Was the Pyramid of Khafre Eroded by a Flood?
Reviewing the Erosion Hypothesis of the Ethical Skeptic
“Ethical Skeptic” is the publication of a retired Navy officer and architect who has recently begun to promote the theory that the Pyramid of Khafre was nearly submerged by a Flood that eroded the facing stones. The primary evidence for his hypothesis is that the visible damage to the Khafre Pyramid is concentrated in one level stratigraphic region near the top (Figure 1). He concludes that the three Giza Pyramids must have been built before the Flood to have been eroded by the sea at a height of about 550 feet above current sea level.
In his paper, Ethical Skeptic proposes several good hypotheses such as the idea that the stones of the pyramids were lifted using water-powered machines. However, his primary thesis that only wave erosion could have produced the damage seen on Khafre’s pyramid is easily debunked.
Ethical Skeptic’s Hypothesis
As seen in Figure 2, the Pyramid of Khafre appears to have undercut erosion because the casing stones have been removed from a band about three-quarters up from the bottom of the structure so that the remaining casing stones jut out from the surface of the structure.
A More Reasonable Explanation
In the Chronological Framework of Ancient History series of papers, Darrell White and I built a model of ancient history that reconciles Egypt and the surrounding kingdoms to Bishop Ussher’s chronology of the Bible, as modified by Floyd Nolan Jones. One of the project’s results was the alignment of the Ice Age from within a century after the Great Flood in 2348 BC and ending with the rise of sea level to the current height by the time of Joshua’s Conquest in 1450 BC.
We found that the Fourth Dynasty Kings Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure built their pyramids between 1921 BC when Abraham visited Egypt, and 1825 BC when the Great War broke out. This century was at the peak of the Ice Age and in the lifetime of Abraham and Isaac.
During the Ice Age the Earth’s oceans were warmer and the interior of the continents much cooler than in the Holocene Era in which we live today. The oceans had been charged with heat by the tectonic activity of Noah’s Flood.
Microscopic organisms called diatoms live in the ocean. They are single-celled algae that have a calcium or silicate internal structure. When they die their shells sink to the bottom and become part of the diatomaceous earth sediment. As it happens, different species of diatoms live in different water temperatures. Therefore the proportion of diatom species in the sediment can allow us to determine the temperature profile of that body of water over the past four thousand years.
Sediment cores from the Antarctic Sea have revealed that at the start of the Ice Age, the average water temperature in Antarctica was 20 C, which is 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the course of the Ice Age, the water temperature slowly cooled until it reached today’s value of 4 C, which is just above freezing.
The warm oceans had higher rates of evaporation which caused very high rates of precipitation of both rain and snow during the Ice Age. The Sahara Desert was lush and green and full of freshwater lakes. During the time of Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms, the Giza Plateau received heavy rainfall. Today it rarely receives any rain at all.
Heavy Rainfall Eroded Soft Limestone
The Giza Pyramids were made of three types of stone. The core, making up 95% of the volume was made with hard limestone blocks quarried locally on the Giza Plateau and thus transported the shortest distance. Some of the internal rooms and passages were lined with very hard granite quarried far up the Nile near Aswan and floated down the river on barges. Granite was the most expensive material and was used only in a few places.
The outer casing stones were made of bright white Tura Limestone blocks, which were quarried on the other side of the Nile near the Wadi Degla. The Tura Limestone casing stones were the softest and most water-soluble of all the Pyramid materials and were therefore the worst choice for a casing stone, except for their color.
Since the Giza Pyramids were built during the high rainfall period of the Ice Age, they were exposed to erosion from acidic rainful, which dissolves limestone in a process called karst erosion as seen in Ethical Skeptic’s Figure 4 below.
Ethical Skeptic observed that the karst erosion is more pronounced on the bottom half of the Pyramid of Khafre than it is on the casing stones remaining on the top. He then jumps to the erroneous conclusion that the karst erosion was caused by the pyramid being partially submerged under the sea and that the top 100 feet of the pyramid experienced only “normal” erosion because they were above sea level.
However, karst erosion does not occur below sea level. It only occurs in limestone that is above sea level when rainfall with carbon dioxide in it percolates down through the cracks on its journey to the sea.
Ethical Skeptic failed to consider two other points that explain the damage to the Pyramid of Khafre. First, the shape of the pyramid itself means that when it receives rainfall the rain from the top runs down the sides to the bottom. While the top of the pyramid is only eroded by the drops of rain that fall on it, the lower region of the pyramid receives both the rain that fell on it and all of the rain flowing down from higher up on the pyramid.
The height and steep slope of the pyramid cause the runoff water flowing down the sides to accelerate. So not only did the bottom receive a lot more total water flow, but the runoff water flowed at a much higher velocity. Fast-moving water is the primary cause of most surface erosion on Earth. The high-velocity runoff water channelized and damaged the casing stones near the bottom much worse than the casing stones at the top.
There is another important detail provided to us by ancient observers of the Giza Pyramids. The outer casing stones were completely covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Thus the pyramid was a monument to some important message written on the outer casing stones. However, the carved hieroglyphs made the casing stones more vulnerable to erosion by runoff water than if they had been clean and smooth.
It appears that the Egyptians recognized this erosion problem before the end of the century in which the pyramids were built. Menkaure was the third Pharoah after Khufu and Khafre. The casing stones of Menkaure’s pyramid were made of the hardest granite from Aswan. But he appears to have run out of money before he could complete it. Thus only the lower courses of Menkaure’s pyramid were encased with granite.
The severe erosion at the lower region of the Khafre Pyramid also explains why the Arabs who quarried the casing stones climbed nearly to the top to obtain stones that were in better condition.
Part of the Ethical Skeptic’s argument is that since the damaged area is horizontal and level, the damage must have been done by waves on a body of water, whose surface is always level. However, the second point that Ethical Skeptic failed to consider is that the pyramids were built in horizontal layers of blocks. Thus they have shear lines of weakness that are horizontal. That weakness could be exploited naturally by earthquakes which have been known to occur in Cairo, and it could also be exploited by men.
When the Arabs began to quarry the pyramids for stone to build Cairo, they had men ascend the sides using crowbars to remove the casing stones, and sometimes the stones underneath. Once they opened a hole in the casing, the easiest way to quarry more stones was to exploit the weakness of the courses by working horizontally all the way around to remove all of the casing stones on that course. Thus, the Arabs caused the “undercut erosion” on the pyramid of Khafre by quarrying the casing stones near the top.
The Death Knell Argument
My final argument to show that the Ethical Skeptic’s theory cannot be true is that the top of the Pyramid of Khufu or the Great Pyramid was originally only 15 feet lower than the top of the Pyramid of Khafre. If the sea level had been high enough to erode the Khafre Pyramid it would have eroded into the core stones of the Great Pyramid at the same elevation. The core stones are harder, but they are still limestone, and therefore they should have been eroded by the waves as well. Yet no such band of erosion is seen on the Great Pyramid.
One might argue that the Pyramid of Khafre was built before the Flood and the Pyramids of Khufu and Menkaure were built after the Flood. However, the likelihood of the same civilization with the same language developing again in the same location and building the same kind of structure after a cataclysm of that nature is impossibly small. The Giza Plateau and any existing structures on it would have been covered in a layer of marine sediment if that had occured.
This argument is the death knell to the Ethical Skeptic’s theory of marine erosion on the Pyramid of Khafre.
In conclusion, I agree with the Ethical Skeptic that the damage to the casing stones on Khafre’s pyramid was caused by water. However, it was rainfall and the resulting runoff, not waves from a higher sea level.
