Scientists scanning and mapping the Giza pyramids say they’ve discovered that the Great Pyramid of Giza is not exactly even. But really not by much. This pyramid is the oldest of the world’s Seven Wonders. The pyramid’s exact size has (26)_____ experts for centuries, as the “more than 21 acres of hard, white casing stones” that originally covered it were (27)_____ long ago. Reporting in the most recent issue of the newsletter “AERAGRAM,” which (28)_____ the work of the Ancient Egypt Research Associates, engineer Glen Dash says his team used a new measuring approach that involved finding any surviving (29)_____ of the casing in order to determine where the original edge was. They found the east side of the pyramid to be a (30)_____ of 5.5 inches shorter than the west side.
The question that most (31)_____ him, however, isn’t how the Egyptians who designed and built the pyramid got it wrong 4,500 years ago, but how they got it so close to (32)_____. “We can only speculate as to how the Egyptians could have laid out these lines with such (33)_____ using only the tools they had” Dash writes. He says his (34)_____ is that the Egyptians laid out their design on a grid, noting that the great pyramid is oriented only (35)_____ away from the cardinal directions (its north-south axis runs 3 minutes 54 seconds west of due north, while its east-west axis runs 3 minutes 51 seconds north of due east)—an amount that’s “tiny, but similar,” archeologist Adam Obscura points out.
