Building the Great Pyramid

by Jackson, Kevin; Stamp, Jonathan; British Broadcasting Corporation

• ISBN13: 9781552977217
• ISBN10: 1552977218
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Firefly Books Ltd

Summary

The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the oldest and sole-surviving member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and has inspired more speculation than any other building on Earth. Using state-of-the-art computer graphics, Building the Great Pyramid brings the world of Fourth Dynasty Egypt to life and shows how and why this most extraordinary of all human monuments was built.Equipped only with the most basic tools, how were ancient Egyptians able to achieve such an extraordinary degree of accuracy in its construction? How were stones, some weighing as much as 40 tons, hauled into position so precisely? What was life like for the conscripted laborers who built it, and how long did it take them to complete their task? Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is it possible to provide answers.The authors trace the history of the exploration of the Giza site, from the earliest Greek and Roman travelers, through to Jean-FranYois Champollion's cracking of the hieroglyphic code; and the work of scholars such as Auguste Mariette and Sir William Flinders Petrie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The final chapter covers less orthodox theories and looks at how the Great Pyramid has become a magnet for all manner of charlatans, heretics, and cranks.

Author Biography

Kevin Jackson is a freelance journalist and film-maker. He has written, directed and narrated documentaries on Anthony Burgess, Dennis Potter and William Morris for BBC television. His books include The Language of Cinema and A Ruskin Alphabet.

Jonathan Stamp is the producer of the BBC television program Pyramid.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Wonderful Things	p. 7
The Pyramid and Its Site	p. 17
A Conscript's Life	p. 31
Building the Great Pyramid	p. 49
Worlds Within and Without	p. 71
Death, Afterlife and the Funeral of the King	p. 91
Travelers' Tales	p. 109
The Origins of Modern Egyptology	p. 129
Egyptology Comes of Age	p. 149
Pyramidology, Heretics, Mystics and Cranks	p. 159
Glossary	p. 182
Further reading	p. 186
Index	p. 188
Picture credits	p. 192
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

IntroductionTHE LAST SURVIVING WONDERThe people of classical times knew that many things were marvelous, but saw that only a few of these things were the work of humanity rather than of the gods. And of these miracles of human ingenuity, only a very few were deemed worthy of universal admiration. You could number them on the fingers of two hands. They were: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia -- the work of Athens's greatest sculptor, Phidias (c. 490 - c. 415 BC), also renowned for creating the heroic marble forms for the facade of the Parthenon, works now known to the British as the Elgin Marbles; the Pharos, or lighthouse-fortress, of Alexandria, built in 279 BC to the designs of Sostratus, an Asiatic Greek in the service of the Ptolemies, and dedicated to "the Savior Gods" -- an edifice well over 400 feet (122 meters) high, and topped by a mirror-like structure which combined the functions of reflector and telescope. Then there were the Colossus of Rhodes -- a bronze statue of the sun-god Helios, which towered over the entrance to Rhodes harbor and was reported by the elder Pliny to be some 70 cubits (100 feet / 30 meters) tall; and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus -- a white marble tomb for Mausolus, ruler of Caria (377-353 BC), well over 130 feet (40 meters) high, erected by his widow Artemisia and decorated with carvings by the brilliant sculptor Scopas. Finally, there was the Great Pyramid of Cheops (also known as Khufu), at Giza.These were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as compiled by the Greek poet Antipator of Sidon around 130 BC. Scholars and adventurers undertook long and arduous journeys to visit them, then came home again and told or wrote awe-inspiring tales of what they had seen. The Seven Wonders passed into legend.Centuries passed, and time took its usual revenge on these monuments of vaulting ambition. An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes in 224 BC. The Pharos survived almost a millennium longer, and was still in use after the Arab conquest of Egypt, but was itself destroyed by earthquakes in AD 700. Earthquakes also did away with the Mausoleum in the fifteenth century AD. Of Phidias's great Olympian Zeus, visited by Pausanias and described in his epic ten-volume travel book, the Guide to Greece, nothing is left except a tiny image on the coins of Elis. Almost all the Wonders were destroyed: the sands rose and buried them, or -- when a few recognizable ruins survived -- the thieves came looting, while rats bred and scurried among the rubble.Eventually, however, starting with a slow trickle of interest in the early Renaissance and building into a flood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new bands of travelers from younger countries came to follow in the path of the classical wanderers, and thrilled to their gradual rediscovery of the grand archaic ruins. This time, however, they came with a very different frame of mind. They looked, not on perfected structures, but on shards and fragments; they reflected, not on the splendors of human achievement, but on its transience. If the great nations of Egypt, Greece and Babylon had fallen, how long could, say, Germany or France or Spain hope to thrive? A thousand years? Five hundred? Less?The reflective mood was caught most memorably near the start of the nineteenth century by the English poet Shelley, who was fascinated to discover that some ancient writers had anticipated this very modern spirit. He found a traveler's tale from ancient Egypt recorded in the pages of the historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in Greek. The story, already a couple of centuries old when Diodorus wrote it down some time around 49 BC, told of one Hectaeus of Abdera, a contemporary of Alexander the Great who journey