Product Description

Eight years ago, Jean-Pierre Houdin, a successful French architect, became obsessed by the age-old mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built. He renounced his architectural practice, sold his Paris apartment, and for ten hours a day labored at his computer to create exquisitely detailed 3-D models of the interior of the Great Pyramid. After five years of effort, the images rotating on his computer screen provided irrefutable evidence of an astonishing secret. Corkscrewing up the inside of the Great Pyramid is a mile-long ramp, unseen for 4,500 years. The pyramid was built from the inside. The revelation casts a fresh light on the minds that founded earth's first civilization. The narration takes place in two time frames: ancient and modern. The ancient story explains how a nation of farmers that had only recently emerged from the Stone Age could construct one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To execute something as complex and massive as the Great Pyramid, Egypt needed architects, mathematicians, boat builders, stone masons, and metallurgists. It took twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. By the time its capstone was laid in 2560 BC, the innovations born of the building quest had transformed agrarian Egypt into the world's most modern, most powerful nation. As we follow the progress of Hemienu, the innovative architect who planned, organized and oversaw construction of the Great Pyramid, we also follow Houdin working to discover how and why the ancient architect designed the pyramid as he did. Houdin works as a 'forensic' architect, aiming to reconstruct the lessons Hemienu had learned from construction of three previous pyramids and to visualise his blueprint for the massive stone building.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #145513 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
"Houdin's theory solves many mysteries about the huge structure." --Scientific American

About the Author
Bob Brier is the enormously popular Egyptologist known around the world as Mr. Mummy. He has conducted research on pyramids and tombs in 15 countries as a senior research fellow at Long Island University. He is the author of 7 books, including The Murder of Tutankhamen, and the host of highly-rated, award-winning, multi-part series for TLC including Mummy Detective. Brier's lectures for The Learning Company are one of the company's most successful offerings. In 1996, Jean-Pierre Houdin left his highly successful independent Parisian architecture firm to devote himself to solving the mystery of the great pyramid. He has been awarded the Montogolfier Prize (awarded for lifetime achievement to still active engineers and scientists) for his research.

Customer Reviews

More than one mystery
Anybody visiting the Great Pyramid in Giza has been in awe at the architectural genius that its construction exhibits - four and a half thousand years ago. The mystery of its structure has been occupying Egyptologists, architects and engineers for a long time. How was it possible to build the pyramid as high as it was and as precise? Could an outer ramp have been used to move the huge stone blocks into position or was there a hidden inner ramp? And what was the real purpose of some of chambers, in particular the commonly named "Great Hall"? Despite many theories, expertly summarized by Bob Brier, nobody has been able to prove any of them. Brier, a renowned Egyptologist himself, follows Jean-Pierre Houdin, an architect, on his nine-year absorbing quest to establish proof of his father's ground-breaking theory of the building's construction and the indisputable brilliance of the pyramid's architect, Hemienu.

Brier takes the reader through the history of pyramid building, interleafing it with the story of the Houdins' intricate search to find the evidence that was needed to convince the expert community of the validity of their theory. The author applies a fluid and conversational tone to the narrative making it easy for the reader to follow his information-rich and well-sourced account, without overloading us with too many technicalities and details. The reader is literally taken by the hand and walked through the building process of the Great Pyramid, one layer at a time, from the planning, design, and quarrying the stones, to the administrative challenges the search for the right locality and positioning and finally the actual construction. The illustrations further facilitate understanding and appreciation. [Friederike Knabe]

BUY Great Pyramid
What an exellent book..The guys a genius for sure. If you want to learn something that 'will' be proved factual very soon...then you need to buy and read this wonderfull book...Thankyou to Jean-Pierre Houdin who gave up so much for this project and Bob brier .