book by the great historian of science Giorgio de Santillana, professor of the history of science at MIT.

He was the first to identify that these numbers and the imagery that go with them derive from a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes.