Conclusion

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PYRAMIDS

Have you ever watched workers building a house? They use all kinds of machines to help them. Can you imagine how Egyptian workers built the Great Pyramid more than 4,500 years ago? They did not have machines – did they use magic? When it was built, the Great Pyramid was over 145 metres high, and each side is still about 230 metres long. But it is not just very big; its measurements also show that the people of Egypt knew a lot mathematics. For example, they used the number pi – 3.1416. They also understood north, south, east and west, and used them to decide where to put the pyramid. But why were the pyramids of Egypt built?

Perhaps they were religious places, where the dead bodies of important people were put. No human bodies were found in the main rooms, but it is possible that these were taken by robbers many hundreds of years ago. However, in the 1920s a Frenchman called Bovis discovered a dead cat and other small dead animals in the center of the Great Pyramid. Usually, dead bodies are quickly destroyed if they are left in the air, but Bovis was interested to see that the animals’ bodies were undamaged and dry. He thought that perhaps the shape of the pyramid helped this to happen, so he made a model pyramid and placed a dead cat inside. It quickly dried!

Even more strange was the discovery by a Czech called Karel Drbal. When he put an old razor that did not cut into a model pyramid, it seemed to ‘grow’ a new cutting edge. No one has explained this, but perhaps it is because the pyramid has a magnetic field.

Not everyone believes that dead bodies were put in the rooms inside the pyramids. Many people think that the rooms, and the tunnels that join them, were made to watch the stars. They say that the Egyptians had a good understanding of astronomy. If this is true, the pyramids were probably used as a kind of calendar.

Some writers think the answer is stranger than this. They say that it was impossible for people who lived many thousands years ago to be so clever, so the pyramids were made by visitors from another planet.

What do you think?

(from Strange but True by Alison Baxter, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles, Oxford University Press 2000)

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