The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Leaving out Zoser’s Step Pyramid, with its unique burial chambers, the nine remaining pyramids contain no more than three authentic sarcophagi. These are distributed over no fewer than fourteen tomb chambers. Petrie has shown that the lidless sarcophagus in the Khufu pyramid had been put into the King’s chamber before the latter was roofed over since it is too large to pass through the entrance passage. The sealed but empty sarcophagus of Sekhemket also was evidently brought in before the pyramid was finished. Even if we assume that the pyramids of Khaba and of Djedefre were left unfinished at an early stage, we still have to account for the disappearance of at least four, and possibly as many as eight, sarcophagi. The magnificent and large granite sarcophagus in mastaba 17 at Meidum shows that even at this early age substantial and heavy sarcophagi were customary, and this is borne out by the sarcophagi in Khufu’s and Khafre’s pyramids. One would like to know what has happened to the missing sarcophagi. The robbers might have smashed their lids but they would hardly have taken the trouble of stealing a smashed sarcophagus. In spite of careful search no chips of broken sarcophagi have been found in any of the pyramid passages or chambers. Moreover, it has to be remembered that from the Meidum pyramid onward the entrance was well above ground level. At the Bent Pyramid even the lower corridor is located 12 m. above the base and bringing a heavy sarcophagus in or out would have necessitated the use of a substantial ramp. At Khufu’s pyramid the sarcophagus had been, as we have seen, put in the tomb chamber while the monument was still under construction, and the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure were both provided with entrances at the base, in addition to the polar passage.

Zoser’s Step Pyramid

The fact that the sarcophagi in the Khufu and Khafre pyramids were found empty is easily explained as the work of intruders, but the empty sarcophagi of Sekhemket, Queen Hetepheres, and a third one in a shaft under the Step Pyramid, pose a more difficult problem. They were all left undisturbed since early antiquity. As these were burials without a corpse, we are almost driven to the conclusion that something other than a human body may have been ritually entombed.

We have already referred to the fact that Snofru seems to have had two, or even three, large pyramids, and he can hardly have been buried in all of them. This brings us back to the awkward problem of multiple tombs which we encountered when discussing the royal burials of the first two dynasties in Chapter 1. There we came across the existence of two tombs for ma|ny of the early pharaohs with the added possibility of a third which may have sunk into the silt of the Delta. It was for this reason that, when first introducing the pyramids, we referred to them as ‘funerary monuments’ rather than as ‘tombs’. If some of the royal tombs, including the pyramids, were not the burial places of the body but 80 cenotaphs, it should be noted that nevertheless they all had tomb chambers. The question arises as to who or what was interred in them.

Most Egyptologists agree that some of the dead person’s spiritual attributes, such as the ba and the ka, were closely connected with jus eternal house. The ka, in particular, was thought to dwell in the tomb, which it could enter or leave by a false door, the closed-up replica of a real entrance. Mastaba tombs usually contain a ka chamber with a statue of the dead occupant. It is also clear that the statuary found in the valley buildings of the pyramids was not meant to be seen and did not serve the same purpose as a present- day monument. These royal statues, which were often combined with those of gods, or the royal spouse, all in an attitude of protecting the dead pharaoh, had purely ritual significance. They were to be animated by his ka, for which the pyramid may have been primarily built.

Turning again to West Africa, we find burials of the soul in proper graves whenever the person has died far away from his home. Since in a hot, humid climate the corpse tends to decompose rapidly, it has to be buried forthwith and cannot be transported. However, the corpse’s hair and fingernails are cut off and sent for burial to his home. Since these features often show some growth after death they are believed to be associated with the spirit of the dead person which is reluctant to leave the body. It is not impossible that some sort of token burial played a part in the funerary arrangements of ancient Egypt.

Even if we concede that the bodies of the pharaohs have long since disappeared, the riddle of the missing sarcophagi remains. They may, of course, not only exist but even be well-known. Who, we may ask, for instance, was the unnamed man buried in the large mastaba 17 at Meidum? His tomb stands in a prominent position in front of the pyramid which was still being built when he was laid to rest in a completely sealed tomb. He had been buried in the large granite sarcophagus which has remained undamaged in his tomb chamber to this day. It would be tempting to think that he may be the pharaoh whose pyramid - without a sarcophagus in it - rose behind his tomb, as the abode of his soul.

Thoughts like these could be dismissed as idle speculation but for a stela found by Petrie at Abydos. It records a reply of the pharaoh Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty to his wife, Queen Ahmose-Nefertari. The passage is important enough to be quoted verbatim in translation :

His sister spoke and answered him: ‘Why have these things been recalled? What has come into thy heart?’ The King’s own person said to her: ‘I have recalled the mother of my mother and the mother of my father, king’s great wife and king’s mother, Tetisheri, deceased. A tomb chamber and a sepulchre of hers are at this moment upon the soil of the Theban and Abydene nomes, but I have said this to thee because My Majesty has wished to make for her a pyramid and a chapel in the Sacred Land close to the monument of My Majesty1 .. . His Majesty spoke thus, and these things were accomplished at once.

We are thus faced with the contemporary statement of a New Kingdom pyramid builder that Queen Tetisheri, consort of the pharaoh Senakhtenre Tao, already possessed two tombs, in one of which she must have been buried, when a pyramid was built for her as well. For once we have the words of the pharaoh himself to state the facts.

While very few people will dispute that the pyramids had some connection with the afterlife of the pharaoh, the general statement that the pharaohs were buried in them is by no means indisputable. The complexity of the evidence before us does not, unfortunately, permit such a simple categorical statement. Quite possibly each pyramid once housed the body of a pharaoh, but there also exists, as we have seen in this chapter, an unpleasantly large number of factors that speak against it. It is on the basis of these complexities and contradictions that Egyptologists had to try and find a solution to the most difficult problem of all: why were these immense pyramids built in the first place ?

When the Step Pyramid at Saqqara was erected, pharaohs who were rulers of Upper and Lower Egypt had been buried, evidently to the satisfaction of all concerned, in palatial tombs. These, however, had demanded only a small fraction of the labour required for Zoser’s funerary complex. The true unification of the country can be cited as a good reason, but then it was in a way a false dawn as the next two pyramids were never finished. Later, with the enigmatic change of plan at Meidum, pyramid building truly got into its stride and in the space of just about one century almost 25 million tons of limestone were quarried, dressed, moved and piled up into man-made mountains. Then, within one generation, this fantastic activity was brought to an end. Pyramids were still provided for the pharaohs for another thousand years, but they were small and soon became cheap and shoddy. They were well within the ordinary budget of the country. The short spell of what 82

appears to us as the magnificent madness of the Fourth Dynasty was never repeated.

Egyptologists have looked in vain for a convincing solution of tjus riddle in a change of religious belief. Such changes did, in fact, take place, but they cannot explain the employment of up to a hundred thousand people for a century on what, on the face of it, js a useless expense of labour. The main difficulty which Egyptologists face is the re-creation of a state of mind of human society

5,0 years ago. Our own approach, which was triggered off quite accidentally, deals with constructional mishaps and their causes. The conclusions are of a purely technological nature and it is due to this nature of our approach that we enjoy a peculiar advantage over the Egyptologist. Whereas in the last 5,000 years man’s spiritual world-picture and his moral laws have changed out of all recognition, the laws of physics have remained unaltered. The knowledge that these same laws were operative and had to be obeyed 5,000 years ago in exactly the same way as today provides a reliable link between the pyramid builders and ourselves. We can follow their decisions, analyse their mistakes and recognise their corrections with absolute certainty. For the technologist a return to the mind of the Old Kingdom presents no difficulty. Whatever Imhotep’s religious beliefs and spiritual motives may have been, his work was governed by the same laws of stability to which we are subject today. It is not that the scientist sees more than the Egyptologist - he merely sees different things. His conclusions do not supplant the Egyptologist’s work but may complement and, one hopes, enrich it.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5

One of the problems that has exercised the minds of many people is the significance of the angle of elevation of the pyramids. Most of them rise at an angle of about 520; only the Red Pyramid and the upper part of the Bent Pyramid, both at Dahshur, are built at the same lower angle of 43 J°. We have mentioned that for the Khufu pyramid the angle (51 “52') leads to the ratio 1 /2TT with an accuracy that cannot comfortably be dismissed as fortuitous and has given rise to strange esoteric speculations which are mentioned in the Appendix to this book. Since this geometric relation was first noticed, more than a century ago, a number of very careful triangulations of the Giza plateau have been carried out.

From each of these measurements the ratio 1/27r emerged with increased accuracy. Since it is known that more than a thousand years after Khufu the Egyptians still did not know the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle to a greater accuracy than 3, the accurate use of the factor i/27t in pyramid construction remained somewhat uncanny. A great number of mathematical explanations have been suggested and even one, made by a noted archaeologist, that the builders by accident used a ratio of 14/11, remains lamentably unconvincing. In spite of brilliant constructional skill and superb workmanship, we have no evidence that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom had more than the most rudimentary command of mathematics. Any acceptable solution must therefore have a practical, rather than a theoretical, basis, and that suggested to me by an electronics engineer, T. E. Connolly, fulfils this condition.

The explanation is based on the assumption that the ancient Egyptians had not yet formed the concept of isotropic three- dimensional space. In other words, whereas to us measures of height and vertical distance are the same thing, namely a length for which we use the same unit, this may not have been regarded as natural by the pyramid builders. They used as height measure the royal cubit, based on the upward distance from elbow to 5 The astonishing accuracy with which the ratio of height to circumference of the Great Pyramid represents the squaring of the circle 1)271 was possibly due to the fact that the Egyptians may have measured long horizontal distances by counting the revolutions of a rolling drum. In this way they would have arrived at the transcendental number n = 3.141... without realising it fingertips, which in the Old Kingdom had already been standardised to a length of 52 centimetres. Since ropes of palm fibre tend to stretch, a much more accurate way of measuring long horizontal distances as, for instance, the base of a large pyramid, was required. One such method is to roll a drum and count the number of revolutions. The royal cubit, already used for height measurement, would immediately suggest itself as the standard diameter of the drum, and one revolution - we may call it a ‘rolled cubit’ - corresponds to the circumference of the drum stretched out horizontally.

It appears that, using this system of measurement, the Egyptian architects never did anything more sophisticated than to build pyramids according to the simple gradients of 4 :1 and 3:1. Taking the former first, the height of the pyramid will be 4x71 cubits, where n is the number chosen to determine its size. The horizontal distance from the centre of the building to its side will then have to be ixn rolled cubits or, in our mathematical terms, n-ir cubits. Since this distance is half the side length of the pyramid, the latter’s circumference comes to 8xmr cubits. Therefore, the ratio of height to circumference is 4 x n/8 x mr cubits or, by dividing this fraction by 4 xn cubits, simply 1 / 2ir. This is the mysterious ratio used in pyramid construction and which, at the same time, leads inevitably to an angle of elevation of 51 °52'. In other words, jjje pyramid builders discovered the transcendental number tr (3 141 • • •) without trying and without knowing. The explanation is made even more likely by the fact that using in this way the lower gradient 3 :1 instead of 4 :1, the angle of elevation comes out correctly as 434°.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4

Herodotus gives a quite fantastic description of the interior of Khufu’s pyramid, referring to a subterranean lake under the building with an island in it on which the pharaoh was buried. This indicates that the pyramid, which certainly had been entered during the First Intermediate Period, had been closed up again. Moreover, the original entrance must still have been well concealed and all knowledge of its existence had evidently been lost when in the ninth century AD the Caliph Ma’mun drove his tunnel into the building in order to discover the tomb chamber and its hidden treasure.

Ancient Egypt Pyramids

The final closing of the pyramids which had been pillaged in ancient times probably took place during the latest period of Egyptian independence under the Saite dynasty which ruled the country in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Whereas we have had to deal so far with the destruction of evidence by treasure seekers and stone robbers we now have to discuss an entirely different aspect: the fabrication of misleading evidence. In spite of the neglect and wanton destruction of the Old Kingdom edifices in later times the pyramids retained their aura of sanctity and, with the passage of the centuries, veneration of the Old Kingdom returned. It became a mark of distinction and an insurance for a man’s afterlife to be buried in or near the ancient tombs. The earlier of these ‘intrusive’ burials, to use an archaeological term, bear so clearly the stamp of their own age that they can easily be recognised for what they are. However, more difficult problems for the archaeologists were created by the pharaohs of the last Egyptian dynasties.

Towards the end of the pharaonic empire the priests of Amun at Thebes gained an ever-increasing political power which, in keeping with the ancient matrilineal tradition, was exercised in the name of a royal princess who held the title ‘wife of the god’. She was never the pharaoh’s wife but the spouse of Amun and her succession was ensured by adoption of further royal princesses. Thus the pharaoh now held power in a less direct manner - not as husband of the ‘great wife’ but as father of his daughter. The central power had slipped from the hands of the king into those of the priests who, in order to maintain it, began to employ foreign mercenaries. These, however, were no match for any powerful aggressor, such as the Assyrians who overran Egypt without much difficulty at about 650 BC. The Assyrians’ victory was of short duration because they, in turn, had to defend themselves against Media.

As the Assyrians’ power in Egypt crumbled, the man whom they had installed to govern the country on their behalf turned against them. He was Psammetichus who declared himself pharaoh and legitimised his position by having his eldest daughter, another Nitokerti, adopted as ‘wife of the god’. Enthroned at his capital of Sals, Psammetichus and his successors in the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty tried to restore the splendour of the ancient traditions, and the Old Kingdom of 2,000 years before their time became their model. Their sculpture and architecture imitated that of the early dynasties so closely that at first Egyptologists were frequently misled. It seems that the Saltes also cleared the pyramids and resealed them after having buried their own dead there. When in 1837 Perring discovered sixty mummies in a large gallery under the Step Pyramid at Saqqara he took them naturally to be the dead retainers of Zoser. Only later was it discovered that not only did the mummies belong to the Late Period but that the gallery itself had been newly excavated by the Saites.

Recently both the wooden coffin lid, inscribed with the name of Menkaure, and the mummy found in the pyramid were recognised as late substitutions. Some doubts have therefore arisen about the authenticity of Menkaure’s basalt sarcophagus, which unfortunately had been lost at sea. The existing drawing of it does not make it appear impossible that this sarcophagus too was a Saite production, despite the fact that it reproduces the ‘palace fa$ade’ decoration.

Summarising all these facts and taking into account early pillage and late restoration, it becomes clear that the evidence presented by the pyramids today is often confusing and, to some extent, perplexing. The complexity is further increased by the existence of the small subsidiary pyramids which were attached to each big pyramid, dating from that at Meidum onward. The interior chambers of some of these are too small to have served for the burial of a human body, and it has been suggested that they may have been the repositories of the canopic jars, holding the pharaoh’s viscera. In that case this ‘ritual’ pyramid should be regarded as an integral part of the standard pyramid complex, together with the mortuary temple, causeway and valley building.

The matter, however, becomes more complicated by the fact that the pyramid complexes of Khufu and Menkaure each contain three of these small pyramids. A pointer concerning their occupants is given by Herodotus. According to the priests from whom he obtained his information, the pharaoh, Khufu, wishing to raise funds for the building of his pyramid, induced his daughter to sell her charms. The lady, who wished to erect a memorial to her filial devotion, asked each man to give her one stone, and she was eventually buried in the small pyramid collected in this manner. Quite apart from the fact that Herodotus could have rejected this preposterous story on numerical grounds - the pyramid contains at least 20,000 stones - it is hardly in keeping with the position of a royal princess of the Fourth Dynasty. However, even the most unlikely legends usually contain a grain of truth and it seems probable that some, at least of these subsidiary pyramids were the tombs of the ‘great queens’. Indeed, according to a late stela, the southernmost of Khufu’s small pyramids was built for Queen Henutsen, one of Khufu’s wives and the mother of Khafre. The details about all these subsidiary pyramids are best given in tabulated form.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2

When the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty secured their tomb chambers with blind passages and portcullises, they felt that their mummies and their treasures had been well guarded against the thief who might sneak in at night, and even against an armed band of robbers who would overpower the watchman. They evidently had not envisaged any long period of lawlessness during which local chiefs had leisure to mount sustained and large-scale operations against the royal sepulchres. During this Intermediate Period not only the pyramids but practically all the tombs of the princes, the high officials and the rich were rifled. Moreover, it seems that knowledge of the secret location of the tomb chambers had, in many cases, been preserved. When after several unsuccessful attempts Petrie and Wainwright found the tomb chamber hidden in the bulk of an immense mastaba - No. 17 - at Meidum, they discovered that it never had an entrance. It had been completely sealed after the burial and the mastaba had then been built up above it. Nevertheless, the tomb had been robbed and, as Wainwright noticed, the thieves must have known exactly where the burial chamber was located since they had tunnelled straight for it by the shortest possible route.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

After Wainwright and Petri had explored the tomb, they closed it again and filled in the shaft that they had dug into the mastaba. The only way in now is to crawl through the narrow tunnel which the thieves had bored into the mud brick of the structure. It cannot be recommended to anyone suffering from claustrophobia, and the crumbling dry mud is an unpleasant reminder that the tunnel may fall in. It was the only place into which our Bedouin guides did not accompany us. However, the visit was well worthwhile. Through a small hole one enters the T-shaped tomb chamber of smoothly dressed limestone which bears no inscription. In it stands an immense sarcophagus of pink granite with its lid swivelled aside, as the tomb robbers left it 4,000 years ago. It is the earliest granite sarcophagus ever discovered and its completely unadorned bulk is deeply impressive.

It is significant that here, as in other tombs of the period, after the sarcophagus had been opened the body of the occupant was thrown on the floor where the archaeologists found it. The thieves had only been after his treasure. It is interesting to note that the bodies recovered from these early tombs were not mummies in the generally accepted sense. The art of embalming, that is, of preserving the human body as a whole, as practised in later times, had evidently not yet been perfected in the Fourth Dynasty. Instead, thj skeleton was defleshed and the bones reassembled with linen bandages soaked in resin. Wadding was put into the body cavity and by the use of more bandages the figure of the dead was faithfully reconstructed. Two fingers, which were missing from the Meidum skeleton, had been carefully replaced by rolled-up linen. The effigy of the dead person, built up around his skeleton, was re-created to such detail as the male sex organs and the breasts and nipples of the women. Again there is a parallel with West African custom where the corpse of the king was defleshed and then articulated with gold wire.

The systematic robbing of the pyramids and of all rich tombs, lasting for two centuries, has deprived us of practically all the evidence connected with the burial of the kings and their families. We do not, of course, know whether somewhere under the desert sand of Saqqara or Giza some undisturbed tomb still awaits discovery. The trouble is that, unlike the carefully hidden rock burials of the New Kingdom, the Old Kingdom tombs, and particularly the pyramids, were built to be conspicuous. However, there are exceptions. When in 1925 Reisner cleared the sand around Khufu’s pyramid he came across a number of paving stones which had been concealed with plaster. They turned out to cover the mouth of a shaft, 32 m. deep and entirely filled with stones. At its bottom the American archaeologists found a tomb chamber with the alabaster sarcophagus and tomb furniture of Queen Hete- pheres 1, the mother of Khufu and wife of Snofru, the woman who had carried the royal blood from the Third into the Fourth Dynasty. The magnificent gilded tomb furniture was carefully restored by the expedition members and stands today in the Cairo Museum, with a replica set in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

In the tomb was also found an alabaster canopic chest containing the viscera that had been removed from the Queen’s corpse. The sarcophagus, however, was empty. Reisner suggested that this was a reburial after the Queen’s tomb at Dahshur had been rifled and that her body was stolen, the latter fact having been concealed from Khufu. When, 45 years after Reisner’s explanation, I asked a surviving member of the team, Dows Dunham, whether he still believed in it, he was hesitant, saying that it was the best story they could think of at the time. However, Dunham pointed out to me the important fact that the inside of the sarcophagus showed brown stains which he took to indicate that it may once have contained a body. In any case, the shaft tomb of Hetepheres is so far the only royal burial, even if it was merely a reburial, which has survived intact from the Old Kingdom.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3

Thirty years after Reisner’s find another discovery of undisturbed Old Kingdom relics was made close by. These are the two huge boat pits, adjacent to the Great Pyramid, of which only one has been opened. It contained the complete parts of a large ship which was found in the same state as when Djedefre buried it there after Khufu’s death four and a half thousand years ago. These two discoveries of untouched subterranean cavities in the rock at Giza show that the sand of the pyramid area may still hold surprises.

Ancient Egypt Pyramids

While cosmic ray investigation has shown that the bulk of the Khafre pyramid contains no hidden chamber, we know nothing, as Emery once pointed out to me, about possible chambers below the pyramids. It is, indeed, a curious fact that large subterranean galleries and magazines have been found only under the first three step pyramids, of which they formed an important feature. No such underground stores have been discovered at the Meidum structure which originally, too, was a step pyramid, or at any of the subsequent pyramids. Access to the step pyramid stores was from the entrance passages and, as we have pointed out, the entrance to the Meidum pyramid deviated from the earlier pattern, even in its original stepped form. In fact the whole pyramid complex at Meidum differs from the large enclosures of the Third Dynasty, indicating a conceptual change in the structure of the royal tomb which came in with the Fourth Dynasty. We do not, of course, know whether from then onward the dead pharaoh could dispense with the thousands of stone vessels that were formerly buried with him in his stores. On the other hand it is not inconceivable that such subterranean galleries also exist under the later pyramids but that they had separate and well-concealed entrances which have as yet not been found.

Although the existence of the ascending passage in Khufu’s pyramid was revealed only when the Caliph Ma’mun’s battering rams caused the concealing roof slab to fall, the robbers of the Intermediate Period would have known of another access to the King’s chamber. They seem to have made use of it 3,000 years before the Caliph. In order to allow the escape of the workmen who had originally sealed the ascending passage from within, a narrow shaft had been constructed which connects the bottom of the Grand Gallery with the unused subterranean tomb chamber. The men who left last then allowed a prepared block of limestone to drop into its place so as to cover the entrance to the shaft from the Grand Gallery. Probably the shaft as well as the underground chamber were subsequently filled with masonry. The block concealing the top of the shaft is now missing and one might suspect that the ancient thieves removed the masonry and then ascended through the shaft into the sealed interior.

While the marauders in the long period of unrest plundered the tomb chambers of the pyramids and of the Old Kingdom mastabas very thoroughly they appear to have done little damage to the structure of the monuments. Their object was to unearth the buried treasure and, as the example of mastaba 17 at Meidum showed, they knew where to look and how to get there by the shortest route. Otherwise, the fabric of the pyramids was evidently of little interest to them.

Things unfortunately changed for the worse after order was restored throughout the country by a series of Theban princes, who, for a span of about 500 years, again held undisputed rule over the two kingdoms. This period of Egyptian history is called the ‘Middle Kingdom’ and the pharaohs of this era were powerful monarchs who, understandably, were bent on erecting impressive tombs. At first they governed the country from Thebes which thus for the first time became the capital of Egypt. There they also constructed their tombs, and one of these, that of Mentu- hotep 1, embodied a small pyramid as its central feature. After about 200 years of Theban rule the next dynasty, the Eleventh, returned to the north, establishing a new administrative capital a few miles south of Memphis. Influenced by the pyramids of the Old Kingdom in their close proximity, they decided to provide themselves also with pyramid tombs. However, they evidently did not command the strong labour force needed for large-scale quarrying which their early predecessors had at their disposal and therefore they began to re-employ the masonry of the Old Kingdom tombs.

The pharaoh Amenemhat 1, in particular, showed a superb disregard for the monuments of the past, and he used stonework much of it with relief sculpture, from the earlier tombs. It has been seriously suggested by Egyptologists that it might be worthwhile to dismantle completely Amenemhat’s pyramid at Lisht, which already is much ruined, in order to recover the Old Kingdom sculpture which it contains.

Stone robbery from ancient monuments continued for many centuries throughout the New Kingdom and archaeologists have singled out the great Pharaoh, Rameses n, as one of the main perpetrators. Even so it seems that the Giza pyramids were not seriously damaged when in the fourth century BC they were described by Herodotus. He refers to an inscription on the surface of the Khufu pyramid which shows that the outer limestone casing was then still in existence. It seems certain that this casing was eventually removed by the Muslims who used the well-polished outer blocks to build the large mosques and the city wall of Cairo.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1

Excavation, accurate measurement and their correlation with inscriptions have provided a large body of information about the pyramids, the gist of which has been recorded in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, the number of questions that have been answered is matched by at least as many new questions which have arisen from this research. The great antiquity of the pyramids has taught us to be very careful about the evidence which the archaeologist’s spade is turning up. The pyramids are separated from our own time by almost 5,000 years and a lot has happened to them during this interval. Much of the vital evidence has been destroyed or irretrievably lost, but equally dangerous is, as we shall presently see, the extraneous evidence which has been added.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

Again and again we have had to use the words ‘robbed in antiquity’; in fact, it appears that all the great pyramids had already been entered and despoiled almost a thousand years before Tutankhamun was laid in his tomb. The solid confidence in the eternity of divine power which the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty expressed in their gigantic pyramids did not outlast them for more than three centuries. Towards the end of the Sixth Dynasty one king, Pepi 11, reigned for no less than ninety years. It seems that during the last decades of his long life corruption and regionalism gained the upper hand in an already decadent administration. After Pepi’s death the woman of the royal blood, Nitokerti - Queen Nitocris of Herodotus’ history - had herself proclaimed pharaoh in the hope of saving the dynasty. However, she failed in her efforts and the different lists now mention a host of kings who may have reigned for very short times and probably simultaneously. The historical record becomes hopelessly blurred as the country entered into what the Egyptologists call ‘the First Intermediate Period’. It lasted for about two centuries and evidently was a time of internecine warfare and general civil disorder. In spite of Manetho’s list of four dynasties covering this interim period, it is fairly certain that no central authority operated during this time.

The contemporary account of one Ipu-wer, preserved in a Middle Kingdom papyrus at Leiden, is a long list of lament, revealing a state of turmoil and revolt. ‘All is ruin,’ he said, ‘A man kills his brother. Blood is everywhere. A few lawless men have ventured to despoil the land of the kingdom. The laws of the judgment hall are cast forth. Officials are slain and their records are taken away. The secrets of the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt are divulged. What the pyramid concealed has become empty and the palace is destroyed’.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

Read more »