Despite many common hypotheses, neither ramping methods nor the Herodotus machine were used to build the pyramids.

For the six Great Pyramids, 99 % of the stones were hauled up by millions thanks to counterweights descending along the opposite face, steered by a winch.

This method is particularly quick and efficient, but it was limited to a load of seven tons because of the ropes’ resistance.

Meaning that the very heavy monoliths, especially the rafters of the vaults, the beams of the five ceilings of the upper chamber, and those of the real burial chambers, were hauled up by sliding floats in wells filled with water and are left to be discovered in the “BIG VOID”.

The stepped pyramid of Saqqara, attributed to Djoser, brings the novelty of oscillating floats to lift the big slabs of rock. These floats are directly inspired by naval architecture; actually, they are specialized vessels for a vertical trip, not a horizontal one. They have a heavy counterweight in their bottom part to stabilize the load put higher above the deck, which means that the load is relatively low, and they operate very slowly.

The following pyramids, Meidum and Red, respectively 2.3 and 6 times bigger than the first one, hid three well shafts; six of them are visible in the rhomboidal pyramid instead of 12 in the first. To lift heavier stones, a second generation of submersible floats saw the light of day.

These floats are more efficient than the first ones, and will be used, not exclusively, for all the Great Pyramids, from Meidum to Khafre’s.

Nonetheless, these floats’ performance was limited to charges of two or three dozen tons, but we found some megaliths weighing approximately 30 to 70 tons inside Cheops; some of them were to be raised 60 meters above the base.

These rocky monsters exceeded the submersible floats’ capacity; it would have required a gigantic plateau as big as that of the “trench of the sun boat”, located on the plateau to the east of the pyramid so that they could be lifted.

Credits to Maraglioglio & Rinaldi

For such a surface inside the pyramid, the builders ran out of solutions to hold the pressure with stones.

A chamber is like a bathyscaphe that overcomes the compression stress inside the pyramid. The lower chamber of the Great Pyramid is under pressure, corresponding to a depth of 300 meters under the sea.

The biggest masonry chamber of the seven pyramids is Cheops’s upper chamber; it is 50 m2, and its ceiling is broken!

Despite a well-shaft of low section regarding the pyramid size and the stones to lift, another float method had to be found, one that could act as springs of tremendous strength while being height adjustable.

The pyramid of Cheops features three chambers, each of which is a water reservoir supplying a float elevator shaft; only the upper chamber obviously shows its associated shaft, covered up as a “harrows chamber”. This shaft has a 1.5 m2 section and is supplied by a 50 m2 chamber, meaning we can calculate the section of the two other, still undiscovered to this day, which are fed by two other chambers whose free water surface is known, namely 71 m2 for the lower chamber and 120 m2 for the horizontal gallery and the underground cave.

A thorough examination of the lower chamber niche allows us to guess that the two other shafts containing the first and second stories’ floats are within masonry to the east of the chamber.

The detailed operation of these elevators will be described floor by floor later.