“Man fears time,” the Arab proverb goes, “but time fears the pyramids.”
Here it is a new millennium, with a manned mission to Mars on humanity’s radar screen, and still we are mesmerized by the Egyptian civilization of nearly 5,000 years ago. “Egypt in Chicago: Festival of the Sun,” the city’s summer-long celebration of the ancient kingdom of the Nile, is in full swing, with the “Pharaohs of the Sun” exhibit at the Art Institute still packing them in and last month’s Midwest premiere of the Philip Glass opera “Akhnaten” by the Chicago Opera Theater still ringing in our ears.
Of all things Egyptian, the pyramids of Giza are arguably the most captivating and confounding. The pyramids have not only fascinated visitors to Egypt for centuries, but also have been the subject of hot speculation about how and why they were erected, ever since the 5th Century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus surmised that they were built by hundreds of thousands of slaves.
Such theories made it alive and well into the 20th Century: The familiar Hollywood scene pictures chained ranks of slaves building the monuments under the lash of overseers. The image endured through the silent-film era, right into the age of Technicolor and wide-screen epics.
It’s a Cecil B. DeMille concept that even Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin chose to evoke. As the 1978 preparatory meetings for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty took place at the Mena House Hotel directly across from the pyramids, Begin noted that his Jewish ancestors had toiled to erect the structures (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
At the other end of the spectrum, some surmise that only a superior intelligence from outer space could have designed and built something so perfect as the pyramids. Psychic Edgar Cayce even prophesied while in a trance in the early 1930s that the Giza pyramids marked a vast storehouse of knowledge left by a lost civilization 10,000 years ago that would be rediscovered by the year 2000.
Cayce’s prophecies aside, the dawn of yet another millennium over the Giza plateau might have gone as unnoticed as a grain of sand if it weren’t that an entirely new understanding of the origin of the pyramids is emerging that may forever lay to rest such wild speculation.
“There is no question,” boasts Mahmoud Afifi, an archeologist, conservator and chief inspector for the Egyptian government of the Giza pyramids, “in the last three or four years, our understanding of the pyramids has increased to the point where for the first time, we now have a complete overview of the Giza pyramids.”
“Do you know who built the pyramids?” asks his boss, Zahi Hawass, rhetorically. “People. People just like you and me. They didn’t come from outer space, they weren’t from Atlantis or some lost civilization, and they definitely weren’t slaves. They were ordinary people just like us.”
“And,” Hawass, author, archeologist and director of the Giza plateau, adds proudly, “they were Egyptians.”
The discoveries made by Hawass and his team at Giza are numerous, but the one closest to Hawass’ heart as an Egyptian was the 1990 discovery of a pyramid workers’ cemetery less than half a mile from the giant structures. Although the discovery was made by accident, Hawass and American archeologist Mark Lehner had been searching for the area for years.
“We stopped excavations in February,” Hawass recalls, “but some months later on a very hot August day, I was sitting in my office at the base of the pyramids and my assistant broke in very excited about a woman, an American tourist on a horse, having found something. It seems that the horse’s leg fell into a shaft where there was a small mud-brick wall. I went over and saw it and immediately knew that this was the area of the tombs of the pyramid builders.”
One decade later, work at the site continues. Thus far, it has revealed only 20 percent of what Hawass and Lehner expect ultimately to find (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“In the very first tomb that we found,” says Hawass, “we moved a rock in a shaft and found a statue of a dwarf, three feet high and made of basalt. We also found the skeleton of this dwarf and the deformity of the shoulder was exactly the same. So, contrary to what we thought, art was realistic in the Old Kingdom. There was an inscription, `He who pleases His Majesty.'” As the years went on, Hawass’ team found evidence of workers who had survived cancer surgery.
“One worker even had a brain tumor removed,” according to Hawass, “and he lived for another two years [which was determined by bone assay]. Such a discovery rewrites the history of medicine, because the Europeans and the Americans are credited with pioneering these procedures thousands of years later.”
The one anomaly that virtually all of the skeletons exhibited was visible strain on the back. “Not just the men,” says Hawass, “but the women as well. All of them spent their lives carrying large stones.”
How large?
“That is one of the biggest myths that everyone repeats about the pyramids,” says Hawass, “that they contain 2 1/2 million stones of 2 1/2 tons each. The largest stones that were used weighed half a ton, and since the base was mother rock dug down, it is actually fewer stones than you might believe.”
And why is Hawass so sure that the people who built them and whose graves he is excavating were not slaves?
“Look at the way they were buried,” replies Hawass animatedly. “Each one of them was carefully and lovingly placed together with objects from their lives for use in the afterlife. Look at the location of their tombs: the most prime position you could possibly be in — next to the king himself. They were buried like kings and queens, not slaves.”
Robert Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, agrees. Ritner recently led one of two groups from the Oriental Institute on an extraordinary tour of Egypt that had unprecedented access to sites and scholars.
“What you had was a series of months when no one could do any agricultural work because the Nile was flooded,” explains Ritner. “So in essence, you have the earliest WPA (a Works Progress Administration) which allowed the government to harness all of the labor when people couldn’t work anyway.
“It also creates a state, because for the first time, people are actually working together across the country for a unified purpose. So the creation of this building,” says Ritner, pointing upward toward the Great Pyramid, “is much more than the creation of this building: You’re actually looking at the product of the first nation state.”
The message is clear: No one could be forced to participate in the building of a pyramid and more to the point, no one had to be. The ancient Egyptians knew that by providing their king access to the afterlife, they were all a step closer to the gods themselves. Coercion would not have been effective, and given the lack of wheels or cranes, the pyramids required cooperation of a scale not seen before or since.
The analogy is often made to stone masons and other artisans who built the great European cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Participating in the building of such sacred structures was an act of devotion, work that was seen as bringing one closer to God. Likewise, the work of the pyramid builders put them in touch with something higher, something larger, something beyond themselves. Such lofty goals needed such an extraordinary sense of purpose to become attainable, particularly when few workers would live to see the completion of the structure.
Small wonder then, when divorced from the extraordinary devotion that motivated their creation, the pyramids of Giza continue to make those with vivid imaginations to seek supernatural explanations for their existence.
In actuality, the ancient architect would select the site of a pyramid based on the quality of the mother rock and how far the site was from the local stone quarry. Then the necessary measurements would be taken to form a perfect square based on the exact angle the pyramid was to achieve.
Then individual stones were carefully cut and moved from the nearby quarry to the pyramid site and were added to the mother rock structure, an outcropping of bedrock 25 feet high or so, from the base up. As the pyramid grew, a movable mud-brick ramp was constructed to zig-zag and surround the emerging structure so that teams of workers could pull stones up on wooden sleds to the construction level.
“Everyone thinks that the ramp was from the base of the pyramid,” says Hawass, “but this would never happen because if you raise the base of the pyramid, you have to extend the ramp as well and you can’t go back up.”
When the capstone was finally added at the very top of the pyramid, the ramp was removed from the top level down and according to Hawass, who bases it on historical reliefs he has studied, the entire nation celebrated with singing, dancing and feasting. In a cavernous trench beneath the workmen’s village and under the timeless gaze of the Sphinx and pyramids, Lehner and his crew are carefully sifting through the sand in what Lehner calls “the lost city of the pyramids.”
“We have the pyramids,” says Lehner, “we have the temples, the Sphinx, now we even the worker’s cemetery, but where were all the people? Where was all of the infrastructure that made all of this possible? That is the question that has been bugging me since I began working out here in the late 1970s.”
Lehner points to a detailed blueprint of the site below him, which is divided up into a careful series of squares, each measuring 5 by 5 meters.
“One graduate student might spend two months inside one of those squares,” Lehner explains, “longer if we’re talking about a full excavation. On the average, we progress at the rate of about one to three squares a week.”
The squares are separated by small stakes and string and shorts-clad students — including some from the University of Chicago; natives dressed in colorful galabayas also can be seen carefully sifting through layers of sand.
“All of this is royal, to be sure,” says Lehner, offering a guided tour of the site. “These people were slaughtering cattle, which has always been prime, expensive meat for special occasions. They were grinding their own paint pigments, fashioning elaborate copper tools. We have yet to find the actual royal enclosure, but that may be just a problem of scale. It may well lie underneath the modern town (of Giza). But as you can see, we’re running out of room here.”
What particularly interests Lehner about the site is not just that it was a bustling pyramid metropolis 4,600 years ago complete with carefully marked roads and homes, but the way in which the entire town was deliberately filled in during the lifetime of its inhabitants.
“That’s not unprecedented,” says Lehner. “Oftentimes, when a king died, the capital moved to a new spot and you would just start over. Here, however, since we are finding tools and things that were used in the actual building of the pyramids, it could be that all involved thought that the pyramids should look as if they came full blown from the gods. Perhaps the builders wanted their secrets to be buried with them.”
Indeed, there has never been a single ancient Egyptian text found explaining exactly how to build a pyramid, which is why all of this archeological evidence is of such importance.
It is precisely such ancient silence, however, that has largely fueled a fascination with the monuments as gargantuan as the structures themselves.
