The Temple of Akhmim and Ancient Egyptian Pyramids as Chemical Plants

​On social media last week, there was a periodic burst of interest in Geoffrey Drumm’s allegation that the Egyptian pyramids were chemical factories after Drumm appeared on the Danny Jones Podcast to discuss a version of a claim he first made in a 2020 book. According to Drumm’s speculation, which he promotes under the name “Land of Chem,” the various pyramids were all designed to focus piezoelectric charges into their inner chambers to create chemicals, which each pyramid’s slope and chamber position “tuned” to produce a different chemical. Drumm suggests that the pyramids were built thousands of years earlier than conventional archaeology assumes—8500 BCE to 5300 BCE—during a wet period when thunderstorms could “power up” the pyramids by striking them with lightning.

This is the best evidence the Egyptian Pyramids were chemical production factories:

Geoffrey Drumm (Land of Chem) demonstrates a perfect 1:40 scale replica of the Red Pyramid.

This replica corroborates all of the mathematical theories surrounding the function of the Red… pic.twitter.com/WqgxgmKSPH

— Danny Jones (@JonesDanny) December 31, 2025

​Naturally, there is no evidence to support any of this, nor any plausible mechanism for how the massive pyramids conducted electricity or utilized water pressure and steam to drive chemical reactions. Nor has Drumm, for all his diagrams and animations, produced a working model of his chemical factory. Drumm relies on an analysis of chemical staining inside the Red Pyramid to find evidence of his chemical factory, though those with expertise in the field have suggested the stains are more likely the result of a buildup of bat guano, torch smoke, and the residue of human breath acting on the particular types of stone used inside the pyramid.
 
Drumm’s speculation is rather similar to Christopher Dunn’s claims in the 2010s about pyramids serving as a power plant running on chemical energy generated within their chambers.
 
Both authors refer to smells encountered in the inner chambers of the pyramids, from an ammonia smell in the innermost chamber of the Red Pyramid to a “grave-like smell” in the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. However, while the authors suggest this is evidence of thousands of years of chemical production, I wasn’t able to find clear evidence that these smells were consistently present, and indeed nineteenth century writers assumed that the smell in the Queen’s Chamber was due to the sweat, breath, and stink of early modern visitors, as they could find nothing within that would have yielded such a smell, which had dissipated by their day.
 
However, I am more interested today in one of the supporting details Drumm uses and the one that gives its name to his social media handle, “The Land of Chem.” Drumm sees a connection between the ancient name for Egypt, Khem, and chemistry, thus implying that his speculative idea derives from a widespread ancient acknowledgement of Egypt as the home of chemistry.
 
Here, Drumm is half-right, but not for the reasons he thinks.
 
As it happens, there is a connection between Khem and chemistry, but it doesn’t travel through the pyramids.
 
The word chemistry derives from alchemy, which came into English via Old French and medieval Latin, ultimately from the Arabic al-kimiya, used to describe the transmutation of substances. This, in turn, came from the Greek word khemeioa, which was used to describe “the old writings of the Egyptians” in a decree of Diocletian, and distinct from the original Greek word, cheo, used to describe metallurgy. It is believed, though it cannot fully be proved, that khemeioa derives from Khem, thus relating the old writings of the Egyptians to the Egyptian magic and science contained within them.
 
Now, the interesting thing is that this is not as closely aligned to what we would consider the occult side of alchemy or any pyramid fantasies as it might at first glance seem to be. “Alchemy” did not take on the meaning we assign to it today until the Early Modern period, when the Arabs began using it to describe efforts to transmute base metals into gold. Prior to the seventeenth century, “alchemy” involved any transformation of one substance into another—i.e., chemical reactions.
 
You might wonder what this has to do with Egypt if not for giant pyramid chemical factories. Well, Egypt was long known as a hotbed of alchemy—primarily due to Greek followers of Hermeticism, who pursued alchemical interests in the name of Hermes Trismegistus. The city of Panopolis was the most important center of Greco-Egyptian Hermeticism, and ancient and medieval sources testify to its position as a place where Late Antique and medieval alchemists gathered to pursue their art. As an early Christian site, it became home to a large contingent of believers in the Book of Enoch, as evidenced from both the best-preserved Greek version of the text being found there and from ancient references to the Watchers in the works of those who lived there, including alchemists like Zosimus of Panopolis. As you know, the Book of Enoch refers to various sciences as the secret teachings of the Watchers.
 
Zosimus was the most famous of the Greco-Egyptian alchemist of the era, but Arabic authors wrote about the continuing belief that the massive temple there contained alchemical secrets of Hermes and the antediluvians in its hieroglyphs, which by that point could no longer be understood. Abu Ma‘shar, the influential astrologer, wrote in The Thousands, around 850 CE, of “a veritable mountain called the Temple in Akhmim, in which [Hermes] carved representations of the arts and instruments, including engraved explanations of science.”
 
Around 1327, Al-Dimashqi wrote in his Cosmography 1.9 about Akhmim’s temple and its secret scientific knowledge:

​Among the most famous of all these temples is that of Akhmim, built of white stone and marble, each block measuring five cubits high and two cubits wide; it comprises seven rooms each dedicated to one of the seven planets, and covered with inscribed stones, painted with azure, of a color so fresh that one would say that the workmen had just finished it. The walls of these rooms are covered with all kinds of figures representing the mysteries of Coptic science: magic, medicine, chemistry, all the branches of astronomy and the cult of the stars.

The Akhbar al-zaman confirms in several references to the temple that stories later told about the magical or alchemical secrets of the Great Pyramid were originally told of the temple of Akhmim.
 
Akhmim was Hellenized as “Chemmis,” which helped to seal the conflation between Akhmim and alchemy. (Similarly, Khufu’s Hellenized name of Chemmis (Diodorus 1.63) added to the conflation due to his Late Antique reputation as a sorcerer and the author of a book of magic spells.) As alchemy’s reputation faded, Akhmim’s memory as the capital of alchemy transformed into a vague recollection that it had been the home of powerful magicians. As late as 1818, Jacques Collin de Plancy could write in his Dictionnaire Infernal that the city had “the reputation of being the abode of the greatest magicians” and housed an angel or a demon.
 
None of this has anything to do with the pyramids, of course, because as Abu Ma‘shar and other early medieval Arabic authors testify, the legends we now associate with the pyramids were originally told of the Egyptian temples, such as the now-vanished temple of Min at Akhmim, and, indeed, the pyramids did not really spark as much interest compared to the temples as you would think until deep into the Middle Ages, when many of the temples had been dismantled for building supplies.

Oh, and as for Diocletian: He was not ordering the destruction of ancient Egyptian chemical production secrets to blot out the teachings of the Watchers or an antediluvian civilization. His order was intended to destroy any instructions on plating base metals ​that could help counterfeiters disguise them as gold or silver as part of his effort to stabilize the Roman money supply, Reality tends to be less glamorous than fantasy.