On Jean-Pierre Houdin

 THE MAN IN BLACK

Almost all Egyptologists receive mail from strangers. Sometimes it is from reincarnated pharaohs; sometimes it is from prospective tourists who want to know if they can drink the water. (You can’t.) Because my specialty is mummies, I receive hundreds of letters and e-mails from sixth graders who have been studying Egypt in school and want to mummify their recently deceased parakeets. About twice a year I receive offers from people who want to donate their bodies for mummification when they die. To these good folks I reply that I did that once, as a research project, and have now moved on.

No matter what our Egyptological specialty, we all receive communications from retired engineers with theories of how the pyramids were built. Usually there is an obvious flaw that even I can spot. On June 16, 2003 I received an e-mail from a French architect, Jean-Pierre Houdin, who had his own theory of how the Great Pyramid of Giza had been built. My friend Jack Josephson, an art historian who also has a degree in engineering, had suggested he contact me. Jack is a no-nonsense type of guy; I knew that if he told Houdin to contact me, it would be worthwhile to meet him. So I invited Jean-Pierre for dinner. Also coming was my friend Armand, an engineer who had been to Egypt, and his wife, as well as another friend, Jack Scaparro, who was working on a novel set in Egypt. My Egyptologist wife, Pat, rounded out a receptive audience of five.

Jean-Pierre arrived at precisely 4:00 P.M., as suggested. We wanted time to hear and discuss his theory before dinner at seven, but would soon discover that three hours was not nearly enough time. This was not your ordinary pyramid theory. Our guest was dressed all in black, including a fashionable black leather jacket—in New York in June. A well-manicured gray-haired man of fifty, he had a pleasant smile and spoke heavily accented but good English. We were soon gathered around the coffee table as Jean-Pierre set up his laptop. He explained that he had given up his architectural practice five years ago so he could devote himself to the puzzle of how the Great Pyramid was built. Working out of his Paris apartment, he spent six or seven hours a day creating elaborate 3-D computer simulations of the interior and exterior of the Great Pyramid. As his computer models progressed he became more and more obsessed with the Pyramid, until it was all he thought about.

Jean-Pierre’s interest in the Great Pyramid began in 1999 when his father, an engineer, watched a television documentary on the pyramids and realized the program’s presentation of how the Great Pyramid was built was all wrong. He had another idea of how the huge blocks were raised to the top, a revolutionary idea, different from anything anyone had ever proposed, so he called his son Jean-Pierre and laid it out.

The father-son team was ideal to tackle this mystery. Henri Houdin had earned a PhD in engineering from Paris’s prestigious École des Arts et Métiers. In 1950, as a twenty-seven-year-old engineer, he was sent to Ivory Coast to build their infrastructure. When he arrived there were eight kilometers of paved roads; when he left there were highways, bridges, and power plants. For decades Jean-Pierre had designed houses and office buildings; he knew about planning big projects. The two were equipped to answer the question how the Great Pyramid was built, but it would not be easy. Eventually the search for the answer would take over both their lives.

While his laptop booted up, Jean-Pierre explained how his computer graphics helped him understand the interior and exterior of the Great Pyramid. With new, sophisticated software developed for architects, he created 3-D images of the chambers inside the Great Pyramid. Then, on his computer screen, he could rotate the images to see the spatial relationships between the rooms—what features were on the same level, what parts had to have been built first, where the largest stones in the Pyramid were placed.

As he clicked the keypad, beautiful diagrams of the Pyramid appeared and we realized we were in the presence of a man who knew the Great Pyramid intimately. He explained why some blocks in the Pyramid were limestone and others granite; why the patterns of stone in some walls were different from others. I have friends who are pyramid experts, but I had never heard anything from them as detailed as Jean-Pierre’s explanation. I was astounded by the quality of his graphics. Little figures hauled blocks up inclined ramps and put them in place with ingenious lifting devices. He even had topographical maps of the Giza Plateau to show how the architects of the Great Pyramid took advantage of the natural contours of the land to move huge blocks of stone. The images weren’t just informative, they were beautiful. I had just completed a high-budget documentary for The Learning Channel on pyramids around the world. We’d spent thousands and thousands of dollars on our graphics, and Jean-Pierre’s were better!

Jean-Pierre explained the difficulties with the two competing theories of how the blocks in the Pyramid were raised to the top. The single ramp theory, so often shown in television documentaries, could be easily discredited. The basic idea is that blocks were hauled up a long ramp constructed against one of the sides of the Pyramid. As the Pyramid grew, the ramp was raised and extended. The problem is that to keep the slope gentle enough so men could haul blocks, the ramp would have to be a mile long. If the Pyramid were being built on the site of New York’s Empire State Building, the ramp would extend all the way into Central Park, about twenty-five city blocks. Building just the ramp would have taken thousands of men decades. Also, there would have been a tremendous amount of debris from such a ramp, and rubble doesn’t just disintegrate in the desert; but huge piles of rubble have never been found. Perhaps most damaging to the single ramp theory is the fact that there is practically no place to put such a long ramp on the Giza Plateau.

The second theory fared no better in Jean-Pierre’s analysis. It posited that a ramp had corkscrewed around the outside of the Pyramid itself, like a road winding around a mountain. This solves the no-space problem. But this theory has a fatal flaw as well. The Pyramid has four corners, and as the Pyramid grew, the architects had to constantly sight along those corners to make sure the edges were straight and thus ensure that they would meet at a perfect point at the top. But a ramp corkscrewing up the outside would have obscured these sight lines. Thus this too couldn’t be how the ancient Egyptians raised the blocks to the top.1

Jean-Pierre showed us graphics of what the Pyramid looked like, year by year, as it was being built. And then he sprang his theory. He claimed that inside the Great Pyramid was a mile-long ramp corkscrewing up to the top, that had remained undetected for 4,500 years! We were astonished. The theory was so radical, so different from anything ever imagined, that it seemed impossible. But as the parade of graphics continued on the computer screen and Jean-Pierre explained the details, it seemed more and more credible, even probable. Here was a solution that answered the questions Egyptologists had been asking for decades. Somehow the centuries-old mystery of the Great Pyramid had been solved by this intense Frenchman dressed in black. I had the feeling that this theory just might be one of the great moments in the intellectual history of the world.

We were all overwhelmed by Jean-Pierre’s step-by-step explanation of the new theory, but the Jean-Pierre Pyramid Show was just beginning. For two more hours, a parade of graphics and explanations of Pyramid minutiae appeared on his laptop. We saw what the Pyramid looked like after five years, seven years, ten years, twenty years, until it seemed as if we were watching it rise block by block. There are three chambers inside the Great Pyramid, and Jean-Pierre gave us the construction details of all three. Two of the rooms—the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber—were clearly intended for burials. They are rectangular rooms where you can put a sarcophagus, statues, funerary furniture, and anything else needed for the next world. The great puzzle is the mysterious Grand Gallery. It doesn’t make any architectural sense. It is a long hallway sloping upward inside the Pyramid, leading to the King’s Chamber. But why the twenty-eight-foot ceiling? And why line the side walls with low stone benches with strange grooves carved in them? Our guest in black had an answer for every question.

After three hours Jean-Pierre was still just warming up, but he had lost his audience; we were all brain-dead. Jean-Pierre had no idea that much of what he had thrown at us had simply bounced off. None of us was nearly so familiar with the Pyramid as he was; there were concepts we just couldn’t wrap our nonarchitect brains around. But we were all impressed. Jean-Pierre could visualize the Great Pyramid in three dimensions in a way no one had ever imagined possible. The man in black was amazing.

Feeding Jean-Pierre was the only way I could think of to slow him down. Still, he continued his Pyramid seminar, laying out the physical evidence to support his theory and so the discussion continued over pasta. By dessert the radical new idea was looking better and better. I asked Jean-Pierre what most impressed him when he first saw the Great Pyramid. “Oh, I’ve never been there,” he answered nonchalantly. The man who had given up his career as an architect and devoted five years of his life unraveling the secrets of the Great Pyramid had never seen it—and didn’t want to! When I pressed Jean-Pierre about visiting the Pyramid, he wasn’t interested. “Oh, I know what it looks like,” he said, and added some polite response like, “Oh yes, I must do that.” Clearly, for him the Great Pyramid was an abstract intellectual puzzle to be solved, not a monument to be visited. Perhaps he was afraid he would be disappointed; perhaps he feared something he might see would disprove his theory and the search would be over.

As the evening wore on the question became, what to do next? Here was a man with what could be the most important archaeological discovery of the century. For five years he had devoted his life to solving an incredibly difficult intellectual puzzle. It was one of those rare times when obsession seems to have produced something positive—indeed, something wonderful, so wonderful that I found myself being drawn into the obsession. I wanted to be part of it; I wanted to be there when Jean-Pierre found his internal ramp.

The Secret of the Great Pyramid

How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery

Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin