It seems that the legendary Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the fabled Seven Wonders of the ancient world, had a curious secret associated with it, that was only cracked thousands of years after its construction, the Daily Express reports.
Citing the National Geographic's "Great Pyramid Mystery Solved" series, the newspaper points at how French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has apparently managed to figure out how the Fourth dynasty managed to erect this massive structure.
"The question is, how do you raise blocks all the way to the top of a 480-foot pyramid? We saw that there were real problems with either a single ramp, or a spiral ramp, and lifting cranes certainly don't do the job", the series notes.
As the narrator further explains, Houdin's "solution still has a ramp, but it’s inside the pyramid and, incredibly, according to Jean-Pierre, it’s been hidden there for 4,500 years".
The architect reportedly calculated that "the slope of this ramp had to be about seven percent so the men could haul the blocks up it", while the ramp itself "would have to start at the base of the pyramid and go upwards as the pyramid grew".
"Amazingly, the ramp never hit any of the chambers or passageways inside the Great Pyramid and for the first time in history, a structural 3D model had been built to test it", the series states. "But how did they turn the blocks around the corners? His solution was that they left the corners open and at the end of each ramp, a notch – about 30 feet square – would have been left open. It let in light and fresh air, but there would also be a crane so it could travel up the next flight of ramp – these cranes could be the machines that Herodotus was talking about."
The newspaper points out, however, that Houdin's thesis remains unproven, with UCL Egyptologist David Jeffreys previously describing the internal spiral hypothesis as "far-fetched and horribly complicated".