12 January 1984 A.D. Pyramid
Mystery Unearthed
Pyramid mystery unearthed
On this day, an
international panel overseeing the restoration of the Great Pyramids in Egypt
overcomes years of frustration when it abandons modern construction techniques
in favor of the method employed by the ancient Egyptians.
Located at Giza outside
Cairo, some of the oldest manmade structures on earth were showing severe signs
of decay by the early 1980s. Successful repair work began on the
4,600-year-old Sphinx in 1981, but restoration of the pyramids proved
destructive when water in modern cement caused adjacent limestone stones to
split. On January 12, 1984, restorers stopped using mortar and adopted the
system of interlocking blocks practiced by the original pyramid builders. From
thereon, the project proceeded smoothly.
The ancient Egyptians built
nearly 100 pyramids over a millennium to serve as burial chambers for their
royalty. They believed that the pyramids eased the monarchs' passage into the
afterlife, and the sites served as centers of religious activity. During the
Old Kingdom, a period of Egyptian history that lasted from the late 26th
century B.C. to the mid-22nd century B.C., the Egyptians built their largest
and most ambitious pyramids.
The three enormous pyramids
situated at Giza outside of Cairo were built by King Khufu, his son, and his
grandson in the Fourth Dynasty. The largest, known as the Great Pyramid, was
built by Khufu and is the only one of the "Seven Wonders of the
World" from antiquity that still survives. The Great Pyramid was built of
approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone and stood nearly 50 stories high upon
completion. Its base forms a nearly perfect and level square, with sides
aligned to the four cardinal points of the compass.
The Great Pyramid is
composed primarily of yellowish limestone blocks and was originally covered in
an outer casing of smooth light-colored limestone. This finer limestone eroded
and was carried away in later centuries, but the material can still be found in
the inner passages. The interior burial chamber was built of huge blocks of
granite. It is believed that construction of the pyramid took 20 years and
involved over 20,000 workers, bakers, carpenters, and water carriers. The exact
method in which this architectural masterpiece was built is not definitively
known, but the leading theory is that the Egyptians employed an encircling
embankment of sand, brick, and earth that was increased in height as the
pyramid rose.
In addition to Khufu's
mummy, interior rooms of the pyramid held objects for the deceased to use in
the afterlife. Many of these items were valuable, and tomb robbers had long ago
robbed the pyramids of their treasures before modern archeologists began
studying the structures in the 17th century.
King Khafre, the grandson of
Khufu, built the Great Sphinx, which was carved from a single block of
limestone left over in a quarry used to build the pyramids. The Sphinx has the
body of a recumbent lion and a human face meant to represent Khafre. There are
no known inner chambers in the structure.
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