The Giza Power Plant by Christopher Dunn

that, contrary to what we have been taught, the pyramid builders were not primitive workers of stone.
    It was clear to me that modern quarrymen and the ancient pyramid builders were not using the same set of guidelines or standards. They were both cutting and dressing stone for the erection of a building, but the ancient Egyptians somehow found it necessary to maintain tolerances that were a mere four percent of modern requirements. Two questions sprang from this revelation. Why did the ancient pyramid builders find it necessary to hold such close tolerances? And how were they able to consistently achieve them?
    It goes without saying that if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book
5/5/2000 Ice:
The Ultimate Disaster,
Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries,
twenty-seven years
to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of
stone. 5 These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place.
    The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inchper foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.
    In
Pyramid Odyssey,
William Fix stated that the most accurate survey of the base of the Great Pyramid showed it as 3023.13 feet around the perimeter, with the average of the sides being 755.78 feet. If the alignment of this structure was governed by today's building standards, then one side of the Great Pyramid would be allowed a variation of 15.115 inches.
    The generally accepted academic theory on how the base of the Great Pyramid was leveled for the most part cannot account for this accuracy. Egyptologists propose that the area was leveled through the use of standing water: A grid-like system of canals was dug into the bedrock where the Great Pyramid was to stand, and then these canals were flooded. The dry rock, or bank of the canals, was cut level, using the surface of the water as a height gauge. Although there is no evidence to support this traditional theory, at first glance it does appear to have some elements of logic. If we believe that the pyramid builders were not sufficiently advanced to have developed the precision tools that are used by today's surveyors, that would seem to be the only method available to a primitive society. However, proponents of this theory sometimes fail to mention that there is an outcrop of bedrock that was left intact at the center of the pyramid. This would mean that any grid canals would have encircled the bedrock mound.
    More importantly, another detail that so far has not been given any consideration by proponents of this theory is: At what rate would the water in the grid canals system have been absorbed into the porous nummulitic limestone bedrock of the plateau, or have evaporated into the atmosphere? The grid system theory of leveling the base of the Great Pyramid is accepted on the premise that the standing water remained at a constant level in the canals. If such canals were indeed cut, how