The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The function of the Sumerian ziggurats themselves is not entirely clear. They may have been designed by default. At the holiest places in Sumer, like the ancient city of Eridu, the temples that grew shabby were knocked down and ceremonially sealed within a layer of hard-packed earth and clay. A new temple was then built on top. Done enough times, this produced a steplike series of platforms, each layer surrounded by a retaining wall to keep the earth in place. It is possible that, over the course of a few centuries, the stepwise construction became an accepted form in its own right: hallowed by age, and useful because the top of the ziggurat, where Sumerian priests carried out rituals that remain unclear, was close to the sky.28 The tops of the ziggurats may have been pedestals for the gods, places on earth where they could set their feet.29

  We’re not exactly sure what Djoser’s spirit was intended to do with the Step Pyramid, but Imhotep’s innovation earned him a whole array of honors. A statue of Imhotep dating from Djoser’s reign lists his titles on its base; he is the Treasurer of the King of Lower Egypt, First after the King of Upper Egypt, the Palace Administrator and High Priest of Heliopolis, servant of the sungod.2 After his death, he was also honored as the greatest priest and wise man of Egypt. Not too long afterwards, he was deified as the god of medicine, another field of endeavor created by men to ward off death.3

  The Step Pyramid, the first of the great Egyptian pyramids, shows more than an effort to redefine death as the absence of the body and the presence of the spirit. It shows the beginning of a new kingdom of Egypt, a peaceful and united one with an orderly bureaucracy. Djoser reigned only nineteen years, which was a relatively brief time span for such a huge building project in stone. In those nineteen years, stone had to be quarried with copper tools and brought from a fair distance; according to Herodotus, the stone for the pyramids was quarried from the mountain range east of Egypt and west of the Red Sea.4 The pyramid itself needed to be constructed by an organized workforce of strong men who could be spared from farming and fighting. Pyramid-building required prosperity, peace, and tax money; Imhotep’s title of “vizier” or “chancellor” suggests that the overseeing of tax collection was part of his job. For the first time, Egypt had a formal Internal Revenue.

  Only a strong and well-to-do state could order workers to the quarries and afford to feed and clothe them. Egypt had reached a new level of prosperity and organization. For this reason, the beginning of the pyramid age also marks the beginning of a new era in Egyptian history: the “Old Kingdom of Egypt.”

  There are nine surviving efforts at pyramid-building in the first two Old Kingdom dynasties, some more successful than others, but all displaying the same mastery of men and resources. After Djoser, the next pharaoh, Sekhemkhet, attempted the same feat. We don’t know much about Sekhemkhet except that he apparently suffered from insecurities; in a classic display of mine-is-bigger, Sekhemkhet’s pyramid was planned to rise seven steps, not six as Djoser’s had. But Sekhemkhet’s pyramid was never completed. He died six years into his reign, and the construction on the Unfinished Pyramid halted at the first layer.

  The fourth king of the Third Dynasty, Khaba, also built a pyramid. Khaba’s Layer Pyramid was constructed not at Saqqara, but a few miles farther north, presumably over into the Lower Kingdom, although tensions at this point between the north and south seem to have ebbed. It too was (in all likelihood) to have seven steps, bringing it to a higher place than Djoser’s. Khaba’s reach exceeded his grasp; this pyramid too remained unfinished. The final pyramid of the Third Dynasty, the Meydum Pyramid, was also unfinished; it was built by the Third Dynasty’s last king, Huni, and it would have had eight steps.

  Unlike the two that came before, this pyramid was finished off by the first king of the next dynasty. From our perspective, the Fourth Dynasty is distinguishable from the Third mostly because the Fourth Dynasty kings finally got the pyramid thing right.

  Snefru started off with a bang. First, he finished off the Meydum Pyramid and put a few innovations into place. For one thing, the Meydum Pyramid’s burial chamber was in the pyramid itself, rather than in the ground below or nearby, as had been the case for the Step, Layer, and Unfinished Pyramids that preceded it. He also gave the Meydum Pyramid a causeway—a broad path leading down from the pyramid to a “mortuary temple,” a sacred building to the east, facing the rising sun, where offerings could be made. Both of these innovations became standard a little later on.

  Most interesting of all is the attempt Snefru apparently made to coat the Meydum Pyramid with a casing of some kind. The first four pyramids had all been step pyramids, with the stairlike sides of ziggurats. But the heaps of rubble around the Meydum Pyramid show that workmen tried to cover the steps with a smooth layer of facing stones.5

  Had this worked, the Meydum Pyramid would have been the first of the familiar smooth-sided pyramids that we know. However, Snefru’s architect (who was not deified later on) did not have the skills of Imhotep. The pyramid collapsed. The remaining core of the Meydum Pyramid still juts up like a half-eaten wedding cake, surrounded by heaps of collapsed stone.

  No one was ever buried in the failed pyramid. Nor did the tiny, windowless temple at the end of the causeway really strike anyone as a spectacular achievement. A few centuries later, some Egyptian wandering past the drab little box scribbled on it “The Beautiful Temple of King Snefru,” the first example of sarcastic graffiti in history.

  Snefru didn’t give up. We know little about this first pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, apart from records of now-standard expeditions to the mines of the Sinai and to the trading ports of Lebanon. (There is also a random story in the Westcar Papyrus of a day when Snefru, bored, ordered the twenty most beautiful girls from his harem to row him around on the palace lake, dressed in nothing but fishnets.) But he was, if nothing else, tenacious. He turned from the failed Meydum experiment and began a new pyramid, this one in a new location: Dahshur, a little bit south of Saqqara.

  From the beginning, this pyramid was different. It was designed from the start to be slope-sided, with a smooth facing of limestone which made it glitter in the sun.

  Much speculation has been centered around the pyramids, but one of the more fascinating unsolved mysteries is why Snefru, who has not been given enough credit for inventing a new architectural form, thought up the innovation of making the pyramids smooth-sided rather than stepped. Did this have some religious significance? Did it symbolize a new way of thinking about the pyramids—as markers on the landscape, rather than centers of a complex for the spirit?

  11.1. Bent Pyramid. The sides of the Bent Pyramid change angle sharply. Photo credit Richard Seaman

  We have no idea. But Snefru’s new smooth-sided pyramid became known as the Bent Pyramid for the unfortunate reason that Snefru still hadn’t quite managed to figure out the angles. The pyramid was to have smooth and very steep sides—but partway through the construction, Snefru and his chief of works seemed to realize that their measurements were off. If the pyramid continued up at its current steep angle, the weight of the stones over the relatively narrow base would likely collapse it. So they made a quick alteration in the angle, with the result that the pyramid turned out hunch-shouldered; one of its sides makes a right-hand turn.

  This pyramid was completed, but never used. Snefru hadn’t yet managed to build an eternal resting place to his satisfaction. Near the end of his reign, he began work on his third pyramid.

  The Northern Pyramid, which stands a little more than a mile north of the Bent Pyramid, was wider, broader, and shorter than the pyramids which came before. The Bent Pyramid had shifted its steep angle from 52 degrees to a more gradual 43 degrees; the Northern Pyramid was designed from its conception with sides that sloped at a 43-degree angle. In this last attempt, Snefru’s design was so well planned that even now, over four thousand years later, no cracks have appeared in the walls or ceilings of the chambers that lie beneath two million tons of stone weight.

  The Northern Pyramid (also nicknamed “t
he Red Pyramid,” since the limestone facing began to flake off and left the red sandstone beneath to glow in the sun) was probably Snefru’s final burial place. Archaeologists found a body in it and shipped it off to the British Museum for identification; it was lost on the way and never found again.

  Wherever Snefru’s body ended up, the implication of his triple-building project suggests that Egyptian beliefs about the still-present nature of the dead pharaoh had solidified into ritual. Snefru was determined to make a final resting place for himself that was not only a good place for his spirit to walk after death, but also would stand apart from the walking-places of the pharaohs who had come before him. In some sense, death had now been tamed. The pharaohs had settled into the fairly comforting belief that they would still live among their people. Now, they could give attention to outdoing the pharaoh that had come before.

  The fact that Snefru was able to complete one pyramid and build two more suggests that Egypt was now even richer, and more peaceful, and more subject to the authority of the pharaoh, than ever before. Snefru’s son Khufu inherited his power and exercised it to its fullest.30 He continued on in the military expeditions that had become, more or less, usual for an Egyptian king; he sent expeditions to the Sinai; he traded for turquoise; and he planned his own pyramid.

  According to Herodotus, Khufu reigned for fifty years. Egyptologists reckon on a reign about half this long, but twenty-five years was long enough for him to begin the biggest building project in history. His pyramid, the Great Pyramid, was laid out with a full complex, based on Snefru’s perfected designs: the pyramid itself, a causeway leading down to a valley temple, a temple for offerings to the east, and three smaller pyramids, probably for Khufu’s queens.

  The pyramid, built in a new location, on the Giza plain, peaked at 481 feet. Its slope is 51º52´, sharper than Snefru’s successful Northern Pyramid but not quite as steep as the failed Bent Pyramid; Khufu’s chief of works had benefited from the example of his predecessors. The sides of the Great Pyramid are remarkably even; each is right around 755 feet long, and even with the others to within 8 inches. The northern shaft that gives onto the King’s Chamber was designed to point to the Pole Star.

  Although we know very little for certain about Khufu’s life, various stories about his reign have trickled their way down to us. One tells us that in order to provide water for the hundreds of thousands of workers who labored on the Great Pyramid, Khufu built the world’s first dam: the Sadd al-Kafara, twenty miles south of Cairo. The lake created by the dam, which was almost eighty feet thick at the bottom, was thus the world’s first public reservoir. Another records that the builder of the Great Pyramid was scornful of the gods and spent years in sneering until he repented and composed a set of Sacred Books.6 And Herodotus writes that, in order to build the Great Pyramid, Khufu “reduced Egypt to a completely awful condition…and also commanded all the Egyptians to work for him.”7 He adds, primly, “He was a very bad man.”

  11.1 Pyramids of the Old Kingdom

  Herodotus, who has all of the pharaohs in the wrong order, is far from reliable on this subject, and the Sacred Books have never been found; probably they never existed. But the tradition of Khufu’s evil, which echoes down from more than one source, is an interesting one. To build his monument—a stone structure with something like two and a half million blocks of stone in it, each block an average weight of two and a half tons—Khufu mobilized one of the largest work forces in the world. Even if the laborers were not reduced to abject slavery, the king’s ability to recruit such an enormous number of workers keenly illustrated his ability to oppress his people. The pyramids themselves stand as signposts to that power.

  The stories of Khufu’s cruelty suggest that his willingness to exercise power, for his own gain, at the expense of his people, did not go over particularly well. His ambition also led to impiety; he was so busy building that he closed down the temples and told the people to stop offering sacrifices. One particularly acid story related by Herodotus tells us that Khufu, running low on funds and needing to raise a little more money, installed his daughter in a room with orders to entertain any men who might want to visit her and pass the cash along to him; she did so, but told every man, as he left her, to pile a stone at the worksite for her. The result was the middle Queen’s Pyramid, which stands near the Great Pyramid and which would have represented some kind of world record of courtesanship.8

  By Khufu’s day, the original purpose of that first necropolis built by Imhotep had been well obscured. The Great Pyramid and the monuments that came after are the oldest surviving example of what we call “monumental architecture”—buildings which are much more elaborate in size or design than practicality requires. In the words of archaeologist Bruce Trigger, “The ability to expend energy, especially in the form of other people’s labour, in non-utilitarian ways, is the most basic and universally understood symbol of power.”9 The less necessary and useful the pyramids were, the more they testified to the power of their builders. The house of the spirit had become the glittering testament to power.

  Almost all that we know of Khufu is centered around his pyramid. His other accomplishments, whatever they were, are lost to history.

  THE GREAT PYRAMID has been at the center of more theories than any other structure (possibly barring Stonehenge) in history. Pyramid theories range from the rational-but-difficult-to-prove to the out and out ridiculous. Among them: the layout of the Pyramids on the Giza plain reproduces on earth the constellation Orion (possibly, but too many stars are missing to make this compelling); the Great Pyramid is at the geographical center of the earth (this only works if you use a Mercator projection, which is unlikely to have been a common practice of the ancient Egyptians); the Egyptians used an energy coil called the “Caduceus Coil” which tapped into the “planetary energy grid” and allowed them to levitate the blocks into place. Charmingly, if anachronistically, “the main control panel for the grid is the Ark of the Covenant.”10 It has also been suggested that the Great Pyramid was built by the residents of Atlantis, who sailed from their mythical continent in mythical boats to build the pyramids, for no particular reason, and abandon them. Other theorists insist that mathematical calculations show that the Great Pyramid is a “scale model of the hemisphere,” and that whoever built it “knew the precise circumference of the planet, and the length of the year to several decimals.”11

  The granddaddy of weird pyramid theories was Erich von Däniken, a Swiss hotelkeeper who turned writer in the early 1960s and published a book called Chariots of the Gods. Däniken insisted that the pyramids could not have been built by the Egyptians because they didn’t possess the necessary technological ability; and, further, that the pyramids suddenly appeared without any precedent, which meant that they had most likely been built by aliens.

  It is true that the Egyptians were not inclined to abstract mathematical thought. However, sighting the straight lines of a pyramid’s base is not that complicated a task; it requires competent calculation, but not a grasp of higher mathematical concepts. The task of moving the huge blocks is an enormous one, but this, again, was a merely mechanical difficulty. Herodotus says that the blocks were hauled up earthen ramps, a task which is far from impossible; experiments have shown that a hundred men are capable of lifting a two-and-a-half-ton block of stone with a papyrus rope,12 particularly if balls of the hard mineral dolomite are slid beneath the stone to act as rollers.

  As for Atlanteans and aliens, the progression of failed pyramids before Khufu shows clearly enough that pyramid-building didn’t spring full-blown from the head of some alien race. The pyramids travelled, in an easily traced line of development, right straight from Djoser’s original city for the spirit to Khufu’s gargantuan resting place. They stand as testaments, not to alien visits, but to the Egyptian reluctance to release power in the face of death. Gilgamesh had gone into the mountain and would not come again. But for the Egyptians, who could always see the house of the king’s spirit looming
in the distance, the might of the pharaoh was ever present.

  Chapter Twelve

  The First Reformer

  Around 2350 BC, a Sumerian king makes war on corruption and poverty and loses his throne

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE the Sumerians, with their spiky independence, ever granting a ruler as much power as the pharaohs of Egypt were given. Sumerian citizens would likely have rebelled if asked to sweat for twenty years over a monument to their ruler’s magnificence. Nor were the kings of Sumer in any state to compel this kind of obedience. Gilgamesh’s four-city coalition was the closest thing to a unified kingdom that Sumer had ever seen, and this coalition barely outlasted Gilgamesh’s lifetime. His son Ur-Lugal inherited his kingdom and managed to keep it together, but the cities had all been weakened by the constant fighting. And while Egypt did not face any immediate threat from outside its borders, the same was not true of Sumer. To the east, the Elamites were waiting.

  The Elamites had been living in their own small cities, over to the east of the Gulf, almost as long as Sumerians had occupied the Mesopotamian plain. Their ultimate origin, like that of most ancient people, is unknown, but their cities grew up not only just south of the Caspian Sea, but also along the southern border of the large salt desert plateau that lay east of the Zagros Mountains.

  From about 2700, the Elamites too had kings. Twinned cities, Susa and Awan, served as the center of their civilization. Awan (whose exact location is unknown) was the more important of the two. Insofar as any king had jurisdiction over the whole Elamite collection, the king of Awan did, not unlike his Sumerian counterpart in Kish.

  Inscriptions from the two centuries after Gilgamesh give us a glimpse of a churning mass of competition. The Elamites and the cities of the Sumerian plain—Uruk and Kish, but also the cities of Ur, Lagash, and Umma, now increasing in strength—fought an unending series of battles for primacy.