There is no doubt of the piety which caused such tremendous structures as the pyramids to be erected; the idea of countless slaves dying under the overseer’s lash is the product of the perfervid imaginations of nineteenth-century romantics and Hollywood film directors. An example of the Egyptians’ power of organization and of the kings’ concern for the welfare of their subjects (Egyptian kings, in somewhat later times, liked to think of themselves as the shepherds of their people) is to be found in the corvee system used to mobilize the farmers of Middle Egypt during the inundation when they were unable to work their land. Their attitudes are well expressed by the graffiti scrawled on many of the blocks praising one gang, disparaging another, and generally presenting a remarkable demonstration of cheerful group loyalty, not unlike the supporters of rival football teams, without the hooliganism.
The control of large masses of men engaged in hard, demanding, and often highly skilled work called for organizational procedures of an exceptionally well-developed order. Herodotus maintained that Khufu’s Pyramid was built in about twenty years. It contains approximately six million tons of stone, brought from the Mokkatam hills, finely cut and fitted into place course by course. Two and a half million blocks were cut: over twenty years this means manhandling an average of 125,000 blocks each year. Averaged out this means that 300,000 tons of stone had to be excavated, worked transported and put in place, year by year.14 It is difficult to imagine a modern contractor being prepared to accept such an assignment today, even with a twenty-year completion date for the project.
The architects engaged on these enormous public works seem from the outset to have used the plateaux at Giza and Saqqara as though they were gigantic drawing boards. We must assume that they did produce preliminary drawings, perhaps even scale models on the lines of examples known from later periods, probably adopting the technique of the sand model; however, they seem to have been prepared to change direction in the middle of a huge enterprise or even to introduce entirely new features into it when it was already well advanced.
These changes resulted in an enormous increase in the requirement of stone and, one suspects, in the exasperation of the building supervisors on site. They had themselves to learn techniques for handling these vast quantities. The architect was still prepared to experiment, despite the scale on which he was working. Underlying the pyramid’s construction was a profound understanding of mathematics. There are those who have detected the knowledge of the Golden Section 9 in the pyramid’s internal mathematics.15
The adoption of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci series which contains it, would account for the supremely satisfying visual impact which the pyramids, like all structures which employ the proportions of the Golden Section, display. It is not necessary to assume that there are any arcane or occult influences at play here; rather it is the extraordinary ‘eye’ which Egyptian architects, like their Italian Renaissance successors and the builders of English country houses in the eighteenth century, so evidently shared. It would be unwise to suggest that Egyptian architects worked only by ‘eye’ and not by the application of some more formal disciplines but the glory of the pyramids as archetypal constructions is that they are essentially human constructs, the expression in massive ranges of stone of human aspirations and the response even to the most extreme technical challenges.
World History
