The Pyramids

Miroslav Verner

• Editore: Atlantic Books
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782396802
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

How did a people who lived nearly five thousand years ago, who knew neither iron nor bronze and who lacked mastery of elementary rules of calculation, manage to construct enormous stone structures with a precision seldom matched even by modern architecture? By one of the world's leading Egyptologists, The Pyramids sets our knowledge of these unique, haunting and perennially fascinating edifices into the context of ancient Egyptian culture and politics.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Note on Usage

Introduction: The Rediscovery of the Pyramids

PART ONE: THE BIRTH OF THE PYRAMIDS

Chapter One: Before the Pyramids

Chapter Two: The Way to Eternity: Ritual and Cult

Chapter Three: The Construction of the Pyramids

PART TWO: THE PYRAMIDS

Chapter Four: The Old Kingdom
(Third to Sixth Dynasty)

Chapter Five: The Fourth Dynasty—
The Greatest of the Great

Chapter Six: The Fifth Dynasty—
When the Sun Ruled

Chapter Seven: The Sixth Dynasty—
The End of an Era

Chapter Eight: The First Intermediate Period
(Seventh Dynasty to the Beginning of the Eleventh)

Chapter Nine: The Middle Kingdom
(Eleventh to Twelfth Dynasty?)

Chapter Ten: The Second Intermediate Period
(Thirteenth to Seventeenth Dynasty)

Postscript

Epilogue: The Secret of the Pyramids

Appendix 1: Basic Dimensions of the Pyramids

Appendix 2: Egyptologists and Pyramid Scholars

Appendix 3: Chronological List of Rulers and Dynasties

Appendix 4: Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Places

THE PYRAMIDS

FOREWORD

It is both surprising and unfortunate that in recent decades professional researchers of the pyramids have seldom made their fascinating work accessible to the general public. There are a few short guides to specific excavation sites and specialized works that discuss questions relating to the construction of the pyramids and the fantastic theories associated with them in particular historical periods, yet only three significant general presentations of the subject addressed to a wider audience are currently available. The Pyramids of Egypt (1st ed., London, 1947), by the late Eiddon Edwards, a British Egyptologist and celebrated connoisseur of the Egyptian pyramids, has gone through several reprintings and has been translated into several languages. In addition, there is Die ägyptischen Pyramiden: vom Ziegelbau zum Weltwunder (1st ed., Mainz, 1985), by the no less celebrated German expert Rainer Stadelmann; its success with readers led the author to publish an expanded version of this work. There is also The Complete Pyramids (London and Cairo, 1997), a richly illustrated overview of the subject by the American archaeologist Mark Lehner.

Archaeologists continue to deepen our knowledge of the pyramids and to produce new theories about them. As a result, many earlier views concerning these monumental edifices, their creators, and their epoch have had to be partly corrected or wholly revised. Even today, it is possible to find previously undiscovered or completely unknown pyramids. Thus even if Egyptologists were able to provide satisfactory answers to many questions still outstanding today, research on the pyramids would continue. This work has recently been complicated by the fact that excavators are now responsible for the preservation of archaeological monuments and have even less time for research. This book presents the general state of research on the pyramids in the late 1990s, and is based primarily on the results of excavations undertaken by the University of Prague’s Czech Institute of Egyptology over the last twenty years.

The complexity of the subject makes it particularly difficult to present it to nonspecialists. The construction of the Egyptian pyramids can be adequately explained only in relation to the social relationships, religious conceptions, administrative and organizational capabilities, technical knowledge, and modes of labor that existed at the time of construction. Just describing the pyramids and explaining their individual parts is harder than it might at first seem, because there is considerable disagreement as to their exact dimensions as well as to how each of these monumental building complexes is to be explained. I have tried to avoid oversimplification and to offer a complete presentation of this very complex subject, even though doing so requires that certain standard situations and fundamental facts be repeatedly described. I have also sought to respond to the broadest possible spectrum of interests, ranging from those of a reader looking for a fascinating account of research, to those of the critical expert on the pyramids.

To that end, I have chosen to present a wealth of illustrations that help the reader form an image of the pyramids while at the same time offering a survey of objects dating from the age when the pyramids were being constructed. These illustrations will allow the reader to become familiar with ancient Egyptian art’s specific mode of expression and with the most notable individuals who have devoted their lives to research on the pyramids. Appendices offer biographical information on these researchers, basic dimensions of the pyramids, a list of the pharaohs and dynasties, and a glossary of important technical terms. A selected bibliography gives suggestions for further reading.

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who made important contributions to the publication of this book. Special thanks are due to Milan Zemina for his outstanding photographs of the Egyptian pyramids, to Jolana Malátková for her drawings and general editing of the Czech manuscript, to Dirk Moldenhauer for his careful supervision of the German edition of this book and many useful comments on it, to Kathrin Liedtke, who translated the book into German, and to Steven Rendall for his translation of the book into English.

Miroslav Verner

A NOTE ON USAGE

The following notations have been used to augment the text throughout:

(?)—Indicates that the accuracy of the preceding statement is in doubt.

(after ___)—Indicates that the preceding information corresponds to the opinion of the cited scientist (see “Select Bibliography” for relevant works by the scientist).

()—Parentheses around a ruler’s or monument’s title indicate that the title was given during a tradition later than the ruler’s or monument’s own. The style follows that of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (D. B. Redford, ed.), 3 vols., Oxford University Press 2000.

Both imperial and metric measures are given in “Appendix 1: Basic Dimensions of the Pyramids,” but elsewhere only metric measures have been used.

INTRODUCTION: THE REDISCOVERY
OF THE PYRAMIDS

The temple of the goddess Isis, known as the Pearl of Egypt, stands on the little island of Philae near the first cataract of the Nile, not far from Aswan. Although it was built long after the last Egyptian pyramids, it is nonetheless a curious milestone in the history of the land of the pyramids and the hieroglyphs.

Far removed from cultural and political centers on the southernmost border of Egypt, this temple remained, at the end of the fourth century C.E., one of the last bastions of paganism. Here were still practiced the age-old Egyptian religious cults whose traditions had been adopted by the tribes of Nubia. And it was here, on 24 August 394, that the last known hieroglyph was inscribed.*

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script was subsequently forgotten. In its Coptic form, which used the capital letters of the Greek alphabet along with a few symbols based on demotic models, the spoken language survived a few centuries longer. The fall of the Egyptian Babylon (in what is now the Misr al-Qadima quarter of modern Cairo) and the ultimate victory of the Arabs in 642 ended the epilogue of ancient Egyptian culture in late antiquity and inaugurated an entirely new era in Egyptian history. Pyramids and temples, along with much of ancient wisdom, were inexorably lost in the depths of time—forever, it seemed. These grandiose, mysterious structures inscribed with incomprehensible symbols gradually fell into ruins. Increasingly, they became the subject of legends and superstitions and the prey of thieves looking for plunder and adventurers hungry for knowledge. But above all they became a source of easily accessible stone useful for other purposes.

In the Middle Ages, Arab scholars seldom showed any interest in ancient Egyptian structures, but when they did—as in the cases of Abd al-Latif Shelebi, Ja’ut ar-Rumi, Shams ad-Din al-Jashari ad-Dimashqi, and Taki ad-Din al-Maqrizi—they generally approached the subject in a serious way. At the same time, Arab culture developed myths and legends about the pyramids, some of which endure to this day. According to one of these legends, three hundred years before the biblical flood King Saurid had a dream in which the (flat) earth turned over and the stars began to fall on it. This so frightened him that, fearing that the end of the world was near, he decided to erect the pyramids and to enclose within them all the knowledge of his age.

Christian Europe in the Middle Ages based its idea of Egypt mainly on the Bible, assuming that the pyramids were Joseph’s grain storehouses (Genesis 41–42). In addition, hermetism exercised a significant influence that was not limited to intellectuals. (The doctrine of hermetism traced its ancestry back to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greek version of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom and writing; it combined ancient Egyptian religious ideas with abstract Greek philosophical conceptions and emphasized the occult aspect of the Egyptian heritage.) In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe the mysterious image of ancient Egypt gradually assumed more rational features. Renaissance humanists, who returned to the works of ancient authors and rediscovered the roots of European culture, made an important contribution to this development. Travelers and conquerors also played an important role by exploring the lands along the Nile. The knowledge and documents they collected and brought back with them laid the foundations for further research.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, John Greaves (1602–1652), a leading English astronomer, mathematician, and orientalist, went to Egypt to study the pyramids. His Pyramidographia, or a Discourse of the Pyramids in Egypt, the first study to report relatively precise measurements of the Great Pyramid, ranks among the most significant forerunners of the future scientific discipline of Egyptology. Travelers from Central Europe also visited Egypt, for example, men such as Christof Harant von Polžice und Bezdružice (1564–1621), the author of Die Reise nach Ägypten (1598). But the person who clearly dominated research on ancient Egypt in the seventeenth century was the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). A multifaceted expert on mathematics, philosophy, and oriental languages, Kircher invented the “magic lantern” and constructed the first calculating machine. His greatest achievement, however, wa...