Egypt -- History, Ancient; Egypt -- Social life and customs
Behind the sanctuary lie storehouses, which hold corn and fruits and
wines enough to supply a city in time of siege. The god is a great
proprietor, holding more land than any of the nobles of the country. He
has a revenue almost as great as that of Pharaoh himself. He has troops
of his own, an army which obeys no orders but his. On the Red Sea he has
one fleet, bringing to his temple the spices and incense of the
Southland; and from the Nile mouths another fleet sails to bring home
cedar-wood from Lebanon, and costly stuffs from Tyre. His priests have
far more power than the greatest barons of the land, and Pharaoh, mighty
as he is, would think twice before offending a band of men whose hatred
could shake him on his throne. Such was an Egyptian temple 3,000 years
ago, when Egypt was the greatest power in the world.
But if the temples of ancient Egypt are wonderful, the tombs are almost
more wonderful still. Very early in their history the Egyptians began to
show their sense of the importance of the life after death by raising
huge buildings to hold the bodies of their great men. Even the earliest
Kings, who lived before there was any history at all, had great
underground chambers scooped out and furnished with all sorts of things
for their use in the after-life. But it is when we come to that King
Khufu, who figures in the fairy-stories of Zazamankh and Dedi, that we
begin to understand what a wonderful thing an Egyptian tomb might be.
Not very far from Cairo, the modern capital of Egypt, a line of strange,
pointed buildings rises against the sky on the edge of the desert. These
are the Pyramids, the tombs of the great Kings of Egypt in early days,
and if we want to know what Egyptian builders could do 4,000 years
before Christ, we must look at them. Take the largest of them, the Great
Pyramid, called the Pyramid of Cheops. Cheops is really Khufu, the King
who was so much put out by Dedi's prophecy about Rud-didet's three
babies. No such building was ever reared either before or since. It
stands, even now, 450 feet in height, and before the peak was destroyed,
it was about 30 feet higher. Each of its four sides measures over 750
feet in length, and it covers more than twelve acres of ground, the size
of a pretty large field. But you will get the best idea of how
tremendous a building it is when I tell you that if you used it as a
quarry, you could build a town, big enough to hold all the people of
Aberdeen, out of the Great Pyramid; or if you broke up the stones of
which it is built, and laid them in a line a foot broad and a foot deep,
the line would reach a good deal more than halfway round the world at
the Equator. You would have some trouble in breaking up the stones,
however; for many of the great blocks weigh from 40 to 50 tons apiece,
and they are so beautifully fitted to one another that you could not get
the edge of a sheet of paper into the joints!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account