INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE ANCIENT EGYPT

How the Pyramids Were Built

The building of the pyramids was one of the greatest achievements in human history. The pyramids are a monument not only to the pharaohs’ power but also to the genius of the architects, engineers, and government officials who planned and built them. First a site had to be selected. It had to be on the west side of the Nile, above flood level. It had to be near the water, because boats would be bringing in the blocks needed for building. The stone came from various places, but the hard granite that surrounded the interior chambers of the pyramid came from 500 miles up the river in Aswan. There, workers in a quarry, a place where stone is “mined” from the earth, spent most of the year cutting giant blocks of granite. Once the Nile flooded in the summer, they loaded the blocks onto boats, or barges, and floated them downriver to the building sites. When the barge arrived, the blocks had to be unloaded. Most of these blocks weighed about 2.5 tons, or 5,000 pounds (2.27 metric tons, or 2,270 kilograms), so it was not easy to get them from the shore to the top of a pyramid. Workers, usually in team of thirty men, pulled the blocks out onto giant sleds atop rows of logs. With ropes attached to the sleds, they would pull the blocks up long temporary ramps made of mud and brick, which were built on a gentle slope to make it easier to drag stones up them. The ramps were also wide, not only so that there would be plenty of room for the sleds, but also so that there would always be a part of the ramp that could be closed off while it was being raised. The ramp, of course, had to rise with the pyramid.  Among the pyramid builders, the workers who dragged the stones up the ramps were at the lowest social level, but they were not slaves. Some of them left behind graffiti (pronounced grah-FEE-tee) or wall writings, that showed how much they felt like an essential part of the project—as indeed they were. Blocks used in Sneferu’s Medium Pyramid include inscriptions celebrating the various work gangs: “Enduring Gang,” says one inscription, and another celebrates the “Vigorous Gang.”
In a class above these common laborers were the skilled workers, especially masons (a type of craftsman who builds with stone). Above the masons were the planners and their assistants, the scribes. The scribes recorded figures for the amount of stone used in a given period of time and helped keep track of the tools and the teams to which they were assigned. Among the scribes’ writings that have survived is a written excuse for a worker who “called in sick.” The scribes also took note of the intricate calculations taken by the builders. It was not enough to plan the pyramid at the beginning, and go from there: the builders had to constantly measure angles and lengths to make sure that they were correct. Their calculations were amazingly sophisticated. One can see how careful they were by measuring the Great Pyramid, the longest side of which is only about eight inches longer than the shortest side. Plenty of houses in America do not have measurements as nearly perfect as these! The precision of the measurements is particularly impressive in light of the Egyptians’ lack of technological sophistication in other areas. For instance, at the time of the Old Kingdom, they had not yet entered the Bronze Age. They may not have even known about the wheel. Furthermore, Egyptian art of the time suggests that they did not have a very well-developed sense of space.
Given these circumstances as well as the suitability of the pyramids’ placement for astronomical observations (that is, observation of the stars), some people have speculated that beings from another planet built the pyramids of Egypt, along with those of Mexico. Such claims are hard to prove or disprove, given the archaeological evidence; less questionable is the opinion that the Great Pyramids are some of the most amazing structures on earth.

How the Egyptians Saw the World

Usually, but not always, one can learn a great deal about a civilization’s level of sophistication by observing its visual arts. For most of human history, until the development of the camera in the mid-1800s, drawing and other forms of visual art, such as painting and sculpture, were the primary means for recording the appearances of people and things. As societies developed, likewise their artists’ ability to”see” the world developed, much as a child goes from drawing scribbles to stick figures to more detailed representations of human figures. It is surprising, then, that the Old Kingdom society that produced the pyramids could also have produced the visual arts it did. The pyramids were built to a degree of exactness that still baffles scientists. Their design indicates that the people who created them had a great understanding of spatial relationships. The phrase spatial relationships refers to the space between and within objects, concepts that are also closely related to the idea of proportion. Proportion describes the size of one thing in relation to something else: if someone drew a picture of a man whose head was twice as big as his body, one would say the picture was “out of proportion.” Egyptian visual art of the Old Kingdom, however, shows little sense of spatial relationships, proportion, or perspective, which helps artists to represent faraway objects as being smaller than objects close by. The Egyptians did not know how to do this, so if they wanted to show that something was farther away, they simply put it on top of the thing that was closer. In a crowd scene, for instance, they would show the first row of men standing side by side, then the next row above them, and so on. Along with this lack of perspective, there was a lack of depth in early Egyptian artwork. Everything seemed to be flat, as though the people in the pictures were crammed up against a sheet of glass.
Their bodies were turned away from the viewer in strange, unnatural ways, with their arms and legs stretched sideways, while their eyes (which always looked more or less the same) faced outward. (The title of a hit song from the 1980s, “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles, played on the weird stance of figures in Egyptian artwork.). Egyptian artists also showed the pharaoh much larger than other men, as though he were twelve feet tall. This was not a problem with proportion: the artists simply wanted to point out that he was more important than others. By the time of the New Kingdom, however, much had changed in both society and art. Thanks to the influence of other cultures, Egyptian art had become considerably more realistic.
Also, the pharaoh’s status had become more human; for example, artists during the reign of Akhenaton depicted their king with a fat stomach and skinny legs. Still, sculpture continued to be more advanced than drawing or painting. Sculptors work in three dimensions— length, width, and depth—whereas painting or drawing involves only length and width. Though two-dimensional art improved greatly, the Egyptians still had a hard time figuring out how to translate three-dimensional figures to a flat surface. By contrast, the bust (a sculpture of a head) of Akhenaton’s wife Queen Nefertiti represents some of the most advanced and realistic artwork of the ancient world. With the end of Akhenaton’s reign in 1336 B.C. came a widespread reaction to the reforms he had brought. Part of the reaction was manifested in a return to more traditional styles of artwork, including a less realistic representation of the human figure.

Whatever Happened to the Treasures of Egypt?

One of the saddest aspects of Egypt’s legacy is that because of greed, ignorance, or simple neglect, the world has lost a great deal of the archaeological riches from that great civilization. Architects of the earliest pyramids were aware that robbers would try to steal the gold and other treasures stored with the pharaoh’s tombs. For that reason, they built in elaborate devices, including blind passageways, trap doors, and air shafts filled with sand, to stop robbers from breaking in. In spite of these efforts, every known pyramid had been looted by 1000 B.C. In many cases the theft was an “inside job” by the very priests whose responsibility it was to protect the tombs. These corrupt priests moved a number of the treasures to another location, supposedly for safekeeping but in fact to loot the gold. Perhaps if the gold items had been preserved intact, they might have later resurfaced, but in order to avoid detection, the robbers usually melted down the treasures they stole. Therefore the world will probably never know what gorgeous objects were buried with pharaohs such as Cheops and Khafre. Ancient Egyptian law set extremely harsh penalties for grave-robbing. There were tales of a curse over those who disturbed the eternal sleep of the pharaohs. Thus when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen, it was said that he brought a curse on himself. Several strange things did happen, including the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon, who financed Carter’s expedition. But Carter himself lived to be 65 years old, so it would be hard to prove that he had suffered a “curse.” Curse or not, great damage has been done by people who did not know how to value the historical treasures of Egypt. In the A.D. 600s, the Arab conquerors ordered the Great Pyramids stripped of their elegant limestone facing so that they could build new structures in and around Cairo. The only part left untouched was the top of Khafre’s pyramid.
Even in ancient times, many treasures of Egypt had fallen into disrepair. By the 1400s B.C., for instance, the Egyptians had allowed the sands of the desert to cover the Sphinx up to its neck. Once a young prince fell asleep in the shadow of the great statue, and had a dream in which the Sphinx itself told him he would become pharaoh if he had the sand removed. So he ordered the Sphinx uncovered and placed between its paws a stone tablet telling the story of what had happened. By then the Sphinx’s prediction had come true, and the young prince reigned as Thutmose IV. In the A.D.1400s Muslim soldiers broke off the nose of the Sphinx. They did this because Islam prohibits making statues or images of a god. More recently, the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids have suffered the damages of pollution, which is gradually eroding their surfaces.

Ancient Egypt at the Movies

During the 1950s, Hollywood produced a number of movies about the ancient world. Most of these films, called Biblical epics, were extremely expensive to make. Elaborate sets represented the cities of ancient Egypt, Judea, Greece, or Italy. In many cases the stories themselves were not very well written. A typical example was 'Cleopatra' (1963), one of the most costly flops of all time, which 'Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever' (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1999) describes as “a blimp-sized, multicolored sleeping tablet.”
Director Cecil B. DeMille, who had made a version of 'Cleopatra' in the 1930s, filmed the story of Moses as 'The Ten Commandments' in 1923. In 1956 he remade 'The Ten Commandments' in a version which proved to be one of the few Biblical epics that succeeded both artistically and commercially. The Golden Movie Retriever notes its “exceptional cast,” including Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh, and commented that the scene showing the parting of the Red Sea “rivals any modern special effects.”  The costumes, architecture, and other features of the movie make it highly educational as well as entertaining, though it does present the false impression that slave labor built the pyramids. The story of Moses, as well as that of Joseph, has been interpreted for young viewers in movies such as Disney’s The Prince of Egypt (1998). Moviemakers have often used ancient Egypt as a backdrop for fantasy. From 'The Mummy' in 1932, a film for which actor Boris Karloff modeled his appearance on the actual mummy of Ramses III, to 'The Mummy' in 1999, there have been plenty of horror films that make use of the fright inspired by the Egyptians’ fascination with death. Less chilling, but plenty suspenseful, is 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981), which involves a brilliant plot concerning the whereabouts of the Israelite’s Ark of the Covenant—in a tomb deep beneath the surface of the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis.  Likewise 'Stargate' (1994), a science-fiction movie that has little to do with the reality of ancient Egypt, provides an intriguing scenario regarding the identity of the sun god Ra. In the 1970s, there was even a popular Saturday morning children’s show, Isis, about an archaeologist who could change into the ancient Egyptian goddess and perform superhero-like feats. There have been at least seventy films that involve Egypt in some way or another. In addition, ancient Egypt has been celebrated in popular songs such as Steve Martin’s comedy hit “King Tut” (1977) and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” (1986).

In the book'Ancient Civilizations Almanac', Judson Knight & Lawrence Baker (Editors), UXL-Gale Publishers, U.S.A, 2000, p.22,23,30,31,36,37 & 45. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.