Pyramid Quest by Robert M. Schoch Read Free Book Online

Both pharaohs feared that because they were such tyrants, the people would rise up in revolt and desecrate their mummies. When they did come to die, they ordered their friends to bury them secretly in order to guarantee their passage into divinity.
    It is important to recognize that these conflicting opinions of Khufu, though themselves ancient by our reckoning, were recorded long after the fact. When Herodotus wrote his account, approximately 2,100 years had passed since Khufu’s rule. Herodotus was as far removed in time from Khufu as we ourselves are from Jesus of Nazareth. The accounts of Diodorus Siculus and Manetho are even farther from their point of origin.
    Still, it is unlikely that the three writers were making up the story entirely. No doubt they were drawing on oral histories or folk tales, a source Herodotus in particular relished. At a minimum, those stories, coupled with the Fourth Dynasty’s religious upheaval, lead us to suspect that something curious and unusual was going on during Khufu’s time, something the standard story—which posits the Great Pyramid as nothing more than a giant mausoleum—falls short of explaining. Once again, we must ask whether the Great Pyramid has more significance than simply being “a tomb for some ambitious booby,” as Henry David Thoreau once expressed it.

FACTS THAT FIT, FACTS THAT DON’T
    In part, the standard story works. The Two Lands did come together and form a dynamic political alliance that grew into an expanding kingdom, one that extended its rule into the neighboring regions of Africa and Asia. A powerful elite personified by the pharaoh ruled this growing kingdom, and the religious ideology of royal Egypt transformed the pharaoh into a god awaiting divine transformation at death.
    It is in the next leap—that the pyramids served only to house the preserved bodies of dead pharaohs and help in their metamorphosis into a god—where the orthodox explanation falls short. Put simply, the standard story doesn’t account for a number of realities, most strikingly in the case of the Great Pyramid.
    To date, no unquestioned royal mummy has been found in the Great Pyramid, nor in any of the three large Giza pyramids for that matter. The best direct evidence for pharaonic interment in the larger Giza pyramids comes from the Menkaure Pyramid, where a basalt sarcophagus was discovered by the British colonel Howard Vyse in 1837 in one chamber, and human bones and the remains of a wooden coffin bearing the name Menkaure in another. Vyse had the sarcophagus shipped back to England for study, but the vessel foundered off the coast of Spain and took the sarcophagus to the bottom. The wooden coffin was probably a restitution from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664-525 B.C.), and, based on radiocarbon dating, the humans remains are from the Christian era. The Khafre Pyramid did contain a sarcophagus, but it housed the remains of not a human but a bull.
    Perhaps robbers penetrated the royal tombs before archaeologists did and made off with the treasures they supposedly contained. The mummies themselves would also have been prizes. Even before history museums began adding mummies to their collections, mummy flesh was considered such a powerful medicinal ingredient in Europe that it fetched a stunning price. Thieves cleaned out more than a few ancient tombs, and the mummies of the pharaohs could have made up part of the supply that fed this ghoulish market.
    But there is another explanation, one that has to be considered: the pyramids contain no mummies because they never were intended as burial sites. Diodorus writes that Khufu and Khafre were buried elsewhere. Perhaps they were hardly unusual in their choice of a final resting place somewhere other than the pyramids they are said to have built.
    If so, then Khufu had another idea in mind with the Great Pyramid. Were he interested simply in building the biggest burial mound in human history, he certainly went to a great deal of