The Meaning Of Ancient Egyptian Pyramids Facts

The Meaning of a Pyramid
We have reached the end of our detective story of exploration into the distant past, and the time has come to take stock. First of all, let us restate the problem that we have solved. The riddle of the pyramids arises out of a discrepancy which many people have found difficult to accept. It is the disparity between the effort of heaping up 25 million tons of quarried limestone and the sole object of burying under them three pharaohs. However much the Egyptians were interested in the afterlife, eight million tons of rock, all nicely shaped and smoothed, per pharaoh must seem excessive. It is therefore not surprising that various alternative uses for the pyramids have been proposed. All of these, however, turn out to be a good deal less acceptable than the straightforward tomb theory. Moreover, we have Herodotus’ statement that the pyramids were tombs, and even if we have doubts whether it was the kings’ bodies or their souls which were buried in them, the funerary function of the pyramids is firmly established.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

My own solution came as a surprise - at least to me. The object of the whole exercise was not the use to which the final product was to be put but its manufacture. Pharaohs could be buried and were, in fact, buried much more cheaply. What mattered was not the pyramid - it was building the pyramid.

There are a number of highly encouraging features in this solution. In the first place it does not contradict the well-established fact that the pyramids were funerary monuments. Secondly, it provides a rational explanation for the colossal labour effort, since employment of labour on an immense scale was the main political and economic object. Thirdly, and this is particularly gratifying, I did not set out to prove my point. My interest was confined to a technological disaster, and the solution of the main problem arrived quite unsolicited. Finally, the solution could be tested on a completely isolated system - the Mexican pyramids - and the test turned out to be successful beyond expectation.

Before proposing a new theory, a scientist usually surveys his material critically, searching for weak points or inconsistencies. There may be some, but if so, I have not been able to detect them. On the other hand, the consistent nature of the four points enumerated in the preceding paragraph encourages me to think that my conclusions would have to contain quite a number of errors before the theory could be proved invalid.

So let us assume for the present that the solution proposed in this book is correct and let us see where we go from there - apart from future corroborative evidence, with which even the best established theory can always do. It would indeed be a poor and sterile theory unless it opens more questions than it has answered.

The first question suggests itself immediately. If man 5,000 years ago looked for a great, unifying common task, why did he choose a pyramid instead of something useful, such as an irrigation scheme? Here the answer is simple. Irrigation projects had been in Egypt long before the pyramids but they were always local efforts, giving benefit to a few villages. Even a more ambitious scheme, such as the Bar Yusuf connecting the Nile with Lake Moeris in the Fayum, would hardly have brought the people together in one locality, and its execution demanded a level of hydrological engineering which, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty, was well beyond their ability. The same argument also applies to the more basic and straightforward project of damming up the Nile at the apex of the Delta. It is worth remembering that when the French eventually undertook it at Kaliub in about i860, the dam proved a dismal failure because they had underestimated the seepage of water under its foundations.

No, the construction of an impressive man-made mountain was not a matter of choice. It was the only means of doing something spectacular with the large labour force that they wanted to gather, and a mountain of 500 elevation was, as we have seen, the best they could manage. In Chapter 6 we have traced its development through the escalation of Zoser’s monument, which resulted in the Step Pyramid. The building of a distinctive mark in the landscape by making a large heap is still with us in the desire of children making a sand castle. Moreover, this primitive urge is testified to in the Bible (Genesis, XI, 4): ‘Let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name.’ The Egyptians of the Fourth Dynasty certainly made their name by building the pyramids.

The second question is equally obvious. Why was the building of immense pyramids discontinued ? The answer has, to some extent, already been given earlier in this book. Once, through the process of building pyramids the formation of a centralised state had been achieved, there was little point in continuing this activity. Building pyramids in Egypt to bury kings, and in Mexico to sacrifice humans, continued, but these later pyramids were on a scale so much reduced that the primary object of concentrating a large labour force clearly did not apply. In both orbits, pyramid-building had achieved its aim and there was no point in prolonging it. Once the object of creating the centralised state had been attained, independently in the two independent hemispheres, it had found its place in the development of society, and it had not to be invented again. It is interesting to note that the only project of commensurable size, the Great Wall of China, followed the pyramids by 2,000 years and that its purpose was not in building it but in the use of the final product - to save the state from barbarian incursions.

Finally, we must ask the question whether pyramid building is likely ever to occur again. We have seen that it was the means by which human society was transformed from a rural village economy to an entirely new form of community life, the state. The world of village and tribe had reached a condition in which no further progress could be made, except through a drastic change, such as took place in Egypt 5,000 years ago. Without this change it would have remained stationary, as it has in many parts of Africa almost to this day. The state as created by the Fourth Dynasty was the nucleus from which, through an infinite variety of expansions, mankind has progressed to its present form. However, the framework, the national (state, has been retained essentially unchanged. The existence of national states soon gave rise to organised wars between them, a pattern that has not been changed in its basic features for five millennia. States have come and gone, nations have risen and fallen, but the pattern of their life and strife has been retained in that uneasy equilibrium which we call ‘the balance of power’. There have been fluctuations, periods in which national wars were almost abolished as, for instance, under the Pax Romana, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, and even in the hope of a Pax Britannica. However, all these had to fail because the globe was too large, and from somewhere an enemy would arise to force mankind back into the old pattern of national war.

In the lifetime of many of us two of these wars have engulfed the whole world, involving not only the fighting forces but also resulting, in one way or another, in the slaughter of many millions of civilians. Since then, however, two important things have happened. The doomsday machine has been invented and the world has shrunk. The nuclear arsenals have become so extensive that not only can the attacking power win by rapid devastation, but the losing one could, by the judicious addition of long-lived radio-isotopes, arrange for the suicide of vanquished and victor alike. Under these circumstances even the politicians have recognised that mankind can afford only one more world war and that we had better not have it. In fact, we have arrived at the stage where the time-honoured system of asserting the sovereignty of national states by war has ceased to function. With it, one suspects, the justification for the national state as an essential form of human society will also fade away.

The world has become much too small for the different shades of men and their individual languages to play separate games. They certainly would find ways of irritating each other. The only thing left to us is the creation of a new pattern of life which takes in all members of the species homo sapiens. In other words, there is no alternative to a very drastic change that is acceptable to everybody. And that means that we have to get together, to work together and to get better acquainted with each other. Together we must build a new pyramid.

Unfortunately, it is as yet by no means clear what form and character this new pyramid will have. Its object, on the other hand, is well-defined. It has to be a unifying common task of such magnitude that its impact will be felt throughout the world. Among the various suggestions which have been offered, uplifting the poor and stopping pollution take first place, and they are worthy causes that are in people’s minds. However, while I would consider both as priority programmes, I am not so sure that they are likely to provide what is wanted. A little while ago I accompanied a group of enthusiastic young people to the shores of a huge crater lake in the West African jungle. There are no roads to it, only a track which becomes impassable in the rainy season. Along the shores of the lake live 10,000 people without any medical care in what still is the white, and also the black, man’s grave. The infant mortality is very, very high.

Against severe odds the young missionaries are setting up a small hospital at the lake and since its fetish does not permit the presence of metal, they intend to visit the villages by the shore in a glass- fibre boat. My forecast is that, if they are successful, the population will have doubled in five years, with still 10,000 needing medical care and 20,000 needing food. Since the worst pollution on our earth is the uncontrolled proliferation of the human species, the well-meaning enthusiasts will have innocently, but handsomely, contributed to it.

I have purposely chosen this rather extreme example to show that most worthwhile common tasks tend to be fraught with difficulties. The trouble with all such programmes is that they are designed to achieve a particular end effect. The great strength and beauty of the pyramid projects lay in the complete uselessness of the final product. Their importance was provided by carrying them out and not by achieving a stated aim. The Egyptian and Mexican pyramids were designed for entirely different uses but the main purpose, that is, engaging a large number of people in a common task, was the same for both. If we want our new pyramid to succeed, we have to make sure that the final edifice is as useless as possible. This will allow for any amount of error and faulty direction in the project since, by definition, a useless final product cannot be made more useless by mistakes.

When an article of mine on the pyramids was published in the Neue Ziircher Zeitung I was amused to learn that my colleagues at GERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, got the idea that it was really less concerned with the pyramids than with them. Their suspicion was, of course, not completely unfounded except that they had taken themselves too seriously by at least three orders of magnitude. The miserable 50 million pounds which they annually spend on trying to find a particle, which is still more fundamental than the fundamental ones, amount, at present standards, to a ridiculously small pyramid.

There is only one project in the world today which, as far as one can see, offers the possibility of being large enough and useless enough to qualify eventually for the new pyramid. And that is the exploration of outer space. When for the first time man stepped on to the moon, the whole world sat glued to their television sets, each viewer identifying himself with the astronauts. It stirred their imagination more than any other event in our time. For a moment the pride of human achievement silenced even the clamour for three instead of two Sundays a week and the rallying call for saving from extinction the Puerto Rican parrot.

In the end, the results of space exploration are likely to be as ephemeral as the pharaoh accompanying the sun. The effort in money or, what is the same, in labour will be gigantic. No other incentive will be provided than the satisfaction of man to make a name for himself by building a tower that reaches unto planetary space. Five thousand years ago the Egyptians, for an equally vague reason, accepted a monstrous sacrifice of sweat and toil which led man into a new form of society. Perhaps we should build the space pyramid, and the effort in doing so together may be the necessary sacrifice which we must bring to gain a new and peaceful world community.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 7

Summarising these findings, we arrive at the picture of an agricultural village population providing labour for a large central project. Unlike Cuicuilco, Teotihuacan cannot have been merely a cult and pilgrimage centre. This becomes apparent when we compare the technological efforts involved in the two projects. At Cuicuilco about 20,000 tons of material were invested against million in the earliest phase at Teotihuacan. While the first could be achieved by a fairly limited number of tribesmen, the second required a well-organised population. And for this a great deal of supporting evidence has been assembled in the last few years.

Mexican Pyramids

Until recently archaeologists have tended to look upon Teotihuacan merely as a magnificent ceremonial centre, permanently inhabited only by a priestly society and its attendants with a small supporting population. Its ceremonial character is certainly emphasised by the grandeur not only of its pyramids but, even more, by its general layout. The central feature, the Street of the Dead, is 45 m. wide and 4 km. long. It is flanked on both sides by smaller pyramids which had been mistaken by the Aztecs for tombs. At its northern end stands the pyramid of the Moon overlooking a plaza framed by a number of lesser pyramids. At its western side the palace of the Quetzal butterfly has been recently excavated. The Pyramid of the Sun and its large surrounding court stand a little to the east of the central avenue, and east of its southern end lies another impressive court with the temple of Quetzalcoatl.

The last two decades have seen an immense amount of archaeological work at Teotihuacan. I first visited the city in 1951 and hardly recognised it when I saw it again fifteen years later. The Street of the Dead had been cleared in all its length and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, as well as a number of American archaeologists, had carried out a huge amount of excavation throughout the Teotihuacan area. A survey of all these results revealed the astonishing fact that, far from just being a ceremonial centre, Teotihuacan had been an immense city, housing at the height of its development about r 50,000 to 200,000 people. The urban area covered no less than 20 km.2 of closely-built housing accommodation, workshops, markets and temples. It was a well-planned city, laid out, as the Street of the Dead and its plazas show, on a grandiose scale, teeming with life as early as 2,000 years ago - the first and the most populous urban centre on the American continent.

We have said already that we do not know who the Teotihua- canos were. They left no legends, no script and no discernible heritage. They came in the last few centuries bc ; they built a huge city and their influence seems to have spread far beyond the Valley of Mexico into Yucatan. When they disappeared at about AD 600 nothing of the flourishing civilisation was left except the ruins of their buildings. The study and excavation of these provides us with the only information which we have of this vanished world. Here the work has only begun and it is a foregone conclusion that in a few decades we will know much more about the Teoti- huacanos than today.

The age of Teotihuacan must have been a peaceful one. There are no signs of fortifications or of a rebuilding of urban districts after destruction by an enemy. Rebuilding was confined to the sacred precincts, and for this we have ample evidence. The reconstruction of the temple of Quetzalcoatl has already been mentioned; it seems that remodelling took place at many other buildings, including the large platforms in front of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Possibly a religious reformation or a highly important calendrical change may have taken place at about AD 300 which resulted in a new and very severe style of architecture. All the temple facades were remodelled by the introduction of large, unsculptured panels which, by a cunning cantilever construction, surmounted inclined, rising planes. The effect, as we see it today, is most impressive in its monumental simplicity and the uncompromising juxtaposition of bright light and deep shade.

The divinities worshipped at Teotihuacan seem to have been the gods of fire, water and wind. The last was later represented by a feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, and Toltec legend identified him with an early cult hero, a god of learning who forbade human sacrifice. While human sacrifice was probably practised at Teotihuacan, it does not seem to have been prominent and the evidence for it is thin. Four skeletons of children buried in a sitting position and facing outwards were found under the comers of the temple of Quetzalcoatl, and Laurette Sejourne discovered a large bowl with the bones of a set of upper thighs which she regarded as evidence of cannibalism. It seems unlikely, however, that the Aztec ritual of mass sacrifice existed, since the oldest pyramid, that of the Sun, is far too high to serve as a suitable stage. Human figures at the top appear diminutive when viewed from the ground and the disposal of the victim’s body would have been a slow and laborious process.

While we do not know why and how the Teotihuacanos vanished from the scene there are indications that the civilisations of Central America passed through a crisis in the last centuries of our first millennium. Unlike Egypt in its desert-bound valley, Central America was wide open to migrating nomadic tribes from the north. It seems that waves of invaders pushed their way southward; the Toltecs were evidently one of the first. Toltec civilisation has all the trappings of a warlike society, to some extent tempered by contact with the higher culture which it had encountered. Whether the Toltecs themselves destroyed Teotihuacan we do not know, but it is certain that Toltec influence penetrated as far as Yucatan where it impressed its warlike glory of human sacrifice on a peaceful agricultural society. The Toltecs, in turn, were superseded by the savage Chichimec tribes, one of which were the Aztecs.

The magnificent city of Teotihuacan arose out of an agricultural village population, and at the very beginning of its history stands the immense Pyramid of the Sun. The parallel with the Egyptian pyramid age is truly compelling. Here, in Central America, and quite independent of Middle Eastern civilisation, villagers had been brought together to erect an immense pyramid, and in doing so laid the foundation of a highly organised community. If anything, the Amerindian pattern of development is even more clear-cut than that on the Nile. Man, after developing agriculture, lived in villages - small units where everybody knew everybody else and everybody else’s problems. As the population density increased, demarcation disputes between villages and tribes became unavoidable. The only way out of this dilemma was a central administration, strong and intelligent enough to keep peace. When we look for the way in which it was brought into being, we discover a strange thing : at the beginning was the great pyramid. It seems that this large-scale co-operative effort was the manner in which the new form of human society, the centralised state, had to be created.


Once a few large pyramids had been built, the organisation and welding together of the village population into a new, more diversified, pattern had become an established fact. No further pyramid- building on a gigantic scale was required. Human labour could now be channelled into a multitude of other activities, all of them planned by the central government. The city of Teotihuacan is a memorial to this first large-scale organisation of man on the American continent. Just as the Old Kingdom administrators thought that their pattern of society was so successful that it deserved to be eternal, so the leaders at Teotihuacan must have believed that nothing would change their blessed world. Neither conceived the idea that their superior pattern of life required defence. Both were wrong, but in the end, the new organisations of man, the state which the pyramid had created, survived all vicissitudes.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 6

The fact that the levels of fill slope towards the centre has been taken as an indication that a tomb may be concealed under the monument. While we do not wish to dispute the suggestion, this inward dip may simply be a result of the method of construction. When discussing the mound at Cuicuilco we mentioned the likelihood that it had started as a ring-shaped dyke into the centre of which the fill had been tipped. In its basic structure the Pyramid of the Sun much resembles Cuicuilco and it is conceivable that for the same technological reasons - to bring the maximum working force to the site - a similar type of construction was chosen at Teotihuacan.

Mexican Pyramids

A still larger pyramid, exceeding even Khufu’s monument in bulk, existed at Cholula but it was largely destroyed by the Spaniards, who built a church on its ruins. Although the core of the Cholula pyramid was built at roughly the same time as Teotihuacan, it was then much smaller than the pyramids at that site. However, whereas the civilisation of the Teotihuacanos vanished long before ad iooo, Cholula remained an active religious centre down to the time of the Conquest. Throughout its history of one and a half millennia, the original pyramid was enlarged at least four times and eventually, with a volume of 3 million m.3, became the largest building ever erected on earth. Its composite structure has been extensively investigated by tunnels totalling 6 km. in length. The buried face of the Teotihuacano period shows that the outside of the pyramids of that time was covered with religious paintings including the ‘butterfly god’, who seems to have been worshipped extensively in Teotihuacan.

However impressive the final form of the Cholula pyramid was, it recedes against the magnificent achievement of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon which were erected in a short span of time, in possibly less than half a century. It turns out that in this, and many other respects, they are the representatives of an Amerindian pyramid age which closely approximates the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt. The parallel becomes even closer when we regard the amount of labour involved at Teotihuacan against the cultural and economic background of the Valley of Mexico 2,000 years ago.

The total amount of material to be quarried, carried to the site, lifted up to an average height of 20 m., distributed and rammed in, was roughly 30 million tons. Most of the pyramidal fill is 40 Representations of the butterfly god of Teotihuacan on ceramics. The top figure shows him associated with the rain god Tlaloc (after Sijoumi) excavated subsoil, but an appreciable amount of quarried stone and prepared adobe was also required. Some of this had to be obtained from a distance of at least several kilometres. The implements available were wooden and stone tools. There is no record of sledges being used for transport, beasts of burden did not exist, and the wheel had not been invented at the time of the Conquest, 1,500 years later. All loads had to be carried, and in addition to the workers actually engaged in the building process others were needed to supply the whole force with food and water. Although the population was certainly accustomed for generations to the local conditions, it has to be remembered that the diminished amount of oxygen at an altitude of 6,000 feet will have had an effect on the efficiency of heavy labour.

Taking all these factors into account we might assume an average of 75 kg. per man to be placed per day. This estimate, of course, covers all the varied activities required by the project. We assume further that the workers were, as in Egypt, agricultural labourers and that, in order to maintain food production, they could spare, at best, a hundred days per annum on pyramid construction. For a building period of thirty years this leads to a labour force of about 15,000 men.

It has to be emphasised that, just as in our estimate of work in Egypt, the number cannot be expected to be correct except within an order of magnitude. However, it is quite clear that the project could not have been undertaken as a secondary activity. In other words, a large proportion of the population must have been involved in it for a very considerable time. Again, as in Egypt, the very large pyramids occur early in the development of civilisation.

We are further aided in our assessment of the conditions under which the pyramids were built by the figurines that were found embedded in the building material in large numbers. These artefacts are helpful in determining the period at which the work was done and they agree with the available carbon dates. The figurines in the Pyramid of the Sun all belong to the so-called Tzacually period which came to an end at about 100 BC. Even more important is the fact that different villages used slightly different styles for their figurines and pottery and the distribution of styles found in the pyramid material indicates that the builders came from a fairly widespread area in the Valley.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 5

All living plants and animals take up carbon from the atmosphere to build it into their tissues, including the very small fraction of 14C. The radioactive decay of 14C is fairly slow and, in any given sample, half of the 14C nuclei will have reverted into nitrogen in 5,500 years. While in the atmosphere this loss is made good constantly by cosmic ray bombardment, the same is, of course, not true for plant or animal tissue that has been buried in the earth. In this the 14C content will decay without being restocked from the atmosphere. In fact, the fraction of 14C in buried samples will diminish by about one per cent every eighty years. Thus it is pos- 160 sible to determine the age of these samples by measuring the 14C proportion in their carbon content.

Mexican Pyramids

While the physical basis of carbon-dating is straightforward, its practical application requires very sensitive instruments and is open to errors which have to be avoided. The amount of beta radiation revealing the 14C content is very small indeed and anything that has happened to the sample in the course of centuries, such as waterlogging or prolonged exposure of small samples to the atmosphere, may falsify the results. It is therefore advisable to carry out tests from different samples at the same site whenever possible. Nevertheless, already in its first applications, carbon- dating proved its worth by giving dates from material in the Zoser and Snofru pyramids which closely agreed with the historically accepted ones. The method is therefore immensely valuable for determining the age of pre-Columbian samples for which we have no independent dating whatever.

It was carbon-dating that provided the surprise of the great age of the Gulf civilisation. Samples from the Olmec site at La Venta suggest a flowering of that culture between 800 and 400 BC, many centuries earlier than had previously been suspected. Similar tests have also provided a guide to the mysterious city of Teotihuacan and it appears that the two great pyramids were constructed just before the beginning of the Christian era. Combining the archaeological evidence with carbon-dating, we can begin to reconstruct this early growth of Amerindian civilisation. It seems fairly certain now that the origin of the Maya glyphs and their knowledge of the calendar came from the Olmecs at the Gulf but, while the Maya built steeper and higher pyramids than the cult mound of La Venta, they never passed through the phase of gigantic monuments such as those erected at Teotihuacan. These, the largest structures ever erected in America, provide a close similarity with the Pyramid Age of Egypt.

The forerunner of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was Cuicuilco, just south of the present university campus of Mexico City. The cult mound is a circular and rather flat step pyramid, with a base diameter of 145 m. but only 20 m. high. Nowadays the flat appearance is further enhanced by the fact that the building was engulfed to a height of nearly 10 m. by lava when the volcano Xitle erupted about 2,000 years ago. This agrees with the type of figurine found there and with the radiocarbon tests which date Cuicuilco at about 400 BC. The mound itself, totalling in its final stage about 7,000 m.3, was built in two phases: the first had two steps, to which a further two were later added. It was evidently abandoned well before the eruption took place.

The material chiefly employed in the construction of this ‘pyramid’ was clay, strengthened in parts with large river boulders. The builders appear to have been aware of the danger of plastic flow to which a clay structure is prone when exposed to rain. Although the mound was extremely flat, it was clearly considered necessary to strengthen the circumference against slip. The clay nucleus is therefore surrounded by a ring-shaped dyke made up of a mixture of clay and stones whose walls were formed by large stones embedded side by side in clay. It appears that mortar was not known, and added strength was obtained by providing the dyke with a series of outer walls, not unlike the buttress walls employed by Imhotep in the construction of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. Trying to reconstruct the building process, one would suspect that the outer dyke was erected first and that the clay filling was subsequently tipped into the central cavity.

The main reason for assuming this type of construction is the deployment of labour in the most efficient manner. If, as seems likely, a large enough labour force was available, the fastest method of erecting the pyramid was to employ the workers at the periphery of the structure. This would allow the builders to use the maximum number of men simultaneously without their getting into each other’s way.

Steps led up to the platform from both east and west, and the remnants of altars were found both at the height of the fourth and at that of the second, buried, platform. The altars were probably surmounted by roofed buildings which have long since disappeared. The Cuicuilco cult mound is the exact opposite of the Aztec pyramids at the time of the Conquest. We do not know what kind of ritual was enacted at the altars but it is obvious that the flat and low platform cannot have provided a good ‘stage’ for a spectacle, such as was the purpose of the Aztec pyramids.

All evidence indicates that Teotihuacan is somewhat later than Cuicuilco, but not very much later. It appears that the great Pyramid of the Sun was the earliest edifice of note at this site. The area covered by it is almost exactly the same as that of the Khufu pyramid but its original height was only about half that of its Egyptian counterpart. This, of course, means that the Pyramid of the Sun has just less than half the volume of the Khufu pyramid and rather less than half its weight. Khufu’s architects had to quarry and pile up about 6| million tons of limestone for his monument whereas the men who built the Pyramid of the Sun had only to provide 20 million tons of stone and earth. The effort required at Teotihuacan was probably a third of that which was devoted to one of the large Giza pyramids but even so a recent estimate by Stierlin that the Pyramid of the Sun could have been built by 3,000 workers in thirty years seems unrealistic.

However, before attempting to correct this estimate, we must describe the construction of the two large pyramids at Teotihuacan. Neither of them seems to have any internal chambers or corridors; our knowledge is entirely based on surface examination and on the archaeological tunnels which have been driven into them. The first archaeological work on the Pyramid of the Sun was carried out by Leopoldo Batres at the beginning of this century and was inspired by President Porfirio Diaz. The occasion was the centenary of Mexico’s liberation from Spanish colonial status and its foundation as a sovereign state in 1810. Batres set to work with great energy and a large labour force. He cleared the pyramid of the vegetation covering it and then tried to lay bare its real surface. In his enthusiasm he unfortunately went too far, removing what had been left of the original outer layer of stone, mortar and plaster from the entire north, east and south faces. The result was disastrous. The underlying adobe surface started to dissolve in heavy rains and began to exhibit plastic flow which threatened to destroy the whole edifice. It was saved only by the very high viscosity of the dissolving clay which rendered the disintegration slow enough to be arrested by hurried remedial measures.

The three exposed faces of the monument were given a new skin of stones and cement, so that today we see the original surface only on the frontal western side which Batres had left largely untouched. The result of his precipitate action is that the pyramid is now somewhat smaller than originally and that all its original surface features have disappeared. However, by peeling off about 7 m. of the outer layer he laid free a number of stone walls which stand out from the building like fins and which had the purpose of holding the original surface in place.

Two tunnels have been driven through the Pyramid of the Sun. The first, dug by Gamio in 1917, enters the monument in the middle of the east face and goes through to its centre. The second tunnel constructed in 1933 by Eduardo Noguera enters at the centre of the western face and meets the Gamio tunnel. Both tunnels are roughly horizontal and run close to the base of the pyramid. These investigations yielded a number of very important results. First and foremost, no sign of an earlier pyramid was found on which a later structure was superimposed. This means that the Pyramid of the Sun was erected in one operation to its present size. Secondly, there are no internal strengthening features and the only means of holding the great mound together is an outer skin of between 15 and 20 m. thickness made up of adobe and stones. The possibility cannot be excluded that, higher up in the edifice, fin walls of stone were introduced, of which the visible fins laid bare by Batres are part. Such fin walls to hold the loose fill were certainly used in the slightly later Pyramid of the Moon; however, there is no indication at ground level of their existence in the older pyramid. The fill visible in the tunnel walls consists 164 of clay, stones, gravel and various types of soil containing figurines and potsherds.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 4

When the Conquistadors arrived in 'Mexico, the Aztecs had not as yet developed a script in our sense. The news of the white men’s arrival was brought to Montezuma by his envoys in the form of a series of pictures, each telling an episode of the story. They were very much like strip cartoons, and even showed speech issuing from the persons’ mouths. However, since they had no script, the speech scrolls of the Aztecs remained empty. A few of these pre- Columbian ‘codices’, as they are called, have been mercifully preserved but most of them were burnt by the pious Spanish friars who felt that these were works of the devil. Even if they had been preserved, it is doubtful whether the codices could have told us much about Mexican history. The Maya had developed writing earlier, and calendrical glyphs on some early stelae appear to record dates corresponding to the beginning of the Christian era. Whether later glyphs - which we cannot decipher - represent a spoken language, we do not know. One may suspect that, like the Aztec codices, they are mainly inventories. It is too rarely realised that writing was not invented by the philosophers and poets but by the accountants.

Mexican Pyramids

The treatment which the codices suffered was shared by almost every item of Mexican religious art that was in existence at the Conquest. A few objects were sent by Cortes in 1519 to the Emperor Charles V and in the following year exhibited in Brussels. The great German painter, Albrecht Diirer, travelled from his native Nuremberg to see them and left us a description in his notes. He was full of admiration for this strange art, the power of which he recognised immediately. His appreciation was probably shared by only a few others since most of the objects have since been lost or destroyed. A small number of them, fortunately, found their way to the British Museum where they form some of its greatest treasures. Otherwise almost nothing was left undestroyed at the Conquest and the large collections in the magnificent Anthropological Museum at Mexico City are all archaeological finds, most of them of fairly recent date.

In the absence of a script or of a key to the Maya glyphs, the eartn of Mexico has to provide all the information of America’s prehistory. Aztec legends that were collected by the early Spanish historians are vague, even about the preceding two centuries when their bloodthirsty humming-bird led them into the Valley. The earliest civilisation which their myths could recall was the legendary Tollan, the capital of a people called Toltecs. Archaeologists have since recognised the remains of Toltec art over a wide region of Mexico, from the Valley to Yucatan. Quite recently the site of ancient Tollan has been identified with the town of Tula in the province of Hidalgo. It seems to have flourished between AD IIOO and 1300. As for Teotihuacan, the Aztec legend had nothing to record and when the Spaniards asked the Mexicans who had built the pyramids and the Street of the Dead, they replied : ‘the gods’.

Man probably appeared on the American continent during the last glacial period, perhaps 50,000 years or so ago. With so much of the water locked up in the huge ice sheets, the level of the oceans was lower than today and it may have been comparatively easy to cross the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. That, as it seems, was the route taken by the hunting nomads who were, most likely, related to the Mongolian races of East Asia. Moving gradually south, some of the nomads became sedentary and developed agriculture, based on a grass from which they bred the maize plant, perhaps in the Gila valley of Arizona. As yet we know little about these early times but it seems that the first Amerindian civilisation may have blossomed at the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. There a people whom we call ‘Olmecs’ established culture centres in which they left a peculiar type of sculpture, characterised by gigantic stone heads and a strange form of portraiture in which the upper lip was drawn up. These ‘baby faced’ figurines occur together with representations of the jaguar which evidently was regarded as a divine animal.

While it is quite possible that tomorrow’s dig may turn up evidence for a precursor of the Olmec culture, we can do no better at present than to regard the early settlements on the Gulf as the cradle of Amerindian civilisation. One of the most important sites near a village called La Venta evidently served as a cult centre for the agricultural population of the neighbourhood. Just like the original followers of Horus in Egypt, the Olmecs of La Venta exhibited a number of accomplishments about the origins of which we know nothing. Two features, in particular, stand out; they built cult mounds and they had sufficient astronomical knowledge to establish a calendar. Both these achievements were passed on to the Mayas of Yucatan and to the Valley of Mexico.

So far we have said nothing about the time when this early civilisation came into being. In the absence of any historical records archaeologists have had to rely on the artefacts that were dug up, particularly the little clay figurines which are so typical of Central America. Classifying their styles and correlating their location had for many decades been the only guide by which archaeologists, men like Caso, Linne, Noguera and Vaillant, tried to establish a sequence of dates. It was an undertaking of great complexity, full of uncertainties and pitfalls. Worst of all, it did not lead to any form of exact dating and often the experts’ opinions on one and the same site differed by quite a few centuries.

All this was suddenly changed by nuclear physics. In 1949 Professor W. F. Libby of the University of Chicago developed a radioactive test which permitted the age of organic deposits, such as wood or bone, to be determined with remarkable accuracy, and for which he received the Nobel Prize in i960. The method is based on the radioactive decay of carbon nuclei with the atomic weight I4,(14C). Almost all the carbon existing in the earth’s atmosphere as carbon dioxide has nuclei with weight i2,(nC), which are inactive, and only one part in a million million is made up of the radioactive 14C. The origin of the 14C is due to neutron bombardment of atmospheric nitrogen (14N+n l4C), the neutrons coming from the cosmic radiation impinging at a steady rate on our planet. The newly created 14C nuclei are unstable and in due course revert to ordinary nitrogen by emitting a beta ray (14C->14N+/S). In this way the concentration of radioactive 14C in atmospheric carbon dioxide is kept constant, being continually created from atmospheric nitrogen and continually destroyed by ito own radioactive decay.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 3

Understandably this surprising discovery has led some archaeologists to suspect that all Amerindian pyramids might contain tombs; but the evidence for this is, so far, not very strong. No other tombs have as yet been found although tunnels have been driven through quite a number of the Mexican pyramids. The object of these particular excavations was not a search for tombs but an investigation of the internal structure of these monuments. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts many of the Mexican pyramids are composite buildings which have increased in size through successive accretions. Excavations have shown that the great pyramid of Tenayuca, for instance, passed through no less than six consecutive building phases, each being superimposed on the previous one. The universality of this practice also extended to the Maya buildings of Yucatan, and the pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza envelops an earlier one which was slightly smaller, with its temple just below the present sanctum. It is now accessible through an archaeological tunnel driven along the surface of the older structure, which has revealed the previous sanctum, containing the stone carving of a jaguar, painted red with large green spots of jade. The most famous instance of these accretions is in the ‘Citadel’ of Teotihuacan, where excavation of the central pyramid, a remarkably plain building, brought to light the highly ornate facade of an earlier phase. This is the famous temple of Quetzal- coatl, with beautifully carved panels embellished by the protruding heads of the plumed serpent and the water god Tlaloc.

Mexican Pyramids

Often, as in the case of the temple of Quetzalcoatl, the underlying structure was partly demolished, and this leads to an explanation of the successive building changes at one and the same edifice. The object was not so much the enlargement of the structure as the alteration of its aspect. The peoples of Central America believed their world to be one of cyclic changes. They used a very complex calendar which featured, in addition to a year of 365 days, a period of 260 days which was made up of 13 ‘months’, each of twenty days. It is not known how these two counts came about, and while one was certainly geared to the motion of the sun, the other seems to have been connected with the planet Venus and its year of 584 days. Here we cannot go into the somewhat intricate relation of these two counts, except to say that it led to a repetition of the same day-name in the same position of the cycle every 52 years. This period, and even more so the longer count of 104 years, were regarded as highly important spans of time after which a renewal of the world took place. The end of each period and the beginning of the next was believed to be of momentous significance and the approach of this moment a time of great danger. During the last five ‘unlucky’ days people fasted and destroyed their household belongings; on the final night children were kept awake to prevent them from turning into mice in their sleep.

Even more victims than usual were sacrificed while the Aztecs extinguished all fires throughout the land, awaiting the change of the era with dark foreboding. In the fateful night the priests ascended a mountain, on the top of which they determined by astronomical observations the moment of midnight. As soon as it had passed without the world’s coming to an end, they kindled with a firedrill the first flame of the new epoch, suitably in the chest of a freshly sacrificed victim. Torches were lit from it and runners took the fire to every part of the country.
These important turning points in the fate of their world were celebrated by replacing old things with new ones, and therefore the temples, too, had to be renewed. Whether rebuilding took place everywhere at 52-year intervals is not certain but it has been suggested that the successive phases of the pyramid at Tenayuca occurred in the years 1299, 1351, 1403, 1455 and 1507 AD. It has already been mentioned that cycles of 104 years were even more important; one has reason to believe that still longer periods were celebrated, which were significant enough to replace the customary style of architecture with an entirely new one.
The concept of cyclic changes not only governed the life of the Aztec nation, but was also the basis of their mythical beliefs. In the past, they thought, there had been four worlds or ‘suns’, after the first of which men were eaten by jaguars, the second was destroyed by hurricanes, the third by fire, and the fourth by floods. Their own world was to be ended by earthquakes and its sun had continually to be fed with human blood to stave off this impending disaster. Thus, human sacrifice was forever needed to maintain the world. We are not certain as to the number slain annually when the Spaniards arrived in Mexico but some authorities have estimated it as high as 50,000 or more.

It seems inconceivable that year in year out these enormous numbers should have gone to a violent death without a popular revolt against this carnage. The reason for this extraordinary phenomenon was religious and based on the Aztec idea of life after death. Beyond this life was Mictlan, a cold cheerless place in the underworld. However, there also was a heaven, the abode of the gods to which some of the dead could be elevated, those who had fallen in battle or died on the sacrificial stone. Women, too, would go to heaven if they had died in childbirth, giving up their life to bear a future warrior. The parading of the victim up the steps of the pyramid was for him the prelude to a glorious and everlasting life which he entered when his heart was offered up to the sun. The sun was waiting for his blood. How strong the victim himself felt about his sublime destiny was shown by an instance that occurred during the Conquest. Every year a beautiful young prisoner was chosen to represent the god Tezcatlipoca. Throughout the year he was feasted like the god and during the last months four lovely girls became his companions. At the day of sacrifice he would bid them farewell, breaking one by one the flutes which he had played as he ascended the stairs of the pyramid. The current candidate remonstrated when Cortes forbade his sacrifice and thus cheated the youth out of the apotheosis awaiting him.
The cult of blood and suffering was not confined to the instance of death. Self-torture and ceremonial bloodletting was a common form of penitence and of asking favours from the gods. For the 156 priests it was a duty : the Spaniards described their frayed earlobes and the stench which emanated from their long hair, matted with blood. Some of the most devout ones would pass a string with maguey thorns through their tongues. The Axtecs were a martial race and, as in other heroic societies, sadism and masochism went hand in hand with homosexuality. Diaz describes the first Aztec pyramid which the Spaniards encountered : ‘There were clay idols made of pottery with faces of demons or women and other evil figures that showed Indians committing acts of sodomy with each other.’ In his speeches Cortes admonished the Aztecs again and again to ‘Give up their sacrifices, the eating of the flesh of their relations and the practice of sodomy’. In fact, the Spaniards, when picking up a prostitute, were often disgusted and horrified to find a man in women’s clothes.

In size the Aztec and Maya pyramids can be compared with the later Egyptian ones but they are far inferior to the huge monuments of the Egyptian Pyramid Age proper. However, there exist two immense pyramids only 50 km. from Mexico City, the ancient Tenochtitlan. When in the twelfth century the Aztecs entered the Valley of Mexico as an insignificant and despised tribe, these large pyramids were more than a thousand years old and even their origin was forgotten. Completely overgrown, they resembled natural hills rather than buildings and the real character of the site was only revealed by a broad ancient avenue, 4 km. long, which was as much overgrown as the hillocks flanking it. The Aztecs took these to be tombs and therefore called the avenue the ‘Street of the Dead’. The two large pyramids they regarded as being sacred to the sun and the moon on the basis of a current legend but without any historical justification. The site itself they called Teotihuacan, ‘The Place where Men became Gods’, and this is the name it bears today because we do not know what the original inhabitants called it. Neither do we know what they called themselves, where they came from and what language they spoke.

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The Mexican Pyramids Facts Part 2

Pyramids and human sacrifice at the top of them were discovered by the Conquistadors to be a standard feature of daily life throughout Mexico. Since human sacrifice came to an abrupt end with the Conquest, the actual number of sacrifices is not certain but native records show that at the dedication of the great temple of Tenochtitlan in 1487 twenty thousand victims were dispatched. When thirty years later the Spaniards entered the great square of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, they found a rack holding many thousands of skulls and similar depositories were discovered in all the other towns and even villages. The Aztecs were a warlike race and they had a multitude of thirsty gods, above all Huitzilo- pochtli, the humming bird who led them into battle.

Mexican Pyramids

His innumerable victims were led up the steps of the pyramid, each stretched with his back over the altar by four priests who had gripped his arms and legs. A fifth priest plunged a stone knife into his belly, ripping open the abdominal cavity, and deftly tore out the still pulsating heart from his chest to be offered on behalf of the god to the sun. Often the victims were first prodded into dancing around the altar, as the Spaniards saw their captured comrades doing on St John’s night in June 1521. Victims in honour of Xipe Totec were crucified and flayed alive so that the priests could wear their skins. Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, required his bound victims to be thrown onto glowing embers to be pulled out again in time to have their hearts torn out. Women, too, were sacrificed, being beheaded while dancing, and the tears of children taken for sacrifice were meant to signify rain which was needed.

There was a never-ending variety of ritual for which the pyramid had to provide the stage. It imposed certain and definite demands on the architect. First of all, the spectacle should be visible to a large audience who should be able to watch the ritual in all its phases. At the beginning of the ceremony, the victim had to be identified with the god to whom he was offered. He was given the headdress characteristic of the god and his emblems. Then he took leave of mankind, being led up the steps of the pyramid, and this ascent into the sphere of divinity required a broad and impressive stairway. Much thought and architectural skill had been devoted by the Mexican builders to the various solutions of this problem, which we shall discuss presently in detail.

After the victim had reached the top of the pyramid, the central feature of the ritual, the sacrifice itself and the apotheosis of the dead man, had to be enacted. He was believed to join the god when his heart was offered up to the sun. It was therefore important that every detail of the victim’s death throes should be observable to the crowd in the pyramid enclosure. It meant that the pyramid, while being sufficiently imposing, must not be too high. Finally, the corpse had to be disposed of, and this, too, should be done in a spectacular manner. For this purpose the body was rolled down the stairway which had to be steep enough to provide an uninterrupted passage to the ground. Finally, as a backcloth to the ritual there had to be a shrine at the top of the platform which was a sanctuary dedicated to the god and which served as an abode for the holy image. Some of the Aztec pyramids, such as that in the capital, Tenochtitlan, and another close by, at Tenayuca, carried at the top two sanctuaries, dedicated to different gods. At these twin structures only the pyramid itself was common to both cults but separate staircases led up side by side to the two sanctuaries.

Practically all the Aztec pyramids in the Valley of Mexico had a core of adobe bricks, which were faced with stone held together with mortar. This sets certain limits on the steepness of the stairs but, since the total height of the structure was modest, a fairly high angle of elevation could be maintained. Even the most important pyramids, such as the great temple of Tenochtitlan, rose to only 30 m., not more than a fifth of the great pyramids of Giza. Since the staircase served as a stage for the initial phases of the sacrifice, the spectators’ interest had to be focused on it and the impression of steepness was further enhanced by an accentuated elevation of the banisters near the top.

Thanks to the use of different materials, the Mayas of Yucatan were able to construct steeper stairs, reaching higher. They built their pyramids throughout of stone, held together with a very strong lime r.iortar. When set, this type of structure was essentially monolithic and there was no danger of slip or plastic flow. In this way they could achieve angles of elevation of up to 750, much steeper than anything attempted in Egypt, and about as steep as the remaining core of the Meidum pyramid. The great stairway of the ‘Pyramid of the Magician’ at Uxmal rises at an angle of almost 50° to a height of nearly 35 m. This is clearly at the very limit of practicability for a flight of steps; when I climbed it I certainly had to keep a good hold of the iron chain now provided for visitors to make a safe ascent. The steepness of these stairways, which was necessary for their sinister purpose, was brought home to me by a macabre incident at the pyramid of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza. Emerging from a tunnel at ground level, I came upon a group of Maya Indians in a hushed silence. At the bottom of the stairs was a large pool of blood. One of the Maya girls whom I had seen making the ascent a few minutes earlier had lost her footing and cracked open her skull.

At this pyramid another cunning device had been used by the architects to make the stairway appear even steeper than it is. This was achieved by making the banisters diverge slightly towards the top of the stairs. Standing, as the spectators were, directly in front of the pyramid, this architectural trick cannot be noticed and it is only from a fair distance that the diverging banisters can be perceived.

The great strength of their mortar allowed the Maya to create internal space in their stone buildings. Just as in Egypt, however, they did not discover the carrying properties of the barrel vault and also had to rely on the corbelled roof. The typical Maya arch is gradually narrowed towards the top, making ample use of the cantilever principle. Consequently, the ratio of internal space to the total size of their building is, in spite of the near-monolithic construction, fairly low. However, unlike the Aztec pyramids, those in Yucatan have mostly retained the crowning temple, often embellished by an elegant roof comb.

From what has been said so far it is clear that the Mexican pyramids differ in a number of essential features from those of Egypt. Whereas the latter could not be ascended after completion, all the Mexican pyramids were provided with steps leading up to the stop of a truncated building. The basic idea of the Central American structures was simply to raise the sanctuary of the god high above the ground. The object was a stairway leading up to a temple. The purpose of the pyramids was therefore quite different in the two cases. Until fairly recently it was taken for granted that the Mexican pyramids never served as tombs. In 1951, however, an internal staircase was discovered in the ‘Pyramid of the Inscriptions’ at Palenque which led into an undisturbed tomb deep in the body of the structure. The staircase, which had been blocked with rubble, descends to a chamber in which the skeletons of four people, evidently sacrificial victims, were found. When a large stone slab at the far end of this chamber was removed it revealed a crypt whose floor was almost completely covered by the carved lid of a huge sarcophagus. It contained the skeleton of a man of magnificent stature whose face had been covered with a jade mask and who wore jade ornaments.

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