The counterweight

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After 2 years of research and study on Khufu’s Pyramid, Jean-Pierre Houdin has come to the conclusion that the construction of the King's Chamber and the so-called relieving chambers and that of the pyramid's volume are very different, and that the former required a special technique: the weight of the granite beams (up to 62t) extracted from the quarries at Aswan, 900 km South of Giza by the Nile, and the delivery time, meant that a special hoisting process had to be put in place, as lifting was out of the question: he therefore imagined a system of counterweights circulating in the Grand Gallery, enabling the number of men assigned to hoisting the monoliths to be considerably reduced.

 

Faced with the obvious impossibility of communicating orders to hoist the beams and reset the counterweights from the outside, he devised an internal phonic communication system based on the use of the Queen's Chamber and its North and South shafts, the room's acoustics being remarkable; this was the birth of the intercom system hypothesis.