The building of the pyramids was one of the greatest achievements in human history. The pyramids are a monument not only to the pharaohs' power but also to the genius of the architects, engineers, and government officials who planned and built them.
First a site had to be selected. It had to be on the west side of the Nile, above flood level. It had to be near the water, because boats would be bringing in the blocks needed for building. The stone came from various places, but the hard granite that surrounded the interior chambers of the pyramid came from 500 miles up the river in Aswan. There, workers in a quarry, a place where stone is "mined" from the earth, spent most of the year cutting giant blocks of granite. Once the Nile flooded in the summer, they loaded the blocks onto boats, or barges, and floated them downriver to the building sites.
When the barge arrived, the blocks had to be unloaded. Most of these blocks weighed about 2.5 tons, or 5,000 pounds (2.27 metric tons, or 2,270 kilograms), so it was not easy to get them from the shore to the top of a pyramid. Workers, usually in team of thirty men, pulled the blocks out onto giant sleds atop rows of logs. With ropes attached to the sleds, they would pull the blocks up long temporary ramps made of mud and brick, which were built on a gentle slope to make it easier to drag stones up them. The ramps were also wide, not only so that there would be plenty of room for the sleds, but also so that there would always be a part of the ramp that could be closed off while it was being raised. The ramp, of course, had to rise with the pyramid.
Among the pyramid builders, the workers who dragged the stones up the ramps were at the lowest social level, but they were not slaves. Some of them left behind graffiti (pronounced grah-FEE-tee) or wall writings, that showed how much they felt like an essential part of the project—as indeed they were. Blocks used in Sneferu's Medium Pyramid include inscriptions celebrating the various work
After this, they wrapped the body with linen, using resins to seal up the wrapping. The wrapped corpse was called a mummy. At the funeral, priests performed a ceremony in which they “opened the mouth" of the dead person so that he or she could eat, speak, and breathe in the afterlife. The mummy was then placed in a brightly decorated coffin, called a sarcophagus (sar-KAHF-uh-gus), which often bore the face of
Gangs: "Enduring Gang," says one inscription, and another celebrates the "Vigorous Gang."
In a class above these common laborers were the skilled workers, especially masons (a type of craftsman who builds with stone). Above the masons were the planners and their assistants, the scribes. The scribes recorded figures for the amount of stone used in a given period of time and helped keep track of the tools and the teams to which they were assigned. Among the scribes' writings that have survived is a written excuse for a worker who "called in sick."
The scribes also took note of the intricate calculations taken by the builders. It was not enough to plan the pyramid at the beginning, and go from there: the builders had to constantly measure angles and lengths to make sure that they were correct. Their calculations were amazingly sophisticated. One can see how careful they were by measuring the Great Pyramid, the longest side of which is only about eight inches longer than the
Shortest side. Plenty of houses in America do not have measurements as nearly perfect as these!
The precision of the measurements is particularly impressive in light of the Egyptians' lack of technological sophistication in other areas. For instance, at the time of the Old Kingdom, they had not yet entered the Bronze Age. They may not have even known about the wheel. Furthermore, Egyptian art of the time suggests that they did not have a very well-developed sense of space.
Given these circumstances as well as the suitability of the pyramids' placement for astronomical observations (that is, observation of the stars), some people have speculated that beings from another planet built the pyramids of Egypt, along with those of Mexico. Such claims are hard to prove or disprove, given the archaeological evidence; less questionable is the opinion that the Great Pyramids are some of the most amazing structures on earth.
The person buried within. And so the dead body would sit, entombed in its quiet chamber within the pyramid, for the rest of eternity.
By almost any measure, the pyramids were and are spooky places. First of all, their very purpose as tombs is a little chilling in most people's view. Second, they have stood for so long: hence an old saying, “Time laughs at all things, but
The pyramids laugh at time.” Even within ancient Egypt, which would continue to exist for almost 2,000 years after the end of the Old Kingdom, people thought of the pyramids as ancient. They would remain a testament to the first, and in some ways, greatest phase of ancient Egyptian history.
World History
