by Bruce Feiler
While the Great Pyramid alone could provide enough questions for a special boxed set of Trivial Pursuit, its dimensions have been grist for elaborate theories, which attempt to prove it has New Age, or maybe that’s Old Age, power. The pyramid, for example, is said to be located at the exact center of the earth’s landmass. Each of its bases measures 9,131 inches long, for a total perimeter of 36,524 inches. Though that number may appear insignificant, move the decimal point two places and you get 365.24, the exact length of the solar year. Also, the average height of all land on earth above sea level is said to be 5,759 inches. The Great Pyramid, naturally, is precisely that high. While these calculations may seem amusing, to many they are deadly serious, even spiritual. Basem was leading a tour the following week of women from America who had applied for special permission to meditate inside the pyramid. They were apparently bringing apples, convinced that if they placed them in the exact center of the structure the fruit would never spoil.
Such calculations, inevitably, have been applied to the Bible in an attempt to link the pyramids with the prophetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. To some, the pyramids are a divine revelation and foretell the future. The Great Pyramid, for example, was covered with 144,000 casing stones. The Bible says the number of people who will save the world on Judgment Day will be 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes, or 144,000. The Great Pyramid was built with ascending and descending passages to allow the king to be buried and his soul to escape. The point where the passages meet is 1,170 inches aboveground. If you subtract this figure from the starting date of construction, the resulting figure is said to predict the start of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, the death of Christ, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Further, if you draw a line from the center of the pyramid through the east-west axis you will apparently hit the exact spot where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, and later where they crossed the Jordan. According to Art Bell, an American pyramidologist, this line “also passes directly through the town of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. As incredibly precise as this may seem, the Pyramid actually pinpoints Christ’s birthplace.” As if that’s not enough, one website I saw insisted that NASA images show three pyramids and a sphinx on the surface of Mars and that both complexes were built by God, in the shape of Orion’s Belt, in such a way that they are communicating with each other in a plot to destroy the world. Photos were provided.
One reason for all this hysteria is a deeply serious question: Do the pyramids have any relation to the stories in the Bible? The idea that they do has been around since the first millennium C.E., when, unable to read hieroglyphics, few knew why the pyramids were built. Sir John Mandeville, an English pilgrim of the fourteenth century who wrote a travel book widely read across Europe, said the pyramids were “granaries of Joseph,” built to store grain after he interpreted the pharaoh’s dreams. “Some men say that they are sepulchers of great lords that were formerly; but this is not true.” The wishful idea of the pyramids as Judeo-Christian creations was given credence in the nineteenth century when British scholars Piazzi Smith and David Davidson called the pyramids the “Bible in stone” and said they were built by the Israelites as a resting place for God. Even as late as the 1970s, when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin paid a state visit to Egypt, he stood with Anwar Sadat at the pyramids and boasted, “Our forefathers built these.” Sadat, dumbfounded, replied, “I don’t see this.” Aides came scurrying, but Begin brushed them away. “Begin was a very formal guy,” Avner said. “It was hard to whisper in his ear.”
What the aides were pointing out, no doubt, was a simple case of mathematics. The first of the Giza pyramids was begun around 2600 B.C.E. Abraham was likely born around 1900 B.C.E. Even outmoded thinking from earlier this century dated Abraham to no earlier than 2200 B.C.E., which in any case wouldn’t place Joseph in Egypt until 150 years later, which in turn wouldn’t have produced a sizable enough population of Israelites until several hundred years after that. The Bible says, in Exodus 1, that the Israelites were forced into bondage by the pharaoh, who feared their size. Egyptian documents confirm that there was a significant Central Asian population, like the Israelites, in Egypt during the New Kingdom, in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. But that was over a thousand years from when the pharaohs built in Giza. The bottom line is clear: It was as long from the pyramids to Moses, as it is from Emperor Constantine to us. We didn’t build Constantinople; the Israelites didn’t build the pyramids.
So who did build the pyramids?
“Actually, it’s not that complicated,” Avner said. We had wandered around the site for a while and settled on a corner of the middle structure, built for Khafre, Khufu’s son. Over the years, people have devised hundreds of theories on how the Egyptians built the pyramids: using slaves, cranes, catapults, slingshots, lasers, crocodiles, bulls, aliens—or some combination thereof. In fact, they used people, Avner said, as many as one hundred thousand, hired by the state and organized into teams of ten. Most of the stone was quarried near Cairo, floated across the river on barges during the flood, then dragged up the plateau using levers and rollers. When each layer was complete, the crews built a ramp of sand and brick to drag the blocks to the next level. Moreover, these people were not slaves like those found in the American South—individuals owned by other individuals—they were usually peasants recruited by the state to serve the pharaoh and were housed, clothed, and fed. Even foreigners wouldn’t have resisted. As one historian put it, “Better to live a well-fed factor in Egypt than die a starving ‘free man’ on the steppes of Asia. Whether emigrating voluntarily, or sold by their village headman, or captured in battle, it is doubtful whether any of the Asiatics regretted their fate.” In the end, the pyramids are less a feat of construction and more one of organization.
Avner gave an example to prove this point. “The first project I organized when I worked in the Sinai as chief archaeologist was the restoration of an Egyptian temple,” he said. “We had to move blocks that were three and a half tons. But the place was on top of a mountain, and there was no way to bring in machinery, or cranes. So we brought ropes, winches, and about thirty bedouin. At first we couldn’t do it. We put all the Israelis on one side, and the bedouin on the other. We said, ‘Hey, hup, pull,’ but the bedouin were just leaning on the rope and they fell down like dominoes. Eventually we devised a system and were able to do it. It taught us that all you need is the right organization, and you can achieve quite a lot.”
“If that’s the case, why all the crackpot theories?” I said.
“We’ve just lost the appreciation for manual work, because we don’t do it anymore. Also, most of the people coming up with these theories know nothing about ancient Egyptians. If you get to know them, it’s easy to understand how they could invest so much labor. There was a very deep motivation of faith. They took part in a very important process that blessed them, their children, and their country.”
“What about the symbolism? Why so many theories about that?”
“It’s the times. People are in a deep search for meaning. Mystery plays a very big role, as do cults. There’s a huge crisis of belonging. The pyramids are the most visible religious structures on earth. It’s natural that they inspire such beliefs.”
And inspire they do. No matter how many times you see them, they still make you happy. This is their secret, I believe: a perennial ability to inspire awe and speculation in each generation. In this way, Smith and Davidson were right. The pyramids are to Egypt what the Bible is to Israel: the great blank slate onto which each age imposes a meaning and takes a set of lessons unique to its time and place. In some ways it doesn’t matter what the builders of the pyramids, like the authors of the Bible, had in mind. The genius of their creations is that their meaning is subtle enough to change over time. As one proverb oft quoted around Giza says:“Things dread time; Time dreads the pyramids.”
Late that afternoon we decided to descend the narrow passage to the heart of Khafre’s pyrami
d. We flashed Dr. Hawass’s card at the entrance and started down the shaft, which was no more than four and a half feet high. Claustrophobia quickly engulfed us. It was the first time I felt like Indiana Jones, just hoping one of those giant stone balls didn’t trap us inside. The deeper we got, the lower the roof, until we were bending over like baboons, dragging our arms on the ground. “No one who has not crawled along the galleries beneath a pyramid,” wrote Egyptian archaeologist Zakharia Gnomein in 1956, “and experienced the silence and darkness, can fully appreciate the feeling which at times overwhelms one. It may sound fantastic, but I felt that the pyramid had a personality, and that this personality was that of the king for whom it was built and which still lingered within it, possibly the soul.”
Every now and then the path would level out for a few moments and we could stand up, then it would fall again, and we’d have to bend over. I heard one man say earlier in the week that after making this trip he had “pyramid legs” and couldn’t walk for a week. As it was, even in early winter, one could feel the air being sucked from the corridor and sweat accumulating at a rapid rate. Every visitor to the pyramids leaves behind twenty grams of water, I had read, just by breathing and perspiring, which in turn creates corrosive salts. The mere act of entering the pyramid, it turns out, slowly diminishes it.
Twenty minutes later we reached the bottom of the corridor, where a man stood at the entrance to the tomb, asking for baksheesh, a small bribe. We demurred and stepped into the chamber, about the size of a subway car, which at the time of burial in the twenty-sixth century B.C.E. would have contained the mummy, the viscera, and an idol with what one observer called “fierce and sparkling eyes” bent on slaying intruders. Ancient writers believed the tomb had no entrance, but in 1818 Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus sideman from Italy, dynamited the sealed portal and discovered the tomb. As a mark, he scrawled his name in black paint on the wall, which is still visible. With no decoration, and no contents other than the empty sarcophagus, the room was creepy, an echo chamber where the echoes bounce five thousand years.
“Think of Tutankhamen, and how much more important Khafre was than him,” Avner said. “Then you can imagine what was in this room. My personal theory is that he died before the pyramid was completed, which is why this chamber was not higher. It’s a sign of the reverence they must have felt toward him that they continued building even after he was dead.”
“So let me ask you,” I said. “If you could have witnessed one moment in the construction, which would it be?”
“I always imagine the moment when they remove the last stone that was blocking the passageway until the pharaoh’s coffin was lowered into place and all the stones came tumbling down to fill up the passageway.”
“And if you could’ve asked one question?”
“For me the question is not ‘how?’ ” he said, “but ‘why?’ ”
We walked back to the entrance of the compound and took a cab back to the city. Though it may seem ungrateful, the only thing more disconcerting than Cairo with all the cars is Cairo without them. At 5 P.M. the streets were totally empty, as Muslims broke their daylight fast for Ramadan. The only people visible were the scores of police eating tin bowls of rice and chicken and coming back to life with the rush of food. This daily Ramadan ritual, breakfast, is so important that two days earlier, the guard operating the metal detector at the Luxor airport waved passengers through his checkpoint so he could eat. Such determination, though, doesn’t get in the way of courtesy. At least half the people I encountered eating their first meal of the day offered me a bite. In Luxor I was sitting by myself in the airport lounge when an elderly man who had been mopping the floor sat down across from me and pulled out a paper bag. He looked in his bag, looked at me, then came and sat down next to me. Without saying a word, he put the entire contents of his meal in one hand: three dried dates. Despite my protest, we ate his meal together that evening.
This evening our destination was Helwan University, where Ali Omar, of the Department of Tourism, had invited us to break the fast with his staff and meet the former head of the Egyptian government’s department of antiquities. Upstairs a banquet was under way, with a dozen tables arranged in a square and brimming with chicken, meatballs, rice, moussaka, pita, tomatoes, cucumbers, and mango juice. When the distinguished archaeologist took time to write on a calling card “Professor Dr. Abd el Halim Nurel Din, Professor of Egyptology, Head of the Department of Egypt, Cairo University, Giza,” I feared we had another case of inflated formality. I could not have been more wrong. Professor Nurel Din, pushing seventy, and dressed to Third World professorial perfection in a brown tweed suit, brown leather vest, mustard shirt, and brown tie, was a charming man with an easy laugh and an avuncular insistence that we eat dessert—sweet cakes topped with honey and pistachio chunks—before talking about ancient Egypt.
The first thing I wanted to know was why there was such confusion about who built the pyramids.
“I can’t answer that,” he said. “Everybody is trying to take credit. When Qaddafi came here, he said the pyramids were built by the Libyans. The black Americans say, ‘These are our pyramids.’ It’s nonsense. I have hundreds of reasons to say these pyramids are Egyptian, they were built by Egyptians, with Egyptian mentality, on an Egyptian plateau. And if you take the Jews, or the Libyans, or the Americans, if they’re so smart, why didn’t they build the pyramids in their country? They were kind enough to come here and build them for us? It’s all very funny.”
“But there are two thousand theories,” I said, “involving aliens, lasers, slaves.”
“It’s just a pyramid,” he said. “It’s the result of four hundred years of experimentation to achieve that shape. People wanted to be connected to the rays of the sun. Also, Egyptians believed the earth came out of the water in a pyramid. They wanted to be buried in a monument with the same shape. It has nothing to do with astronomy or astrology. But once you’re impressed with something, you can’t get it out of your mind. I’m sorry to say, that’s why we have Egyptmania. That’s why we have Pyramidiots.”
I asked him about the Bible, and about how closely he thought it reflected Egyptian history.
“First of all, as an Egyptologist, as a person acquainted with the ancient Near East, I do not believe very much in trying to have a link between the biblical prophets and certain periods, or certain people, in Egypt. I never try to discuss that, simply because we don’t have any evidence that the Israelites were in Egypt. We don’t have any evidence that they left Egypt. We don’t have any evidence of Joseph or Moses. When we don’t have evidence, it’s just too hard.
“But I’m a good Muslim,” he continued, “and good Muslims should be respectful of other religions. Also, it’s hard to imagine why the Israelites would invent a past in slavery if they didn’t experience it. That’s not evidence, but it is interesting. I think it’s safe to say that they were here, and that they learned a lot.” So what did they learn?
“Egypt was a pioneer in many things,” he said. “It was one of the strongest countries in the ancient Near East. But above all, Egyptians had a feeling of dignity, of grandeur. They believed they were special. They believed they were blessed. Maybe that’s what the Israelites learned: a sense of destiny.” And where might the Egyptians have gotten that feeling?
“They had a chance, because they were living in a place that was safe. The borders were secure. The weather was good. It was easy to reach other countries. Plus, they had the Nile. Ancient Egyptians found themselves in a situation that facilitated their having great achievements. Once you leave, the world becomes much less friendly. In any direction, you get desert.” I thanked him extensively and sneaked one last piece of cake. As we were heading out, I mentioned that we were leaving the following morning for the land of Goshen, where Moses was born, and for the Red Sea. Did he have any advice?
He looked a bit concerned. “Be sure and keep your passports with you,” he said. “And unlike Moses, I hope you come b
ack.”
3. A Wall of Water
Our final wake-up call in Cairo came at 4 A.M. The predawn fog, mixed with the pollution, created a double veil over the city. The Cairo Tower, a 617-foot, latticed, concrete minaret in the shape of a lotus flower, was not even visible from our hotel window, just across the river.
Downstairs our driver and guide were already waiting. At the urging of several friends, we had hired not only a jeep but also a police escort for our day in the Delta, an area regarded as too unstable for foreign visitors. Our driver, however, a former policeman himself, had purposefully evaded the escort on his way to the hotel and suggested we go alone. He was backed by Yasser, our guide, a burly man in his twenties who was wearing black combat boots and a black uniform, and carrying a black walking stick, all of which gave him the slightly menacing appearance of an army commandant or, worse, an officer in the S.S. Under the circumstances, we had little choice. We were in their care for our most ambitious day so far, as we set out to re-create one of the monumental passages of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites’ flight to freedom across the Red Sea. Instead of just visiting this site, we hoped, in a bit of romantic folly (and an indication of how committed we were becoming to our effort) to cross the water ourselves. Along the way, we also hoped to tackle some of the most heated debates about the historicity of the Bible. What caused the plagues? Who was the pharaoh of the Exodus? Where was the Red Sea? And, of course, could it have been parted?
The streets were as empty at 5 A.M. as they had been at 5 P.M. the previous day. The deserted overpasses, underpasses, and tunnels made crossing the city like being in a giant race-car video game, especially when our driver, Ahmed, a mustachioed man with an iron gaze, took the occasion to accelerate over ninety miles per hour, even while we were still downtown. Most people would have had their morning meal at 4 A.M., Yasser said, then elected for “a bit of a lie-in” this Thursday, ahead of the weekly day of rest on Friday. “It’s Ramadan,” he said. “People are lazy. By six o’clock tonight it will be busy.” As a result, the streets remained empty even beyond the airport, and a drive that had taken well over an hour during my first visit took less than twenty minutes.