History's Greatest Mysteries: Unlocking the Secrets of Egypt's Pyramids (Season 4)

Saqqara, Egypt, 2650 BC. Workers serving under Pharaoh Djoser are nearing completion on one of the ancient world's largest construction projects, a pyramid. We can't definitively say which was the very first Egyptian pyramid, but Djoser's is certainly one of the first. It's 205 feet tall with a base of 358 feet by 397 feet, the size of two football fields side by side. And it's an amazing feat of engineering and technology. Many others are built in the same area. There are probably even more, but we know of at least 118 Egyptian pyramids that still exist today with extensive ruins. Most of them have been intact, almost perfectly preserved over the millennia. Including the largest ever built, the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Great Pyramid is equivalent to the Empire State Building of its day. It reaches 480 feet tall. And for about 4,000 years, it is the tallest man-made structure on the planet, until it's finally dethroned by England's Lincoln Cathedral in the year 1311. It's composed of an estimated 2.3 million blocks of stones, weighing an estimated 6 million tons. And some of these stones individually are 50 to 80 tons each. The workforce that was needed to lift these stones must have been massive. According to ancient Greek and Roman historians, it is suggested that it was a labor workforce of around 100,000 enslaved people. And it's not just the size that's impressive. The Great Pyramid is probably one of the most unique and most precise buildings that has ever been built. It is aligned to true north within 1 20th of a degree. That is remarkable when you consider the time period when the Great Pyramid was built. The entire base of the Great Pyramid is nearly a perfect square, with the western side being only 5.5 inches longer than the eastern side. This is 0.01% difference. This is an amazing amount of accuracy for a structure this big this long ago. When hieroglyphics are first translated in the 1820s, it unlocks a trove of new information about the pyramids of Egypt and why they were built. They were long suspected to be tombs for pharaohs. And the hieroglyphics confirmed this. But as more of these hieroglyphics are translated, we find out that maybe these pyramids had another function as well. There's a group of hieroglyphics that line the subterranean chambers of the pyramids at Saqqara. And these date to around 23 or 2,400 BC. And they've become known as the pyramid texts. They're written in vertical lines. And they cover the walls of almost every single room of these pyramids. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics, even the ones inside the pyramids, they're offering new names. They're offering new dates. They're offering new legacies of the pharaohs, who the rulers were. They're talking about the afterlife a little bit. But in terms of why these pyramids were built, we don't seem to have that information. But these particular texts are different. These hieroglyphics suggest a potential purpose for the pyramids. And it starts with a fundamental ancient Egyptian belief. Like many other world traditions, these texts reveal that they believe in an eternal soul, which the Egyptians call the Ka. The hieroglyphics suggest that the Egyptians believed that the pharaoh's Ka travels to the starry heavens, where he'll live in eternity amongst the gods. To some, that means the pyramids could In 1994, Belgian engineer Robert Bavall and British historian Adrian Gilbert published their book, The Orion Mystery, which becomes an international bestseller. The central crux of the book is what is known as the Orion correlation theory. The authors propose that the pyramids of Giza are designed to match a star alignment in the belt constellation of Orion. However, some think it's more than just souls that travel. In 2012, Belgian author Philip Coppens takes the idea of the Orion correlation theory and expands on it. He supports the idea that the builders of the pyramids may have aimed their pyramid shafts directly at Orion. But rather than transport the Ka of the pharaoh to the heavens, he suggests that they could have actually been transporting the physical bodies. I mean, it's a pretty fantastical interpretation. How do the bodies levitate and stay up there in the sky? Coppens doesn't explain that, but he does cite what he claims is evidence that the pharaoh's bodies were somehow transported. As Coppens describes, a great many of the sarcophagi inside the pyramids are found empty. This is true, and Egyptologists generally attribute that to grave robbers. But Coppens cites multiple examples of completely untouched burial chambers inside pyramids. No grave robbers have accessed them. And yet, when modern archaeologists finally open these chambers, bodies are nowhere to be found. Coppens states that after the pharaohs are laid to rest, their sarcophagi and burial chambers are sealed up. And then the pyramid somehow moves their actual bodies, and you're left with an empty tomb. The pyramids might be the most famous and remarkable aspect of the kingdom of Egypt, but they were only being built for a relatively short time. You have a civilization that's around for about 2,000 years, yet they only spent about 300 to 400 years designing these magnificent structures. So among the many mysteries surrounding the pyramids, one important question is, why did they stop being built? In the late 90s and early 2000s, an all-new theory emerges that attempts to explain what might have happened. And according to this theory, the pyramids were built with a very specific purpose in mind. And once this purpose was fulfilled, the Egyptians didn't need to make any more. In 1998, engineer Christopher Dunn publishes a book. And in that book, he posits that the pyramids really have nothing to do with the afterlife at all. They're there to serve the everyday life of the people of Egypt living throughout the kingdom by providing electrical power. Dunn's theory starts with one significant word. When you consider the word pyramid, you've got pi, which is a fire, and then mid, which is the middle. So when you bring the two together, you've got fire in the middle, and that is essentially what I'm proposing for the Great Pyramid, except that it's not a fire of combustion, but it's an energetic environment. With that in mind, modern-day engineers like Dunn start to examine the layout of the pyramids' internal structures. Inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza, you have three chambers. You have a subterranean chamber. You've got a chamber that's been named the Queen's Chamber, and one that's been called the King's Chamber. Traditional Egyptologists have been long focused on this building as a tomb. So they've taken the conventional view that the pharaoh's body was placed in the King's Chamber, and the other two could have been used if the pharaoh died before the pyramid was finished. However, no human remains or funerary objects have ever been found inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza, but that might be the point. When you look at these chambers through the eyes of an engineer, you see that they might be serving a different function. American engineer John Cadman also supports this theory. Cadman is looking into this problem at the same time as Dunn in the late 1990s, and he really seizes upon the idea that this building has a mechanical function as some kind of pump. Water would flow in via the tunnels from an ancient lake at a higher elevation. The water would then flow through a duct up into the Queen's Chamber, and then exit through an outflow tunnel to the Nile River. The next question is, why a water pump? To find out, Cadman makes his own model of the pyramid's subterranean chambers. In the year 2000, Cadman uses a 500-pound block of cement to carve out a smaller replica of the Great Pyramid to study the fluid dynamics that were happening inside the chambers. Incredibly, when he runs water through, the block actually starts shaking with long and then short pulses. Now, if you scaled up this experiment to the full size of the pyramid, Cadman believes the system would have created a heartbeat-like vibration that shook the entire structure. Eventually, Dunn further expands on this idea. He outlines that the Great Pyramid is actually a coupled oscillator, which transforms vibrations into energy, and that generates power. Dunn's hypothesis also could account for findings in the Queen's Chamber that have never been fully understood. Those twin shafts diagonally extending upwards from this chamber were once thought of as air ducts, and others have hypothesized that they target certain stars in the night sky. Now, early explorers reported that the walls and the ceilings of the Queen's Chamber were covered with up to about an inch of salt, and that there was gypsum coming out of the cracks in the limestone. Nobody knew what to make of this at the time. According to Dunn, it's evidence that the pyramid served as a chemical reactor. My theory on the Queen's Chamber is that chemicals were delivered to the chamber through shafts. Those solutions were dilute hydrochloric acid and a hydrated zinc solution. Those two chemicals brought together would boil off hydrogen. This hydrogen would cause a chemical reaction with the chamber's limestone, which would explain the presence of salt and gypsum. The hydrogen reaction compounds the pyramid's vibrations exponentially. It's now really moving and can generate a lot of power. Dunn believes all of these vibrations charge up the quartz and granite stones in the center of the pyramid. This is why they're putting these stones that weigh 50 to 80 tons in the center. They're almost like batteries. And with that, you have yourself an energy source. Just how would the Egyptians use that energy? According to a 1996 book by Austrian writers Peter Krasa and Rainer Habeck, the ancient Egyptians may have actually had electric lights. Their theory is based on a relief sculpture that was found in the 2,000-year-old Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt. It shows what they believe to be a massive light bulb with a socket, a cable, and a filament. These so-called light fixtures appear prominently in several other Egyptian artworks as well. Krasa and Habeck also cite a 1982 experiment by Austrian engineer Walter Garn. He sees the so-called Dendera light and decides to test if such a device could have been built using the materials available to the ancient Egyptians. He was able to make a working model of the device, but his used traditional electricity, not pyramid power. Did the Egyptians actually have electricity? According to this theory, they did. And once they had built enough pyramids to light and power their civilization, they could stop. It's, uh, it's out there, but hey, it's a theory.