The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Read online

  To fund this massive project, and ensure a perpetual supply of commodities for the king’s cult, an equally vast administrative effort was required. An entry on the Palermo Stone for the fourteenth year of Sneferu’s reign records the creation of thirty-five royal estates (complete with their human workforces) and 122 cattle farms. Many of these new foundations were located in the wide expanses of the delta, and one of them, in the western delta, subsequently grew to a considerable size. Imu (modern Kom el-Hisn) demonstrates the extent to which government policy shaped the demography of Old Kingdom Egypt. Although cattle seem to have been reared in large numbers at the site, the local population did not enjoy the fruits of their labors. Their diet was unusually low in beef and cattle products, suggesting that most of the livestock was sent straight to the royal palace and cult centers near Memphis, leaving the cattle keepers themselves to survive on more meager fare. Even the cereals grown at Imu seem to have been fed preferentially to the cattle rather than to their human attendants. Once again, we see the essentially self-interested nature of the ancient Egyptian monarchy. This was not so much enlightened despotism as despotism, pure and simple.

  While the extensive low-lying fields of the delta provided ideal grazing for vast herds of cattle, the royal estates in Upper Egypt concentrated on grain production. The staple crop was barley, which provided the basic ingredient for both bread and beer. Egypt’s climate and the annual regime of the Nile favored arable farming. As soon as the floodwaters receded, in early autumn, seed was broadcast over the newly irrigated and fertilized fields, and it germinated quickly. The main growing season coincided with the cooler months of winter, and this was followed by the onset of summer, which ripened the grain and allowed harvesting to take place in ideal conditions, before the inundation arrived to start the annual cycle over again. In such a favorable environment, it was relatively easy to produce a surplus; easy, too, for the state to siphon off a significant percentage of agricultural production, by way of taxation, to fund its own projects. The end product of all this economic activity is illustrated in reliefs from the Dahshur valley temple. In a frieze around the walls, a line of female offering bearers, each personifying a different royal estate, is shown bringing supplies for the royal cult. The king was letting it be known that his pyramid was a national enterprise, involving the whole country—whether the populace liked it or not.

  The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  Sneferu may have been able to command his people and their livelihoods, but he could not control the forces of nature. As his massive pyramid at Dahshur reached the halfway point, geology rudely intervened. Cracks started appearing in the outer casing, the telltale signs of subsidence. The underlying sands and shales were simply not strong enough to support the vast weight of the growing pyramid, and the ground had begun to give way. As an emergency measure, extra blocks of stone were laid around the base of the pyramid, reducing the angle of the sides to 54 degrees, but it was too little, too late. Fissures started to open up in the internal corridors and chambers. The architects tried everything from plaster repairs to a new stone lining. They even used expensive imported logs to shore up the ceilings (an entry on the Palermo Stone records the arrival of forty ships from Kebny, laden with coniferous timber), but to no avail. Finally in a desperate attempt to salvage the pyramid—and their own careers—from complete ruin, the architects implemented a radical change of plan. For the upper half of the pyramid, the angle of incline was reduced still further, to 43 degrees. Smaller blocks of stone were employed, and they were laid in horizontal courses, rather than the inward-sloping courses used previously, which had unintentionally contributed to the stresses and strains at the base. The result would be a completed pyramid, but a seriously botched job. Though it would ultimately reach 346 feet in height, the “Bent Pyramid” was hardly fit to serve as the eternal resting place of the perfect god. Exhausted and humiliated, Sneferu’s engineers, architects, and builders were left in no doubt about what they had to do—start again from scratch.

  Work continued on the Bent Pyramid—although now useless, it nevertheless had to be completed. An unfinished disaster would be the ultimate disgrace. Eventually the focus of attention and activity shifted toward preparations for a third great monument. This time, the lessons learned from bitter experience were rigorously applied. A site was chosen with stable underlying geology; the monument was planned, from the outset, with a reduced angle of slope (the same 43 degrees used for the upper part of the Bent Pyramid); and the stone blocks would all be laid in horizontal courses. Resources and manpower were mobilized as never before, for the only commodity in short supply was time. Sneferu had already been king for twenty years, and his monument for eternity had to be finished before he died. As an insurance policy, the royal builders returned to Meidum to convert the king’s eight-stepped pyramid into a true pyramid by casing it with additonal masonry. For a time, major construction work was taking place on three different monuments simultaneously, an unprecedented commitment of manpower and resources.

  The accelerating pace of construction was extraordinary. In the first decade of Sneferu’s reign, during initial work at Meidum, his builders had laid around 46,000 cubic yards of stone per year. In the second decade, as the Bent Pyramid was taking shape, the rate was increased to 105,000 cubic yards per year. In the king’s third decade on the throne, with work taking place on three fronts, between 130,000 and 200,000 cubic yards of stone were laid each year. It is unlikely that this work rate was ever surpassed, even a generation later during the construction of Khufu’s Great Pyramid at Giza. Remarkably, it has been calculated that Sneferu’s third pyramid, known today as the Red Pyramid (from the color of its core limestone blocks), could have been built in as few as ten and a half years. The extra effort involved in hauling blocks higher and higher up the pyramid was compensated for by the sharply reducing volume of the monument toward its apex. The first eleven courses of masonry (out of 157) accounted for 20 percent of the pyramid’s total volume. By the time the builders laid the sixty-sixth course (less than halfway up), they had accomplished 80 percent of the work by volume. In such a way, with an unrelenting pace and enormous effort, the Red Pyramid was finished in good time. The greatest pyramid builder in Egyptian history finally had a monument worthy of the name. (Indeed, the name Appearance was transferred to the Red Pyramid while the Bent Pyramid was rather embarrassingly renamed Southern Appearance.) Not only was it perfect in outward form, but its interior chambers also showed a new sophistication of design, with elegantly corbeled roofs producing pyramid-shaped spaces to reflect the building as a whole. Two of the rooms stood at ground level, but the third, perhaps destined to be the king’s burial chamber, was placed higher up in the body of the pyramid. In death as in life, the king would be elevated above the mundane, closer to heaven than to earth.

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  IF THE ART OF PYRAMID BUILDING WAS GRADUALLY PERFECTED UNDER Sneferu, it was taken to new heights by his son. Virtually nothing is known about Khufu the man, and the events of his reign are sketchy. But it seems likely that he grew up in his father’s shadow, his young life shaped by the court’s obsession with pyramid building, and that he resolved to outdo even Sneferu by commissioning the ultimate in funerary monuments. The Great Pyramid at Giza marks the zenith not just of ancient Egyptian kingship but of the universal tendency for absolute power to project itself in grandiose architecture. At its most stark, the structure represents the untrammeled exercise of political and economic control; at its most inspirational, it represents a unique episode in human history. It is this combination of the sinister and the dazzling that gives Khufu’s monument its enduring fascination.

  From the outset, it was designed to set new standards that would remain unsurpassed. Khufu chose the site carefully, the Giza plateau (like Dahshur) being visible from Saqqara, yet virgin ground. The underlying geology—a strong seam of limestone called the Mokattam Formation—was ideally suited to bear the we
ight of a gigantic monument. The local availability of building material in vast quantities was a further advantage, and during the inundation, boats could reach the base of the plateau, facilitating deliveries to the construction site from all over Egypt.

  The king also chose wisely when appointing the man who would oversee the entire project. For most of the Fourth Dynasty, the highest offices of state were reserved exclusively for senior male members of the royal family, in what seems to have been a deliberate policy to concentrate all power in the hands of the king. For the greatest undertaking of his reign, therefore, Khufu chose a trusted royal relative. Hemiunu was probably the king’s nephew. His membership in the king’s inner circle undoubtedly gave him opportunities for advancement, but he must have possessed innate ability as well, for his rise to a position of great eminence was rapid. In his prime, he held a combination of courtly, religious, and administrative offices, ranging from elder of the palace to high priest of Thoth (the god of writing and wisdom). The unusual title “director of music of the south and the north” may reflect one of Hemiunu’s private interests, but the offices that conferred the greatest responsibility were those directly connected with the business of government: overseer of royal scribes (in other words, head of the civil service) and overseer of all construction projects of the king. Of all Khufu’s construction projects, none was more important than his Great Pyramid, and Hemiunu was responsible for the entire operation, from provisioning and organizing the workforce to quarrying and transporting the stone, from building and maintaining the construction ramps to marshaling the surveyors, architects, and supervisors. Hemiunu’s life-size statue from his tomb at Giza shows a man in full enjoyment of the benefits of high office, his pronounced corpulence emphasizing his wealth and privilege. With an aquiline nose and strong jaw, his facial features project an air of self-confidence and determination. Notwithstanding his impeccable royal connections, these were qualities he would have needed in large measure as he stood on the Giza plateau for the first time, at the beginning of his uncle’s reign, contemplating the immense challenge that lay before him.

  The first—and in many ways the most crucial—stage of building a pyramid involved laying out and preparing the site. The extraordinary precision with which the Great Pyramid is aligned to the points of the compass indicates that a method of orientation involving the stars must have been used. Solar methods are simply not accurate enough. The precise technique that the Egyptians used is not certain, but it may well have involved a pair of stars that circle the celestial north pole; when the two are in a direct vertical alignment (easily checked with a simple plumb line), the line of sight toward them marks true north. We may imagine this alignment ceremony being carried out with great solemnity, in the presence of priests, with Hemiunu and perhaps the king himself looking on, for the efficacy of the pyramid as a means of resurrecting the king after his death depended on the accuracy of its orientation—as we shall see later.

  Hemiunu—the man behind the Great Pyramid © ROEMER-UND PELIZAEUS MUSEUM HILDESHEIM, GERMANY/PHOTO: SHAHROK SHALCHI

  Once the site had been laid out, and the ground cleared and leveled—probably by using channels cut into the surface of the rock and filled with water—it was time for the construction itself to begin. The scale of the project seems almost overwhelming today, but to the government machine of Khufu’s reign, with the benefit of a generation’s experience in the construction of vast pyramids, it may have appeared less daunting. The ancient Egyptian approach to any large-scale undertaking was to divide it up into a series of more manageable units. When it came to pyramid building and the organization of a vast workforce, this proved both efficient and highly effective. The basic unit of the workforce was probably a team of twenty men, each with its own team leader. This kind of organization would have produced a team spirit, and a sense of friendly rivalry between teams would have encouraged each to try and outdo the others. This was certainly the case with larger units of the workforce, as surviving inscriptions testify. Ten teams formed a two-hundred-strong division, known today by the Greek term “phyle.” Five phyles, each with its own leader and identity, made up a gang of a thousand workers. And two gangs, again with distinctive and often jokey names (such as “the king’s drunkards”), made a crew, the largest unit of men. The pyramid-shaped structure of the workforce reflected the monument itself. Like the regiments, battalions, and companies of an army, the organizational arrangement engendered a strong sense of corporate identity and pride at different levels of the system. Team vied with team, phyle with phyle, and gang with gang to be the best and to win recognition. This structure was a simple and ingenious solution to a massive task, and it ensured that motivation was maintained.

  It needed to be. Throughout the two decades it took to build the Great Pyramid, the construction work was hot, unrelenting, exhausting, and dangerous. The conditions must have been particularly unpleasant down in the main quarry, a few hundred yards south of the pyramid itself. Choking clouds of limestone dust, the blinding glare of the quarry face, the constant din of chisels, swarms of flies, and the stench of sweated labor: it was not a pleasant environment. The rawest of recruits had to serve their time here, earnestly hoping for promotion—and working hard to achieve it. Not that the alternative was any less strenuous. Hauling the vast stone blocks from quarry face to construction site was backbreaking work. Each block, weighing a ton or more, had to be levered onto a wooden sledge, then dragged by ropes along a carefully prepared track. At the end of its journey, it had to be taken off the sledge and moved carefully into position, ready for shaping and finishing. And all this at the pace of one block every two minutes, for ten hours a day.

  Despite its superhuman scale, Khufu’s monument was nevertheless a profoundly human achievement, and well within the capacity of the ancient Egyptians. Calculations and practical experiments have shown that just two crews, or four thousand men, would have been sufficient to quarry, haul, and set in place the more than two million stone blocks used to build the pyramid. Perhaps the same size of workforce again would have been required to construct and maintain the vast ramps leading from the main quarry to the pyramid and up the sides of the monument as it grew steadily in height. Another army of workers toiled behind the scenes to keep the whole operation going: carpenters to make the sledges for dragging huge blocks of stone; water carriers to lubricate the passage of the sledges along wood and mud tracks; potters to make the jars for the water carriers as well as the day-to-day ware for storage, cooking, and eating; smiths to forge and repair copper chisels for the quarrymen; bakers, brewers, and cooks to supply the entire workforce. Even so, the number of people employed at any one time on the Great Pyramid project may not have risen much beyond ten thousand.

  Only a relatively small contingent of specialist quarrymen, surveyors, engineers, and craftsmen, together with their wives and children, lived at the pyramid site year-round. The majority of the workers were temporary employees, serving for a period of a few months before returning to their families in towns and villages throughout Egypt. The pyramid town in which these ordinary workmen were quartered reveals fascinating details of their daily lives. During the construction of the Great Pyramid, the main settlement, called Gerget Khufu (“settlement of Khufu”), was located near the cultivation, close to Khufu’s valley temple. Large quantities of broken pottery, charcoal, ash, and animal bones indicate a hive of activity, focused primarily on feeding the thousands of workers. Farther south, at the edge of the Giza plateau, an even larger pyramid town flourished during subsequent reigns. The town illuminates the meticulous organization and planning that went into pyramid building. Separated from the sacred necropolis by a massive stone wall, thirty feet high and thirty feet thick at the base, the town was carefully laid out. Its various components all point to a rigidly hierarchical arrangement mirroring and reinforcing the management pyramid of the workforce.

  The men slept in fairly primitive conditions, on rough earth beds ranged along the wa
lls of barrack blocks. Each long, narrow unit could have housed two teams of twenty workers. At the back of each unit, more spacious living quarters were probably reserved for the team supervisors. The overseer in charge of the entire operation—not an individual of Hemiunu’s rank but the official who supervised day-to-day activity at the construction site—lived in even greater comfort in a large detached villa. Directly opposite, a columned hall could have served as a communal dining facility. Eating together would certainly have helped to reinforce bonds of community and friendship among the workforce. The hard manual labor of pyramid building demanded a diet rich in protein, and up to eleven cattle and thirty sheep and goats were slaughtered every day in the town, providing meat to supplement the abundant rations of dried fish. At the same time, dozens of bakeries were kept busy producing the ancient Egyptian staples of bread and beer. As the most important dietary ingredient, grain was carefully rationed and its distribution was kept under close supervision. The silos and granaries were situated within a royal administrative complex, set within its own double enclosure wall at the edge of the town for added security. Despite the friendly camaraderie among the workforce, there was no forgetting whom they served.