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Cover: The majestic features of an un-known ro\'al figure grace the cedarwoodcoffin that once held Ramses the Great.He was placed, in the borrowed coffinwhen ancient priests, seeking to proteahis mummy from tomb robbers, removedthe body from its original sarcophagusand secreted it in an isolated hideaway,along with the rescued remains of otherpharaohs. The cache was not found un-til the late 19th century. The sarcophagusis seen here against a background of ram-headcd sphinxes from Kamak.

End paper: Painted on papyrus by theartist Paul Brcedcn, the map showsthe locus of the Eg)'ptian civilization,the Nile valley. Breeden also painted thevignettes illustrating the timeline onpages 158-159.

EGYPT:LAND OF THEPHARAOHS

Time-Life Books is a division of Time LifeInc., a whoUv owned subsidian' ofTHE TIME INC. BOOK COMPANYTIME-LIFE BOOKSPRESIDENT: Man' N. Davis

Alanoflmj! Editor: Thomas H. Flahcm'Direaor ofEditorial Resources: Elise D. Rittcr-Clough

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PUBLISHER: Robert H. Smith

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f 1992 Time-Life Books. All rights reser\'ed.No pan of this book mav be reproduced inanv form or bv anv electronic or mechanicalmeans, including information storage and re-trie\al devices or systems, without prior writ-ten permission from the publisher, except thatbrief passages mav be quoted for reviews. Firstprinting. Printed in U.S.A. Published simulta-

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Library of CongressCataloging in Publication DataEg\pt: Land of the pharaohs / by the editorsof Timc-Life Books.

p. cm.(Lost civilizations)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8094-9850-2 (trade)ISBN 0-8094-9851-0 (lib. bdg.)

1. Eg\pt,\ntiquities. 2. Excavations(Archaeolog\)Eg\'pt. 3. Egi,'pt

CivilizationTo 332 BC. I. Time-LifeB

LOST CIV I L I Z A T I O N S

EGYPT:LAND OF THEPHARAOHS

By the Editors of Time-Life Books

TIME-LIFE BOOKS, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

T S

O N EMUMMIES, TOMBS, AND TREASURES

9

ESSAY: Home of the Giants 34

T W OIN THE SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS

45

ESSAY: Houses of Etemit\' 73

THE PHARAOH WHOM HISTORYCOULD NOT FORGET

81

ESSAY: The Stories Mummies Tell 105

FOURIN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

117

ESSAY: The Personal Tutankhamen 149

Timeline 158Acknowledgments 160Picture Credits 160Bibliography 162

Index 164

mwm^m^^^&mmm:'^VW' yV^S?S^t-~u^''^'.-

Puncturing morning mists, the Gizapyramids present their timeless profUesto the new day. "They have been con-temporaries oflost empires," wrote theFrench author Theophile Gautier."They have seen civilizations that wehave never known, understood lan-guages that we try toguess throughhieroglyphics, known customs that to usseem asfantastical as a dream. Theyhave been there so long that even thestars have changed positions in the sky."

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MUMMIES,TOMBS,AND

TREASURES

Anns crossed uponits chest in the pose

cftbe Egyptian roy-al dtad, the 3,000-

year-old mummy ofRamses II confrontsthe modem erawith the serene im-passivity of one whoknows eternity.

%ne of the great monuments ofancient Epptand one of the most studiedis the 3,400-year-oldLuxor Temple, 450 miles up the Nile from Cairo. Afirer decades of

intense scrutinv bv archaeologists and scholars from around the

world, the site seemed to all intents and purposes just about ex-

hausted. The only major challenge remaining was to protea thetemple from the inroads ofmodem cixilization. In 1989, inspectorsfrom the Eg\ptian .\ntiquities Organization (EAO), alarmed thatseepage from Luxor s sewer system and the Nile might be threatening

the monumenfs foundations, arranged for soil samples to be takento determine the extent of the problem. Workers had dug onl)- a few-

feet into the temple court\ard when the\- uncovered a statue lying onits side; soon they had unearthed two more.

The inspectors recognized a momentous find and had the holefilled pending instructions from their Cairo headquarters on how- to

proceed. The EAO put the director of Luxor antiquities in charge ofthe excaxation, and the digging resumed. The excited workers soon

turned up an additional 21 figuresall in excellent condition.

Among them was a magnificent eight-foot-tall standing figure. Theinscription revealed that the subject was none other than Amenhotep

III, the king who had built the temple and had reigned bet\\-een1391-1353 BC when Eg>ptian power, having reached its zenith.

extended all the wav from today's Sudan to modern Iraq.Examining the king's statue, experts pronounced it one ofthe

most valuable single pieces of sculpture ever to emerge from the soilof Eg\'pt. Some went so far as to say that the discover}^ of the tu^odozen masterpieces, dating from Eg}'pt's golden age, equals in ar-chaeological importance the finding of Tutankhamen's tomb 67years earlier. How the statues came to be buried in the courtx^ard, noone can say. One theon' holds that local priests in the fourth centur)^AD sought to hide them from Romans who had turned the templeprecincts into a military' encampment. If this is what happened, theremay be other items lying buried close bv, awaiting discoven'.

From the water)' marshes of itsnorthern delta to its arid south

ern reaches, Eg^'pt is a place where, as one contemporary archaeol-ogist has noted, "you can't put vour spade in the ground and not findsomething." This great treasure house of a countr\' has been luringthe curious for centuries. Among them haxe been many who soughtto become rich by plundering the past. Others called themselvesarchaeologists, but by today's stricter standards count as no morethan amateurs. The worst ofthem did more harm than good in theirgreedy haste to clear a tomb or temple, destroying valuable exidencethat might haxe helped solve many of the riddles still attached to theobjects they crated and sent home. But at their best the searchers weremagnificent professionals, lovers of histon', and great respecters ofthe humanit}' behind their finds. The\' pulled open the doors thatstood between present and ancient Eg\'pt, empowering all those whoshare a fascination with antiquity to step through a kind of magicallooking glass into the intriguing land of the pharaohs.

Much of what the world first learned about the Egyptianscame from an early obsession with their tombs. Thanks to the dn'nessthat prevails throughout most of the land, not onh' did these burialsites ofi:en contain bodies that had sur\'i\'ed the ages largely intact,but with them were found an array ofitems that rc\ealed much aboutcivilization thousands of years ago. Exen when a burial site has beendevastated by ancient tomb robbers or modern treasure seekers, itstill can tell a great deal. This is something the archaeologist HerbertEustis VVinlock ofNew York's Metropolitaji Museum of Art was tolearn in 1920, as he worked on a 4,000-vear-old tomb at Deir elBahri, near the long-vanished cit\- of Thebes.

10

Shown as they were found in 1919 andthen attain in contemporary photographs,

models ofa boat and a granary belong-ing to an llth-Dynasty court functionarynamed Meketre offer a glimpse of dailylife in ancient Egypt. Under the boat'scanopy sits Meketre himself while inthegranary his estate workers fill binswith wheat as scribes in an adjacentoffice record the amounts being stored.

Winlock knew that the tomb had been explored twicebefore, in 1895 and in 1902. But he hoped that his teammight uncover some previously overlooked inscriptions

that would link two historic kings to the area. His archae-ologist's conscience led him to do something his predeces-

sors had not donedraw a plan of the corridors and pits, which

meant clearing out the tomb. Although his team found no lost pieces

of sculptureor evidence that might have helped answer the histor-

ical questions he had in mindthe seemingly empty corridors gaveWinlock, as he put it, "one of the great finds of recent years."

The tomb, which had once held the mummy of an 1 1th-Dvnast\' court functionary' named Meketre, had long ago been rav-aged by robbers and now contained little more than broken stone and

rubbish. The clearing operation was almost over when Harr\' Burton,the photographer who had accompanied the expedition, entered thetomb at sunset to dismiss the workers for the day and found the air"electric with suppressed excitement." One ofthe workmen had beenstartled to see chips ofstone trickle through a crack between floor and

wall. With the overseer, he had begun scraping away other chips piledthere, some of which had also slid into the fissure. Burton struck a

match in an attempt to light up the cavity; plainly such faint illumi-

nation would not do. But so tantalizing was the promise of what

might lie hidden in the blackness that he decided to tell others about

11

the opening at once. He dashed off a note to his colleagues, asking

them to come to the tomb and bring flashlights.Winlock, just returned to the main camp from work at an-

other site, greeted the message skeptically. Nevertheless, he and his

part}' went for a look. 'There was nothing for us to see," he recalled,

"but a ragged hole, but when one by one we lay flat on the ground

and shot a beam of light into that crack, one of the most startlingsights it is e\er a digger's luck to see flashed before us." Winlock

found himself "gazing down into the midst of a myriad of brightlypainted little men going this way and that.

"A tall, slender girl gazed across at me perfectly composed,"

he later wrote. "Little men with sticks in their upraised hands drove

spotted oxen; rowers tugged at their oars in a fleet ofboats, while one

ship seemed foundering right in front of me with its bow balancedprecariously in the air. And all of this busy going and coming was inuncanny silence, as though the distance back over the forty centuries

I looked across was too great for even an echo to reach my ears."Night was falling, so Winlock and his colleagues could do

nothing but plug the crack and wait anxiously for the dawn. The next

day they returned to the tomb, taking with them the tools they would

needinstruments, drawing boards, reflectors, mirrors. Burton set

about taking pictures. He rigged up an ingenious system, usingmirrors to beam sunlight from outside the tomb along the full 90 to100 feet ofcorridor, where it bounced oft' reflectors to illuminate the

unfolding operation.

The men were concerned that a rush of fresh air into the tiny,

roughly hewn chamber, which had been sealed off" for 4,000 years,would cause some of the loose stone to separate from the ceihng and

crash down on the marxelous figures and boats. Slowly they removedthe encumbrances that stood in their way, including a mud-brick

wall; to their rehef, the ceiling held. At last they had a good look

inside. It was not a burial chamber, as they had expected, but "a little

secret room" in which the essentials for a happy afterlife had been

placed bv mourners on behalf of the entombed Meketre.

The Egyptians loved life so much they tried to take it withthem to the grave and beyond. In the early days of their long history,

the\- had themsehes buried with food and drink. Then they began to

add more elaborate appurtenances and comforts to their burial sites,

everything from beds and couches to hand mirrors and perftime.

As custom e\ol\ed, the rich and might)' started taking

12

A DIET FORTHE LIVINGAND THE DEADWhen they died, Eg)'ptians wentto the grave with everything theymight need in the afterlifein-cluding ftill-course meals. Edi-

blessuch as the well-preserved

bread, duck, dried fish, and figsbelow found heaped in bowls andon a reed shelf in tombs nearThebesindicate that the diet ofancient Egypt was remarkablybroad and appealing.

Although class determinedhow varied the fare might be,bread and beer made from wheatand barley were staples for every-one. All Eg\'ptians ate vegetables

as wellonions, cucumbers,beans, lentils, peas, and lettuce, toname a fewand such fruits asdates and watermelon. While thepoorest peasants may have existedon plant foods only, most Egyp-

tians also consumed a variet)' offish and fowl. The wealthyindulged, sometimes to excess, insuch luxuries as wine, careftiUy

labeled as to year and vineyard,and in such fatt>' meats as beef and

pork. As a result, some becameoverweight, with obesit\' happilydismissed as a sign of prosperity.

Egxptian cooks used oils,thickeners, and spices to concocttheir soups and dishes, .\mongtheir seasonings were garlic,

cumin, coriander, parsle\', andfenugreek. Dates, figs, chocolate-

like carob, and other fhiitssweetened cakes and pastries;hone\' too serxed this purpose,butagainonl\' for thosewho could afford it.

A muralfrom the tomb cfNakht, apriest during the rei_gn ofThutmoseIV, shows the makings ofan opulentfeast: grapes; pomegranates; lotus

plants, the roots and seeds ofwhichwere eaten; cucumbers; eggs; figs;

fish; geese; ducks; and pigeons.

so-called senants with them to the tombnot human beings, butcaned figures the\' beliexed would care for them in the next world.

Because of his great wealth, Meketre could afford a fijU as-

semblage of such tiny helpmates, the largest collection e\er unco\'-

ered. In 24 little boxes representing rooms and courtxards werecowherds and butchers, bakers and brewers, spinners and weavers,

carpenters and scribesall busily laboring at their assigned tasks.

Together thev offered an intimate \'ie\v of what life was like onMeketre's estates. The baker, for example, stood in a vat, kneadingthe dough with his feet.

The boat models surrounding the boxes represented vesselsMeketre would ha\'e used for traxel and pleasure as he journeyed upand clown the Nile \isiting his properties. On one of them, Meketrehimself sits relaxing, dreamilv sniffing a lotus bud; beside him are hisyoung son and a singer, who taps his mouth with his pahn to protiucea warbling sound. On another of Meketre's vessels, a blind musician

plavs a harp, anchored in a stand between his knees. Since

in realit\' these narrow boats had to accommodate crews ofoarsmen as well as passengers, the\' would ha\-e been toosmall to hold a kitchen. Thus, even here in the tomb, a

floating cook's gallev had been provided for the master.

As Winlock examined the models, he noticed sev-

eral things that puzzleci him. A fisherman lacked an arm.Some of the boats bore burn marks or had parts missing,and a few had had their masts wrenched off. Many dis-pla\'ed flv specks; others had been gnawed on by mice thatleft droppings behind; still others held cobwebs with deadspiders caught in them. Yet, as Winlock knew, there nexerhad been a fire in the little room, and he could find no trace

of flies, mice, or spiders on the floor. How to explain themvsterx'? He reasoned that Meketre had had his ftinerar}'models prepared long before his death and kept them in an

unused portion of his house, inhabited only by mice, spi-

ders, and flics. He imagined children sneaking in to playwith the boats and figures, and the\-, he concluded, were

the ones who had lost the arm off" the fisherman andbroken and burned the masts.

Here, in a cramped, low-ceilinged room in which

thev could not even stand upright, the archaeologists had

iourne\'ed back in time, meeting Meketre and his entou-

13

rage face to face. And there was to beanother eerie confrontation whenthey moved the boat models and box-es containing the figures out into the

sun. Only Winlock and one colleaguehad touched the objects in the tombas they shifted them about to be pho-tographed, and they had taken painsto do so gently, with their handsdraped in handkerchiefs. Yet in the

blazing light they found the treasurescovered with fingerprintsthe trac-

es, Winlock recognized with amaze-ment, of "the men who had carriedthem up to the tomb from the housein Thebes 4,000 years ago and leftthem there for their long rest."

Winlock's discovery offered a

window into the past, a glimpse ofordinary people engaged in the kindof tasks that helped sustain Egypt

during its nearly 3,500 years of exist-ence. Not only was Egypt one of thefirst ofthe ancient civihzations; it en-dured the longest. The reason for thishas much to do with Egypt's location. A land apart, it lies bufferedbetween two deserts and was thus able to evolve in the nourishingvalley of the Nile without outside influence or interference. Like along papyrus stem, it extended in a green, fertile swath only 2 to 14

miles wide from the first cataract of the Nile at Aswan, north to thebroad flower head of the delta 700 miles downriver, where the Nileflows into the Mediterranean through a series ofchannels. The river'sannual flooding brought a gift of dark brown silt to farmers' fieldsand, on the whole, a regularity to life. Egypt's ancient name, Kemet,

the word for "'black land," refers to this waterborne beneficence.Trulv a blessed people, the Eg\'ptianswho probably num-

bered no more than five million at any one timelived through muchof their histor\' under the stewardship of semidivine rulers. So nu-merous were the kings, or pharaohs, who governed the country thatsome are remembered today in name only, their monuments and

Pharaoh Sett I and his young son, theCrown Prince Ramses, later to becomeRamses the Great, confront their heritage

in a wall relief in a temple at Abydos.

The carvings include the names of 76kinj/senclosed in ovals known as car-touchesrunning from the inception ofSeti's reign in 1306 BC all the way backto Menes, believed to have founded theFirst Dynasty in 2920 BC.

14

edicts having long ago disappeared. When historians talk of Egypt,they do so in terms of royal lines or dynasties (see timeline, pages158-159). They also speak ofkingdoms, long eras ofEgyptian great-ness, and of less happy intermediate periods when political upheavalor foreign invaders destabilized the country. Final decline set in after

Egypt fell to Augustus Caesar in 30 BC and became a province ofRome. Slowly, out ofneglect, the relics ofthe proud civilization wereswallowed by the sand. Soon e\'en its spoken language was lost.

For centuries afterward, ancientEgypt remained an all-but-

mute culture. Travelers from Greek and Roman days right up to the19th century were enthralled by the monuments poking up from itsendless dunes, yet they could not read the mysterious carved inscrip-

tions and could only wonder at their meaning. The expedition ofNapoleon's army to Egypt in 1 798 unearthed many treasures, chiefamong them the Rosetta stone, whose parallel bands of inscriptionsin hieroglyphs (picture script), demotic (a cursive form of Egyptianwriting), and Greek provided the key to the ancient signs.

Once again, the Egyptians could speak, and as the decipheringoftheir writings gathered momentum, they began to emerge in threedimensions, a vibrant, dynamic people. But their past continued tosuffer at the hands ofthe greedy. The looting oftheir tombs, temples,and buried cities, which had begun as early as Greek and Romantimes, reached a frenzied peak in the 19th century. Any object thatdynamite, crowbar, battering ram, or human fingers could wrest freefrom the abundant ruins was fair game. A brisk trade grew up inantiquities, and several European collections became the richer for it.

One ofthe outsize figures ofthis harmful commerceLiterallyas well as figuratively^was an Italian-born strongman and weight-Ufter, Giovanni Battista Belzoni. Standing more than six feet sixinches tall, Belzoni was as muscular as he was handsome, and enjoyeda sometime career as the "Patagonian Samson" on the London stage.There he amazed audiences with his ability to hoist a 12 7-pound ironframe onto his shoulders, stand steady as 12 members ofthe Sadler'sWells Theatre climbed onto it, and then stride around the boardswith his burden, nonchalantly waving two flags.

An interest in hydraulics led Belzoni in 1815 to Egypt, wherehe tried to sell the country's despotic leader, Mohammed 'Ali, awaterwheel he had invented. Belzoni was convinced it would revo-

15

UNLOCKING THE SECRETSOF THE HIEROGLYPHSFor centuries, Europeansthought that the hieroglyphscar\ed onto Egyptian monu-ments were pictographs, each

embod\'ing a mystical or spir-itual idea, and could not pos-sibh' represent the sounds ofthe Egyptian language. Onlyafter the Rosetta stone, offer-

ing a key to hierogh'phs, wasdisco\'ered in 1 799 clid theidea that certain hieroglyphsmight be phonetic sxmbolsgain some support.

Of the European scholarswho labored to decipherEg\'ptian, Jean-FrancoisChampoUion of France wasparticularly qualified to crack

the elusiye code. Born in1790, he displayed from boy-hood a genius for languages

and a determination to deci-pher the hieroglyphs thatcould open the book on muchof Egypt's past. In 1821, afteryears of feyerish study ofmanyEg\'ptian texts, ChampoUion

corrected and completed an-other scholar's phonetic trans-literation of a royal name onthe Rosetta stonePtolemy

pro\iding a springboard toftirther breakthroughs.

The most spectacular ofthese occurred on September14, 1822, while ChampoUionwas working on an inscriptionfrom a temple at Abu Simbel.Until then, only names andterms from Egypt's Greek-dominated Late Period had

I nou4KrwC5iS

PIn 1822, the year this portrait was paint-ed, 31 -year-oldJean-Franfoif Champol-lion broke the code ofEgyptian hieroglyphswhen he deciphered the names of thekings Ramses and Thutmose (above).The first modem Egyptologist and the fa-ther rfEgyptian linguistics, ChampoUionpursued a brilliant but short career, ter-minated by his death at the age of41.

been deciphered. Yet dieEgyptians had been carvinghieroglyphs as long ago as3000 BC. Had die script al-ways been hindamentally pho-netic, the Frenchman won-dered, or were the soundsymbols a late development?When he came across an unfa-miliar royal nameknown tobe royal because the cluster ofglyphs had been set off in anoval, or cartouche (top left)

he recognized the last twosigns as s-s, and, on the basis ofhis earlier work, realized thatthe one preceding them waslikely ms. The first was a st)A-ized picture of the sun, andChampoUion knew that inCoptic, a lang^iage derivedfrom ancient Egyptian, theword for "sun" is re. Re-ms-s-s. Could this possibly be the19th-Dynasty pharaoh Ram-ses? (The hieroglyphic systemomits most vowels.) Champol-lion moved on to a secondcartouche, also containing thems and s characters (bottomleft) . Here, the first glyph rep-resented a birdan ibis

which was sacred to the godThoth. Boldly guessing thatthe ibis stood for the god'sname, ChampoUion foundhimselfmuttering 'Thoth-ms-s"Thutmose, the nameof another great king.

Writing of his discovery,which effectively ended debateover the nature of hieroglyphs,ChampoUion said: "It is ascript that is at once pictorial,

symbolic, and phonetic withinthe same text, the same sen-

tence, I would almost saywithin the same word."

lutionize Egypt's antiquated system of agricultureand make himrich. When nothing came of the waterwheel caper, he turned to anendeavor that promised an immediate payoff: the exploitation oftheancient treasures scattered about in the desert sands.

Through a Swiss scholar and linguist, Belzoni had heard ofthe gigantic granite head ofa king called the Young Memnon (in fact,it was a portrait of the great pharaoh Ramses II), regarded by oneauthority ofthe day as "certainly the most beautifijl and perfect pieceof Egyptian sculpture that can be seen throughout the whole coun-try." Measuring nine feet high and almost seven feet wide at theshoulders, the piece weighed well over seven tons. Aware of itsimportance, a group of Frenchmen had tried to remove the head butcould not budge it. Belzoni tietermined to succeed where they hadfailed. This, he recognized, would be a great prize for the BritishMuseum. "I found it near the remains of its body and chair," hebragged afterward, "with its face upward, and apparently smiling onme, at the thought of being taken to England."

Using a crudely built cart and a contingent of local laborers,Belzoni managed after several days of hauling to get the sculpture tothe bank of the Nile. Weeks would elapse before it could be hoistedonto a ship and transported to Cairo and eventually to England,where it produced a sensation worthy of Belzoni's effort.

Belzoni had become addicted to the hunt. He was a zestftilfellow, happily crawling in and out of tombs, sometimes spendingthe night in them. On occasion he lived with the tomb robbers whoinhabited the entrances to the larger of these burial places, even

dining with them in less-than-sanitary conditions. Whenever therobbers thought he might stay overnight with them, they would killa couple of chickens and roast them in a small oven heated withfragments ofwooden mummy cases, and, as the guest noted, "some-times even with the bones and wrappings of the former occupants."

Belzoni had plainly gained the confidence of his hosts; hepersuaded them to take him into the deep, rock-cut sepulchers fromwhich they obtained the antiquities they sold. Despite the stifling airand the choking dust that rose from the mummies, Belzoni wentabout his task with gustorobbing the bodies of their papyri, illus-

trated texts of supposedly magical content hidden in the coffins or

among the wrappings.Getting into the tombs was not easy, involving as it did te-

dious crawling through sand-and-rubble-choked passageways. Re-

17

maining there for any length of time in the company of the tombrobbers required a special courage. "In some places," Belzoni wrote,

"there is not more than a vacanc)' of a foot left:, which you mustcontrive to pass through in a creeping posture like a snail, on pointedand keen stones that cut like glass." On one occasion, the strongmanfound himself "surrounded by bodies, by heaps of mummies in alldirections; which, previous to my being accustomed to the sight,impressed me with horror. The blackness of the wall, the faint lightgiven bv the candles or torches for want of air, the different objectsthat surrounded me, seeming to converse with each other, and theArabs with the candles or torches in their hands, naked and coveredwith dust, themselves resembling living mummies, absolutelyformed a scene that cannot be described."

Yet Belzoni did describe his experiences among the Egyptiandead, in a popular book that spared no gruesome detail. He wrotethat he counted himself luck}' for lacking a sense of smell, but that ashe rummaged among the bodies, breathing in their fetid dust, he"could taste that the mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow."Once, as he sat down on a cofFm to rest, the weight of his enormousframe bore down on the body inside and "crushed it like a bandbox."Without anything to hold on to, Belzoni sank "among the brokenmummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, whichraised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour,waiting till it subsided again." When eventually he got up to leave,he raised more dust, "and every step I took I crushed a mummy insome part or other."

On another occasion, Belzoni found himself squeezingthrough a 20-foot-long passage not much wider than his own body."It was choked with mummies," he wrote, "and I could not passwithout putting my face in contact with that ofsome decayed Egyp-tian; but as the passage inclined downward, my own weight helpedme on: However, I could not avoid being covered with bones, legs,arms, and heads rolling from above. Thus I proceeded from one caveto another, all full of mummies piled up in various ways, somestanding, some lying, and some on their heads."

Amateur though he was, Belzoni made several importantfinds in Egypt, including the magnificent tomb of Seti I, father ofRamses II. He was soon joined by other Europeans who threwthemselves into the treasure hunt with a passion, as a French scholarsaid, "so violent that it is inferior to love or ambition only in the

Dapper in 19th-century Egyptum farb,Giovanni Battista Belzoni ran this par-trait ofhimself as the frontispiece to his1822 book recounting his experiences"within the pyramids, temples, tombs,and excavations" ofEgypt. Among hisreat coups was the recovery of the headofMemnon (actually Ramses U), shownbeing dragged to the Nile by workmenprior to shipment to England.

18

pettiness of its aims." The deciphering of hieroglyphs, however, hadbegun to produce respect among scholars for a past that now seemedin danger of disappearing. The Egyptians themselves, who had longshown little regard for their heritage, rivaled the foreigners in theirwanton destruction. Not only did the Egyptians sack ancient sites for

items to sell to tourists, but, following an old practice, they quarried

monuments to obtain building blocks. (A quarter of the temple atDendera went into the construction of a saltpeter factory; the temple

at Armant surrendered its stones to a sugar-beet refinery.)

It was an interest in Coptic manuscripts that brought

Auguste Mariette, a French scholar, to Egypt in 1850. Anoutgoing man like Belzoni, Mariette soon gave up his

literar)' pursuits in favor of digging. In short order, he

gained the support of an influential fellow French-

man, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who a few years laterwould mastermind the construction ofthe Suez Ca-nal. Impressed by Mariette's concern over the fate of

Egypt's antiquities, de Lesseps went to the new ruler

ofthe country. Said Pasha, and urged him to appointhis young protege director of ancient monuments as

well as curator of a museum that would be built inCairo to house new finds. Said Pasha agreed, and at last

ancient Egypt had a guardian. Mariette tried to put a

halt to the looting and unauthorized excavations. "It be-^" hooves us," he wrote, "to preserve Egypt's monuments

with care. Five hundred years hence Egypt should still be

able to show to the scholars who shall visit her the samemonuments that we are now describing."

However lofty his goals, Mari-

ette himself was not above re-proach for the archaeologicalmethods he employed. He resort-ed to dynamite to dislodge what

did not come loose easily, and he

paid almost no heed to recording

the many details of his excava-,i v' tions, something archaeologists

today do with obsessive concernfor the valuable information that

can be garnered from even the

m

smallest scraps ofevidence. Mariette cleared more dian 300 tombs oftheir contents at Saqqara, the cemetery of the ancient cit\' of Mem-phis, and at nearby Giza, site of the Sphinx and the pyramids. Over

a lifetime, he dug up 15,000 small antiquities alone and employed asmany as 2,780 workers at his digs.

As Mariette and his successors all too quickly learned, therewas no easy way to stop the despoiling that had been going on in

Egypt since the time of the pharaohs themselves. Rare was the tombthat had not been tunneled into or otherwise entered by robbers,despite all precautions taken by the builders to protect these final

resting places. Their futile efforts employed everything from bolts tofalse passageways, shding trapdoors of stone, and overhead shaftsfilled with rubble that came crashing down on anyone trying to digthrough such a barrier. Grisly evidence of at least one robber caught

at his thievery showed up in a tomb. An archaeologist working therefound a pair ofsevered arms atop a shattered coffin, with the victim'sbones lying alongside. The scientist surmised that a robber had beenabout to lift the mummy from its casket when the tomb's ceilingcollapsed, cutting off the arms and at the same time killing him.

An unholy lot, the tomb robbers showed litde respect for thedead. One group thought nothing of turning the mummies of chil-dren into torches with which to light up their work. In tearing at thewrappings of the pharaohs and their queens in a search for gold, therobbers often ripped off heads, arms, and hands and tossed themaside. They were bold, to say the least. Some apparently worked un-hurriedly. One group even had time to set up a little joke, althoughit would be 3,000 years before anyone else could laugh at it: In aseries of burial shafts containing mummified sacred animals, archae-ologists came upon a perfecdy preserved monkey and dog that hadbeen unwrapped by robbers and propped up beside each other tomake it look as though the dog, with its tail curved alertly over itsback, were in animated conversation with the monkey.

The robbing of tombs was particularlv widespread duringhard times, as the evidence provided by court records shows. Onedocument from Thebes tells how "the tombs and sepulchers in whichrested the blessed ones of old" had all been broken into by thieves,who pulled the occupants from their cofFms and sarcophagi, threwthem "out upon the desert," and stole "their articles of householdfurniture, which had been given them, together with the gold, thesilver, and the ornaments which were in their coffins."

20

One of two wooden coffins in which themummy ofThutmose I was enclosed bearsadz marks left by modem tomb robbersas they hacked cff theoldfoil that cov-ered mttch of the carved surface. Appar-

ently as a result of rough handling byancient thieves who tore at the Pharaoh'sbody for hidden jewels, Thutmose lackedboth hands when found in 1881.

Manv thieves were caught, and se\'eral confessed. "We wentto rob the tombs in accordance with our regular habit," one robber

told the men who would judge him, "and we found the pyramid ofKing Sekemre-shedtawy. We took our copper tools and we brokeinto this p\Tamid through its innermost part. Then we broke throughthe rubble and found the pharaoh lying at the back of his burial place.

The noble mummy was completely bedecked with gold, and hiscofFms were adorned with gold and silver inside and out and inlaid

with all sorts of precious stones." Beside the king lay his queen, her

person similarh' adorned.

The thie\'es collected the items of \'alue belonging to both

king and queen and set fire to their coffins, a regular practice among

tomb robbers since the fire freed any gold foil still clinging to thewood after most of the precious metal had been stripped off. Thenthe men divided the gold, jewels, and amulets among themselves and

set off for Thebes where, presumably, they disposed of their loot.

What punishment this particular fellow received goes unnoted, butthe oath taken bv another suspect makes chillingly clear the outcome

ofa guilt)' verdict: "As Amen lives and as the Ruler lives, if I be foundto have had anything to do with any one of the thieves, may I be

mutilated in nose and ears and be placed on the stake."

Despite the severit^' of the punishments meted out by the courts,

tomb robbing was so rampant by the 21st Dynast\' (1070-945 BC)and the destruction to the royal mummies of the previous threedynasties viewed as so sacrilegious that the priests removed the bod-

ies of the kings and queens from their resting places and assembled

them in two well-hidden tombs. In several instances they made re-pairs to the bodies, reattaching arms and at least one head, that of Seti

1 (pa.e 106), and rewrapping some of the kings before labeling them

for identification. Not until the late 19th centurs' were these hiding

places foundat Deir el Bahri and in the cliffs of the Valley of theKingsand then exploited by modern tomb robbers.

The exact details of the discover)' of the first cache are some-

what vague and confused, but it appears that in 1871 a goatherd

named Ahmed abd er-Rassul went in search of a missing kid, only tofind that it had fallen down a deep hole. As he lowered himself intowhat he realized was in fact a hand-cut shaft, he saw a small doorway

carved in the rock. Shpping through it, he entered a veritable Alad-

din's cave of antiquities. Ahmed reported his discovery at once to his

21

son and two brothers, and together thev began a 10-year-long ex-ploitation of the tomb's treasures. But as the high-qualitv relics theyremoved began to appear on the marketa papyrus here, a scarabthere, many bearing illustrious namessuspicions about their ori-gins began to grow among the authorities.

When Mariette's successor, Gaston Maspero, heard that phar-aonic objects of considerable value were being sold to tourists inEgypt and to collectors in Europe, he knew at once that a spectaculartrove had been uncovered and that the plundering had to be stoppedifany valuable items were to remain for the Cairo Museum. Pursuingvarious leads to the thieves' identit}', Maspero had Ahmed and one ofhis brothers arrested. Although the prisoners were beaten on thesoles of their feet until their skin hung loose and were subjected toother tortures and humiliations, they refused to di\ailge their secret.

Ahmed, after his release, now believed that his family owedhim something for having endured torture and not revealed thelocation of the tomb. He was entided, he said, to half the remainingloot. The eldest sur\'iving sibling, Mohammed, decided the issue bydisclosing the source of the famine's income to the provincial gover-nor^who informed Emil Brugsch, Maspero's German assistant. Forthis, Mohammed was made foreman of tlie Cairo Museum's dig atThebes and given a reward of 500 pounds, a goodly sum that hegenerously shared with his brothers. "If he ser\'es the museum withthe same skill that he has used for so many years against it," Masperocommented, "we may hope for some magnificent discoveries."

Nothing could have prepared Brugsch for the extraordinaryexperience that awaited him when Mohammed led him to the cache.Descending the shaft on a rope, Brugsch squeezed through the three-foot-high entrance into a corridor. Immediately he came upon a largewhitewashed cofFm, bearing the name of a high priest. Beyond laythree more coffins. Then, after lighting a candle in order to see in thedarkness, he entered another hallway, strewn with small antiquities.He advanced to a short flight of steps, went down them, and con-fronted a chamber hollowed from the wall. Here stood more coffins,some of which bulked so large that, as one author has written, they"must have fitted through the tiny doorway ofthe tomb like corks ina botde." As he brought the flickering light of his candle to bear onthe inscriptions, Brugsch was startled by the names he readtheywere a roster of some of Eg\'pt's greatest pharaohs of the NewKingdom, including Seti I, as well as Seti's even more illustrious son,

22

A hole cut in the wrapped mummy ofThutmose 727 is the work of robbers whosoufht the king's heart scarab, an amulet

placed in the chest to ensure safe passage

to the underworld. Rewrapped in ancienttimes, the body was stiffened with oars

that had been included in the king's tombto facilitate his journey by solar boat tothe next world. The brush may have beenused by ancient priests to remove foot-prints before the tomb was sealed.

Ramses II, "the Great." "I took in the situation with a gasp," reported

Brugsch later, "and hurried to the open air lest I should be overcome

and the glorious prize, still unrevealed, be lost to science." He fearedthat the candle he gripped, along with those in the hands of his

companions, might ignite the dry, highly flammable wooden cofFms,should he or any of the others stumble or faint in the close air.

When he had pulled himself together, Brugsch explored thetomb more fully. At the end of the long corridor he came to acavernous room, 20 feet long with a 16-foot-high ceiling, where lay

the cofFms ofa Third Intermediate Period priest, Pinedjem II, and hisfamily. Lying all about in the dust were the remnants of their burial

goodsflower garlands, shabtis (small funerary figures), vases of

bronze, and objects of glass, a precious substance in Egyptian times.

With so rich a trove, Brugsch worried that the locals would

learn of the find and come to raid the tomb. He arranged for thecontents to be removed quickly, not even bothering to have the

cofifms and thousands of artifacts photographed in place, which

would have contributed gready to archaeologists' knowledge of the

site today. It took 300 workers two days to clear the tomb and asmany as a dozen men to lift some of the cofFms. The pharaohs, their

queens, and their treasures were loaded on a boat for Cairo.

As the vessel drifted out into the river, the Egyptians who hadhelped empty the tomb watched in silence from the opposite shore.Word had gotten down the Nile about the cargo, and as the boatpassed towns along the way, the inhabitants stood along the banks

"and made most frantic demonstrations," the women screaming andtearing their hair, the men firing rifles into the air. What Brugsch waswitnessing was public mourning, a funeral rite dating back to the

time of the pharaohs. The Egyptians were showing the respect due

so august a company ofthe dead, yet perhaps also bemoaning the loss

of a treasure that might have made some of them rich.The arrival ofthe mummies at Cairo produced a less respectful

response from the customs officer, whose duty it was to tax all goods

coming into the city. Unable to classify the remains, he wrote them

o& 2iS farseekh, dried fish. In the Cairo Museum the kings were sep-

arated from the entourage of40 bodies and put into display cases of

their own, while the lesser figures went into storage.

In time, Maspero organized the unwrapping of the royal

mummies, spaced at intervals. The first pharaoh to be examined was

Thutmose III. He had received rough treatment earUer at the hands

23

Dwarfed by the more-than-ten-feet-high sar-

cophagus ofQueen Ah-mose Nefertari, AhmedKamal wears the satis-fied expression ofsome-one who has participatedin a mafnificentfind

the 1881 discovery of 17mummies of kings andqueens of the 17th, 18th,

and 19th dynasties. Theentrance to the secret

cache where they hadlain for 2,800 years wasonly three feet wide, yet

somehow the priests whobrought the bodies herefrom their originalburial sites managed tosqueeze the sarcophagi

through the opening.

ofAhmed abd er-Rassul and his brodiers, who had cut through thebandages looking for jewels and amulets. When at last Thutmose layrevealed, the once-powerful king, who had led his armies victoriouslyagainst his enemies and turned Eg}'pt into a mighty empire, turned

out to be in a decrepit state. The pharaoh's head had been torn fromhis neck and his legs had been ripped from his torso. Remnants ofthe

resin-soaked wrappings still clung to his skin.

Sexeral years elapsed before Mas-pero had the stomach to try an-

other unwrapping. He chose Ramses II as his subject. Removinglayer upon layer of linen bandages, he and his assistants at last con-

fronted the pharaoh, who had lived some 90 years and left Egyptstrewn with monuments to his greatness. Maspero was staggered.

This king was perfectlv presersed, his skin an "earthy brown,

splotched with black," his arms crossed on his chest, his face serene,

his nose hawkish, slightly bent by the pressure that had been exerted

on it bv the bandages. The mouth, small yet thick-lipped, containeda black paste, which Maspero partially cut away with scissors to reveal

the aged pharaoh's front teeth, still a healthy white.

Maspero and his helpers went on with the unwrapping. Theychose next an anonymous mummy that turned out to be that ofQueen Ahmose Nefertari. "But," as the archaeologist noted, "thebodv was no sooner exposed to the outer air than it fell literally into

a state of putrefaction, dissoKing into black matter which gave out

an insupportable smell." Already the more humid air of Cairo wastaking its toll of the bodies that had lain inside their dry, airless, and

sterile tombs for centuries without decay.Hoping for better luck, the archaeologists turned to the mum-

m^' of Ramses III. First they unwound three layers of bandages, thencut through a canvas casing covered with a thick coat of a cemendike

substance. Underneath the\' found more layers of linen and canvas

before reaching a red winding sheet. At last the moment they had

been waiting for was at hand. But it proved "a great disappointment,

keenly felt by the operators," lamented Maspero. The king's face wascovered by a coating of bitumen, which concealed his features.

In time, other mummies from the cache were unwrapped.Amenhotep I lay just as his mourners had left him, garlanded inflowers. As the archaeologists poked among the withered blossoms,thev made a startling disco\'er)': An ancient wasp, drawn by the scent,

25

had been trapped in die petals, joining the pharaoh in eternal dark-ness as the lid was placed on the coffin.

Eugene Lefebure, who had just assumed his duties as directorofthe French Institute ofArchaeology, found himselfdeeply moved."Nearly all the mummies," he commented, "were covered with drygarlands and withered lotuses that had lasted intact through thethousands of years, and there was no better way to understand thesuspension of time and the halting of decay than to see these im-mortal flowers on the eternalized bodies." To him it "was the imageof an endless sleep."

No mummy reflected this image better than that of Seti I. Theking seemed only recendy to have taken his last breath, an eyewitnessobserved, with "a calm and gende smile" still playing over his lips;from under the lashes of his half-opened eyelids could be seen "anapparently moist and glistening line, the reflection from the whiteporcelain eyes set into the orbit at the time of burial."

Few are the individuals today who are not stirred or fascinated by thenotion of mummiesof human beings who managed to vanquishtime. Eons after being embalmed they remain intact, the ver)' em-bodiment of the Egyptian belief in an afi:erlife.

The ancient morticians had a godlike role to play in passingthe bodies ofthe pharaohs on to eternity. "O flesh ofthe king," readsone old lament, "do not decay, do not rot, do not smell unpleasant!"The embalmers, called upon to beat these odds, faced a difficult task,especially in Eg\'pt, where the warm climate hastened decay. In keep-ing with the gravity of their profession and the holy nature of theirsubjectswho were seen as being one with Osiris, god ofthe dead

they sometimes wore masks representing deities, particularly thejackal-headed Anubis, god of embalming, as they went about themore ceremonial aspects of their jobs.

A great deal is known about the mummification process,thanks in part to sur\'iving records, including a long description bythe fifdi-century-BC Greek historian Herodotus. Early in their his-tory' the Egyptians began preserving bodies for posterity. Corpseslong buried in the desert remained undecayed years afterward, thanksto dehydration in the hot sand; the uncorrupted bodies must haveinspired people to seek such immortality' for themselves. But as buri-als grew more elaborate and came to involve entombment for the richand powerful, new methods had to be devised to ensure that the flesh

26

T- '/"

Theface ofdeath, this pottery mask

with eyeholes under the chinrepresentsAnubis, proteaor cf deceased pharaohs.It was worn by the chiefembalmer, apriest, who is seen in the wall paintingbelow bending over a mummifiedbody that has been laid out on a lion-

headed-and-tailedfitnerary couch.

Hftfi^^'

The puffed cheeks of the mummy ofQueen Nodjmet reveal how embalmingtechniques couldo awry. The embalmershad packed them with a mixture offatand soda toffive the face a more lifelikeappearance, but as the mummy driedout, the tightened skin began to crack.

would not decay in the enclosed environment of a burial chamber.Continually improving their techniques, the embalmers raised theircraft almost to the level of an art.

There were several methods ofpreparing a corpse, but the onepracticed on the royal dead of the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC)was the most complicated and the best. Since there was no easy wayto keep the internal organs from rotting, they were removed, dried

out with salts, treated with oils and liquid resins, and then depositedin special containers known as canopic jars that accompanied themummy to the grave. (In some later burials the organs were bundledin linen and returned to the body.) More often than not, the brainwas extracted from the skull with aid of a long hook passed throughthe nostrils. The Egyptians put little value on this organ, regardingthe heart as the seat of wisdom and feeling, and believing that onlyit was weighed in the balance at judgment time. Thus the heart was

left in the chest cavit)', while the rest of the organs were pulled

'8^'- out through an incision made in the abdomen with a flint^^(H-^ ^., knife. Once emptied, the cavity was anointed with palm

wine and often partially filled with bitumen or resins

ili before being stitched shut. Then the eviscerated bodywas laid on a bed of natron, a dehydrating salt, andcovered with more of the crystals. Originally the salt

tended to destrov skin and loosen hair, but later,with fijrther refmements, both were saved.

After losing its fluids to the natron andarid air over a period of 40 days, the desiccatedbody was washed ceremoniously in Nile water toremove any salt and wrapped in Unen strips. Of-

ten resins and unguents were added direcdy to theskin and the bandages themselves as a kind of seal and

to create a pleasant odor. In the 21st Dynasty, sand,

mud, sawdust, Unen, and other substances were inserted underthe skin beforehand to flesh out the body, which in drying wouldshrink. By Ramses IIFs day, artificial eyeballs were regularly

inserted into sockets to restore the curvature ofthe eyeUds; some

of these were made of stone, but in at least one case, that ofRamses IV, small onions made a cheap and ready substitute.Great pains were taken to keep the nails from dropping off";

V^ fingers and toes were wrapped individually in bandages and,in the case ofthe pharaohs, often encased in gold sheaths. All

told, the mummification process took 70 davs.Throughout, the embahners were at

pains to collect and retain scraps ofthe body that rotherwise might have been discarded; thev e\'en %kept rags stained with body fluids. Like the internalorgans, these were buried near the mummy, in thebelief that the dead pharaoh would need e\er\' bit ofhimself in the afterlife. "Your flesh shall rise up for)'ou," runs one ancient text describing the resurrec-

tion awaiting the dead, "your bones shall fuse them-sehes for \'ou, vour members shall collect themsehesfor you, vour flesh shall reassemble for you!" As tombpaintings show, the Eg\'ptians imagined the legstwitching back to life, the torso swelling, the soul andthe shadow rushing to rejoin the body, and the once-more-ali\'e king turning to worship Re, the sun god,in gratitude for rescuing him from death.

As luck would ha\e it, in 1898, 17 yearsafter the disco\en' of the cache of ro\'al mummiesthat so stimulated imaginations, a second spectac-ular find was made by \''ictor Loret, \\ho onh' a shortwhile before had become director of the French Archaeological Ser\ice. Loret had been exploring a portion of the \^al-ley of the Kings and had opened and examined one tomb when hehappened on another. He climbed inside, his candle lighting the way,and came upon a horrific sight: a bod\' King on the model ofa funeralboat, "all black and hideous," with "its grimacing face turning towardme and looking at me, its long brown hair in sparse bunches aroundits head." Apparendy, robbers had entered the tomb in ancient times,when the oils and resins that had been poured on the mummy werestill yiscous. In their haste to get at the treasures the\' had tossed thebody aside; it had landed on the boat and stuck fast.

Penetrating deeper into the darkness, Loret and his colleaguesentered an immense pillared hall, the decorated burial chamber ofAmenhotep II. Toward the back ofthe room, they spotted the king'ssarcophagus. The Ud was open, "But was it empt\'?" Loret anxiouslyasked himself. He leaned oxer the edge and could hardl\' contain hisexcitement: "Victors! A dark coffin rested in the bottom, ha\'ing atits head a bunch of flowers and at its feet a wreath of lea\'es."

Thrilled at the thought of more disco\eries to come, Loret

Shod in the golden sandals ofa deadpharaoh, the feet ofTutanklmmen alsowear thegold casings that were placed oneach of his toes during the embalmingprocess. The boy-king's feet were in abetter state ofpreservation than much ofthe rest of his body, thegold havingprotected them from the oxidationbrought about by the unguents withwhich the mummy had been soaked.

29

Seen in an 1898 photograph taken afterthe discovery ofa second cache of royalmummies, the bodies ofQueen Tiy andtwo males show damage by tomb robbers.

moved on, taking pains not to crush any of the valuable objectsunderfoot. In another room, "An unusually strange sight met oureyes," he wrote. Three unwrapped bodies lay side by side. The firstseemed to be female; a thick veil had been draped across her foreheadand left eye. One arm had been severed and replaced at her side. Shestill wore some clothing, although the remnants were torn andragged. From her well-preser\'ed head, long black curly hair spilledonto the tomb's limestone floor. Her face, in Lorefs words, pos-sessed a "majestic gravit}'." The woman had been laid to rest with herintact arm bent across her chest in a pose that some archaeologiststhink was reserved for roval female burials. Even in death, she pro-jected a presence, but who might she be? Only in recent years has shebeen identified as Queen Tiy, mother of Akhenaten, known as theheretic kingand possibly the grandmother of Tutankhamen.

The second body was that of a pubescent boy whose head wasshaved except for a single lock oflong hair dangling from his temple,the customarv' haircut for young Eg}'ptian males. The third mummy,a womanwhich, because of its bald head, Loret mistook for amanhad half-closed eyes and wore an odd expression, produced bva linen pad inserted between the teeth. Loret likened the appearanceto that of a "playfiil cat with a piece of cloth."

Three more rooms remained to be explored; the entrance ofone was closed with limestone blocks, a few of which were missingat the top. Loret hoisted himself up. Though his candle barely shedlight on the other side, he could make out nine coffins crowded intoa confined space. A couple of days later he climbed over the wall toexamine them. Blowing away the dust, he was startled to read theinscriptionshere were the names of Ramses IV, Siptah, Seti II,Thutmose IV, and other equally illustrious pharaohs.

The room itself was too small for the coffins to be openedeasily, but Loret was a patient man; he restrained himselffrom goingafter the prize right away. In fact, he held off" returning to the roomuntil he had cleared the rest ofthe tomb, a painstaking task involvingthe removal and cataloging of more than 2,000 objects and frag-ments. When at last the limestone wall was taken down and thecoffins brought out, he approached them calmly

photographingthem one at a time, then measuring the mummies within and de-scribing them, before copving all the inscriptions.

Loret was one of a new breed of archaeologist. "Everythingwas well carried out, foreseen, organized," he could write with pride

30

about his work at the tomb. After almost a centur\' of careless ex-ploitation, Egypt's past was at last being treated with respectandwith an eve to ftiture study. At the forefront of this scientific archae-ology' were two rivals, Flinders Petrie, an Englishman, and GeorgeReisner, an American, both ofwhom operated in Eg\'pt in the latterpart ofthe 19th centun' and the early decades ofthe 20th. They werestrong-minded, and though their methods and techniques differed,their goals were alike. They believed that an excavation should becarried out with minute attention to detail, con\'inced that e\'er\'thingthev unco\ered had some significance.

Of the two, Reisner was the more compulsive, sinking in theminutiae of his digs until he found it almost impossible to sortthrough the piles of information and publish readable papers de-scribing his finds. But he became famous for his meticulous excava-tions around the Giza pyramids, practically his life's work. He wonthe affection of man\' and was fondly called Papa George b\' hisadmirers and associates.

Petrie, the more colorful, was rough-hewn, bearded, a char-acter with ''a constant feverish speed of speech" and a firm belief inthe Tightness of his own opinions. Passionate about the way anexcavation should be conducted, he cared about little else, includinghis appearance. He thought nothing, for instance, of shedding hisclothes during the heat ofsummer and working in his undershirt andunderpants. If these were red, that was all the better because in his\'iew "they kept the tourist at baN'" b\' making him "too queer forinspection!" And he did not mind getting dirt}'; indeed, he wasgreatly admired bv his workers as the one European who got as dirt}'as they did on the job. He often took up his abode in tombs and feltno trepidation about sleeping with mummies stored under his bed.

A man of enormous integrit\', Petrie did not grow rich fromthe treasures he unearthed; after the Cairo Museum took its share ofthe finds, he saw that the remainder were properly distributed toother museums. Lacking wealth, he had to watch his pennies, and themoney saved he spent on his excavations. Generally, he allowedhimself only a "morning and e\'ening feed" and at night ate directlyfrom cans of food that lined his worktable, e\en those that had beenleft open in the heat all day. "Thoughts of digestion must be setaside," commented a visitor as he contemplated the archaeologist'shospitalit}'. Indeed, wrote another, Petrie served "a table so excru-ciatingly bad that only persons of iron constitution could survive it."

A'^WICKEDKIND OFDRUGGE"

Mummies were put to strange usein Europe between the 15th and18th centuries. Ground into pow-der, they served as the basis of acure-all that was sprinkled onwounds and even taken internally.

This medicinal fad arose whena black, tarr\' substance importedfrom the Near East called mumiawas seen to benefit patients suffer-

ing from a variet}' of complaints.But when demand for mumia be-gan to outpace supply, a substitute

32

had to be found. Pulverized, resin-soaked mummies produced asimilar-looking product that oneauthority considered "very medi-cineable," and soon it was beingused widely.

Shaking his head over thevogue, the 17th-century doctorand writer. Sir Thomas Browne,was outraged: "Shall we be curedby cannibal mixtures?" he asked."Surely such diet is dismal vampir-ism." But no matter how muchsome railed against it, sales of this'Svicked kind ofdrugge" contin-ued brisk until a story circulatedthat suppliers were using bodies ofthe recently dead, rather thanthose of ancient Egyptians.

Petrie never pulled his punches when evaluating his fellow^archaeologists. He openly criticized no less a figure than Mariette forhaving "most rascally blasted to pieces all the fallen stones of a temple

that might better have been Ufted by means of a tackle." He railedover "the barbaric sort of regard" that the authorities showed formonuments ofthe past. "Nothing," he wrote, "seems to be done withany uniform and regular plan, work is begun and left unfinished; noregard is paid to fiiture requirements ofexploration. It is sickening to

see the rate at which ever\'thing is being destroyed." In particular,Petrie could not abide the Abbe Amelineau, a French archaeologist-priest who had worked for five years at the royal tombs of Abydos,a cult center devoted to Osiris, yet had failed to keep any records ofwhere his finds had turned up. It infiariated Petrie that this man couldboast "that he had reduced to chips the pieces of stone vases whichhe did not care to remove, and burnt up the remains ofthe woodworkof the First Dynasty in his kitchen." He likened such defilers to "theblackbird who used to pick off" all the finest bunch of currants, eatone, and leave the rest to rot." And to hammer home his point, hetook the thousands of chips that Amelineau had left behind andreassembled them to obtain data about the age of the site.

Petrie spent 45 years digging in Egypt, aided by an uncanny

sense ofwhere a discovery might be made. Almost every new seasonfound him at another site, but he was motivated less by a yearning forthe big find than by a thirst for information. For him, shards of

pottery, mud walls, splintered timbers, corroded weapons, and prim-itive tools all had a story to tell. He carefully noted where these turnedup and in what context, collating his finds and managing each yearto publish the results, thus making available to the growing body ofEgyptologists the world over all the latest data from the field.

Petrie and Reisner are considered the fathers of the British

and American schools of archaeology; their methods revolutionizedthe profession and influenced people working in countries well be-yond Egypt. It was said of Petrieand the same could be said ofReisnerthat "he found archaeology in Egypt a treasure hunt; he left

it a science." Indeed, Petrie and Reisner made possible the kind ofpainstaking detective work that has enabled Egyptologists followingin their footsteps to assemble an ever more complete picture of life in

ancient Egypt. Thanks to the efforts of such individuals, the Egyp-

tians ofold are now better known to us than many other peoples whomore lately have come and gone on the world stage.

^^

33

HOME OF THE GIANTSEgv'pt

has long cast a spell over those with thegood fortune to behold its man-made won-ders. Napoleon, about to send his invading

army against Egypt's Turkish oppressors, caughtsight of the world's most famous monuments onthe horizon and declared, "Soldiers! From the sum-mit of yonder pyramids 40 centuries look downupon you." The troops could only have been in-spired by the scene as they set out to make historyof their own. Although the general's 1798 militaryexpedition ended up a fiasco, a victory of sorts didemerge from the misguided effortthe triumph ofthe ancient Egyptians over people's imaginations.The huge team of 167 savantsscientists, artists,

and other "wise men"that Napoleon had takenalong with his 34,000 troops proved astonishinglysuccessfiil at their task ofmaking the first systematicstudies of the imposing ruins. Out of their effortscame the 24-volume Description tie I'Egypte that didmore than any other work to inflame 19th-centuryEuropeans and Americans with the urge to see,to learn, to penetrate the enigma of this mysteri-ous civilization that had flourished an almost-incomprehensible 4,000 and more years earlier.

Soon all manner ofpeople were invading Egypt:artists, antiquarians, scholars. The famous sitesthese early visitors sawmost ofwhich had not yetbeen excavated by archaeologistslooked very dif-ferent from today. Millennia of shifting sands hadhalf buried the huge pillars and statues. Indeed,some tourists scrambling around the ancient col-umns carved their names on the capitals, which,thanks to the massive dunes, often lay within easyreach of their penknives.The paintings and writings of some of the most

notable travelers of the daywhich serve as thebasis for this essaymirror not just the marvelsthese intrepid individuals encountered almost everystep of the way, but the awe they felt in rediscov-ering a lost civilization.

Carried away by enthusiasm, Englishartist David Roberts rearranged the

Sphinx and the pyramids in this 1840slithograph to portray them against asunset and an advancing sandstorm.

Actually, the Sphinxfates east.

:-m

IC

mmmm

I'-w.

JLJ ,!LJ

hese half-buried

pylons, those [iant heads rising

inihastly resurrection before the

gates of the Temple, were magnificent

still. But it was as the splendid pro-

logue to a poem of which only garbled

fragments remain. Beyond that

entrance lay a smoky, filthy, intricate

labyrinth oflanes and passages.

AMELIA B. EDWARDSA Thousand Miles up the Nile, 1888

This watercolor (^ thegreat temple atLuxor by Fratifois Charles Cecile, one

ofNapoleon's savants, shows a mina-ret risingjrom a mosque within themonument's precincts, as well as dove-

cotes and sand partially obscuring thedecorated pylons outside. In 1831 theobelisk on the riglrt was removed andshipped to Paris, where it stands todayin the Place de la Concorde.

r-m-m

.he Colossi don't

look at all colossal; on the

contrary they are quite in keeping

with everything about them, as ifthey

were the natural size ofman,

and we were dwarfs, not theygiants.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALELettersfrom E^ypt:A Journey on the Nile, 1849-1850

The 65-fbot-tall Colossi ofMemnon,located between Luxor and Kamak,appear to float on the annual Nile

flood in a lithograph by Roberts. Rep-

resenting Amenhotep m, they oncesat before the Pharaoh's long-vanished

temple. Awe-struck Greek and Romantravelers regularly inscribed tributes

on the monuments.

"W

The Outer Court of the Temple ofEdfou, painted in 1840 by Roberts,records the pillars still unexcavated,

with Egyptians living in the porticoesand conversing in the courtyard.Comparatively young, Edfit was

begun in 237BC and is consideredthe most beautiful cfEgypt's temples.

. he enormous

capitals seem to risefrom the sand andspread out like aflower without a

stem. The templets proportions put inmind agiant buried up to hiswaist, overwhelming man^spuny stat-

ure with his head and shoulders.

JEAN-JACQUESAMPERETravels in Egypt and Nubia, 1868

F-!r>f^v^--'';

Roberts's 1839 Excavation of Templesat Abu Simbel depicts a team cfexca-vators trudging towurd the 66-foot-tall motMliths carved in the diffabove

the Nile. Until it was cleared away,

a vast sandslide blocked entrances to

the two temples built by Ramses IIfar

up the river as a monument to him-

selfand his favorite wife, Ntfertari.

w o

IN THESHADOWOF THE

PYRAMIDS

With confidentstride, King Djoserof the Third DyfMS-tybuilder of theworld's first pyra-

midruns a ritualrace in a relief

carved on the wall

ofa tiled cham-berforming partcfhis sprawlingfunerary monu-ment at Saqqara.

Q^le sultry summer's dav in1867, Mark Twain, then a voung^ewspaper reporter, set out fromCairo on a donkey to xisit the sandy desert plateau of Giza some fivemiles to the west, near the ruins of the ancient capital of Memphis.His goal: to climb one of Giza's three famous pyramids and toexamine the lion-bodied Sphinx.

Twain's part\' crossed two arms ofthe muddy and turbid Nilein a dhow, a small Eg\'ptian boat with a lateen sail, and walked acrossthe desert to the base ofthe Great Pyramid. The young American feltoverpowered by its height; it appeared, he said, "to pierce the skies."With the aid of se\'eral muscular Arab guides, and with no smallamount of trepidation, he and his colleagues began to climb thepyramid's rough exterior.

When Twain reached the top, 450 feet in the air, he sat downto admire the stunning yiew. As he later described it in The InnocentsAbroad: "On the one hand, a mighty sea of yellow sand stretchedaway toward the ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of \'egeta-tion, its solitude uncheered b\' any forms of creature life. On theother, the Eden of Eg^^pt was spread below usa broad green floor,clo\'en by the sinuous ri\'er, dotted with \'illages, its yast distancesmeasured and marked by the diminishing stature ofreceding clustersof palms. It lay asleep in an enchanted atmosphere. There was

45

no sound, no motion. Away toward the horizon a dozen shapelypyramids watched over ruined Memphis; and at our feet the blandimpassable Sphinx looked out upon the picture from her throne inthe sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like fullfifty lagging centuries ago."

The expanse of land Mark Twain viewed from atop the GreatPyramid encompasses part of one of the world's most extensive andfascinating strings of archaeological sites. Within this area of Egypt,which stretches from the tiny village ofAbu Roash just northwest ofGiza to the Faiyum Oasis some 55 miles to the south, archaeologistshave uncovered the remains ofhuge ancient necropolises, or cities ofthe dead, where the Egyptians laid to rest many of their kings andnobles in large and elaborate tombs. The most famous of these mon-uments are the pyramids, more than 90 in all, although most are nowin such a ruined state that their original shape is barely recognizable.

The best-preserved pyramids rise from the sands ofGiza and from thenearby necropolises of Saqqara, Dahshur, and Meidum. Ironically,these are also the oldest, built by the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom,a period of about 500 years, from roughly 2575 BC to 2134 BC.

Few monuments of lost civilizations have evoked as muchmystery and inspired as much awe as have Egypt's Old Kingdompyramids. "Man fears time and time fears the pyramids," runs anArab proverb. They were considered ancient wonders even whilepharaohs still ruled over Egypt. By the time of the New Kingdom(1550-1070 BC), Egyptians visited Giza and other sites to pay theirrespects to long-dead kings and to wonder at the antiquity of thegiant tombs. As evidence of their visits, several early Egyptian tour-ists sketched graffiti on the stone surfaces of the pyramids and theiradjacent temples. One tourist, who signed his name "Ahmose, son ofIptah," visited the Step Pyramid of Saqqara about 1600 BC, when itwas already a thousand years old, and wrote reverentially that themonument looked "as though heaven were within it." Some 400years later, another tourist, "Hednakht, son ofTjenro and Tewosret,"noted how he had enjoyed a stroll around the Step Pyramid with hisbrother, and asked the gods to grant him "a hill lifetime in servingyour good pleasure" and "a goodly burial afi:er a happy old age."

No one in ancient Egypt took more interest in the pyramidsand their history than Crown Prince Kaemwaset, the fourth son ofRamses II, one ofEgypt's most famous and longest-governing phar-aohs. By Ramses's reign (1290-1224 BC), the Old Kingdom pyra-

46

.i3!B$i>'?^*-55S2*

DesiffTter ofKing Djoser's Step Pyramid(above, far right), Imhotep (left) iftnemorialized in bronze. Coming morethan 4,000 years after its construction,the English archaeologist WalterEmeryseen here trailed by a chair-bearingflunkywould scour the sandsofSaqqara, site of the pyramid, search-ing unsuccessfully for the still-hiddenresting place of the architea, whosefamerivals that ofhis powerful patron.

mids had existed for 13 centuries.Weathered on the outside by desertwinds and sand and ravaged on theinside by tomb robbers, the pyra-mids and their associated templeshad fallen into ruinous neglect.With his father's permission. PrinceKaemwaset set about to restore the

pyramids and other Old Kingdomtombs to at least some of theirformer glory. For these efforts,Kaemwaset is often referred to to-

' '

'J day as the world's first Egyptologist

,; ^ - and archaeologist.1: V rVf ; .iy-^i o. ' An apparently inquisitive

;^i-;'i'7.-2-/-r."-*

and introspective man who chosepriesthood over a military' career,

Kaemwaset spent long hours, or so

later accounts claim, wandering.

- among Old Kingdom ruins at Giza.

.

_

-'

.

1" ; - ." -^-.., ":.-] and elsewhere, investigating ancient

.

" '-'-'

'""'' '"'' " -'"

-"I tombs and temples and puzzling

over the writings on their walls. After inspecting a tomb, he would

order his workmen to engrave on its face a hieroglyphic inscriptionthat identified the king for whom it was builtcreating the fore-runner ofthe modern museum label. Kaemwaset's interest in the pasteventually led him to the excavation, as well as the restoration, ofseveral historic sites. He uncovered a variety of artifacts, which he

also inscribed with identifying labels. Among his finds was a statueof Kawab, a son of King Khufu, the pharaoh for whom the GreatPyramid at Giza was built. In the inscription he had carved on it,

Kaemwaset explained that his work at the old tombs was motivated

by his "love for the ancient days" and was undertaken because of"the

perfection of all that his ancestors achieved." The prince apparendy

admired the statue enough to take it home to Memphis, where afragment of the original was dug up again by the British archaeol-

ogist James Edward Quibell in 1908some 3,200 years later.The stor\' of the pyramidsand of the necropolises from

which they rosebegins in Memphis, the old administrative capital

located on the west bank of the Nile, 20 miles upstream from Cairo.

47

Popular tradition holds that Memphis was founded around 2900 BCby Mencs, a powerfiil chieftain who became Eg\'pt's first king bysuccessftillv uniting the many loosely connected agricultural townsand villages along the Nile into a single realm. Its inhabitants orig-

inally called the cm' Incb-hedj, "White Wall"

probably because of

the fortresslike whitewashed mud-brick walls that enclosed the king'spalace. Memphis e\'entually became a vast metropolis by ancientstandards. The cit\' ran about eight miles from north to south andfour miles from east to west, and ser\'ed as an important political,commercial, and religious center for more than three millennia. Fromits busy whar\'cs, ships sailed down the Nile to the east coast of theMediterranean and on to Greece and the Aegean Islands. At the peakof Memphis's power, as many as 50,000 people may have lived andworked there, probably crowded together on narrow streets in two-and three-story mud-brick houses and shops. Many were fine crafts-men, producing a wide variet\' ofgoods: fiirniture with ornate inlays,jewelry made of gold and semiprecious gems, chariots, shields,spears, and other weapons. Most of the people of Memphis, how-ever, worked in nearby fields on the Nile flood plain, raising cattle,sheep, and goats, and cultivating crops of grain and flax.

M emphis remained a prosper-.ous cit\' until the seventh cen-tury AD, when the Arabs conquered Eg\'pt and quarried stone fromMemphis's buildings to constmct the new capital of Cairo. Today,whatever may remain of ancient Memphis lies buried under modernvillages and tons of Nile silt, making it difficult and expensive forarchaeologists to examine. Only a small portion ofthe once-great cityhas been excavated to date, and no traces of its original palace or otherearly buildings have ever been found.

Almost all of what is known about Old Kingdom life inMemphisand in Egyptcomes not from the city's living quartersbut from its cemeteries. The people of Memphis built their firstnecropolis on a steep desert escarpment just west of the cit\'. Theycalled it Saqqara, a name derived from that of the Egy^ptian funerarygod, Sokar, and purposely placed it west of their city because theybelieved another deirv, the sun god. Re, started his nightly journeyto the underworld from the western skies. Archaeologists have un-covered tombs of nearly all eras of Egyptian history at Saqqara,although most date from the Old Kingdom or beforea period of

48

Dating back to the Sixth Dynasty, thispleated tunicone of the earliest pieces ofintact clothing everfoundsurvived thepassing millennia in a tomb nearSaqqara. The narrow horizontal pleatswere folded while the cloth, probably

starched, was still wet. A true classic,the tunic's design was popular withEgyptiansfrom the Old Kingdmnto the New, a period of 1,500 years.

^\-^

about 1,000 years, from roughly 3 100 BC to 2 134 BC.Burials continued at Saqqara until the Christian era,

when the necropolis coxered an area more than three anda half miles long and almost a mile wide.

The earh' tombs at Saqqara were rectangular mud-brick structures with flat roofs and slighdv sloping sides.Each tomb contained se\'eral underground rooms, includ-ing a central rock-hewn burial chamber where the body ofthe deceased rested, together with weapons, toiletr)'items, and e\'en musical instruments and games. Theaboveground portion of the tomb featured smaller stor-age compartments stocked with food, furniture, tools,

wine, and clothing, all the supplies considered necessar\'

for the afterlife of the tomb owner s ka, or spirit. Egyp-tians today call these tombs mastabas, an Arabic wordmeaning "benches," because the\' resemble, on a muchlarger scale, the rectangular mud- brick benches still com-monly seen outside \'illage homes and shops in Eg\'pt.

As time went on, the mastabas at Saqqara grew

larger and more elaborateup to 12 feet in height, with

numerous chambers. It became customar\' to add a chapelroom on the eastern side ofthe mastaba where relatixes of

the deceasedor ka priests endowed by the deceased'sestatecould bring daily offerings of food and drink. Onspecial festi\al days, the descendants of those buried at

Saqqara would gather at the great cemeter\' to carr\' out the offeringrites themsehes and celebrate with a family feast.

Then, around 2630 BC, during the reign of King Djoser ofthe Third Dynasr\', the Saqqara necropolis underwent a profound

transformation. By this time the Egyptian kings had gained consid-

erable wealth and absolute authority' o\er their subjects, who con-sidered them in some wa\'s to be Ii\'ing gods. And gods, of course,deserved grand tombs to ensure continuance of their exalted exist-

ence in the afterlife. To differentiate his tomb from those ofthe past,Djoser ordered that it be built of stone rather than of mud bricks, areyolutionar\' idea at the time. Although stone had lined the floors

of seyeral earlier tombs, it had not \'et been used to construct an en-

tire Eg\'ptian building.

Djoser placed the design and construction of his tomb in themore-than-capable hands of his \izier, or chief counselor, a brilliant

49

and multitalented man named Imhotep. Changing his mind sixdifferent times during the course of the tomb's construction, Im-

hotep finally settled on a design that resembled six mastabas ofdiminishing size, one stacked on top of another. The finished mon-ument has become known as the Step Pyramid, a name that mayreflect its original spiritual purposea staircase for the king to as-

cend to the heavens after death.Unparalleled at the time in size or design, the Step Pyramid

measured 389 by 462 feet at its base and rose to a height of204 feet.Yet the pyramid itself made up only part of the massive tomb.Imhotep built a maze of shafi:s, passageways, galleries, and cham-bers under the pyramid, and various mortuar\' buildings, chapels,and courts outside it that were for rituals and ceremonies connectedwith the king's afterlife. Then Imhotep encircled the entire complexwith a huge stone wall, a mile long and 33 feet high, with onetrue entry'way and 13 false ones. The result was a tomb complextruly fit for a god-king.

For this astounding architectural and engineering accom-plishment, as well as for his skills as a scribe and wise counselor tothe king, Imhotep received the adulation of his countr^'men formore than a thousand years and became a minor deity. Templeswere raised in his memory centuries after his death, and he becamemore famous than the king he set out to immortalize. Yet, sur-prisinglv, the Egyptians who revered Imhotep left no clues as to thelocation of his tomb. During the 1950s, the British archaeologistWalter Emery started a search for the tomb at Saqqara but failedto find it. Emery did uncover the tombs of other noblemen, in-cluding one named Hetepka, who held the curious title of"keeperof the diadem and inspector of the king's wigmakers."

Much ofwhat is known today about the Step Pyramid comesfrom the work of another Egyptologist, a Frenchman, Jean-Philippe Lauer. In 1926, the British archaeologist Cecil Firth hired

Lauer, who at 24 was an architecture student in Paris, to assist himwith the first systematic excavation of the Step Pyramid. Lauer

arrived in EgN^pt for a short trial periodand stayed for more than50 vears. "As soon as I studied this monument," he told an inter-

\iewcr in 1 99 1, "I realized its great importancethe first building inthe world to be built of cut stone in lexel courses and designed byImhotep, the Michelangelo of that epoch. I decided then to devote

m\' life to this work."

Startingly realistic, these statues

intended to embody the spirits of the sit-ters, Fourth Dynasty Nofret and her hus-

band Prince Rhahoptep, son ofKin^Snefrucaused workers opening the sub-jects' tomb to flee at sight of them.

Lauer recalled with special fondness his early days atSaqqara, when he and Firth first explored many of the StepPyramid's inner chambers. Following passageways planned byImhotep, the two men slowly worked their way through the hugecomplex. Lauer remembered the wonder and respect with whichhe entered one of the chambers, which had been hidden behinda walled door. "We made a hole in this door and Firth, who wasrather corpulent, asked me to enter and describe what was in-side," he later wrote. "With feelings of great awe, I entered thissubterranean gallery which no one had set foot in since it wasrobbed some 4,000 years ago. I made my way by the light of acandle, and found myself in an oblong room lined with finelydressed and carefijlly smoothed limestone. It led northward intoother rooms closed offwith more blocks of dressed stone, someof which were decorated with large stars in low relief"

Although the chambers had been robbed long ago oftheirtreasures, Lauer encountered "one surprise aft:er another" on thewalls, including beautifiilly carved stone reliefs showing KingDjoser presiding over religious ceremonies and running a sym-bolic footrace. Some years later, while exploring the deepestunderground galleries of the Step Pyramid complex, Lauercame across the bones of an eight-year-old child and about40,000 vases, bowls, and dishes made of alabaster, quartz,marble, dolomite, and other valuable stone. The vessels datefrom before Djoser's reign. Lauer believes that they came from .tombs violated by robbers and that Djoser had them placedthere out of respect for the dead to whom they once belongedand to restore them to their rightfiil owners in the aft:erlife.

Not surprisingly, the kings who immediately succeededDjoser also wanted giant staircases on which to climb to heav-en, and thus ordered their own step pyramids to be built. AHof the early efforts at erecting another step pyramid provedunsuccessful, however, due either to faulty construction or tothe untimely death of the king for whom the tomb was intend-ed. Not until some 50 years after Djoser's death did the Egyp-tians finish another large pyramid, an eight-step colossus onthe sands of Meidum, a new necropolis located about 40miles south of Memphis and Saqqara.

The Meidum pyramid would mark a dramatic changein pyramid design, for workmen later packed the tomb's

51

huge steps with rough-cut stones to create a sloping edge, then

encased the entire structure with limestone to give it the smooth,

continuous sides of a perfect pyramid. Why the Egyptians aban-doned the stepped pyramid for a true one is unclear; some scholars

believe it had to do with the growing importance of the sun cult inEgypt. Worshipers ofRe may have chosen the new design because it

emulates the triangular pattern that the sun's rays make when shiningdown on earth from a break in the clouds. Unfortunately, looterswere to make off with the valuable stones from the outer shell,

exposing earlier stages of construction. But the huge stone core

survived the vandalism, and it towers today strikingly above the

rubble that was once its shell.

The Meidum pyramid may have been built for King Huni, thelast ruler ofthe Third Dynasty. Many Egyptologists, however, creditSnefru, the first ruler of the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2551 BC), withordering the facing of the pyramidand thus with creating the first

true pyramid. Snefru, a king beloved by his subjects and long re-

membered for his benevolent, gentle disposition, went on to buildtwo more true pyramidsthe Bent Pyramid, so named because itangles in to a gentler slope about halfway up, and the Red Pyramid,famous for its reddish hmestone. The crooked slope of the BentPyramid may reflect the architect's attempt to solve problems caused

by an initial gradient that was too steep for the massive blocks of

stonebut it may also have made the finished monument seem lessthan perfect in the eyes ofthe monarch, especially as his eternal home.

Whatever the reason, Snefru abandoned it in favor of the Red Pyr-amid. He built both pyramids at Dahshur, a necropolis located abouthalfway between Saqqara and Meidum. Rising to heights of approx-imately 340 feet, the tombs easily surpassed Djoser's Step Pyramid

and became Egypt's largest structures.But not for long. Snefru's son, Khufu (Cheops), apparendy

wanting to outdo the massive tombs built by his father, ordered the

construction of a pyramid of even greater dimensions at the Giza

necropolis, a burial ground north of Memphis with tombs of thenobilitN' dating back to at least the First Dynasty. Khufu was a tyrant,by all accounts as despotic as his father was benevolent. According to

legend, he shut down temples during his reign so that his subjectswould focus all their efforts on the building of his pyramid.

As work on the monument advanced, either Khufii or hisarchitect changed his mind, shifiiing the location of the royal burial

52

A ISO-foot-high central core surroundedby rubble is all that remains ofthe Meidum pyramid, erected around2600 BC. A precursor of the better-known Giza pyramids, the monumentwas once sheathed in limestone to^ive

it smooth, sloping sides.

chamber from under the pyramid to