For more than four millennia, the pyramids that inspire respect and even awe have stood in the sands of Egypt. The tombs of the pharaohs look like aliens from another world, they contrast so strongly with the surrounding environment and their scale is so great. It seems incredible that thousands of years ago people were able to erect structures of such a height that, with the use of modern technologies at that time, it was possible to surpass only in the 19th century, and have not surpassed in volume until now.
Of course, theories about the “other” origin of the pyramids could not but arise. Gods, aliens, representatives of disappeared civilizations - whoever was not credited with the creation of these majestic structures, along the way attributing the most incredible properties to them.
In fact, the pyramids are the work of human hands. In our age of an atomized society, when joining the efforts of several dozen people for the sake of achieving a common goal already seems like a miracle, even large-scale construction projects of the 20th century look incredible. And to imagine that the ancestors were capable of such a union thousands of years ago, you need to have an imagination at the level of a science fiction writer. It's easier to attribute everything to aliens ...
1. If you still did not know this, Scythian mounds are pyramids for the poor. Or how to look: the pyramids are mounds for the poor in land. If it was enough for the nomads to drag a pile of earth to the grave, then the Egyptians had to carry thousands of stone blocks - the sand mounds would be blown up by the wind. However, the wind also covered the pyramids with sand. Some had to be dug up. Large pyramids were more fortunate - they were also covered with sand, but only partially. Thus, a Russian traveler at the end of the 19th century noted in his diary that the Sphinx was covered with sand up to his chest. Accordingly, the Pyramid of Khafre, standing next to it, seemed to be lower.
2. The first serious problem in the history of the pyramids is also connected with sand drifts. Herodotus, who described and even measured them, does not mention a word about the Sphinx. Modern researchers explain this by the fact that the figures were covered with sand. However, Herodotus's measurements, albeit with slight inaccuracies, coincide with modern ones, made when the pyramids were cleared of sand. It is thanks to Herodotus that we call the largest pyramid the “Pyramid of Cheops”. It is much more correct to call it the "Pyramid of Khufu".
3. As often happens with ancient travelers or historians, from the works of Herodotus one can learn more about his personality than about the countries and phenomena he describes. According to the Greek, Cheops, when he did not have enough money to build his own burial complex, sent his own daughter to a brothel. At the same time, he built a separate small pyramid for his own sister, who combined family responsibilities with the role of one of the wives of Cheops.
Heterodyne
4. The number of pyramids, oddly enough, fluctuates. Some of them, especially small ones, are poorly preserved or even represent a pile of stones, so some scientists refuse to consider them pyramids. Thus, their number varies from 118 to 138.
5. If it were possible to disassemble the six largest pyramids into stones and cut tiles from these stones, it would be enough to pave the road from Moscow to Vladivostok 8 meters wide.
6. Napoleon (then still not Bonaparte), having estimated the volume of the three pyramids in Giza, calculated that from the stone available in them it is possible to encircle the perimeter of France with a wall 30 centimeters thick and 3 meters high. And the launch pad of modern space rockets would fit inside the Cheops pyramid.
Napoleon is shown a mummy
7. To match the size of the pyramid-tombs and the territory on which they were located. So, around the pyramid of Djoser there was a stone wall (now it is destroyed and covered with sand), which fenced off an area of one and a half hectares.
8. Not all pyramids served as tombs of the pharaohs, less than half of them. Others were intended for wives, children, or had a religious purpose.
9. The Pyramid of Cheops is considered to be the highest, but the height of 146.6 meters was assigned to it empirically - this would be the case if the facing had survived. The actual height of the Cheops Pyramid is less than 139 meters. In the crypt of this pyramid, you can completely fit two middle two-room apartments, placed one on top of the other. The tomb is faced with granite slabs. They fit so well that a needle does not fit into the gap.
The Pyramid of Cheops
10. The oldest pyramid was built for Pharaoh Djoser in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. Its height is 62 meters. Inside the pyramid, 11 tombs were found - for all members of the pharaoh's family. The robbers stole the mummy of Djoser himself in ancient times (the pyramid was robbed several times), but the remains of family members, including a small child, have survived.
Djoser's pyramid
11. When the ancient Greek civilization was born, the pyramids stood for a thousand years. By the time of the founding of Rome, they were two thousand years old. When Napoleon on the eve of the “Battle of the Pyramids” pathetically exclaimed: “Soldiers! They look at you for 40 centuries! ”, He was mistaken for about 500 years. In the words of the Czechoslovak writer Vojtech Zamarovsky, the pyramids stood when people considered the moon to be a deity, and continued to stand when people landed on the moon.
12. The ancient Egyptians did not know the compass, but the pyramids at Giza are very clearly oriented to the cardinal points. Deviations are measured in fractions of a degree.
13. The first European entered the pyramids in the 1st century AD. e. The multi-talented Roman scientist Pliny turned out to be lucky. He described his impressions in the VI volume of his famous "Natural History". Pliny called the pyramids "evidence of senseless vanity." Saw Pliny and the Sphinx.
Lines
14. Until the end of the first millennium AD. only three pyramids at Giza were known. The pyramids were opened gradually, and the Menkaur pyramid was unknown until the 15th century.
Pyramid of Menkaur. The trail of the Arab assault is clearly visible
15. Immediately after the construction of the pyramids were white - they were faced with polished white limestone. After the conquest of Egypt, the Arabs appreciated the quality of the cladding. When Baron d'Anglure visited Egypt at the end of the 14th century, he still saw the process of dismantling the facing stone for construction in Cairo. He was told that white limestone had been “mined” in this way for a thousand years. So the cladding did not disappear from the pyramids under the influence of the forces of nature.
16. The Arab ruler of Egypt, Sheikh al-Mamun, deciding to penetrate the pyramid of Cheops, acted as a military leader besieging the fortress - the wall of the pyramid was hollowed out with battering rams. The pyramid did not give up until the sheikh was told to pour boiling vinegar on the stone. The wall began to gradually move, but it is unlikely that the sheikh's idea was a success, if he was not lucky - the breach coincided with the beginning of the so-called. Great gallery. However, the victory disappointed al-Mansur - he wanted to profit from the treasures of the pharaohs, but found only a few precious stones in the sarcophagus.
17. There are still rumors about some kind of "curse of Tutankhamun" - anyone who desecrates the burial of Pharaoh will die in the very near future. They began in the 1920s. Howard Carter, who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, in a letter to the editorial office of the newspaper that he and several other members of the expedition had died, stated that spiritually contemporaries did not go far from the ancient Egyptians.
Howard Carter is somewhat surprised by the news of his painful death
18. Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian adventurer who roamed all over Europe, in 1815 entered into an agreement with the British Consul in Egypt, according to which Belzoni was appointed the official representative of the British Museum in Egypt, and the Consul Salt pledged to buy from him the acquired values for the British Museum. The British, as always, hauled the chestnuts out of the fire with someone else's hands. Belzoni went down in history as a grave robber, and was killed in 1823, and the British Museum “preserved for civilization” a lot of Egyptian treasures. It was Belzoni who managed to find the entrance to the Khafre pyramid without breaking the walls. Anticipating prey, he burst into the tomb, opened the sarcophagus and ... made sure that it was empty. Moreover, in good light, he saw the inscription on the wall, made by the Arabs. It followed from it that they did not find the treasures either.
19. For about half a century after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, only the lazy did not plunder the pyramids. Rather, the Egyptians themselves robbed, selling the relics found for a pittance. Suffice it to say that for a small amount, tourists could watch the colorful spectacle of the fall of the facing slabs from the upper tiers of the pyramids. Only Sultan Khediv Said in 1857 forbade robbing the pyramids without his permission.
20. For a long time, scientists believed that the embalmers who processed the bodies of the pharaohs after death knew some special secrets. Only in the twentieth century, after people began to actively penetrate into the deserts, it became clear that dry hot air preserves corpses much better than embalming solutions. The bodies of the poor, lost in the desert, remained practically the same as the bodies of the pharaohs.
21. Stones for the construction of the pyramids were mined by trivial carving. The use of wooden stakes, which tore the stone when wet, is more a hypothesis than an everyday practice. The resulting blocks were pulled out to the surface and polished. Special craftsmen numbered them near the quarry. Then, in the order determined by the numbers, by the efforts of hundreds of people, the blocks were dragged to the Nile, loaded onto barges and taken to the place where the pyramids were built. The transportation was carried out in high water - an extra hundred meters of transportation by land extended the construction for months. The final grinding of the blocks was carried out while they were in place in the pyramid. Remains of traces of painted boards, which checked the quality of grinding, and numbers on some blocks.
There are still blanks ...
22. There is no evidence of the use of animals in transporting blocks and building pyramids. The ancient Egyptians actively raised livestock, but small bulls, donkeys, goats and mules are clearly not the kind of animals that can be forced to do the hardest work every day. But the fact that during the construction of the pyramids, animals went for food in herds is quite obvious. According to various estimates, from 10 to 100,000 people worked at the same time on the construction of the pyramids.
23. Either in Stalin's times they knew about the principles of work of the Egyptians in the construction of the pyramids, or the inhabitants of the Nile Valley developed an optimal scheme for using forced labor, but the breakdown of labor resources looks surprisingly similar. In Egypt, the pyramid builders were divided into groups of up to 1,000 people for the most difficult and unskilled work (analogous to the GULAG camp). These groups, in turn, were divided into shifts. There was a "free" bosses: architects (civilian specialists), overseers (VOKHR) and priests (political department). Not without "idiots" - stone cutters and sculptors were in a privileged position.
24. The whistling of whips over the heads of slaves and the terrifying mortality during the construction of the pyramids are the inventions of historians closer to the present. The climate of Egypt allowed free peasants to work in their fields for several months (in the Nile delta they took 4 crops a year), and they were free to use the forced “idle time” for construction. Later, with the increase in the size of the pyramids, they began to be attracted to construction sites without consent, but so that no one would die of hunger. But during the breaks for the cultivation of fields and harvesting, slaves worked, they were about a quarter of all employed.
25. Pharaoh of the 6th dynasty Piopi II did not waste his time on trifles. He ordered to build 8 pyramids at once - for himself, for each of the wives and 3 ritual ones. One of the spouses, whose name was Imtes, betrayed the sovereign and was severely punished - she was deprived of her personal pyramid. And Piopi II still surpassed Senusert I, who built 11 tombs.
26. Already in the middle of the 19th century, “pyramidology” and “pyramidography” were born - pseudosciences that open people's eyes to the essence of the pyramids. By interpreting Egyptian texts and various mathematical and algebraic actions with the size of the pyramids, they convincingly proved that people simply could not build pyramids. As of the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the situation has not changed dramatically.
26. You should not follow the pyramidologists and confuse the accuracy of the granite slabs of the tombs and the fit of the outer stone blocks. Granite slabs of interior claddings (by no means all of them!) Are fitted very precisely. But the millimeter tolerances in the external masonry are the fantasies of unscrupulous interpreters. There are gaps, and quite significant ones, between the blocks.
27. Having measured the pyramids along and across, the pyramidologists came to an amazing conclusion: the ancient Egyptians knew the number π! Replicating discoveries of this kind, first from book to book, and then from site to site, the experts obviously do not remember, or have not already found mathematics lessons in one of the elementary grades of the Soviet school. There, children were given round objects of various sizes and a piece of thread. To the surprise of the schoolchildren, the ratio of the length of the thread, which was used to wrap round objects, to the diameter of these objects, hardly changed, and was always slightly more than 3.
28. Above the entrance to the office of the American construction company The Starrett Brothers and Eken hung a slogan in which the company that built the Empire State Building promised to erect a life-size copy of the Cheops Pyramid at the request of the customer.
29. The Luxor entertainment complex in Las Vegas, which often appears in American films and TV series, is not a copy of the Cheops pyramid (although the association “pyramid” - “Cheops” is understandable and forgivable). For the design of Luxor, the parameters of the Pink Pyramid (the third largest) and the Broken Pyramid, known for its characteristic broken edges, were used.
