Egyptian Civilization
Senior 1 · History and Citizenship
Egyptian Civilization
Lesson 4 of 5
25 min
About 2,100 years after the Great Pyramid was built, Herodotus asked Egyptian priests how it had been made. This is what he wrote down.
"Kheops… compelled all the Egyptians to work for him… They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months… The pyramid itself was twenty years in the making. Its base is square, each side eight hundred feet long, and its height is the same."
Herodotus, The Histories, book 2, chapter 124, translated by A. D. Godley (1920). Public domain. "Kheops" is the Greek form of Khufu.
Worked example: testing Herodotus against the evidence
The Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu about 2560 BCE, from about 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, many weighing over 2 tonnes. It was originally covered in smooth white limestone, most of which was later taken away for other buildings. For more than 3,800 years it was the tallest building made by people anywhere in the world.
The king's body was placed in a granite coffin (sarcophagus) in the King's Chamber. The relieving chambers above it spread the enormous weight of stone. The narrow shafts from the King's Chamber may have had a religious purpose, pointing towards stars linked with the king's journey after death.
Definition
Pyramid: a massive stone tomb with a square base and four triangular sides meeting at a point, built for an Egyptian king or queen. The first was the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, c. 2650 BCE, designed by the official Imhotep.
Definition
Polytheism: belief in many gods. Example: the Egyptians worshipped Ra (the sun), Osiris (god of the dead), Isis (his wife, a protector), Horus (the sky, linked with the king) and Anubis (guardian of tombs).
Definition
Mummification: the preservation of a dead body by removing the internal organs, drying the body with a salt called natron and wrapping it in linen, so that the soul could use it in the afterlife. The process took about 70 days.
Definition
Afterlife: life after death. The Egyptians believed that a good person's spirit could live for ever in a perfect version of Egypt, the Field of Reeds, if the body was preserved and the right rituals performed.
Egyptians spent great effort preparing for death, because they believed death was a journey, not an end. The dead were given food, furniture, models of servants (like Meketre's granary in lesson 1) and books of spells to help them. The most famous is the Book of the Dead, written on papyrus and placed in the tomb.
Since the 1990s, archaeologists led by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have uncovered a whole town where the pyramid builders lived, just south of the Giza pyramids, and the tombs of workers and overseers. Skeletons show hard labour, but also healed fractures that had been treated: workers received medical care.
In 2013 a French and Egyptian team led by Pierre Tallet found the oldest inscribed papyri yet known, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast. They include the logbook of an inspector named Merer, whose team of about 40 men carried limestone blocks by boat from the quarries at Tura, across the Nile and along canals to Giza, in the reign of Khufu. For the first time, a person who worked on the Great Pyramid speaks to us directly.
TED-Ed: "How did they build the Great Pyramid of Giza?". Watch for how the builders moved and lifted the stone, and compare the video's picture of the workers with Herodotus's.
Think, pair, share: Was building the pyramids a good use of Egypt's wealth and labour? Give one argument from the point of view of a pharaoh and one from the point of view of a farmer called up to work.
Practice
Sources and credits
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
