The Building of the Pyramids

The Building of the Pyramids

THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS


From the reign of Djoser until the beginning if the New Kingdom, almost

every pharaoh of substance and authority was buried under a pyramid. The pyramid, introduced by Djoser, reached its most definitive form with the Great Pyramid of Cheops, at Giza. At the end of this long tradition the splendid visions of the earlier dynasties had shrunk to monuments of poorly built steep-sided mud brick, that were no larger that about forty feet square, but a thousand years before, pyramids had been measured in hundreds of feet,   their masonry in millions of tons, The largest of all, the Great Pyramid on the plateau of Giza, near modern Cairo, is still the biggest stone building ever build by man and one of the most accurately constructed. It was built less than one hundred years after Djoser’s craftsman had started their work on the Step Pyramid. Singularly, the kings of the Third Dynasty who followed Djoser to the throne have not left any finished monuments- though there might still be some to be found lying under the desert sands a Sakkara. It was at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty, in the desert north of the older monuments, that pyramid building on a

quite unprecedented scale was started. These Fourth Dynasty monuments are the

finest of the pyramids,: seldom do they measure less than three hundred and fifty

feet along their sides, and most are double that. After this time there was an

immediate reduction in size and quality of construction that continued throughout

the rest of the Old Kingdom. During the Middle Kingdom however, the pyramids

once again reached the colossal measurements of their forerunners, but these

monuments were of carefully crafted mud-brick, cased with stone.

The Egyptians all believed that the body of the god-king had to be preserved

intact in order for him to reach immortality. The belief that fulfillment in the

afterlife...