French Team Undertakes One Heavy Task--to Weigh the Great Pyramid of Cheops

Some speculate that if you were to hack it into one-foot cubes, you could stretch the cubes two-thirds of the way around the earth at the Equator.

Others contend it’s big enough to hold the cathedrals of Florence, Milan and St. Peter, with room left over for Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s as well.

But just how much does the Great Pyramid of Cheops weigh?

“Just wait, and I’ll tell you,” said Jacques Montlucon. He heads a three-man French technical team on a 20-day project that has them scampering up and down and around the massive stones that ancients piled one by one to build the most impressive of about 80 pyramids in Egypt.

13.1 Acres at Base

Cheops, largest of the three pyramids adorning Giza Plateau, covers 13.1 acres at its base and is thought to comprise more than 2.3 million limestone blocks weighing 2 1/2 tons each.

“We’re going to weigh Cheops, and we’ll do it with this,” the Frenchman said, stabilizing his microgravimeter against an enormous boulder.

A metal box the size and shape of an automobile battery, the microgravimeter is used in France to locate underground caves, quarries, trenches and tunnels. By measuring minute changes in the gravitational pull on a suspended weight, the instrument defines variations in subterranean density, from empty space to solid rock.

In Egypt, the French team hopes to use the machine’s readings to pinpoint chambers hidden when the pyramid was built 4,600 years ago, in the process determining the pyramid’s weight.

But the weighing hasn’t been easy.

Drawn by Its Magic

The microgravimeter demands quiet, but there is always a lot of life around the monument associated with the death of Pharaoh Cheops.

Egyptians are drawn by its magic, whether spiritual or not. For them, Cheops is a very personal pyramid.

Goats graze lazily on grass between the stones, and families picnic and play games at the base of the pyramid. Children belly-dance to blasts from transistor radios. Camel drivers bellow to foreign tourists to don fake Arab headdresses, then their animals bellow as the tourists unsteadily climb aboard for their first, and perhaps only, camel ride.

Horses and horse carts race at full speed on roadways around the pyramid. Young Egyptians defy regulations and risk death by climbing to the top to the cheers of onlookers below.

Hullabaloo at Pyramid

Last September, when the French tried to reach hidden cavities by boring three holes into a huge rock alongside the queen’s chamber, they ignored the bedlam and worked in the daytime.

“This time we’ve had to come early in the morning and work after 4 p.m., when everybody is thrown out of the pyramid, before and after people gather at the base,” Montlucon said.

Sitting near a hole hacked in the 9th Century by treasure-seeking troops of Caliph Ma’amun, the Frenchmen waited for quiet on a recent cool day.

Outside, a band played to the cheers of a crowd.

Inside, guards were having trouble ejecting a group of high school students who had spent hours sliding down ramps leading up and down the Grand Gallery, a passage to the king’s chamber and one of the world’s most amazing architectural feats.

Three-Dimensional Profile

With the quiet, work resumed. A French technician groped for balance as he pulled an extension cord up a steep, dark incline.

“This is new territory for us,” Montlucon said as the microgravimeter silently recorded what lay behind the walls.

“We’re taking more than 400 measurements . . . from the tip of the pyramid to the chamber under the ground. We want to find what kinds of rocks made up the structure, how they are layered. When a portion of the pyramid doesn’t weigh as much as expected, there should be spaces between the blocks.”

The team expects eventually to have a three-dimensional profile of how Cheops is built, including chambers currently known and unknown. Results from this mission should be known soon.