The exceptional ability of Egyptian craftsmen and artists to eliminate inessentials in the reliefs and sculptures which they made, can be seen in works such as the marvellous triad statuary groups made for King Menkaure, the builder of the third pyramid at Giza. The king, now presented not only as the ruler of the gods but as a man of great and vigorous physical beauty, is shown as it were coming out of the stone itself, supported by two divine companions. The king is depicted as smiling, almost as if welcoming the observer, his head lifted confidently, assured both of his divinity and his beauty. The distinctly African cast of the king’s features, like those of Khufu in the tiny ivory piece which was found at Abydos and of Net-jerykhet in his serdab statue, prompts the speculation whether the pyramid builders were not, after all, black Africans or that at least there was a strong African strain in their ancestry. This question has often been put, and as quickly suppressed, except by African historians who have perhaps been too enthusiastic in their espousing of this possibility. But the Giza kings of the Fourth Dynasty do share a notably African cast of feature.
A pleasing anecdote is told of Menkaure which, like that of King Khufu and his dog, suggests a more human dimension to the builders of the pyramids. During the building of his pyramid, when he visited the site to view its construction, he gave orders that a band of the workers engaged on it should be detailed to build a tomb for one of his friends, a noble named Debhen. The king’s generosity was considerable. Debhen’s tomb was lined with stone, the first example of such a feature. It also contained an exceptionally early landscape scene, of men climbing a ramp to burn incense at a shrine at its summit.29
Gradually, as the generations passed, the plateau around Giza filled up with its royal dead and their extraordinary monuments. Every part of the great buildings was covered with polished stone; the temples, built in darker stones, contrasted with the pyramids, which towered above the other burial places which clustered round them, their occupants hoping thereby to draw to themselves some part of the vicarious immortality which proximity to the mountains of stone of the kings’ tombs promised for them. Laid in rows the mastabas of the courtiers and the small pyramids of the queens and the royal children have a forlorn and touching quality, even now. They must then have constituted a well-planned, orderly city of the princely dead.
When it was completed the complex of monuments at Giza, polished in the perfection of an ideal form, must have been an astonishing sight. From every face of the pyramid, through the night as much as in the day, light must have been thrown back into the immensity of space as from a colossal jewel.
World History
