The mission – 1st attempt

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Jean-Pierre Houdin makes several trips to Cairo to study the pyramid sites, advance the mission project and seek local sponsors; thanks to the Mission Economique Française and the Club d'Affaires Franco-Egyptien (CAFE), he convinces several French and Egyptian companies to become ACGP sponsors. Funding for the mission is well underway. CAFE later publishes a lengthy article on the theory, in Arabic and French, in its magazine L'Antenne.

On January 12, Jean-Pierre Houdin gives a lecture at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes.

 

On April 4, Jean-Pierre Houdin meets Prof. Dr. Rainer Stadelmann, a renowned Egyptologist and former director of the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, who also agrees to act as advisor to the future mission; it is now supported by the 2 Egyptologists specializing in the pyramids. The following day, a meeting is held with Dr Magdy El Ghandour, Director of Foreign Missions at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, to clarify the administrative arrangements for the future mission.

 

On April 18, at the invitation of Dr Pierre Grussenmeyer, founding member of the ACGP, Jean-Pierre Houdin gives a lecture at INSA Strasbourg, scientific partner of the mission in preparation (Photogrammetry).

On May 3, a conference at the Société des Ingénieurs des Arts et Métiers with Henri Houdin, Hubert Labonne, Jean Carayon, Gérard Ledieu and Jean-Louis Simonneau, all Gad'zarts, has an extraordinary consequence for theory and the ACGP: another Gad'zart present in the room, Jean-Jacques Urban-Galindo, discreetly contacts Dassault Systèmes, publisher of 3D software, to recommend a meeting with Jean-Pierre Houdin.

 

On June 21, Jean-Pierre Houdin receives a call in Cairo from Richard Breitner, an engineer from Dassault Systèmes, and an appointment is planned at the company's headquarters for June 30. On that day, the basis for collaboration is discussed with Mehdi Tayoubi, director of the "Passion for Innovation" program, and Richard Breitner.

 

In September, the EIFFEL company offers to the ACGP a magnificent brochure presenting the Khufu Project, based on a model designed and produced free of charge by the artist Raphaël Thierry. This one is unanimously admired by those who receive it, patrons and partners of the future mission in particular.

After more than 8 months of preparation, the final mission file is almost ready to be handed over to the Egyptian authorities when, on June 25, Prof. Dr. Rainer Stadelmann informs Jean-Pierre Houdin that his participation as advisor to the mission had not been approved by the Secretary General of Antiquities. A few days later, it is Dr Dieter Arnold's turn not to be approved. The mission is de facto postponed until other consultant Egyptologists could be found. Invited by Jean-Pierre Houdin to lead the mission himself, Dr. Hawass declines.

A few months later, however, he agrees to write a foreword for a book Jean-Pierre Houdin is working on, to be published in Egypt by Farid Atiya Press in 2006. 

In November and January 2006 in Cairo, videographer Bulle Plexiglass films some astonishing scenes on a construction  site in the city center: the creation of 2 sandbag massifs designed to test the strength of the soil before building posts; these are built "from the inside", with an internal ramp for one of them. A technique that seems ancestral.