Pyramids : A Wonder

 

Pyramids : A Wonder

 

More than two thousand years ago, geographers in ancient Greece cataloged the Seven Wonders of the World. All of these ancient wonders have long since vanished from the earth. All except one, the very oldest.

 

Through a darkened quarter into the past, a path leads to the funeral chamber of a god-king, surrounded by 2 million blocks of granite and limestone some weighing seven tons. The chamber was meant to be  the impregnable resting place of the pharaoh Khufu, ruler of upper and lower Egypt and the incarnation of the gods Horace and Osiris. This is his tomb. The Pyramids at Giza on a desert plateau some 25 miles west of Cairo stand the largest tombs ever built, the final resting places of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure eventually father, son and grandson. 

 

The river Nile, its life-sustaining waters gave rise to the civilization that made the pyramids possible. Before the beginning of recorded history in an otherwise barren desert, nomadic peoples cultivated the land on the river's banks. Annual floods fertilized their fields with rich silk from the riverbed. Over time elaborate irrigation systems were devised to bring water to fields far from the river. A society with a centralized government began to form a hierarchy of Kian Scorchers officials and Scholars that oversaw the rise of a civilization with both the knowledge and imagination to create wonders unlike any the world that ever seen.

 

The pyramid stand on the boundary between unrecorded and recorded history. Around the time they were built between approximately 2700 and 2550 BC, the earliest record of civilization begins. Pictures of the lives and beliefs of an ancient people. The ancient Egyptians believed in immortality. They thought their civilization would last forever on the walls of tombs and funerary temples, the images of life after death.

An afterlife that was believed to be much like life on Earth, only somewhat grander and more comfortable.

 

In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh or King was seen as the son of a god and as such received the soul, depicted in this hieroglyph of outstretched hands. Soul or life force that passed from the gods through the Pharaoh to his people. Thus the Pharaoh was worshiped both in life and in death as the source of immortality. When the Pharaoh died it was believed that he became a God with special powers to influence the destiny of the living. The pyramids were built both to preserve the body of the Pharaoh which was mummified to last throughout eternity and to preserve his soul. The pyramids for the central structures

in larger funerary complexes that included temples where the living could worship and make offerings to statues of the Dead God kings.

 

The most famous and most mysterious of those statues is the Great Sphinx with the head of a king and

the body of a lion. Its meaning has both fascinated and eluded scholars for thousands of years. Carved from a single block of stone, the man-beast gazes enigmatically as though guarding the secrets of the

ancient desert. The size of the pyramids is so overwhelming that they dwarf even the greatest cathedrals of Europe. Each side of the Great Pyramid is longer than seven football fields. Its base covers more than 13 acres and it rises higher than a 40 storey skyscraper.

 

Many have believed that the pyramids could not be the works of mere mortals equipped only with crude tools. Rather so some say the gods themselves or even visitors from another planet must have had a hand in their creation. It is only the modern era that has produced a plausible explanation for how this astonishing feat of engineering and construction could have been accomplished.

 

First a site was chosen that had bedrock solid enough to support the tremendous weight of the pyramid. Then the area was surveyed so that the four sides of the pyramid would be perfectly oriented to the four points of the compass. To level the foundation a grid work of trenches was built. Water flooded into the trenches was used as a level. A string was stretched between two sticks of equal length held touching the

Water. The ground was then leveled until measuring rods showed that the surface was parallel to the strings. Some of the limestone blocks were quarried at the building site. Others were cut from the banks of the Nile and floated to the site on barges. The stones were then pulled over wooden rollers to the site. As many as 200 men may have been harnessed to a single block which could weigh more than 15,000 pounds. Huge ramps were built to serve as roadways for the massive blocks. Steeper ramps provided access to the mountain levels of stone. After the capstone had been placed on the final tier of stones, mason stressed the exterior with layers of fine white limestone leaving a smooth gleaming surface. Only a fragment of the limestone can still be seen at the summit of khafre's pyramid.  

It was long believed that the pyramids were built by slaves, how else could sufficient labor have been marshaled for the prodigious task?  

 

But today Egyptologists think that the workers were not slaves but peasants, organised into teams or gangs. They would work in rotation for several months each year throughout the decades needed to finish the project. They did so because the back-breaking toil was seen as an exalted calling, an opportunity to serve their kings who would become gods.

 

More than 80 pyramids still stand in Egypt over built in less than two centuries. Then construction abruptly and mysteriously ceased. Ironically the pyramids failed in their primary function are protecting the Pharaohs entombed within. Long ago robbers broke through the seemingly impregnable masonry and emptied the sacred chambers of their treasures and sarcophagi. Even so, priests in the cult of Khufu were still officiating in the ruins of his temple, 2,000 years after the Pharaoh had been sealed in his awesome tomb.

 

Thus the ancient religion of Egypt persisted for at least as long as the world has known Christianity. And although the pyramids have been assaulted and plundered by Emperor's and Sultan's as well as by common thieves, their power and mystery remained undiminished, the first and last great wonder of the ancient world

 

[Author : Quester Ent.]