Building the Great Pyramid - Softcover

9781552977194: Building the Great Pyramid
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The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the oldest and sole-surviving member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and has inspired more speculation than any other building on Earth. Using state-of-the-art computer graphics, Building the Great Pyramid brings the world of Fourth Dynasty Egypt to life and shows how and why this most extraordinary of all human monuments was built.

Equipped only with the most basic tools, how were ancient Egyptians able to achieve such an extraordinary degree of accuracy in its construction? How were stones, some weighing as much as 40 tons, hauled into position so precisely? What was life like for the conscripted laborers who built it, and how long did it take them to complete their task? Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is it possible to provide answers.

The authors trace the history of the exploration of the Giza site, from the earliest Greek and Roman travelers, through to Jean-François Champollion's cracking of the hieroglyphic code; and the work of scholars such as Auguste Mariette and Sir William Flinders Petrie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The final chapter covers less orthodox theories and looks at how the Great Pyramid has become a magnet for all manner of charlatans, heretics, and cranks.

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About the Author:

Kevin Jackson is a freelance journalist and film-maker. He has written, directed and narrated documentaries on Anthony Burgess, Dennis Potter and William Morris for BBC television. His books include The Language of Cinema and A Ruskin Alphabet.

Jonathan Stamp is the producer of the BBC television program Pyramid.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

THE LAST SURVIVING WONDER

The people of classical times knew that many things were marvelous, but saw that only a few of these things were the work of humanity rather than of the gods. And of these miracles of human ingenuity, only a very few were deemed worthy of universal admiration. You could number them on the fingers of two hands. They were: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia -- the work of Athens's greatest sculptor, Phidias (c. 490 - c. 415 BC), also renowned for creating the heroic marble forms for the facade of the Parthenon, works now known to the British as the Elgin Marbles; the Pharos, or lighthouse-fortress, of Alexandria, built in 279 BC to the designs of Sostratus, an Asiatic Greek in the service of the Ptolemies, and dedicated to "the Savior Gods" -- an edifice well over 400 feet (122 meters) high, and topped by a mirror-like structure which combined the functions of reflector and telescope. Then there were the Colossus of Rhodes -- a bronze statue of the sun-god Helios, which towered over the entrance to Rhodes harbor and was reported by the elder Pliny to be some 70 cubits (100 feet / 30 meters) tall; and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus -- a white marble tomb for Mausolus, ruler of Caria (377-353 BC), well over 130 feet (40 meters) high, erected by his widow Artemisia and decorated with carvings by the brilliant sculptor Scopas. Finally, there was the Great Pyramid of Cheops (also known as Khufu), at Giza.

These were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as compiled by the Greek poet Antipator of Sidon around 130 BC. Scholars and adventurers undertook long and arduous journeys to visit them, then came home again and told or wrote awe-inspiring tales of what they had seen. The Seven Wonders passed into legend.

Centuries passed, and time took its usual revenge on these monuments of vaulting ambition. An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes in 224 BC. The Pharos survived almost a millennium longer, and was still in use after the Arab conquest of Egypt, but was itself destroyed by earthquakes in AD 700. Earthquakes also did away with the Mausoleum in the fifteenth century AD. Of Phidias's great Olympian Zeus, visited by Pausanias and described in his epic ten-volume travel book, the Guide to Greece, nothing is left except a tiny image on the coins of Elis. Almost all the Wonders were destroyed: the sands rose and buried them, or -- when a few recognizable ruins survived -- the thieves came looting, while rats bred and scurried among the rubble.

Eventually, however, starting with a slow trickle of interest in the early Renaissance and building into a flood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new bands of travelers from younger countries came to follow in the path of the classical wanderers, and thrilled to their gradual rediscovery of the grand archaic ruins. This time, however, they came with a very different frame of mind. They looked, not on perfected structures, but on shards and fragments; they reflected, not on the splendors of human achievement, but on its transience. If the great nations of Egypt, Greece and Babylon had fallen, how long could, say, Germany or France or Spain hope to thrive? A thousand years? Five hundred? Less?

The reflective mood was caught most memorably near the start of the nineteenth century by the English poet Shelley, who was fascinated to discover that some ancient writers had anticipated this very modern spirit. He found a traveler's tale from ancient Egypt recorded in the pages of the historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in Greek. The story, already a couple of centuries old when Diodorus wrote it down some time around 49 BC, told of one Hectaeus of Abdera, a contemporary of Alexander the Great who journeyed throughout Egypt and recorded his impressions.

One day, Hectaeus came across the ruins of what had been built by one of the most powerful of all the pharaohs, Ramses II, believed by some to be the pharaoh mentioned in the Old Testament book of Exodus. In Greek, Ramses's throne name was rendered as user-maat-re, or "strong in right is Re." Shelley seized on this word, anglicized it, and turned it into "Ozymandias."

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
 
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The somber ironies and implicit threat to tyrants of the modern age -- for Shelley was a revolutionary -- helped make the poem one of the most famous short verses in the English language. Schoolchildren were made to learn it by heart, though not, perhaps, to inquire too deeply into its politics. It is a remarkable poem, and yet the truth it tells is only a partial one. For if the Ramesseum and the other magnificent wrecks of Egypt's golden age reminded visitors that sic transit gloria mundi -- "so passes the glory of the world" -- there was one monument which told exactly the opposite story: a story of triumph over time.

Six of the Seven Wonders vanished. The seventh endured, to be called by various names: the Pyramid of Giza; Khufu's Pyramid; most commonly and justly of all, the Great Pyramid. Four and a half thousand years after its creation, the Pyramid still stands, still strikes awe into everyone who sees it. True, it has suffered some damage -- the glorious white limestone casing which once made it gleam and dazzle in the Egyptian sunlight has long since been stripped off; builders have helped themselves to some of its stones for their own, more modest creations; and it has been centuries since grave-robbers looted its magnificent interior.

Still, it endures: the greatest time traveler of all. Awesome, of course, in its sheer scale, and in the thought of the human effort that went into its making, but awesome in its other qualities, too. Awesome in the astonishing accuracy of its proportions -- an architectural feat to rival anything that can be done with steel and glass and concrete by modern builders armed with computers, and all performed by a people whose main tools of measurement were the rope and the stick. Awesome in its dazzlingly precise alignment with north, and in its complex relationship with the sun, moon and stars -- features which modern archaeologists and astronomers are only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, beginning to comprehend. Awesome, above all, in its mystery. What does the building mean? What motive could possibly have been powerful enough to compel the expenditure of so much labor, skill, ingenuity and treasure on a structure with no apparent function? Who were the people who built such a marvel, and how -- how on earth -- did they accomplish it?

It is no surprise that the Pyramid should have inspired wild answers to these difficult questions. That vast and enigmatic form, known to almost every-one on earth, has been the object of speculation that ranges from the contentious via the merely fanciful to the frankly insane. The steady output of writings on the subject since the twelfth century AD became an entire publishing industry by the end of the nineteenth century, as a motley army of mystics, theosophists, spiritualists, charlatans and conspiracy-mongers set themselves up to reveal the (supposed) Secret of the Pyramid.

Among the more celebrated contenders in the field were those who insisted that the Pyramid

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  • PublisherFirefly Books
  • Publication date2003
  • ISBN 10 1552977196
  • ISBN 13 9781552977194
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages192
  • Rating

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