Why built pyramid

Its estimated 2. Khufu's son, Pharaoh Khafre, built the second pyramid at Giza, circa B. His necropolis also included the Sphinx, a mysterious limestone monument with the body of a lion and a pharaoh's head. The Sphinx may stand sentinel for the pharaoh's entire tomb complex. The third of the Giza Pyramids is considerably smaller than the first two. Built by Pharaoh Menkaure circa B. Each massive pyramid is but one part of a larger complex, including a palace, temples, solar boat pits, and other features.

The ancient engineering feats at Giza were so impressive that even today scientists can't be sure how the pyramids were built. Yet they have learned much about the people who built them and the political power necessary to make it happen. The builders were skilled, well-fed Egyptian workers who lived in a nearby temporary city.

Archaeological digs on the fascinating site have revealed a highly organized community, rich with resources, that must have been backed by strong central authority.

It's likely that communities across Egypt contributed workers, as well as food and other essentials, for what became in some ways a national project to display the wealth and control of the ancient pharaohs. Such revelations have led Zahi Hawass , secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, to note that in one sense it was the Pyramids that built Egypt—rather than the other way around. If the Pyramids helped to build ancient Egypt, they also preserved it.

Giza allows us to explore a long-vanished world. Tomb art includes depictions of ancient farmers working their fields and tending livestock, fishing and fowling, carpentry, costumes, religious rituals, and burial practices. Horus is one of the most compelling and symbolic gods in Egyptian mythology. Horus is customarily known as the sky god and appropriated as two deities: Horus the Elder and Horus the Younger.

Horus the Elder is the final god born of the first five original gods. Horus the Younger is the son of Osiris and Isis. Of the avian deities, Horus is regarded as the most important Mark. As a result, Horus is more of a general term to portray a surfeit of falcon deities Mark.

In order to exist as a being in the afterlife his physical body was to be preserved and safeguarded. It was imperative that the body be recognizable by his spirit which led to the process of mummification. Mummification consisted of preserving the body in fine linen. Once the process was completed, the pharaoh was buried deep inside the pyramid with his most prized possessions such as jewelry, decorative statues, and items that would assist him in the afterlife kingtutone.

Egyptian embalmers were very skilled in their task because of the high importance placed on preserving the bodies of the pharaohs. These embalmers made it so people mummified thousands of years ago still had distinct features intact including skin, hair, scars, and tattoos.

Their design remains a true testament The amazing works of art and architecture known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World serve as a testament to the ingenuity, imagination and sheer hard work of which human beings are capable.

They are also, however, reminders of the human capacity for disagreement, The oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one that survives today, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed as a tomb for the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu. Researchers in Egypt discovered a 4,year-old ramp system used to haul alabaster stones out of a quarry, and reports have suggested that it could provide clues as to how Egyptians built the pyramids.

Yet while the ramp system is a significant technological discovery, the In , a joint team of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered a remarkable find in a cave at the ancient Red Sea port of Wadi el-Jarf—hundreds of inscribed papyrus fragments that were the oldest ever unearthed in Egypt. For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around B. From the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom through the military conquests of the New King Tutankhamun or Tutankhamen ruled Egypt as pharaoh for 10 years until his death at age 19, around B.

Upon his death, she began acting as regent for her stepson, the infant Thutmose III, but later took on the full powers of a pharaoh, becoming Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The Pharaoh in Egyptian Society During the third and fourth dynasties of the Old Kingdom, Egypt enjoyed tremendous economic prosperity and stability.

And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the Egyptians of Khufu's day. But the stones didn't go in one after another, you see.

And you can actually work out the coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a 1. And then you could come up with very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an average size block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to the pyramid.

And you could even factor in different configurations of the ramp which would give you a different length. Well, working in such ways, and I challenge anybody to join in the challenge, it comes out that you can actually get the delivery that you need. You need stones delivered you see, every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten hour day, right.

Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something like 2,, somewhere in that area.

We can go over the exact figures. So now we've got men in the quarry which is a very generous estimate, 2, men delivering. And so that's 3, OK, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints, so there's a difference there.

But let's gloss over that for a moment. One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could, is just what is it like to have a 2 or 3-ton block—how many men can get their hands on it? Well, you can't have 50 men working on one block, you see.

And you can only get about four or five, six guys at most working on a block, say two on levers, you know, cutters and so on.

And you know, you put pivots under it and as few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it. There are all these tricks they know.

But it's just impossible to get too many men on a block. But you figure out how many stones have to be set to keep up with this rate, to get in with 20 years. And it actually comes up 5, or less men, including the stone setters. Now the stone setting gets a bit complicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from each corner, and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing and then the core.

And I'm going to gloss over that. But the challenge is out there: 5, men to actually do the building and the quarrying and the schlepping from the local quarry. This doesn't count the men cutting the granite and shipping it from Aswan or the men over in Tura. OK, so that increases the numbers somewhat No, we're not recreating ancient society, and ancient pyramid building percent. And probably not even 60 percent. But we are showing some nuts and bolts that are very useful and insightful, far more than all the armchair theorizing.

And one of the senior vice presidents decided to take on for a formal address for fellow engineers, a program management study of the Great Pyramid. So these are not guys lifting boilers in Manhattan, these are senior civil engineers with one of the largest construction corporations in the United States. And I'm sure they'd be happy to go on record with their study which looked at what they call critical path analysis. What do you need to get the job done? What tools did they have?

And they contacted me and other Egyptologists and we gave them some references. Here's what we know about their tools, the inclined plane, the lever and so on. And without any secret sophistication or hidden technology, just basically what archaeologists say, this is what these folks had. And they have very specific calculations on every single aspect, from the gravel, for the ramps, to baking the bread.

So I throw that out there, not because that's gospel truth, but because reasoned construction engineers, who plan great projects like bridges and buildings today and earthworks and so on, look at the Great Pyramid and don't opt out for lost civilizations, extraterrestrials, or hidden technologies.

No, they say it's a very impressive job, extraordinary for the people who lived then and there, but it could be done. They are human monuments. What do the inscriptions say? LEHNER: One of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have is graffiti on ancient stone monuments in places that they didn't mean to be shown.

Like on foundations when we dig down below the floor level, up in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber, and in many monuments of the Old Kingdom, temples, the Sun temples, other pyramids.

Well, the graffiti gives us a picture of organization where crews, where a gang of workmen was organized into two crews. And the crews were subdivided into five phyles.

The word phyles is spelled p-h-y-l-e-s. It's the Greek word for tribe. The Egyptian word is za. They were divided into five za's. In later times when the Greeks came and in bilingual inscriptions, when somebody was translating za into Greek they used the word phyles, the word for tribe, which is extremely interesting actually.

Were these militaristic kinds of conscripts? Certainly they weren't slaves. Could they actually have been natural communities of the Nile Valley kind of contributing like the way the Inca build their bridges and so on? So the phyles then are subdivided into divisions.

And the divisions are identified by single hieroglyphs with names that mean things like endurance, perfection, strong. OK, so how do we know this—you come to a block of stone in the relieving chambers above the Great Pyramid.