Free The Giza Power Plant by Christopher Dunn

absolute solitude, thinking over what it might
mean.
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    Smyth's meditation on the Antechamber, its granite leaf, and the slots in the east and west walls left him resigned to a conclusion that does not seem to have been improved upon after the passing of a complete century. Writing in 1880, Smyth sagely concluded that "the granite leaf is, therefore, even by the few data already given, a something which needs a vast deal more than a simple portcullis notion to explain it. And so do likewise the three broader empty pairs of grooves to the south of it, remarkable with their semi-cylindrical hollows on the west side of the
chamber." 12
    How correct, then, are those theories that explain the existence of the Antechamber? Not very, for none adequately explains the indisputable amount of work that went into making it more than just a simple room withfour walls, floor, ceiling, and two passageways. There must have been a reason for the additional effort expended in cutting the four slots in the chamber walls and installing a granite slab in an immovable position. As we will soon discover, one explanation that does explain the Antechamber is that it had a mechanical function. The evidence is plainly clear if one knows how to read it.
    For example, the presence of half-round hollows in the top surface of the granite wainscot definitely suggests that cylindrical objects were at one time suspended across the width of the Antechamber and that these may have been receptacles for bearings, or were the bearing surfaces themselves. Again, Piazzi Smyth took careful notes:
    . . . Little indeed is the ante-chamber, when it measures only 65.2 inches in utmost breadth from east to west, 116.3 long from north to south, and 149.4 high; but it has a sort of granite wainscot on either side of it, full of detail; and was to me so complicated and troublesome a matter as to occupy three entire days in measuring.
    On the east side, this wainscot is only 103.1 inches high, and is flat and level on the top; but on the west side it is 111.8 inches high, and has three semi-cylindrical cross hollows of nine inch radius, cut down into it, and also back through its whole thickness of 8.5 to 11.7 inches to the wall. Each of those semi-cylindrical hollows stands over a broad, shallow, vertical, flat groove 21.6 inches wide, 3.2 inches deep, running from top to bottom of the wainscot, leaving a pilaster like separation between them. The greater part of the said pilasters has indeed long since been hammered away, but their fractured places are easily traced; and with this allowance to researchers in the present day, the groove and pilaster part of the arrangement is precisely repeated on the east side, within its lower compass of
height.
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    Is it conceivable that the pyramid builders went to such a great amount of trouble to cut this granite for a one-time operation? If this chamber was designed to be a closing mechanism, and it was to be activated only one time, it would not have been necessary to include such a complicated design and to cut that design out of such hard and durable material. Still, if we tryour hardest to give this theory its due, we would have to admit that there are cases today where a tool or machine may be "over-designed" to do the work for which it was built. But we must be aware that for the Antechamber to find a parallel in modern industry, we would have to allow for an equivalent situation, such as an expensive die being built from the finest quality tool-steel, even though it would be used to produce only one part. The theory strains under the weight of such an unlikelihood.
    Under the Egyptologists' present theories, the Antechamber is, indeed, a perplexing and contradictory inclusion in the design and building of the Great Pyramid. But there is a reasonable answer to this mysterious and puzzling feature of the Great Pyramid—it is a mechanical and technological answer that so far has not attracted any consideration.
    Perhaps the