Anthony Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> First, I said it was wedged up in there... not
> that wedges were used to hold it up in there.
>
> All this would have required is the stone have a
> couple bumps sticking out the sides that made it
> especially hard to push up into place "straight"
> (flush with the roof of the DP).

Hello Anthony,

My apologies. I missed writing a section of what I was thinking at the time.
Articulating one's thoughts is not always a forte of mine.

What I had in mind was that it would have been remarkably difficult for the builders to have jacked this block up off the Descending Passage and into the space in the roof it was intended for.
Having protrusions on the sides to effectively wedge it into place would, IMO, have made putting the block in place shift up from remarkably difficult to downright impossible.
A suitable alternative, again IMO, would have been the cutting of slots along the sides of the block's outer face into which wedges could then be hammered once the block was in place.
But this latter fixing method might well have been visible to a searching eye; which leaves me wondering why nobody noticed it and, perhaps more pertinently, recorded it until Al Mamun and his band of Merry Men arrived on the scene.


> It would not surprise me if Mamun did knock the
> piece out while examining the entire passage for
> secret doors and such. Having found it, possibly
> by simply banging on the walls looking for hidden
> chambers, he then realized he had found one.
> Rather than trying to dig up (which would have
> been a suicide mission) he backed out of the
> pyramid, found a spot level with the plugstones,
> and started removing blocks to get in to that
> specific area.
>
> It's possible that the report of Mamun's workers
> hearing the stone fall was more like the workers
> were banging along inside looking for secret
> passages when they hit on the fake block, knocked
> it loose (just like they're supposed to have) and
> it was Mamun outside the pyramid who heard the
> stone crash and knew it was something important.
> They then started digging the tunnel towards the
> spot where the stone had come down (meaning they
> started outside the pyramid and headed towards the
> plugstones), and that has given rise to the
> malformed mutation of a story we have today.
>
> That story makes a ton more sense than the one
> we've been handed via oral tradition, now that we
> know the facts of the layout of the pyramid.

As I have mentioned elsewhere (a 'senior moment' is preventing me from remembering exactly where) Piazzi Smyth discovered two unique joints in the Descending Passage floor below the opening to the Ascending Passage.
These joints uniquely run underneath the side walls of the Descending Passage.
The uniqueness and location of these two floor joints strongly suggests that they are in some way linked to the Ascending Passage opening and possibly the vertical shaft in the Trial Passages.

Now, as Smyth observed, these two floor joints are very fine and easily overlooked.
However, Smyth viewed them as they were one thousand years after Al Mamun.
I would suggest that these lines were far more visible in Al Mamun's time
Even allowing for the fact that the Descending Passage floor in this area is noticably harder than the flooring north and south of it, a thousand years of human traffic can cause a lot of wear.

Could it be that these two lines drew Al Mamun's attention to the block in the ceiling?

Consider, if you will, the following extract from Piazzi Smyth's Life and Work at the Great Pyramid Edinburgh. 1867 (to set the scene, Smyth is in the Descending Passage with his guide, Alee) :

"Alee, you are a Pyramid guide, do you see these two diagonal floor joints?”
Yes, he did see them; and confessed, now they were pointed out, that they were true joints of the masonry, going under the walls of the passage on either side.
“Now why, Alee, did the kings [sic] who built the Pyramid make these two joints run in such very different directions from all the other joints in the passage floor?”
He only looked up and down at the different joints, saw that ‘the two’ were an exception, but said he could form no idea.
“Then look up, Alee, at the roof, and see why; so, turning his head in the narrow passage, he saw he was then vis-à-vis to the lower butt-end of the portcullis-block closing the entrance to all the ascending passages of the Pyramid; to everything constituting the interior of the Great Pyramid essentially different from every other Pyramid in Egypt.”

Now go back to my suggestion that Al Mamun started his tunnel at the mid-length of the north side of the Pyramid because he saw the small groove/marker cut into the pavement and running under the casing blocks …

MJ