PYRAMIDS AND GEOPOLYMERS
BOOK: THE PYRAMIDS AN ENIGMA SOLVED
Prof. Joseph Davidovits
Chapter 7
The Hard Scientific Proof
Though I am the first to apply this technology to the pyramid construction theory, another French chemist, Henry le Chatelier (1850 - 1936), was the first to discover that the ancient Egyptians produced man-made stone. Le Chatelier was also a metallurgist and ceramist. He worked with newly developed micrographic techniques, glass slides, thin section analysis, and photography in combination with the microscope. He was the first to examine enameled funerary statuettes from Egypt’s Thinite epoch (c. 3000 BC) with these techniques and to see them as they had never been seen before [37].
As Le Chatelier studied enameled funerary statuettes, he found that his observation methods led him to notice that the enamel was not a coating applied to the surface of the statuettes. Instead, the enamel was the result of minerals which migrated from within the stone itself. He cut thin sections with a diamond-tipped saw and observed a gradually increasing concentration of minerals that had migrated to or near the surface of the stone to form enamel. The process is like that which occurs with Egyptian faience, a self-glazing ceramic. Le Chatelier was astonished to realize that the statuettes were man-made stone.
He and his colleagues tried in vain to duplicate the process. The method that produced the statuettes is one of my chemical discoveries discussed in Appendix 1. Le Chatelier’s research took place in the early 1900s and his revelation should have raised debate about other stone artifacts, especially the pyramids with their numerous enigmatic features.
Academics, however, are not necessarily innovators. And scholars involved with the soft sciences, such as history, may not necessarily be scientifically minded. In fact, during my presentation at the Second International Congress of Egyptologists, I used le Chatelier’s work to make the Egyptologists who were present aware that science had already shown that the Egyptians produced man-made stone. Acknowledging that, they were still unwilling to concede that the pyramid stone might be man-made.
It was not until some years after I devised my theory that I analyzed actual ancient geopolymer. In 1981, Liliane Courtois of the Center for Archaeological Research, in Paris, and I carried out an X-ray chemical analysis on fragments of lime vessels fromTel-Ramad, Syria, dating from 6000BC.The vessels were made of a white stony lime material. In other words, they are classified as being made primarily of lime. We made a presentation at the Twenty-First International Symposium on Archaeometry, held at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York [38]. We reported that the samples contain up to forty-one percent of analcime (analcite), a zeolite that is easy to produce. This high amount of zeolitic material is not found in the raw material from which the vases were made and could only be the result of geopolymerization.The fact is that synthetic zeolites had been produced 8,000 years ago in the Middle East. In modern times they were first produced by an English scientist named Barrer in the 1950s.
Knowing that it would be impossible to prove my theory without samples of pyramid stone, in 1982 I made an appointment to visit Jean-Philippe Lauer at his home in Paris. Lauer, now over ninety years old, is eminent among European Egyptologists. He spent sixty years of his career restoring the pyramid of Zoser. He has his own conservative views on pyramid construction based on more than fifty years of study, and his attitude about my research is reserved. In a letter I received before I visited him, he said, “ I defy you to prove that the pyramid stone is synthetic. ”
That, of course, was my intent. During our visit, he gave me samples from the pyramids of Khufu (Kheops or Cheops) and Teti. The sample from Teti came from an outer casing block and the one from the Great Pyramid came from the ascending passageway (Fig.16). I had X-ray chemical analysis performed on the samples by two different laboratories to be sure that there would be no analytical discrepancies. I presented a paper on the test results at the International Congress of Egyptologists held that same year in Toronto [39]. The title of my conference was “ No more than 1,400 Workers to Build the Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu) with Man-Made Stone ”. At the congress, Lauer and I each made separate presentations about our theories of pyramid construction. Despite knowing that I was making a presentation using his samples, Lauer did not attend my presentation because he did not take my theory seriously. The Toronto Star newspaper covered the congress and published Lauer’s following response to my research (September 7, 1982): “ There are man ridiculous surveys, not stupid, but impossible. Not many are serious. ”
Figure 16: The Great Pyramid Lauer sample with coating.
The sample from the Teti pyramid is lighter in density than the sample from Khufu’s (Kheops or Cheops) pyramid (the Great Pyramid). The Teti sample is weak and extremely weathered, and it lacks one of the minerals found in the sample from the Great Pyramid. The samples contain some phosphate minerals, one of which was identified as brushite, which is thought to represent an organic material occurring in bird droppings, bone, and teeth, but it would be rare to find brushite in natural limestone.
The presence of such organic materials in the pyramid stone affords new possibilities for a better understanding of ancient culture. If bird droppings were a source of the brushite, this might explain a function of the large place known as Ostrich Farm, which was not far from Giza. It is well known that in ancient Egypt, bird droppings, urine, and animal dung were added to straw and mud to increase the cohesiveness of mud brick.
If bone were a source of brushite, this could shed new light on the mysterious sacrificial rites of antiquity. The sacred animals would have been slaughtered and burned on the sacrificial altars, their bones calcined to ashes. The ashes would have been powdered and used as an ingredient of the religious monument. The vestiges of this alchemical knowledge may have influenced customs and inspired mythology and legends of later times.
The pyramid samples also contain a mineral known as opal CT, a siliceous material. I had a debate about this with Michael S. Tite, Head of the Museum Laboratory at the British Museum. Tite was the coordinator of the Archaeometry ’84 Symposium, held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 1984. As coordinator, he had the advantage of prior review of my presentation. He took advantage of this and submitted a piece of a casing block exhibited at the British Museum to chemical analysis at the museum laboratory.
After my presentation titled“ Pyramids of Egypt Made of Man-Made Stone, Myth of Fact? ” [40], he arose and told the symposium,“ All of the features that they [his analytical team] saw can be explained on the basis of natural origin, and there is really no need to introduce this hypothesis of reconstituted stone. ” Like anyone unfamiliar with geopolymerization, Tite saw nothing unusual in the mineral composition.
Thanks to help from colleagues, especially Hisham Gaber, a geology graduate of Ain Shams University in Cairo, I obtained samples from the quarries of Tura and Mokkatam in the Arabian mountains, where it is believed that the casing blocks originated. Gaber collected more than thirty samples from various sites.We performed X-ray chemical analysis and X-ray diffraction on quarry stones and on pyramid stones. X-ray diffraction and microscopical analyses of the quarry samples indicates that they are pure calcite, sometimes containing a trace of dolomite. None of the quarry samples contains any of the unusual minerals found in the pyramid samples. If the casing stones were natural limestone, quarries different from those traditionally associated with the pyramid sites must be found, but where? This demonstrates that a complicated man-made geopolymeric system was produced in Egypt 4,700 years ago.
Thin sections made on pyramid stones of Khufu (Kheops or Cheops) and Teti show that they are light in density unlike the quarry samples which are uniformly dense. A thin section from Teti casing (Fig.17a) shows a natural nummulite imbedded in calcite surrounded with gaps in a very loose matrix. This could be agglomerated limestone. The thin sections for Tura/Mokkatam geological samples are quite different (Fig.17b). Their matrix is dense with no gap and no trapped air bubble. A problem of analysis, assuming that the Khufu (Kheops or Cheops) and Teti stones are made by agglomerating limestone using lime as a binder, is that lime hardens over a period of time and becomes recarbonated into calcium carbonate. It is impossible to distinguish a natural calcite microcrystal and a microcrystal of calcite which is the result of the recarbonation of lime. This is an obstacle involved in the detection of geopolymeric setting and new techniques must be developed to resolve it.
I met with Tite in London shortly thereafter to have a closer look at his test results. His charts showed practically the same peaks as the charts produced by my analysis, indicating a comparable mineralogical makeup in our samples. I presented my official rebuttal to Tite at the Science in Egyptology Symposium, held in England at the Manchester Museum in June 1984 [41]. The title of my conference was “ X-Ray Analysis and X-Ray Diffraction of Casing Stones from the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Limestone of the Associated Quarries ”. While a geological explanation for the presence of opal CT is valid, the presence of opal CT (detected by X- ray diffraction or microscopy) could also imply the addition of silicate materials during stone manufacture. The presence of opal CT in the pyramid stone might result from an addition of plant-ashes from bread-hearths. The burning of cereal husks, straw, and certain types of reeds yields such siliceous materials.
Although the quarry samples do not match the pyra- mid stone, a sample of stone I made with a very large excess of geopolymeric cement and fine limestone produced simi- lar peaks on the X-ray charts. Researchers who previously performed chemical analysis on pyramid stone never suspected anything out of the ordinary even though their samples contain elements uncommon in natural limestone. A case in point is a project mentioned in Chapter 1, the joint research venture carried out by Ain Shams University and SRI International. G. E. Brown, a geologist at Stanford University, was unable to mineralogically classify casing- block samples devoid of classifiable fossils, which enable pet- rographic comparison. Consequently, he could draw only ten- tative conclusions about the origin of the casing blocks. I am providing another example at the end of this chapter. Because it is not easy to match blocks which appear incomparable mineralogically with the natural limestone of Egypt, one be- gins to see how the use of reconstituted stone settles the out- standing scientific dilemmas.
Figure 17a: Thin section of Teti casing stone with nummulite shell and calcite micrystals.
Figure 17b: Thin section of Turah limestone with quartz inclusion (arrow) in dense matrix.
Figure 18: Drawing from Description de l'Egypte shows jumbled shells in pyramid core blocks.
Napoleonic geologists Jomard and de Roziere, however, described the rough building blocks of the Great Pyramid as being composed of shells that are in disarray (Fig.18) [42]:
“ The main variety of limestone in the Great Pyramid is almost solely formed of an accumulation of nummulites, which are disk-like fossil shells of various sizes that seem to be arranged in all orientations. ”
As in any concrete, the aggregates are for the most part jumbled, in this case devoid of sedimentary layering.
In addition to the jumbled shells and chemical makeup, the pyramid stone demonstrates other telltale physical features. Scattered through Lauer’s samples are numerous air bubbles. The bubbles are not round, but oval, like those that occur during the manipulation of clay. The broken surfaces have a clay-matrix look (Fig.19). This can often be observed with the naked eye on the broken surface of casing blocks.
Figure 19: Organic fibers, air bubbles, and an artificial red coating are visible on a sample stone from the ascending passageway of the Great Pyramid.
The sample from the Great Pyramid provided by Lauer is topped with a white coating overlaid with a brownish-red surface coloration. Such coloration appears also on a few remaining outer casing blocks of this pyramid and varies from brownish red to greyish black. There has been long debate about whether the coloration is a type of paint or a patina, the latter resulting gradually from desert weather conditions.
Attempting to show that the casing block coloration of the Khufu (Kheops or Cheops) and Khafra (Khefren or Chephren) pyramids is a paint, Andre Pochan, in 1934, analyzed the coloration appearing on these pyramids [43]. His tests revealed the presence of minerals highly uncommon in limestone, leading him to conclude that the coloration could not be a patina because that would require a migration of minerals from within the stone itself. He therefore proposed that some type of hard, siliceous binder was applied and painted over with a pigment of red ochre.
A. Lucas accepted the validity of Pochan’s chemical analysis but disputed the presence of a deliberate coating. Lucas maintained that the coloration is a patina. Lauer and K. L. Gauri, of the Stone Conservation Laboratory of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, also maintain that the coloration is a patina. Pochan and Lauer hotly debated the issue for twenty years. Lauer’s opinion carries great weight among peers, and he had the last word on the subject because he outlived Pochan. The chemistry of geopolymerization serves to settle this issue as well.
Because Pochan had already analyzed the red coloration, I analyzed only the underlying white coating appearing on the white coating from the Great Pyramid. I submitted Lauer’s sample to two different laboratories employing experts with diverse backgrounds in geology and mineralogy, Combining our expertise, I was amazed to find a tremendously complex geopolymeric chemical system in the white coating. Its principal ingredients are two calcium phosphates, brushite and crystalline hydroxyapatite, both found in bone, and a zeolite called ZK-20. The coating is pure geopolymeric cement. It is the key to the composition of the pyramid stone. This binder is infinitely more sophisticated than the simple gypsum and lime cement by which scholars have characterized Egyptian cement technology. Indeed, the binder is even more sophisticated than I had expected.
Even though Pochan did not understand the chemistry involved, he was nevertheless correct in his surmise that the red coloration is synthetic. As he knew, the minerals thought to have migrated are highly uncommon in natural limestone. In any case, the amount of minerals present in the stone is too small to form a patina. Additionally, the minerals in the red coloration, like those in the white coating, are insoluble and, therefore, could not have migrated, nor could minerals have migrated through the white coating to form a red coloration. Furthermore, the sample I analyzed exhibiting the red coloration came from the pyramid’s interior where it was unaffected by weathering. Finally, using a microscope, I observed two cracks in the red coating of this sample. One crack is deep and exposes white limestone, making it much more recent than the coating. The other crack is ancient, and it is filled with the red coloration. The color was obviously painted on because it filled the crack. The coating and coloration are truly remarkable alchemical products, showing no blistering or other appreciable deterioration after about 4,500 years.
In fall of 1992, a geologist, James Harrell, University of Toledo, approached my assistant Margie Morris. She agreed that Harrell be allowed to perform additional tests on the Lauer sample. He classified the limestone as natural limestone and the coating as man-made. Harrell never gave back the sample to Mss. Morris. He told her that in his effort to prove the natural limestone case, he destroyed the Lauer sample. He never stated that my claim on the presence of organic fibers was wrong. [43b].
Geologists who have analyzed the pyramid blocks have recognized no known adhesives holding the stone together. Not realizing that the unusual minerals in the stone comprise the binder, they have not recognized the stone as reconstituted limestone. Likewise, researchers recognize no known chemical composition to justify a man-made coating and coloration on the stone. A report that typifies the reaction of geologists to this material is amusing. A geologist was commissioned by the owners of a collection of limestone artifacts from ancient Egypt to prove them to be natural stone because museum authenticators interested in the collection detected that the stone was artificial. They opined that the pieces must, therefore, be fakes. Trying to prove the natural origin of the limestone, the geologist claimed that perhaps some extraterrestrial system, far in advance of our own, might possess the technology required for producing such stone, but lacking proof of that, we of the earth must consider the stone to be of natural origin. I shall come back to this extraordinary statement in a later chapter.
There is a historical account that supports the presence of paint on the Great Pyramid, and it also mentions remarkable pyramid cement. The following remarks were made by Abd el Latif (13 century AD):
“ These pyramids are built of large stones, ten to twenty cubits [16.6 -33 feet] in length by a thickness of two to three cubits [20 - 30 inches] and a similar width. What is worthy of the greatest admiration is the extreme precision with which the stones have been dressed and laid one over the other. Their foundations are so well leveled that one cannot plunge a needle or a hair between any two stones. They are cemented by mortar which forms a layer the thickness of a sheet of paper. I do not know what this mortar is made of; it is totally unknown to me. The stones are covered with writings in ancient characters whose meaning today I do not know and nowhere in all of Egypt have I met anyone who, even by hearsay, is able to interpret them.The inscriptions are so numerous that if one were to copy on paper merely those on the surface of the two pyramids, ten thousand pages would be filled. ”
Even though the paper-thin cement would afford no appreciable cohesive power for adhering one block to another, it is assumed that the builders, nevertheless, applied a thin coating of what is assumed to be ordinary lime-gypsum plaster. But Abd el-Latifs account shows that the Arabs, who were producing lime-gypsum plaster and lime mortar more than 3,000 years after the Great Pyramid was built, found the thin cement completely unfamiliar and quite impressive. Pa- per-thin mortar is a by-product of geopolymerization that forms when there is excess water in the slurry. The weight of aggregates squeezes watery cement to the surfaces, where it sets to form a skin.We may never learn much more about the colored hieroglyphs cited above. Abd el-Latif’s report was made shortly before the earthquake of AD 1301. Cairo was destroyed, and most of the outer casing blocks were stripped to rebuild the city.
That the pyramid stone is reconstituted limestone has eluded several individuals who might have recognized it. It never occurred to Jomard and de Roziere that the pyramid stone was a concrete when they observed the jumbled shells in 1801. Only poor-quality cement was produced after the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476. Portland cement was invented only in 1824. It was not manufactured until the 1830s.
Pochan recognized the coloration on the pyramid blocks as synthetic because it contains minerals uncommon in limestone. It follows that had he analyzed the pyramid stone as well, he would also have recognized it as the result of man- made reagglomeration, especially if he had considered the work of le Chatelier. And in 1974, the revelation eluded researchers of SRI International. Their team attempted to locate hidden chambers in the Great Pyramids of Giza. The project failed, however, because the pyramid stone contains so much moisture that the electromagnetic waves would not transmit, and were instead absorbed by the stone. This was unexpected because the natural limestone bedrock at Giza is relatively dry.
Only concrete would be full of moisture. The moisture content encountered by SRI International alone would convince any professional of the concrete industry that the pyramid stone is some kind of concrete. Today’s newly built concrete structures are internally moist. The moisture in the pyramid stone is probably the result of the migration of ground water. It is common for concrete structures to absorb ground water in desert environments.Additionally,the Great Pyramids are so massive and were built so rapidly that blocks that were not exposed to air for any appreciable time never fully dried. That the pyramid stone must be a concrete never occurred to the researchers at SRI International.
Additional supporting analytical data
The basic geological knowledge set out that the stone material was extracted from quarries located at the edges of the wadi in the soft yellow marly bed. In 1993, the German geochemist Klemm published analytical data from his new study on the origin of the core stones for the three pyramids, Khufu (Kheops or Cheops), Khafra (Khefren or Chephren) and Menkure (Mykerinos) [124]. Klemm did not discuss the agglomerated stone theory in this study. His objectives were to locate the source of the limestone raw material. To do this he chemically analyzed pieces of fossil shells and compared the results obtained on pyramid blocks and quarry fragments. The bulk material in reagglomerated stone is made of these fossil shells or of disaggregated quarry limestone. Klemm’s results relate to the origin of the fossil shells, in other words to the provenience of the limestone raw material.
Figure 20: Origin of the core stones for Khufu, Khafra and Menkure pyramids. Adapted from Klemm [124]
1 - Up to 100 % (100% Menkure, 72% Khufu, 44% Khafra) are attributed to the quarries located at the north edge of the wadi in the soft marly bed, some in the vicinity of Khent Kawes monument, named in the chart Wadi N .
2 - Up to 26% (0% Menkure, 15% Khufu, 26% Khafra) are attributed to a quarry located at the south edge of the wadi at the place called Hitan el Gurab and named in the chart Wadi S.1 .
3 - For Khafra, 25% are attributed to a quarry not recognized by Klemm; yet, from the analytical data, it could be located in the vicinity of the latter, at the south edge of the wadi, named in the chart Wadi S.2.
4 - up to 10% (0% Menkure, 10% Khufu, 2.5% Khafra) are attributed to an unknown quarry, which is not located in the vicinity of the pyramids, named in the chart unknown.
5 - Only up to 3% (0% for Menkure, 2.5% for Khafra, 3% for Khufu) of the analyzed blocks are attributed to the hard Mokattam Formation in the direct vicinity of the pyramids, named in the chart Base . It is reasonable to admit that these stones were added probably later to the site and were carved, during subsequent repair and restoration works carried out either by Ramses II or his successors.
Klemm’s results confirm the basic geological statement, namely that the pyramid builders did not quarry the hard grey Mokattam limestone located nearby the basements of the pyramids, but preferred to excavate 97% to 100% of the raw material limestone in the soft marly outcrops located at the edges of the wadi (down the hill).
Some Egyptologists criticize my findings because I obtained only two small samples of pyramid stone for analysis. However, the samples analyzed by Klemm (which came from the rough core blocks), Brown, and Tite can serve further to confirm my test results. In 1984 I submitted a research proposal to the Egyptian Antiquities Organization in Cairo requesting permission to sample the core blocks of the Great Pyramid. The permission was denied. The following excerpts are from their letter to me, translated from French:
“ Cairo, December 16, 1984 Dear Sir: WeareansweringyourletterfromOctober13,1984,andIhave the duty of informing you that the Permanent Committee of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, during their meeting on December 6, 1984, regrets not responding favorably to your proposal concerning the authorization for analyzing the stones of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the quarries. The decision is because your hypothesis represents only a private point of view which has no analogy with archaeological or geological facts.
Sincerely yours, The President of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. ”
Objection to my theory
A scientific paper was published by a team from the University of North Texas, USA in the December 1993 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. The paper titled “ The Pyramids - cement or stone? ” by K. Ingram, K. Daugherty and J. Marshall, outlines the results of a series of tests performed in 1989 on samples of limestone from the pyramids of Khafra (Khefren or Chephren) and Menkure (Mykerinos) at Giza. Their con- clusion reads: “ ... We found no evidence that support his [Davidovits] ideas ... ”. This conclusion is wrong because the paper contains at least three data which proves the contrary. What would have upset any fair geologist seems normal to these scientists. Trained experts will decide whether the three following uncommon scientific data must be qualified as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ results:
1 - To determine the chemical content of the limestone, one proceeds generally with a calcination at 900°C of a powdered sample. The calcite (calcium carbonate) decomposes and gives off carbon dioxide. In general, the calcination material loss for Egyptian limestone (and other limestones) ranges between 40-41% of its mass. In Ingram/ Daugherty’s paper, the material lost 60% of its mass during decarboxylation. This is an unusual result for ordinary limestone. This excessive loss should have been tentatively assigned to bounded water and therefore suggesting geopolymeric reagglomeration.
2 - The chemical analysis determined with a sophisticated tool called Inductively Coupled Plasmagraphy (ICP) provides a high amount for aluminum, 3.9 % expressed in aluminum oxide Al2O3. The authors wrote: “ ... the sample appears to be normal limestone, not a geopolymeric cement blend... ” This is again very unusual. We know that the limestone of the hard gray Mokattam bed does not contain more than 0.5% aluminum oxide Al2O3. On the other hand this high aluminum amount is found in the soft yellow marly limestone of the Sphinx trench and the wadi quarries and that it is not appropriate for standard constructional purpose, yet a dedicated raw material for the reagglomeration process as depicted in the previous chapter.
3 - The third mistake relates to the Infra-Red Spectroscopy investigation. The infra-Red spectrum differentiates between calcium carbonate calcite and silico- aluminate (clay constituent of geopolymeric cement). A shoulder in the spectra around 1000 cm-1 characterizes silico- aluminate. Both Khafra (Khefren or Chephren) and Menkure (Mykerinos) stones spectra display this shoulder. Yet for Ingram/Daugherty“ ... this is a minor variation... ”.Why did they refrain from enlarging their spectra, as would have done any scientist in order to focus on this very peculiar band which pertains to routine geopolymeric characterization?
To sum up: this paper provides additional data supporting the agglomeration theory. It shows how untrained scientist, who are ignorant of the geopolymer chemistry potential, can improperly assign the analyzed samples to natural stones despite their uncommon features. K. Ingram, K. Daugherty and J. Marshall assumed that since the agglomeration stone theory is against orthodoxy, it must be incorrect; therefore, it is not worthy of serious study and hence their sloppy science and incorrect conclusion.
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