Pharaoh's Pump by Edward J. Kunkel

How the Great Pyramid At Giza was built, and Why!

Inlet Valve Area

Even though the Great Pyramid has been badly damaged through the centuries one can still get an idea of how the moving parts looked and functioned before they were destroyed. This check valve is one of these areas. The original "valve seat" is still there as are the 8 inch sockets that held the moving part. This "pivoting door" makes for a very good check valve but a very poor barrier to tomb robbers.

A short distance down in the solid rock of the lower diagonal, is a tiny offset, “wherein,” says Petrie, “hung a door that swung inward.” A pair of eight inch round holes are found here, one in the ease wall and the other in the west wall. Adjacent to these round holes, is granite masonry. Giving this mechanical element an interpretation in hydraulics, is, check-valve. The holes support a round shaft, and the granite masonry is the valve seat.

Here is some additional information that relates to the construction of the Great Pyramid from the book, Pharaoh's Pump.

Heretofore; little or no consideration has been given the magnitude of work involved in the quarrying, and transportation of 7,000,000 tons of rock.
Perhaps, the repetition of a statement made earlier in this text, may bring into sharp focus, the enormity of this phase; the handling of building material:
“The actual building time then would be only sixty months, which makes this feat all the more phenomenal.”
Assuming the Egyptians worked a ten hour day, six days a week, and now swing shift; simple arithmetic discloses; fantastic facts.
60 months = 260 weeks
260 weeks =1560 days
7,000,000 ÷ 1560 = 4480 tons per day.
4480 ÷ 10 = 448 tons per hour.
448 tons per hour = 9 carload per hour.
Nine carloads per hour, and a schedule everybody understands.
PRODUCTION NIGHMARE!!! “HERE THOU ART”
What a production schedule? — High speed quarrying! — High speed loading! — What a transportation job? — And for sure, no traffic jams, or manual handling.
The bottom of the quarry must have been a maize; of water-locks, loading docks, and float-locks. Every movement, every operation, must be coordinated to perfection, — All this, during that far distant, hazy genesis of antiquity; at the dawn of civilization, when man began struggling with an alphabet.
High speed production, “Whither comest thou.”
This is elementary arithmetic, and elementary mechanics. It is foolhardy to believe, that the ancients were unaware of this powerful force; and it is reasonable to assume, that they used it, in some manner, in quarrying operations.
“The achievements of the Egyptian builders in the construction of gigantic temples and pyramids are famous, but aside from quarrier’s and masons tools, little is known of the methods of raising and laying blocks weighing more than a thousand tons.” TACv1
This information is not found in ordinary text-books or reference books. However, while Perring does not mention weights of blocks found in the Great Pyramid, he does show dimensions of certain exposed blocks, some of which weigh more than 300 tons, and more than two dozen that weigh upwards of 40 tons each. All but two of these massive blocks are found in the interior of the building.
There is not a flat car, a lowboy, a modern derrick, or a gantry crane that will handle the heaviest weights, such as these. — Also, it should be mentioned, that many of these blocks are precision cut at the joints, and there is not the slightest evidence of damage made by hooks, chains, levers, rollers, or what have you. — There are no handling scars.
These facts are hard to come by. Nearly all authors omit them. How can authors of text-books, or archeologists assume the responsibility of informing readers of facts, and make such grotesque omissions?
One author wrote a 275 page book about the Great Pyramid, and never mentioned the subterranean cuttings at all.
This monstrous omission of facts, perpetuates the modern conception of the ancient Egyptian. Indirectly, it has a tendency to belittle the achievements of the ancient, and medicine, literature, social consciousness, astronomy, geographical exploration, metallurgy, the mechanical arts, mathematics. And engineering.
Big, massive, ponderous weights, and the standards for judging the engineer’s skill in handling great masses of stone, not the itty-bitty rocks.
A few years ago (Dec. 3, 1945) the magazine LIFE published an article, the title of which is, “The Building of the Great Pyramid.” Pictures of Norman Bel Geddes models are used for the purpose of illustration.
This article is truly a theoretical mechanical monstrosity. It shows pictures of slaves in harness, dragging blocks up a ramp made of earth. The size of the ramp is almost as big as the half completed Pyramid. The ramp is not paved, nor is there any evidence of the use of planking or skids, although the text does mention the use of the lever, the roller, ropes, and sledges.
Furthermore, the article offers no suggestion, or solution, as to the method the ancients used to get the blocks on the sledges, or how they got them off the sledges, or how they were set in place, or of what material the rollers were made of.
If LIFE had printed all the pertinent facts, as to the location, the size and weights of some of these massive blocks, this slave-ramp theory may never have been printed, because LIFE would have to face some obstinate facts of mechanical life.
And some of the facts of mechanical life are; the use of rollers as hard as nichrome steel, wooden planking as hard as steel rails, because such great weight would cause the rollers to sink in, and dent the hardest of known hardwoods, thus making the use of wooden planking, and skids, and rollers, useless.
Then last of all, to make this theory consistent with such a premise, it would be necessary to reinvent, or reconstruct, the most fabulous lifting device of all time, such as that of a crane or a derrick, make of sterner stuff than our toughest steel beams; and that it use ropes made of stuff with a tensile strength as great as our toughest steel cable; also the use of a complicated system of metal pulleys, together with some vague source of some mysterious power, to pick up and swing, and to lower these blocks in position, and leave no handling scars.
From this article, the reader concludes that the slaves were endowed with super-duper strength; that the harness had a tensile strength greater than that of heaviest steel cable, and that everybody involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid, didn’t have the intelligence of an ape.
Also the article does not speculate as to the weight of the harness itself. — How far out in orbit, from basic reality, can one get?
Is it any wonder that school kids grow up believing these ancient builders to be civilization’s number one numb-skulls, and keep on believing it until the day they die?
As a result of this fantastic theoretical nonsense, together with the gross omissions of facts, we have all been brain-washed to the nth degree, and will stay that way the rest of out lives.
And to further perpetuate this gross misconception, this atrocious myth of the character, and mechanical skills of the ancient Egyptian, this work of Norman Bel Beddes was designed for incorporation in our greatest reference library, THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITTANNICA.
I doubt very much, that the text on these pages will change your preconceived conceptions one iota, although you are reading for the first time in recorded history, reasons in the science of physics, (hydraulics) why this strange mysterious interior of the Great Pyramid, is built the way it is. — Common sense and reason can’t lick the brain-washed. — The brain-washing has been too thorough, and too permanent. — This work presents a stupendous psychological challenge, and demands a lucidity of reasoning, and horse-sense.
This slave-ramp hogwash steams me up. — I really burn and get carried away. — For me, this slave-ramp-roller business is for the birds, and a lot of malarkey. —
I’ll calm down now, and get on with the work at hand.

When the Egyptians started a pyramid, they first cut a level platform in the solid rock. Then they cut shafts down in the solid limestone, below the platform. Over these shafts, they added masonry which formed, “a sort of core,” around which the pyramid was built. (En. Brit. 9t Ed.)”
Over the (subterranean) chamber was built a mass of masonry, which was gradually added to at the sides and top, according to the power, or the wealth, or the length of life of the founder.” (EB9)
Why this odd procedure? They were doing what every engineer must do before he undertakes such a project. The machine comes first, and in this case it was a water pump. This subterranean cutting formed the lower part of it, while the “core” made of ponderous masonry, formed the upper part. Thus; half of the pump is above the ground, and half below it.
The drawing of the interior of the Great Pyramid, shows that the engineers designed and built this monstrous pump, to take advantage of two diagonal water columns, set in motion, by creating a vacuum and releasing it. One diagonal is below the ground, and the other above the ground.
The lower one is cut in solid limestone, with a large chamber at the bottom, while the upper diagonal is made of ponderous masonry, It is designed to withstand atmospheric pressure if a vacuum is created in it, by the means of a fire.
Both the King and Queen’s chambers are component parts of this pump. Both are designed to withstand pressure from within.
The lower diagonal feeds water into the pump, while the upper one discharges it.
The two diagonals are connected by a shaft cut in the solid limestone. The upper end of this shaft ends in a huge enclosed bowl-like formation cutting in the solid limestone, while the lower end joins the lower diagonal with a unique jet. — A jet-bowl shaft of tube would be a good name for this element.
This subterranean cutting was a tremendous task. It required the evacuation of more than 2,000 tons of rock.
The shafts are of such proportions, that only one man can chisel at the rock face at one time.
Add to this; a constant temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit, together with a working space where ventilation is almost zero, and lime dust permeates the air, and a burning miner’s torch consumes the life-giving oxygen: the sum total of these conditions are about as undesirable as one could imagine. — A 2,000 ton rock pile assumes nightmarish proportions.
2,000 TONS OF ROCK, all cut by hand; every pound of it carried or hoisted out of the cuttings by manual labor adds up to a awful job.
2,000 TONS OF ROCK, will fill 40 freight cars of 50 tons capacity.
It was a Herculean task; executed thousands of years before the invention of pneumatic drills, jack-hammers, and dynamite. — “Ten years were spent in preparation,” writes Herodotus.