Excluding the base, a pyramid has four faces. I am, and you should be too, an avid believer of this fact.
However, I am an avid believer that Tottenham Hotspur were, are and will continue to be the greatest football club in the world, so what do I know?
As it turns out, none of us know very much at all because the most famous of all the pyramids, the Great Pyramid of Giza, actually has eight faces.
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I shit you not.
Apparently, you can't see it from the ground and because it is built with such an extraordinary degree of precision, the 'hidden faces' are invisible to the naked eye.
In a book by J.P. Lepre called The Egyptian Pyramids: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Reference, it claims:
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One very unusual feature of the Great Pyramid is a concavity of the core that makes the monument an eight-sided figure, rather than four-sided like every other Egyptian pyramid. That is to say, that its four sides are hollowed in or indented along their central lines, from base to peak. This concavity divides each of the apparent four sides in half, creating a very special and unusual eight-sided pyramid.
The hollowing-in can be noticed only from the air, and only at certain times of the day. This explains why virtually every available photograph of the Great Pyramid does not show the hollowing-in phenomenon, and why the concavity was never discovered until the age of aviation.
Groves' image
Apparently the eight-sides were discovered entirely by accident in 1940 when a British Air Force Pilot, P. Groves, flew over the pyramid and realised the concavity, taking a picture that is now famous among those who are into this sort of thing.
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To some, this may be common knowledge and I apologise if you've simply read about something you already knew about. When I read about this for the first time this morning, I almost shit my pants. I've been to the Pyramids and I had no clue whatsoever.
Maybe I should read more books.
Words by George Pavlou
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