Pyramid Quest (3 page)

It is a daunting task. For one thing, we are investigating a complex, incompletely preserved monument that is no less than 4,500 years old. For another, our own preconceptions and unstated beliefs cloud our vision. As we shall see again and again, ancient Egypt has this way of bending under the weight of Western civilization’s latest big idea.

For example, during medieval Christian times, the Giza pyramids were said to be the granaries in which the Hebrew patriarch Joseph stashed the bumper harvests of grain that carried Egypt through the terrible time of drought and hunger described in chapters 40 and 41 of the biblical book of Genesis. Given the worldview of medieval Christianity, in which biblical accounts served as literal history, explaining the pyramids as Joseph’s granaries made sense. After all, if Joseph told the Egyptians to store their surplus, what else in the landscape of Egyptian civilization could have qualified as large enough to accept all that abundance?

The trouble is, the explanation hardly fits the facts. Had those medieval Christian scholars bothered to examine the pyramids, they would have discovered that they are ill suited to be granaries. Apart from the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid, the Giza pyramids lack the large internal hollows that make granaries suited for massive storage.

The modern study of ancient Egypt—which does involve actually looking at the pyramids—substituted a different point of view, but one that has also had its faith-based elements. What we think of as Egyptology began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the early nineteenth century. Certain that he was making history with his ambition and his army, Napoleon took along not only soldiers but also a group of scholars, or savants, whose task it was to record what they saw. Much like the medieval Christian scholastics, Napoleon’s savants had their own preconceived worldview, which they incorporated into their depiction of the pyramids. Appalled by what they saw as the squalid backwardness of the Islamic East and certain that they themselves were the founders of a great world civilization led by France, the savants created the image of a long-ago, long-lost, timeless Orient that had little or nothing to do with the Muslims they came to conquer and rule. Ancient Egypt proved not the historical magnificence of the modern East but its fall into decadence.

Although the terms of the description have changed, much the same process of seeing in the pyramids what we want to see continues. Consider contemporary Egyptology, which makes the pyramids monuments to pharaonic ego built by a massively powerful theocratic state. It is intriguing that this perspective arose during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which witnessed the expansion of powerful imperialistic nations, major world wars, and the rise of two of the world’s most vicious totalitarian states—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—both led by egos of cosmic proportions, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and guided by ideologies and symbols, Marxism-Leninism and Nazism, claiming the status, reverence, and universal reach of a state religion.

“The Ægyptian Pyramides and Colossus.” Early seventeenth-century rendition of the Giza Plateau, showing the Great Pyramid (right), the other major pyramids, the Great Sphinx, and visitors traveling in the desert. (
From Sandys, 1621, page 128.
)

Much the same process goes on with pyramidology. If you believe in lost ancient wisdom and technology, submerged civilizations and Atlantis, the literal truth of the Old Testament, extraterrestrials in flying saucers, or the imminent occurrence of the Second Coming, what better place to find evidence of that belief than in the mute stones of the Great Pyramid?

In this book I attempt to cut through the noise and the nonsense, sift through what we know about the Great Pyramid, and discover as much of its truth as I can. This is a valuable enterprise. It tells us about the nature of a people who lived long ago and far away, of course. Equally important, it teaches us about the heritage of the civilization we live in and the nature of the humanity we share across the long reach of time.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, AND HOW

THE STANDARD STORY

IT IS ONE OF THOSE UNSTATED ASSUMPTIONS OF HISTORIOG raphy that civilization as a whole grows more complicated and soIhisticated over time, moving in a straight, upward line of progress and complexity. Individual empires may rise and fall, of course, a process famously memorialized in Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and dramatized in popular culture by Hollywood epics depicting Roman decadence. Still, in the wider, global view, we believe firmly that we are more civilized today than our kind was a millennium ago or certainly a millennium before that. This image of inevitable progression underlies the accepted history leading up to the Great Pyramid. And, in fact, there is something of truth to it—but only something.

Say “ancient Egypt” to many people, and the first thing they think of is embalming, mummies, and an endless preoccupation with death. In truth, Egypt of the early days focused no more on death than have many other cultures. Egypt’s cities, villages, and farms were strung out along the Nile, with its rich, ever-deepening soil and annual floods. Most of the artifacts of daily life, fashioned from wood, leather, cotton, and papyrus, quickly decayed and left little or no trace in that hot, fertile environment. But the ancient Egyptians took their dead to the desert, where heat and dryness helped to preserve both human remains and many of the objects used for funerals and burial. As a result, we know more about Egyptians in death than in life.

Still, this has proved a boon for scholars who study ancient Egypt, since the customs and rituals surrounding death provide important evidence of a culture’s deepest religious beliefs and practices. As we follow the history of Egyptian funeral practices from the earliest days through the Giza pyramids and beyond, we witness not only the technological progress of a civilization but also its religious evolution.

In the Predynastic Period (c. 4500-3100 B.C.) before Menes united the Two Lands of Egypt under a single political power, Egyptians of south and north shared some funeral customs and differed on others. Throughout Egypt, both Upper (south) and Lower (north), graves were excavated in the sand, away from cultivated fields, in the form of oval or rectangular pits. The dead were laid to rest on their left sides, curled in the fetal position. Ritually, the grave represented a womb in the Earth Mother, and the buried corpse became the newborn awaiting rebirth. In Lower Egypt only the dead were placed in the tomb. But even before 4500 B.C. the people of Upper Egypt were burying various useful objects alongside corpses, probably in the belief that the dead would need them in the afterlife. This Upper Egyptian idea eventually spread throughout the Two Lands and became common practice across the whole country.

By the late Predynastic Period, bodies were placed, often on a reed mat or goat skin, so that they faced west, which was considered the direction of afterlife and rebirth. The goods buried along with the body represented the deceased’s social standing—the more and classier the goods, the higher the dead one’s position in the community hierarchy. Grave goods were useful objects: flint knives, scrapers, adzes, ornaments, grinding stones. These were things the deceased would need later.

Toward the end of this era, Egyptians were paying more and more attention to the grave itself. In some cases, they lined the walls of the pit with sun-baked mud bricks and plastered them with mud. As for the bodies themselves, they were not mummified, but burial in hot sand often effectively preserved them. Between desiccation by happenstance and purposely elaborate tomb-building, the Egyptians were working culturally toward establishing permanence in the face of death.

This trend became ever more elaborate during the Early Dynastic Period (2920-2575 B.C.). Egypt was united, but two power centers remained, one in the north, the other in the south. As a result, there were two burial areas: Saqqara in the north (near modern Cairo) and Abydos in the south (about 90 miles north of Luxor along the Nile). In the same way that Predynastic bodies faced west in their graves, both Abydos and Saqqara sit on the west side of the Nile. Scholars have long debated which of these ancient graveyards hold Egypt’s earliest pharaohs. Today most of them are convinced that Abydos was the royal burial ground.

Abydos’s earliest First Dynasty (2920-2770 B.C.) royal tombs are simply slightly more elaborate versions of the burial pits of the Predynastic Period. Gravediggers excavated a single pit and lined it with mud brick to receive both body and grave goods. Planks resting on wooden beams and posts roofed the pit, and a superstructure was erected atop the planks. No superstructures have survived, but they probably consisted of rubble and sand heaped into a mound, or tumulus, covered with mud brick to mark the grave.

The First Dynasty made a significant addition to the stock of grave goods: servants. In the case of Pharaoh Djer (also known as Dyer, c. 2900 B.C.), hundreds of servants were sacrificed, then buried, around his tomb. Since the point of grave goods was to provide the dead with everything they needed in the afterlife, a man who was used to being waited on hand and foot during mortal days would surely need a crowd of servants on the other side. Slaughtering a palace’s worth of servants to make the journey with him made religious sense.

This custom of retainer burial, as it is often known, may have been imported from Mesopotamia, where it was a longstanding part of royal burial customs. In the case of Egypt, retainer burials faded out by the end of the First Dynasty. There is no evidence of retainer burials during the Old Kingdom, but the custom returned in Nubia, upstream from Abydos, between 2000 and 1700 B.C. when the area was a province of Middle Kingdom Egypt.

Some of the First Dynasty pharaohs built themselves two funeral monuments at Abydos. One was a tumulus burial pit, excavated in the ancestral cemetery known as Umm el-Saab (“mother of pots,” in Arabic). The other was a palace constructed behind the town. At Saqqara, which is the better preserved of the two First Dynasty graveyards, the tumulus grave and the palace were united into one complex that shows a strong connection to the pyramids to follow. These massive mud brick structures are known as mastabas, from the modern Arabic word meaning “mud brick bench,” which they resemble.

There are three main components to a mastaba. First is the substructure, a pit dug into the earth. Then comes the superstructure, the mud brick edifice that perches atop the excavated substructure. Finally, there are the ancillary, or auxiliary, buildings, which correspond to the separate palace buildings at Abydos.

The First Dynasty substructures of Saqqara are strikingly more permanent and more complex than the sand burial pits of the Predynastic Period. Cut from rock rather than simply dug out of the moving sands, the pit was large enough to be divided into separate rooms by walls of mud brick. Typically the large central burial chamber was surrounded by four storage rooms. Ornamentation, like inlaid gold work or colored mats, decorated some burial chambers, which held not only the body in a wooden coffin but also folded clothes in chests, furniture, and a funerary meal. This repast could be quite elaborate. The remains of one such final dinner uncovered at Saqqara included beef ribs, kidneys, pigeon stew, roast quail, loaves of bread, barley porridge, stewed figs, and berries. The storage rooms held jewelry, games, additional furniture, more food, tools, and weapons. The dead were taking all the gear of daily life into their new existence.

Wooden beams with planks at right angles roofed the substructures of the early Saqqara mastabas. As a result, the body and the grave goods had to be put inside the substructure before the roofing was complete and, possibly, even before the superstructure built. During the First Dynasty an innovation that solved this inconvenience took hold: a stairway starting outside the superstructure and leading into the burial chamber. The stairway meant that builders didn’t have to wait until after the mastaba’s owner died before building the superstructure. But it did have a disadvantage: robbers could make their way down the same entry to steal those sumptuous grave goods and turn a rich man of this world into a pauper in the next. To keep criminals out, mastaba builders lowered a series of stone slabs, or portcullises, down grooves cut into the stairway’s walls after the body was interred to keep interlopers out of the burial chamber. The stairway proved to be such a good idea that it became the fashion at Abydos as well.