PARIS: Millions of tourists, from the Ancient Greeks on may have been victims of one of the world’s oldest confidence tricks when they walked round the Pyramids on holiday trips to Egypt. To the uninitiated eye, the 2.3 million blocks of stones rising to a 146-metre peak on the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid near Cairo look as solid as pure granite. But French architects and scientists believe they are nothing more than weathered concrete blocks, moulded on the spot, stone by stone and layer by layer, from the ground upwards.

The theory, being explored by scientists at Montpellier University, has thrown Egyptology into turmoil. It could destroy thousands of years of speculation on the greatest of all riddles of the sands, one that has made fortunes for novelists such as Christian Jacques. Researchers believe that only the reluctance of the Egyptian authorities to allow more samples to be examined stands between them and final proof.

Joel Bertho, an architect, used his expert knowledge of reconstituted stone to explain how easy it was to pass off concrete and mortar for real carved stone. “It needs a trained specialist to identify the basic material,” he said. “The Egyptians had mastered many techniques of plaster and mortar and knew all about making bricks. There is no reason why they could not reconstitute stone into blocks weighing two or three tonnes layer by layer rather than try to heave huge weights up several hundred feet without even the benefit of crude cranes. I have even been able to identify frame marks left by some moulds.”

The theory, set out in a book called La Pyramide Reconstituee, is largely based on the precision of the joints between the stones. ”Joints are invisible and it would be impossible to pass a cigarette paper between them. To carve blocks of solid stone to tolerances of hardly a millimetre would need incredible skill without the benefit of machine tools.”

At its Laboratoire de Tectonophysique, Suzanne Raynaud has cut samples of stone from the Great Pyramid into thin slices to examine under a microscope. “I went from surprise to surprise,” she said. “The arrangement of micro-fossils had been disturbed, which could be explained by the manipulation of reconstituted stone. The components of what appears to be solid stone could have been crushed or passed through a sieve before being put into moulds.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.