Ancient Egypt: History in an Hour

The consolidation of Upper and Lower Egypt under a single centre of rule took place in c.3100 BC. This time of unification is generally recognized as the beginning of ancient Egyptian civilization. The actual dynamics are uncertain, but the name of King Narmer is preeminent. He is generally recognized as the first king of a unified Upper and Lower Egypt.

An immensely important artefact in the Cairo Museum called the ‘Palette of King Narmer’ shows Narmer wearing the crowns of both Upper and Lower Egypt. The palette also contains some of the earliest known hieroglyphs. Little is known about Narmer. His base of power was Nekhen, where the ‘lords of Nekhen’ banded together to secure domination of the entire land under a single king.

The Palette of King Narmer

The Old Kingdom: 2649 BC–2152 BC

The Old Kingdom covered a period of approximately 500 years that spanned the 3rd to the 6th Dynasties, during which time Egypt experienced its great age of pyramid building in a 45-mile span of desert.

The Pyramids of Giza

The major contributors to the construction of pyramids were:

King Djoser ‘The Holy’ (c.2667 BC–2648 BC)

The second king of the 3rd Dynasty was named Djoser. Up to the time of his reign, burials took place in the ground. An underground chamber was excavated to house the deceased’s remains and a mud-brick structure with a rectangular base, sloping sides and a flat roof was built over the burial site as an offertory chapel. The Arabic word mastaba, meaning bench, which was used to describe to shape of the structure has been adopted by archaeologists to refer to the entire tomb.

The Stepped Pyramid of DjoserPhotograph by Gary Ku

Djoser’s architect, Imhotep, was tasked with excavating and lining a complex underground structure for the king’s burial at Saqqara. It was covered with a mastaba built of stone. A second, smaller mastaba was built in stone on the first and so on until Djoser’s ‘six-step pyramid’ was completed. It was the first stone structure of significance in ancient Egypt, and indeed the world, and remains impressive today.

King Sneferu (c.2613 BC–2589 BC)

The first king of the 4th Dynasty, Sneferu used the design of Djoser’s stepped pyramid to build his own memorials. Sneferu is credited with three, possibly four, pyramids, although the first, now called the Meidum Pyramid, may have been built by Sneferu’s father, Huni.

Sneferu preferred a smooth-sided structure. The builders filled the steps with mud bricks, and clad the resulting structure with limestone slabs. The limestone casing is thought to have collapsed about 1,000 years later. The limestone cladding was removed for other purposes and the underlying mud bricks slumped into an untidy heap around the stone core.

The ‘Bent’ Pyramid of Sneferu

Sneferu’s second pyramid is called the ‘Bent Pyramid’ because the angle of its sides was changed midway through construction from 55° to 43°. It has been suggested that it was possibly a pyramid built on top of a mastaba, or perhaps the structure was not strong enough and the builders changed the design to lighten the load.

Sneferu’s third pyramid is called the ‘North’ or ‘Red Pyramid’. It has a more gentle (43°) slope and internal chambers built from red granite. It is not known whether Sneferu was buried in one of his pyramids as his sarcophagus and corpse were not found, but the three practice runs at pyramid construction brought Khufu, Sneferu’s son, on to the scene. King Khufu was the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

King Khufu (c.2589 BC–2566 BC)

The colossal structure of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was the world’s tallest man-made structure for 3,800 years, until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in the 1300s. It is the largest and only surviving example of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It took about 20 years to build, is 146.5 metres high, and comprises 2.3 million limestone blocks with a total mass estimated at 5.9 million tonnes.

Khufu

Modern builders would be hard-pressed to equal the accuracy of the construction which is remarkable, taking into account the simple tools and instruments available at the time. Chambers were built inside the pyramids during the construction phase. The two main chambers within the Great Pyramid are called (by convention) the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber and they are interconnected by a corbelled grand gallery.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu

A major misconception, first promulgated by the Jewish historian Josephus in the first century AD and subsequently fuelled by Hollywood movies, is that the Great Pyramid was built by Hebrew slaves who were subjected to inhumane conditions as they were forced to drag huge blocks of stone. The story goes that slave overseers cracked whips and beat the workers unmercifully. This myth persists regardless that when the pyramids of Giza were built the hard labour suffered by the Hebrews in the brick-making pits of the early Rameside Period was still 1,000 years in the future. The truth behind the construction of the pyramids would not be sufficiently dramatic for the silver screen.

The pyramids of the 4th Dynasty were built by Egyptians. A core of full-time construction personnel was augmented annually during the period of the Nile flood by farmers and other men who could not work during the inundation. At the peak there may have been 20–25,000 men working on the Great Pyramid. They were housed and well fed in a workers’ village close to the construction site. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of their dormitories and eating halls.

Their diet comprised highly nutritious bread and beer and even fish and meat. They had access to medical care as has been demonstrated by the examination of skeletal remains showing set and healed broken limbs. They also received ‘tax rebates’ for working on the project. Crews working on the site adopted names such as ‘Friends of Khufu’ and ‘The Drunken Gang’ and they were very competitive in terms of achieving their daily quotas. It was indeed considered a privilege to contribute to the memorial of the divine pharaoh and their work added to their credit for the afterlife.

The fundamental reason for pyramid building remains a contentious issue. Conventional wisdom suggests that pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs. Other theories range from those based on mystic symbolism to the incorporation of prophetic measurements into the structure or even extra-terrestrial intervention.

It cannot be stated for certain that the Great Pyramid was the final resting place of King Khufu, who commissioned its construction. Modern investigation into the small rectangular shafts that extend from the Queen’s and King’s Chambers towards the surface of the pyramid shows that the shafts point directly to certain stars known to have religious significance for the ancient Egyptians. This fact has led to the hypothesis that the king’s body was laid in the burial chamber and his spirit (his Ka) was directed to those particular stars through the shafts. His body may subsequently have been removed and interred elsewhere.

Khufu’s son Djedefre built a lesser pyramid at Abu Rowash (8 kilometres north of Giza) which may have been unfinished and is now virtually destroyed.

King Khafre (c.2558–2532 BC)

The second large pyramid at Giza was built by Khufu’s grandson Khafre, who is also credited with the sculpture of the Sphinx. The second pyramid is a little smaller than the Great Pyramid but, built on a slightly higher elevation, it looks about the same size.

The Pyramid of Khafre and the Sphinx

The Sphinx poses a different challenge for those who wish to understand ancient Egypt. The shape of the lion was carved from a rock outcrop of soft sandstone. It is thought to have been sculptured at the time the pyramids of Giza were built, some 4,500 years ago, but there is a hypothesis, based on the erosion of the body, that it is much older. The Sphinx has spent much of its existence covered by desert sand which protected it from sand and wind erosion. However, the body is deeply etched with vertical erosion channels, which suggests it may have been exposed during the wet period prior to c.8000 BC. This, however, is still much controverted.

The head of the pharaoh was carved, supposedly as a likeness of Khafre. One theory proposes that the sculpture was originally that of a maned lion and the reshaping of the head to that of a pharaoh took place at the time of Khafre.

The great sculpture was called the Sphinx by the Greeks who equated it with their own myth of a sphinx that had the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird. The Egyptian religion like many other early cults believed the sun was controlled by a god, in this case Re. The Sphinx accurately faces the eastern horizon and greets the rising of the sun god Re precisely on the mornings of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Over the centuries, the Sphinx has lost its pharaonic beard, part of which is in the British Museum, and likewise the sacred cobra from its forehead. The most disfiguring loss is that of its nose which would have been about a metre wide at the nostrils. Examination of the Sphinx’s face shows that long rods or chisels were hammered into the nose, one down from the bridge and one beneath the nostrils. The rods were then used to prise the nose off.

The Egyptian Arab historian Al-Maqrīzī, writing in the fifteenth century AD, attributes the loss of the nose to the destructive act of Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. In AD 1378, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Sa’im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose. He was hanged for vandalism.

A story claiming that the nose was broken off by a cannonball fired by Napoleon’s soldiers is entirely false. A painting of the Sphinx, made sixty years before Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, shows the Sphinx without a nose, but the cannonball legend still lives on today.

The suggestion that there may be chambers beneath the Sphinx containing records of ‘ancient wisdom’ has persisted for decades. Ground-penetrating radar has shown that voids do exist, but experts believe these are naturally occurring spaces, and were not created or enhanced by man.

The third pyramid on the same site at Giza is very much smaller than the two major pyramids. It was built by Menkaure, the son of Khafre. In addition there are three small satellite pyramids.

In an endeavour to consolidate a theory as to the purpose of the pyramids, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, authors of The Orion Mystery, propose that the three pyramids of Giza reflect the position of the three stars of Orion’s Belt, using the River Nile as an earthly image of the Milky Way. It is also suggested that the many other pyramids contribute to an earthly map of the night sky over ancient Egypt. Most Egyptologists remain unconvinced by this theory.

The Ancient Religion

People of ancient times did not have scientific explanations for natural phenomena such as weather, floods, pestilence or even the daily sunrise, so they assumed supernatural powers were involved. Gods were invented to rationalize matters that were otherwise inexplicable. The first of the divine responsibilities was the creation of their world.

They imagined a formless watery infinity called ‘the Nun’. There were several gods involved in creation. Ptah used the power of words to create the world. When he spoke, his words became reality through the active power of the god Atum and whatever Ptah gave a name was created. The god of air was called Shu and his wife Tefnut was the goddess of moisture. Their son Geb was the god of the earth and his sister Nut was the goddess of the sky.