Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [23]
The mystery is solved, however, when one posits that the Egyptians laid out their pyramids with a measuring wheel with a known radius, which also served as the basic unit of height. Since the measuring wheel’s circumference automatically measured one unit of π for each unit of height, it automatically built π into the equation. So, if the construction engineers laid out the pyramid with each half of the base measuring the same number of revolutions of the wheel as they planned for the units of the height, the ratio of base to height would be exactly 2π, even if the architects themselves had no knowledge of how to calculate the constant. In any case, the result is an exceptionally massive and stable building, the equivalent of a man-made mountain of stone. Indeed they have survived like mountains.
The person credited with the invention of the pyramid is Imhotep, the great architect of King Djoser (2630-2611 BCE) of the Third Dynasty. He designed the famous step-pyramid as the pharaoh’s tomb, which soon evolved into the smooth-walled pyramidal form. Pyramids were exclusively used for royal tombs during this period. The steps suggest a ladder or staircase for the king to ascend to his heavenly abode, as in one of the depictions of the ascent of the pharaoh in the tomb of Unas. The first true pyramid was the one constructed for Sneferu near Saqqara and was quickly joined by the one built for his son Khufu (Cheops) and, finally, by those of their successors, Kaphren and Merikare, completing the great pyramid complex at Saqqara, which tourists visit daily by the thousands. The pyramid was also associated with the famous pyramidal benben (perhaps meaning “shining”) stone of Ra, attesting to the importance of the priests of Heliopolis in the development of the form, as the shape appears to be a depiction of the spreading out of the sun’s rays. The pyramidal capstone made of shining electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), reflecting light in all directions at the top of pyramids and obelisks, was known as the benbenet, a term also derived from the base meaning of “shine” or “reflect.” The king’s ladder to heaven and the rays of the sun become architecturally wedded together by the Fourth Dynasty. Many of the spells in the Pyramid Texts suggest that the pharaoh rises to heaven by means of a ladder:
N. ascends on the ladder which his father Ra made for him.12
or
Atum brought to N. the gods belonging to heaven, he assembled to him the gods belonging to earth. They put their arms under him. They made a ladder for N. that he might ascend to heaven on it.13
Indeed many pyramids made use of a spiral ascending staircase, later filled in to achieve the pyramidal shape, as both a construction necessity and a religious symbol.14 The ladder, the staircase, was part of the magic of the pyramid itself.
In the first pyramid inscriptions, found in the pyramid of King Unas, we see a variety of methods for achieving this ascent. After the first inscriptions in pyramids, the pyramid symbol itself became the determinative in hieroglyphic writing to indicate that the next word was a tomb; that connection continues long after the Egyptians stopped building pyramids. It is quite important for the later history of Western notions of afterlife that the Egyptian pharaoh achieved immortality by stepping into the heavens. The association of heaven with immortality is uniquely an Egyptian invention, occurring many millennia before it becomes part of Biblical or Greek tradition.
The ancient pharaohs were at first the only ones to climb to heaven with the sun because they were the only ones who could organize the community and pay to construct the great pyramids, the great stone machines that