Let’s not forget that 90% of the megaliths found in the pyramid are those at the entry, of the lower chamber and the upper chamber.

Yet, it is highly probable that the upper chamber was never designed to host the king for eternity with its cracked ceiling and its joke of a harrows chamber blocking the entry.

There are solid evidence allowing to interpret this masonry as the remains of a hydraulic machinery designed to raise the heaviest stone blocks of the pyramid.

Because, it would be an aberration to built such a huge machinery only for itself!

In this context, the craziest construction, a sheer architectural madness, is the upper chamber with its five ceilings and its vault, all huge.

This complex masonry found inside the pyramid would only make sense if there is the complex funeral in the “Big Void” which would also be waterproof construction made of granite megaliths as the upper chamber.

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The extraction from the quarries, the transportation, the lifting and laying of the megaliths forming the chambers’ vaults of the said “queen” lower chamber, and of the said “king” upper chamber, (including those of funeral complex) have been technical feats of the construction of the Cheops pyramid.

In the following chapters, I am going to describe the methods and the tools used and how the builders could have manage such achievement with an extraordinary economy of means only possible thanks to a clever use of the laws of nature as well as a great precision in the execution.

In the Cheops’s Pyramid, the lower chamber is topped with 18 double chevrons of 7 meters (22.9 ft) long, 2.4 m (7.87 ft) high, 8 m (26.2 ft) wide and each weights 32 t.

Above the upper chamber, more than 50 stone blocks are piled up in a incredible way, they measure between 6 and 7 m (19.6 and 22.9 ft) long, from 1.25 to 2.6 m (4.10 to 8.53 ft) high for 1 to 2 m (3.2 ft to 6.5 ft) wide, and weighing from 30 to 72 tons. I will focus my account on these blocks.

Credits to Maraglioglio & Rinaldi

To close the volume of the upper chamber, these megaliths were laid starting from the height of 49 m to 60 m, which correspond to a total of 13 courses.

From this height, the speed of construction of the pyramid could have been around 24 days per course, or more than a year to lay hundred of stone blocks, or an average of 3 days per block.

One of the successfully key of this operation was the use of a transportation process, from the launching of the megalith in an individual small barge at Aswan to its final position in the pyramid.

The lowest part of the plateau could be flooded by the Nile during its yearly floods; at 15 m (49.2 ft) above the sea level, the searches of the “workers’ town” revealed port facilities remains, as well as a dyke remains in the Cairo area, whose highest part was also at 15 m above ground (49.2 ft).

This means that there used to be a port on a water surface of unknown configuration, but we do know that it must have reached the “lower temple” site of the Cheops’s Pyramid.

Once a year, this water surface was filled thanks to the Nile’s floods, and the rest of the year it was maintained by a team in charge of pumping water to compensate the water loss by evaporation (1,5 m / year or 4,9 ft / year), the water consumption of the “workers’ town”, and of the sluices allowing the supplies boats from the town and from the construction site – brought via a canal connecting the Nile and the town – to pass through the Nile’s variable level to the 15 m (49.2 ft) level of the water surface of the port.

The altitude of 15 m (49.2 ft) was not the highest level of the Nile’s flood, that is why the foundations of the “lower temples” have been found at 20 m above the sea level (65.6 ft).

This water surface could have served as an intermediate storage for the construction site of the pyramid, where stones of a certain volume would stay on their small boats from Aswan or Tura allowing to desynchronize the extraction rhythm and transportation of the blocks from the laying rhythm in the pyramid.

For getting the stones out of the water surface, they went through a 3-m (9.8 ft)-deep unloading basin of a sufficient surface to hold the biggest megalith on its small boat.

The megaliths floated laying on their side so that the draught of the small boat was at its minimum. Once unloaded from their carts at the plateau’s feet at 12 m (39.3 ft) level, the megaliths had to be transported along the 750 m (2460.6 ft) access causeway to the pyramid, rising by 50 m (164 ft). Then, they progressed along the access track, crossing the pyramid, to the elevator where they were lifted onto the course where they were be moved into different directions before being laid.

Continuously handling these giants without the right lifting tools that we know today, transporting them through narrow galleries, lifting them by 60 m (196.8 ft) into an elevator cage has been some of the biggest challenge of the Cheops’s Pyramid. These challenges couldn’t have been overcome without theoretical and empirical knowledges of the laws of inertia, and without a great precision in the transportation of the megaliths made possible thanks to a special foreseen equipment.

The chapters dedicated to the fluvial route, the unloading, to the lifting onto the causeway, the lifting through elevator, and laying to final position describe in details how these operations were done.

For better understanding the route taken by the megaliths on the construction site, we can observe below an illustration showing the “configuration” of the lowest part of the construction site:

The stone blocks came from the Nile on their small boats via a canal connecting the construction site of the pyramid.

These small boats went from and to the variable level of the Nile to the fixed level of the water surface thanks a system of sluices, and were stored on some place of this water surface.

The megaliths (and the casing stones) went one-by-one through an unloading basin, connected with the water surface by a waterproof door, and with the causeway leading to the pyramid by another waterproof door, for installing them on carts, this would take a day of work.

They were then taken over by a team responsible to transport them on the 750 m (2460.6 ft) long causeway rising over 50 m (164 ft) which too would have take a day of work.

A “boat pit’

following the principles of second generation floats, could have been equipped with an immersible boat whose 6 m (19.6 ft) raised deck could accommodated around a hundred of workers who, sinking with the boat, could have generated the force needed to raise the megalith causeway (as well as the facing blocks from Turah) to the base level in stages.

Once on the float’s plateau of the first floor, the megaliths were lifted to their final level following a special procedure which took another day of work.

Finally arrived at its level, they crossed the course, still on the same cart (thanks to the roller skids), until they reached their final position.

From the extraction from the storage water surface to their final laying position, the megaliths went through a 4 days handling cycle, mobilizing a team of less than a hundred people.