Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [31]
The pyramid complex (1) pyramid (2) subsidiary pyramid (3) enclosure wall (4) pyramid temple (5) causeway (6) valley temple
This is the Pyramid Age—more properly called the Old Kingdom—and we are about to discuss the biggest pyramid of them all, which was built by Khufu (called Cheops by the Greeks), the son and successor of good King Snefru. Khufu is remembered by the world at large for only one accomplishment; yet the size of the one is so gigantic that it has brought Khufu’s name and fame down undiminished through four thousand years. So much has been written about the Great Pyramid of Giza that it is impossible to add any new facts or even approach it from a fresh viewpoint. Everybody wrote about it—poets, statesmen, tourists, archaeologists, novelists, engineers, fortune-tellers. Even Mark Twain’s carefully cultivated contempt for the Old World deserted him when he stood under the Great Pyramid’s immensity of stone.
The pyramid form has a certain austere beauty, and the tawny color of the stone is capable of bewitching and subtle variations from pale silver to gold as the sunlight changes. But it is not the aesthetic qualities of the Great Pyramid which have hypnotized so many people. Partly, it is the size—two and one-half million blocks of stone averaging two and a half tons each, comprising a structure which covers an area equal to the combined base areas of the cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey. In part the attraction lies in the atmosphere of mystery and mysticism which has surrounded the pyramids from the beginning. They were Houses of Eternity even to the Egyptians, dwellings in a land that was beyond mortal ken. “No one has returned from there to tell us how they fare.” When Greeks supplanted Egyptians, and Romans conquered Greeks, and the ancient heritage of Egypt was shadowed by ignorance, the imaginative visitors of classical and later times added their inventions to swell the mystery. Even in modern times, when people, one would think, should know better, the Great Pyramid of Giza has proved a fertile field for fantasy.
The people who do not know better are the pyramid mystics, who believe that the Great Pyramid is a gigantic prophecy in stone, built by a group of ancient adepts in magic. Egyptologists sometimes uncharitably refer to this group as “pyramidiots,” but the school continues to flourish despite scholarly anathemas. I cannot refrain from quoting a few of the more entertaining blunders of the mystics, which appear in one of the books they publish with such alarming frequency.
“The Egyptian word Pir-em-us meant to them something of great vertical height.” (No such word; the Egyptian name for pyramid is mer.) “In The Book of the Dead the Great Pyramid is called ‘The Temple of Amen.’” (No, it isn’t.) “The subterranean temple which is mentioned in the ancient mystical writings, and whose existence as an initiatory center scholars long denied, has recently been discovered.” (I guess the temple is the Valley Temple of the Second Pyramid, whose function had to do with the mummification of the dead; it was not built underground but was buried by sand and silt.) “The great stone in front of the breast of the Sphinx with its symbolic writings and laws for the initiate has been discovered.” (This must be the stela of Thutmose IV, which explains how he acquired the throne, and which is about as mystical as a campaign speech.) “This stone…would open to the commands of candidates upon the pronunciation of the proper word.” (So far it hasn’t.) “In adopting the mystical pyramid inch as a unit of measurement, the Egyptians realized that the Anglo-Saxon races [sic] would be the first to recognize the unit of measurement and look upon the messages concealed in the Great Pyramid as intended for them principally.”
The last statement is beyond criticism, surely. I have not mentioned the specific prophecies of the Great