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A Passion for Pyramids - Part I

© Jennifer Overhulse-King

Not unlike Elizabeth Peters’ heroine, Amelia Peabody, much of the world can be said to have “a passion for pyramids.” And not just any old pyramids will do. Around the world, many countries boast pyramids of long ago civilizations, but none have drawn the wonder or the attention of the world like those of Egypt.

Life as a Seven Wonder
The generations of today have never known a time without the electric light bulb, cars and nylon stockings, and they have never known a time before the Great Pyramids of the Giza Plateau existed. The collection of pyramids lounging on the Giza Plateau is Egypt’s greatest mystery, greatest treasure and the symbol of all things Egyptian rolled into one neat package. From the Biblical to the extraterrestrial, none of Egypt’s wonders have come close to claiming the fame of the Pyramids of Giza.

In the history books, the time of the pyramid builders was a time of gods, magic, monsters and monuments. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Lighthouse of Alexandria are all gone. Only traces of the Temple of Artemis and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus remain. Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only the Great Pyramids still stand.

For some 45 centuries, the pyramids have stood the test of time, the assault of the desert sands and winds, and most recently, the erosive effects of man-made pollutants on what is left of these great monuments. Man has waged war around them and today weather and pollution wage war on them. The wonder is that any of them remain at all. We have only drawings to conjure up images of the Colossus of Rhodes and the rest of the group. And, just recently remnants of what may have been the Lighthouse of Alexandria have been found. Some say the Seven Wonders are wonders because they were, for the most part, figments of the imagination. . .that maybe they weren’t as “wonder”ful as they were made out to be. One has only to look at a picture of a tourist dwarfed by the Great Pyramids to disagree.

“Man fears Time, yet Time fears the Pyramids.” –Ancient Arabian proverb

“From atop these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” – Napoleon, in an address to his troops before the Battle of Giza in 1798.

Just What is it Made of Anyway?
Archaeologists estimate the largest of the pyramids at Giza was built between 2600 and 2500 B.C. by a 4th Dynasty pharaoh called Cheops or Khufu. Cheops was not the first to conceive the idea of a pyramid. Several examples of earlier “stepped” pyramids exist in Egypt, the most famous of the stepped pyramids being that of Djoser, a pharaoh of the 3rd Dynasty. Cheops simply took the idea and blew it entirely out of proportion. His royal architects completed the building of a “perfect” pyramid over 4500 years before any of us were even born.