Engineering a pyramid was all human sweat, sinew
Thursday, October 12 2006 @ 10:41 PM CDT Views: 619
TED MAHAR
The Oregonian
Despite today's super-duper technology, building a pyramid would be a formidably difficult job, even if there was a remotely imaginable reason to do it.
When the pharaohs began doing it in 2667 B.C., it was incomparably more challenging. We could look at the millennia-old structures today and assure ourselves that it was doable.
Pharaoh Djoser had the idea, and he had the legendary architect Imhotep, some 10,000 workers and the rest of his life for them to work on it; 19 years, it turned out.
But Djoser had no model and no experienced helpers. His result was flawed, but still stands today, the first of its kind.
What Djoser did and how he did it is one of the stories in The History Channel series "Engineering an Empire." The series eventually will cover ancient Greece, Persia, the Byzantines, the Aztecs, the Mayas, Carthage, China, Russia, Napoleon and Britain.
Starting with Egypt is natural, because Egypt is where Djoser started it all in a place called Saqqara. Eventually some 100 pyramids were built over many centuries.
Most still stand. It's hard for a pyramid to fall down. But some were built on ground that couldn't handle the weight and shifted. A few were looted to the ground -- for plunder, for materials, for other structures or out of sheer cussedness.
"Engineering" shows how they almost certainly did it. We still don't really quite know. Some say that earthlings couldn't have done it, that the saucer people did it. But host Peter Weller -- working from a script by producer/director Christopher Cassel -- shows how it probably was done. So do 10 experts from Egypt and elsewhere.
The world's first quarrymen cut the stone out of mountains, laborers hauled it by sled to the building site, and they or others lugged it up earthen ramps and muscled it into its proper place. When the pyramid was done, laborers hauled the ramps away.
No cranes, no tractors, no earth movers, no steam engines, no electricity and evidently few, if any, beasts of burden. It was almost all human sweat and sinew.
The story is inevitably a history of the pharaohs who left their tombs, forts, dams and palaces as monuments above ground and under their pyramids. Djoser was beloved, regarded as a kindly god.
He was followed by Snerfu, who sought to outdo Djoser and did, despite some catastrophic mistakes and setbacks. Of slightly dubious antecedents, Snerfu solidified his stature by marrying his sister, whose lineage was more secure. Egyptian royals often married family members and had children by them and by others not their spouses. Rameses II sired at least 100 children.
Snerfu's son Khufu (or Cheops) built the Great Pyramid of Giza which is universally considered not just the biggest but the most perfect example of the art.
Some left little behind despite their best efforts. Not just tomb raiders but succeeding pharaohs sometimes tried to eliminate predecessors from history.
Hatshepsut, something like a viceroy to her 6-year-old stepson Thutmose III, reigned the longest of Egypt's few queens, about 15 years. When she disappeared around 1458 B.C., stepson dearest destroyed or obscured most of her monuments.
After Akhenaten's death around 1338 B.C., his name was scratched from buildings and monuments. His imposition of a one-god theology on Egypt was readily dumped after he died, and most were happy to forget him.
Re-enactors illustrate some of the process; so does CGI. What we think we know is stated and illustrated clearly and elegantly.
Egypt's architectural marvels cannot be studied apart from religion and politics. Pharaohs were deemed at least partly divine, and the decades-in-the-making pyramids and other imposing structures required at least some consent of the governed. By and large, freemen, not slaves did the building. Pharaohs were major employers, and building sites were neighborhoods for decades as thousands toiled on the structures.
And financing the imposing edifices often required warring against or simply plundering neighboring countries.
The magnificent creations continue to support Egypt. Tourists by the hundreds of thousands visit Egypt annually, drawn almost exclusively by the concrete dreams of a few dozen lavishly memorialized pharaohs and the strenuous labors of tens of thousands of nameless toilers who spent their lives building them.
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