Pyramid Quest (5 page)

I suspect strongly that the Bent Pyramid was meant to be bent from the beginning. Unlike any other ancient Egyptian pyramid, it expresses duality—two angles, two geometries, two tunnel and chamber complexes. There is something ritualistic and symbolic in this shape, a meaning we now find elusive. The Egyptians clearly found this meaning to be important. The craftsmanship of the Bent Pyramid achieves a high level, and the entire structure is beautifully wrought. Clearly, Sneferu and the Egyptians of his time were using architecture to express something of great importance, and they were giving this work their all.

We might also note that Sneferu’s three pyramids do little if anything to help the theory of pyramids as tombs. Why does anyone need to be buried in three different structures? Furthermore, as the Egyptologist Miroslav Verner has written, “neither his [Sneferu’s] bodily remains nor any convincing proof of his interment were found in any of them [the Meidum, Bent, or Red/North Pyramids].”
¹

Khufu, Sneferu’s son and successor and the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2551-2528 B.C.), outdid his predecessor not in number of pyramids but in the size and elaboration of his single effort. Realizing that Dahshur was too small to hold the kind of grand pyramid complex he envisioned, Khufu chose the Giza plateau, which lay farther up the Nile, close to the point where the great river branches and braids into the delta that spills its great watery load into the Mediterranean. This area on the border between the dry Sahara and the verdant Nile Valley offered plenty of room and an abundant supply of high-quality limestone.

As we shall see later, there may have been additional reasons for Khufu’s choice of Giza. For example, the presence of the Sphinx, the origins of which predate the Old Kingdom by at least 2,000 years, indicates that the area possessed ritual significance well before Khufu turned his attention to it. He may have been less going somewhere new than returning somewhere old.

Whatever brought him to Giza, it was there that Khufu launched the largest single building project of ancient Egypt (although, in sum, Sneferu’s two or three pyramids were more ambitious) and one of the most monumental structures yet erected on this planet. The Great Pyramid—which the ancient Egyptians called Khufu’s Horizon—is the only survivor among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world (see the appendices). It certainly qualifies, if only on quantitative measure. Even without its original white-limestone casing, the Great Pyramid contains approximately 2.3 million blocks of limestone. At an average per-block weight of 2.5 tons, the whole structure tips the scales at some 5.75 million tons. Originally reaching 481 feet in height, the Great Pyramid is the tallest pyramid, not only in Egypt but also in the entire ancient world. Until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it was the tallest building in the modern world, as well. With its sides measuring almost 756 feet apiece in length, it also has the largest ancient footprint of all, over 13 acres.

Photograph of the Great Pyramid taken by Francis Bedford on March 5, 1862; to the left is the Second (Khafre) Pyramid. (
From Smyth, 1864, frontispiece.
)

Two other aspects of the Great Pyramid make it stand out from all the other pyramids, both of which we will examine in more detail later. One is the extraordinary precision of the building. For example, the sides are oriented almost perfectly to the north-south and east-west axes, and they vary in length by only a matter of inches. The second feature is the network of passages and chambers that lie within and under the great stone structure. No other pyramid boasts an interior architecture anywhere nearly as complex.

After Khufu, pyramid building declined in scale and, apparently, social and religious importance. Only two more of the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty built pyramids at Giza: Khafre, the fourth king in the line, and Menkaure, the sixth. In addition to being smaller than Khufu’s, these two pyramids are less precise in their construction, less craftsmanlike, and simpler, with less complicated tunnels and internal chambers.

Pyramid building continued in the Fifth (2465-2323 B.C.), Sixth (2323-2150 B.C.), and Seventh-Eighth dynasties (2150-2134 B.C.), but only one of the structures exceeded Menkaure’s in size—and Menkaure’s pyramid was but a fraction of the size of Khufu’s. Likewise, the workmanship comes nowhere near what was exhibited at Giza. The high point had passed, and as in the Roman Empire depicted by Edward Gibbon and embellished by Hollywood, it was all downhill from there.

There is more to the pyramids than the pyramids themselves. Surrounding the pyramids were complexes of temples, subsidiary tombs, causeways, walls, courtyards, and other structures. The pyramids and their ancillary structures were the centers of cult activities supported and administered by pious foundations. Each cult focused on statues of the dead pharaoh that were the basis of what amounted to an elaborate form of ancestor worship and that represented a shift in the nature of kingship from the First Dynasty to the Fourth.

In the early days, kingship among the Egyptians centered on military and physical prowess. To be pharaoh, the ruler had to be smart, strong, and sly; weakness meant the end of rule. The
sed
festival of early Egypt tested the king’s mettle by requiring him to run the perimeter of a large court-yard, possibly several times. Since
sed
is rooted in the Egyptian word
sdi,
which means “slay” or “butcher,” it is very likely that a king who proved less than vigorous was dead by the end of the
sed
festival, and a stronger rival had taken over the palace.

The philosophy of the pharaoh as the biggest, baddest guy on the Nile changed with Djoser and Imhotep. With a unified, peaceful Egypt, the king became less a military dictator who enforced order in the Two Lands than the man who was responsible for maintaining the fundamental order of the cosmos.

Since we see history as linear, we might assume that the emergence of the
benben
(the first land) from the original chaos set the universe on its course once and for all. The Egyptians, though, saw history as circular: what happened before will happen again. Chaos, or
isfet,
was always waiting to overwhelm creation and return the cosmos to formlessness. Existence depended on maintaining the balance between creation and chaos, a delicate, subtle, equilibrium the Egyptians called
ma’at.
Sometimes translated as “truth,”
ma’at
has a meaning akin to Hebrew
shalom,
Arabic
salaam,
Sanskrit
om,
and Hawaiian
aloha,
implying balance on a scale that reaches from the individual to the cosmos. To preserve
ma’at,
everything in the universe required the balance of its opposite. Male had female, up down, night day, black white, mortal immortal.

To the pharaoh fell the cosmic task of bridging the gap between the two worlds of mortality and immortality, of this world and the afterlife. The pharaoh walked in the company of the gods, spoke their language, shared their wisdom, and enacted ceremonies daily that replicated the first instance of creation, thereby saving the cosmos from descent into chaos. Because the pharaoh attended to daily rituals that summoned the powers of creation against those of chaos, the natural world continued in its proper rhythms. When the pharaoh preserved
ma’at,
the Nile rose and fell as it should, the sun completed its daily passage from east to west, the moon always came back after three days of darkness, and prosperity and justice reigned in the Two Lands. The pharaoh’s was an awesome task, and it was his to fulfill in death as well as life.

As befits the Egyptian sense of balanced duality, two worlds existed side by side. One was earthly existence—mortality, with its pain, illness, brevity, and impermanence. The other world was the afterlife—much like mortal life in its beauty and pleasure, yet eternal, populated by spirits the Egyptians called gods and lacking sickness, death, suffering, or worry. It was a blessed place to be, especially forever.

At the moment of conception, the two worlds combined to create a child. The mortal, physical world contributed the body, which could operate only because it was animated by the spiritual
ka.
The
ka
could leave the body during sleep or unconsciousness, but it always returned—at least until death, when the
ka
departed the body yet remained close to the grave or tomb. Since the
ka
had directed needs like hunger and thirst during life, it continued to need food and drink after death.

Each human also contained a
ba,
which lacked the personal identity of the
ka
and was a formless, cosmic energy that animated all beings. At death the
ba
returned to the universe, carrying no memory of its recent sojourn into mortality.

At death, the
ka
and
ba
fled the body and left it an empty shell. Mummification transformed this emptiness so that it could pass over into the afterlife. Mummification constituted a form of resurrection by reconnecting
ka
and
ba
to body and allowing the whole being to cross over.

Exactly where the realm of the afterlife was thought to exist changed over the course of the Old Kingdom, most notably during the reign of Khufu. Early on, the other world was located in heaven, among the stars. After death and burial, the mummified, resurrected pharaoh made his way to the stars and there joined the ranks of the gods. Later, however, the afterlife came to be literally an underworld. The sun moved from east to west during the day, then at night dropped below the horizon to appear again in the eastern sky at dawn. There, beneath our world, in that unknown place where the sun shone at night, the gods and the resurrected spirits passed their paradisiacal days for all eternity. The afterlife had moved from stars to sun.

Khufu was never known as a “son of Re,” the sun god worshiped at the Egyptian holy city of Iunu (later known by its Greek name Heliopolis, “city of the sun”). But his Fourth Dynasty successors—Djedefre, Khafre, and Menkaure—bore that title. According to one interpretation, sometime between the death of Khufu and the accession of Djedefre, a major religious change occurred. A minor son of Khufu who came to the throne only after the untimely death of the most likely successor to the throne, Djedefre turned away from his father’s complex at Giza to go his own way. The new pharaoh began a pyramid at Abu Roash (also spelled Abu Rawash), some 5 miles north of Giza and directly opposite the temple of Re at Iunu.

When Khafre, another minor son of Khufu, took the throne—possibly as a result of Djedefre’s unexpected death, perhaps through a coup d’état—the pyramid of Abu Roash was left unfinished, and images of Djedefre were smashed. Something ferocious was going on in ancient Egypt, even as Khafre refocused the energy of the Fourth Dynasty on Giza and there built the pyramids associated with his reigns. He had come back to Khufu’s ritual center, yet he and his Fourth Dynasty successors carried the title “son of Re,” which the builder of the Great Pyramid had never borne.

Against this background, one interpretation is to view Khufu as the last defender of the old way, a fact that becomes all the more interesting when we look at the conflicting ancient stories surrounding him. Khufu is variously seen as a sacrilegious tyrant who opposed the religious ways of many of his people, or as a religious scholar who possessed a deep knowledge and yearning for the sacred. These competing interpretations of Khufu might be expected if he was a man of strong religious convictions—but not necessarily convictions shared by all of his people.

One ancient account of Khufu comes from the classical Greek historian Herodotus, who lived from about 484 B.C. until sometime between 430 and 420 B.C. According to Herodotus, Sneferu created a perfect state of justice—the social version of
ma’at
—and spread prosperity across Egypt. Khufu, though, “plunged into every kind of wickedness,”
²
shutting down all the temples, forbidding sacrifice, sending his daughter into prostitution when he needed money, and ordering all Egyptians to work for him, first in building a road, then on a burial vault on an island created by a canal from the Nile, and finally on the pyramid that now bears his name. Manetho, an Egyptian priest and writer of the third century B.C., who authored a history of the pharaohs from before the First Dynasty to Alexander’s invasion, described Khufu as a scholar who wrote a holy book. Manetho claimed to have a copy, but unfortunately this work has not survived. Diodorus Siculus (c. 80-20 B.C.), a Graeco-Roman historian from the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus, maintained that neither Khufu nor Khafre was buried in the pyramid each built. Both pharaohs feared that because they were such tyrants, the people would rise up in revolt and desecrate their mummies. When they did come to die, they ordered their friends to bury them secretly in order to guarantee their passage into divinity.