| THE
GREAT PYRAMID -
THE KING'S CHAMBERS
 Orthodox
Theory
According
to Egyptologists, the King’s Chamber was the
king’s final resting place – the raison d’etre
of the monument. Supposedly, his mummy was sealed inside the
granite sarcophagus, which was broken and plundered in antiquity.
The
two ‘airshafts’ in the King’s Chamber
may have provided fresh air for the benefit of the funeral
cortege,
but most Egyptologists nowadays call them ‘soul-shafts’ on
the assumption that the king’s soul used them for a
direct ascent into the northern and southern skies.
The
huge granite beams in the King’s Chamber superstructure – a
unique feature of the Great Pyramid – are thought
to have had a structural purpose – to protect the
flat roof of the chamber from the superincumbent weight
of masonry.
The
use of granite in this chamber and its superstructure
is thought to reflect that material’s protective
strength, but religious symbolism might also have been
a factor.
Alford
Theory
 The
concept of burial at such a height inside a pyramid goes against
a fundamental principle of Egyptian religion
which
dictated that the king’s body be buried at
ground level or below. The soul-shaft theory is unacceptable
too since the king’s
soul could have used the Descending Passage for its
ascent to the sky. Finally, the superstructure theory
is problematic,
since
the raised roofs provided no additional weight relief.
The
true purpose of the King’s Chamber, I suggest,
was to effect a perpetual re-enactment of the myth
of the creation.
The
first key component of this re-enactment was sound. The granite
beams in the
superstructure
were designed
to vibrate
in harmony
with Earth resonance and transmit low frequency
vibrations to the chamber below. The chamber,
built of highly
resonant granite,
then amplified these vibrations and their harmonics,
and transmitted audible sound via its so-called ‘airshafts’.
The broadcasting of this low frequency sound
re-enacted the sound
of creation (the latter idea being attested in
the Pyramid Texts).
 The
second key component of the re-enactment was meteoritic iron – the
seed of creation – which was hermetically
sealed inside the King’s Chamber sarcophagus
(on the role of meteoritic iron in the creation
myth, see my book). In a symbolic sense,
the sound spiritualised the iron and ejected
it into the northern and southern skies, via
the shafts, thereby re-enacting the
formation of the celestial bodies: the circumpolar
stars in the northern
sky, and the Sun, the Moon, and the rising-and-setting
stars in the southern sky (in Egyptian myth,
all of these bodies
were said to be made of iron).
The
King’s
Chamber was therefore a ‘chamber of
creation’,
in keeping with the creational symbolism
of the Pyramid, as illustrated in the diagram
to the right.
It
is important to realise that access to the King’s Chamber
was not intended by the architect, but became
possible after the acoustic system was damaged irreparably by an
earthquake
of exceptional force. The limit of the repository
would therefore have been the Antechamber to the King’s Chamber. |
