Pyramids (Egypt) - geography.

« displayed in its full majesty. B Interior The interior of the Great Pyramid is complex, with a series of passages leading to several rooms.

The most important room is the King’s Chamber, the room in which Khufu’sbody was placed during his funeral.

In this room the priests left items that Khufu, like all Egyptians, would need for the afterlife.

Although the builders tried to blockpassages and doors when they left the pyramid after the king’s funeral, tomb robbers did eventually take everything of value. The entrance to the Great Pyramid was set 17 m (55 ft) above ground level.

It was intended to be used only once, during Khufu’s funeral, when special scaffolding waserected.

Once the scaffolding was dismantled, the entrance’s height served as a security measure against tomb robbers.

The entrance leads to the Descending Passage,which runs down through the pyramid into bedrock beneath the pyramid and levels out until it reaches the Subterranean Chamber.

About 18 m (60 ft) from the pyramidentrance, before entering the bedrock, the Descending Passage intersects another corridor, called the Ascending Passage, now sealed with three large granite blocks. The Ascending Passage runs upward for about 39 m (129 ft), until it levels out and enters the so-called Queen’s Chamber.

Early Arab explorers of the Great Pyramid gave itthis name in the mistaken belief that the queen was buried here.

Instead, it most probably held a statue of the king that represented his ka, a form of his spirit.

The walls ofthe unfinished Queen’s Chamber grow closer as they rise and meet at a single point at the ceiling.

This form results from each level of stones in the walls projecting slightlyoutward from the level beneath it, an arrangement called corbeling. Where the Ascending Passage levels off horizontally and runs toward the Queen’s Chamber, it also intersects with one end of the Grand Gallery, a large, corbeledpassageway 47 m (153 ft) long and 8.5 m (28 ft) high.

The Grand Gallery most probably held some of the large stones that were used to plug passages after the king’sfuneral.

In the western wall at the point where the Ascending Passage and the Grand Gallery meet, there is an opening to a tunnel that winds its way down through the coreof the pyramid and the bedrock to meet the Descending Passage near the Subterranean Chamber.

It probably provided air to the workers carving out the SubterraneanChamber. At the upper end of the Grand Gallery, another level corridor runs south into the King’s Chamber, a simple, rectangular room faced entirely with red granite.

All that remainsin the room now is a granite sarcophagus in which King Khufu was buried, near the western wall.

About 1 m (3 ft) above the floor, near the center of the northern andsouthern walls of the King’s Chamber, are openings to shafts that run upward through the pyramid to the exterior of the pyramid.

The exact purpose of these shafts is notknown.

Similar shafts lead out from the Queen’s Chamber but are blocked after 65 m (213 ft) and never reach the exterior of the pyramid. IV HOW THE PYRAMID FORM DEVELOPED The Egyptian pyramids developed from royal tombs of the earliest periods of Egyptian history.

In the 1st and 2nd dynasties (2920 BC-2770 BC and 2770 BC-2649 BC), kings were buried at the city of Abydos in graves topped with a pile of clean sand inside low-lying brick walls.

By the 3rd Dynasty (2649 BC-2575 BC), kings were being buried underneath large mud brick rectangles called mastabas, from the Arabic word meaning “bench.” King Djoser, who reigned from 2630 BC to 2611 BC, built a more elaborate royal tomb known as the Step Pyramid at Şaqq ārah.

This tomb started out as a mastaba, but its architect, Imhotep, first expanded the mastaba then topped it with successively smaller mastabas.

In the end, Djoser’s tomb looked like a rectangular wedding cake with sixlayers. The Step Pyramid and later pyramids of the 3rd Dynasty were constructed of small, almost brick-sized stones that were laid in vertical courses and inward-leaning to createthe sloped sides. King Sneferu, the father of Khufu, built the initial true pyramids, developing the new technique during construction.

The earliest true pyramid, at the town of Mayd ūm,began as a step pyramid with inward-leaning walls and eight levels.

After working on the structure for 14 years, Sneferu moved his burial ground north to Dashur forunknown reasons, and construction began on another pyramid.

This one, too, was made of stone blocks that leaned inward.

The architects had designed it with an angle of60 degrees (to the ground), but as the pyramid rose, it started to sink because of the weight and angle of the stones.

To solve this problem, the builders put up an outersupporting wall, giving the half-finished pyramid a shallower angle of 55 degrees.

After this, the architects finished the upper portion of the pyramid off with a slope of only43 degrees.

This shift in angle from 55 to 43 degrees gives this pyramid its name—the Bent Pyramid. During construction of the Bent Pyramid, the architects made a discovery: On the upper portion, instead of leaning the stones inward, they laid down horizontal layers oflarger stone blocks.

With the new technique, the pyramid shape resulted because each level was slightly smaller than the one it lay upon.

The new technique was then usedto construct another giant pyramid for Sneferu, now called the North Pyramid, located about 1.6 km (1 mi) north of the Bent Pyramid.

It proved so successful that Sneferureturned to Mayd ūm, while construction was still in progress on the two Dashur pyramids, and refined the Mayd ūm pyramid by adding an outer level constructed with thenew approach. All the pyramid builders of the 4th Dynasty (2575 BC-2467 BC), including the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza, used Sneferu’s new technique.

Over the course of the 5th Dynasty (2465 BC-2323 BC), however, the quality of the royal pyramids declined.

The cores were made of smaller blocks of stone, laid more irregularly.

By the end of the Old Kingdom around 2134 BC, the pyramids had a core of shoddy masonry and debris covered with a veneer of fine limestone. After a chaotic period in Egyptian history called the First Intermediate Period (2134 BC-2040 BC), Egyptian kings chose to be buried in pyramids at their new capital city near modern Lisht.

These pyramids of the Middle Kingdom resemble those of the late Old Kingdom, being loosely constructed of rough stones, debris, and mud-brick, and coatedwith fine limestone.

However, the associated temples were much larger than those of the Old Kingdom. The pyramids built early on in the Middle Kingdom were entered through an opening cut into the center of the north face, from which a simple passage descended.

By thereign of Senwosret II (1897 BC-1878 BC), builders altered this simple and predictable arrangement.

At his pyramid at Illahun the entrance led to a system of shafts on the south side of the pyramid and a passageway that circled the burial chamber before opening into it.

During the rest of the Middle Kingdom, royal pyramids becameincreasingly complicated in plan, presumably to foil the intentions of tomb robbers. In the New Kingdom (1550 BC-1070 BC), kings were no longer buried in pyramids.

The site of royal tombs had shifted to the Valley of the Kings near modern Luxor.

But private citizens used small pyramids for tombs that were barely higher and wider than the entrances to them. V STUDYING THE PYRAMIDS The pyramids of Egypt have long captivated people’s imaginations.

The Greek historian Herodotus described his visit to Egypt and its pyramids in the middle of the 5thcentury BC, and later Greek and Roman travelers admired and climbed the Great Pyramid.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who lived in the 1st century AD, told of local Egyptians who would help tourists in their ascents.

But European descriptions of the pyramids largely ceased for more than 1,000 years after the decline and fall of theRoman Empire in the 300s and 400s AD.

Over time, the sands of the desert swept over many of the pyramids, burying them. John Greaves, a professor from Britain’s Oxford University, undertook the first organized scientific expedition to Egypt in 1638.

Greaves set out to describe the GreatPyramid, and his measurements proved to be highly accurate.

Throughout the rest of the 17th and 18th centuries the efforts of European diplomats and travelers, such asBenoît de Maillet of France, Richard Pococke of Britain, and Frederik Norden of Denmark, helped stimulate European interest in the monuments of ancient Egypt.. »