Who Built The Egyptian Pyramids Essays (1404 words) - Giza Plateau

Who built the Egyptian pyramids? For centuries, the Egyptian Pyramids and the Sphinx have stood a silent testimony to a great and powerful civilization long since ground to dust. But behind the great walls of the Pyramids and this long lasting silence, mysteries are still unrevealed and the explanation of these mysteries is a set of theories based on observation and on the printed texts on the Pyramids walls. One great mystery was the one dealing with the building of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. In fact, there are two major theories (Pahl 1998) (Ashmawy 1995- 1997) explaining why the Pyramids were built. The first one states that the ancient Egyptian people built them as tombs for their great kings (Ashmawy 1995- 1997) (Cottrell 1956), and the other one is that they were built by other people more technologically advanced than us, whose purposes were much more important than building tombs for dead Kings (Bauval & Hancock 1996). There is an ancient Egyptian proverb, that says: Everything fears time, but time fears the Pyramids. They are the only Wonders of the ancient world to remain standing, which do not need to be described. Their enormous size made Herodotus the Father of the ancient history, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and many more important invaders to stand in awe overwhelmed by the greatest structures on earth. As for the roots of the word pyramid, they are unknown for it has no origin in any language on earth (Russel & Sellier 1994). The first conventional and widely approved theory, says that the Pyramids were constructed by the Egyptian people 4500 years ago, and states that they are tombs for the dead kings. In fact, the Great Pyramid was constructed by the king Khufu to become his tomb when he dies. For instance, Pyramid building was a tradition to the old Egyptians before Khufu's age, which started as a small structure known as Mastaba (the Mastaba is an Arabic word meaning a bench), which was a small structure were the king and his personal belongings were buried. (Ashmawy 1995) (Cottrell 1956. The reason that lies beyond the building of such great structures was related to the Egyptian religion. The Egyptian religion was a very complex one, based on many after-death believes. Furthermore, through the help of the scenes, paintings, and texts that are found on the walls of the Pyramids, we conclude that the reason that led the Egyptians to build the Pyramids was to protect the body of the mummified king. Besides, the reason to mummification was due to their belief that as long as the body endured, so long the soul continued with it (Wallbank p26) not as quickening and animating it but as an attendant or guardian unwilling to leave the former habitation (Moffet p22). On the other hand, when entering the Great Pyramid, the scholars found that the king's body was missing which lead the scientists to believe that it was stolen, just like other smaller Pyramids which were found empty. Moreover, the pyramidologists got the idea that these empty Pyramids are tombs for old pharos, because there are more than seventy Pyramids found in Egypt which contained mummified bodies of old dead kings (Russel & Sellier). As for the way they were built, the scientists released a very popular theory, which states that the limestones of which the Pyramids are built, were quarried from the Mokkatam Hills, on the opposite bank of the river, and floated across in barges at flood time. Herodotus describes that as each layer of blocks was laid, an earth ramp was raised by gathering earth and stones covered with water, keeping a constant angle so that the ramp would get longer and longer as the work proceeded, on which the block was dragged up (Kemp 1989). So by putting each block on its specific site, the construction was complete in twenty years, by a hundred thousand workers, as Herodotus said. ( Kemp 1989) But is it possible that a 450 feet high, having a base of 755 feet, with 22 acres of stone bocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons each, was built with the old pharaonic civilization tools? Another group of archeologists thinks that the Pyramids could not have been built by the