Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (14 page)

Wepwawet
Another funerary god with a dog’s body and the head of a jackal, his name means “the opener of ways.” A very old deity, represented on the Narmer Palette, he guides the dead person’s soul through the underworld and assists in the weighing of the heart.

Why are there so many animals—real and imaginary—in Egypt’s myths?

Maybe you’ve heard the riddle of the sphinx? It was once popular fifth-grade humor.

“Which lion doesn’t roar?”

Answer: “The Sphinx—it’s made of stone.”

In ancient Egypt, animals played a prominent role in myth and religion, apparently from prehistoric times, judging from early art and burial practices. Images and references to hawks, falcons, lions, serpents, crocodiles, and bulls fill the pantheon of Egypt and are vividly illustrated in Egyptian art. While that idea was not unique to Egypt, animal worship may have been more significant in Egypt than almost any other ancient civilization. Springing from the belief that animals were manifestations of the gods—vehicles through which the gods could be worshipped—the Egyptians often buried animals in ritual graves, mummified them, provided them with food on their journeys to the afterlife, and used them in worship ceremonies at temples.

The Apis bull of Memphis, for instance, was considered a manifestation of the creator god Ptah and was used to make divinations. Worshippers could ask “yes” or “no” question of the oracle bull, which provided an answer to the petitioner by moving into one sacred corral or another. Other major religious centers, such as Heliopolis and Elephantine, had stables of sacred bulls and rams, respectively, while flocks of ibises and falcons, and thousands of cats—considered manifestations of Thoth, Horus, and Bastet—were maintained throughout Egypt, vast menageries that were used to make sacrifices by pilgrims seeking a favor from the gods.

Not only did the Egyptians represent their gods in animal forms, they also used a combined animal-human form, of which the Sphinx is the most famous example. A Greek word that is derived from Egyptian words meaning “living statue,” a sphinx in ancient times was believed to be a mythical beast with the body of a lion or lioness and the head of a ram, hawk, or reigning king or queen. Sphinxes, which were reported by ancient Greek travelers to have been located all across Egypt, were thought to embody the power of the ruler to defend Egypt and served as visible symbols of the strength and power of the pharaoh.

Located near the pyramids at Giza, the Great Sphinx is one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of art in the world as well as the largest statue in the ancient world. Measuring 240 feet (73 meters) long and about 66 feet (20 meters) high, and carved from an outcropping of limestone, the Great Sphinx at Giza was sculpted with the body of a lion and the head of Khafra, son of Khufu the Great. The Sphinx’s head, which served as the guardian of the royal cemeteries outside Memphis, seems to have been positioned so that the setting sun would stream through the temple on the days of the two equinoxes, capturing the moment when day and night were in perfect harmony.

What did the pyramids have to do with the gods?

No doubt it was repeating stories like this—about a king forcing his daughter to become a prostitute to pay for a pyramid—that made people wonder whether Herodotus was a reliable source. What the first Greek historian might have been passing on as “history” sounds suspiciously like the kind of story disgruntled commoners might tell if they don’t like the king. Since Cheops—or more accurately Khufu—lived some two thousand years before Herodotus was in Egypt, the story of the daughter in the brothel has the ring of legend, not history. In fact, although the writings of Herodotus on Egypt profoundly influenced the study of Egypt for centuries, recent scholarship suggests that Herodotus never even traveled to some of the places he claims to have visited. For his inaccuracies and tall tales, Herodotus is sometimes called the “father of lies.”

Still, it is understandable that Egyptians might have been a little peeved with Khufu. Most likely, the scale of his pyramid, the Great Pyramid at Giza, must have placed extraordinary demands on the Egyptian farmers and working class who paid the taxes and provided most of the labor force that built the pyramids, which could account for stories like the one that Herodotus told.

Even so, the very existence of these pyramids speaks eloquently to the power of Egyptian religion and an incredibly well ordered society that could have produced such marvels in a time with precious little technology. As Egyptologist Jaromir Malek notes, “For a modern mind, especially one that no longer knows profound religious experience and deep faith, it is not easy to understand the reasons for such huge and seemingly wasteful projects as the building of pyramids. This lack of understanding is reflected in the large number of esoteric theories about their purpose and origin.” Those theories, which began in the nineteenth century, inspired the word “pyramidiots,” for people who proposed extravagantly fanciful ideas about both the function and construction of the pyramids.

The pyramids we typically associate with Egypt today had evolved from earlier burial sites called “mastaba tombs,” simple, rectangular, flat-topped structures built from mud bricks. Observing their profound religious beliefs, the earliest Egyptian kings were buried in these tombs to begin their journey to eternity. Initially, these tombs simply served as a safe place for the remains of the mummified king until he was resurrected to join the other gods.

But others apparently went along for the ride. Recent discoveries suggest that household servants and government officials in Egypt’s earliest dynasties were sometimes sacrificed to spend eternity with their kings. In 2004, archaeologists announced finding the remains of human sacrifice in some early Egyptian tombs that predate the pyramids. The practice, while it had been suspected, had never been substantiated until a team from New York University, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania found a series of graves near the tomb of King Aha, believed to be the first king in the First Dynasty. The graves, as reported in the
New York Times
in March 2004, yielded the remains of court officials, servants, and artisans, all apparently sacrificed to serve the king’s needs in the afterlife. Nearby graves held the bones of seven young lions, symbols of kingly power, and one grave also held the bones of donkeys, presumably to help transport the king into the afterlife. “We may think of the ritual slaughter of a large number of retainers as barbaric,” one researcher told the
New York Times
. But the ancient Egyptians “may have come to look upon the sacrifices as passports to eternal life, a guarantee of immortality….”

The mastaba tomb became more elaborate with the first Egyptian pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Third Dynasty King Djoser (also Zoser, 2667–2648 BCE), which rose like a gigantic stairway, allowing the king to climb to the heavens and join the sun god.

The magnificence of the pyramids took on extraordinary new dimensions, both in size and decoration, with the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza.
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Called the Great Pyramid, the pyramid of Khufu contains an estimated 2.5 million stone blocks that average 2.5 tons each, with a base covering about 13 acres. Originally it was 481 feet (147 meters) tall, but some of its upper stones have fallen away, and today it stands about 450 feet (138 meters) high. A dismantled cedar boat, discovered near the southern face of the pyramid, has been restored, and a second boat has also been uncovered nearby. Undoubtedly these boats were intended for the deceased king to make his journey across the sky to join the gods. The king’s body and all the trappings within the burial chamber are long gone, victims of grave robbers.

The ruins of the Great Pyramid are one of thirty-five major pyramids still standing in Egypt, each built to protect the body of an Egyptian king. The pyramids of Giza (Al Jizah) stand on the west bank of the Nile River outside Cairo, where there are ten pyramids, including three of the largest and best preserved. These extraordinary monuments to the power of one man have also been the source of wonder, curiosity, and speculation for centuries.

Besides the colossal dimensions they achieved in the Pyramid Age, the pyramid also became more elaborate in its designs and religious functions. The simple burial chamber of early tombs and periods grew to include attached temples where offerings to the dead king were made, multiple chambers, and granite doors and false passageways intended to deter grave robbers (unsuccessfully, for the most part!). The simplest explanation for the Giza pyramids is that the pharaohs had become obsessed with maintaining their status for eternity, an expression of their divinity. But in almost all aspects of its design and construction, the pyramid was symbolically tied to Egyptian mythology. The four smooth, straight ascending sides of the pyramid were meant to imitate the slant of the sun’s rays, a physical representation of the centrality of the sun—and the sun god—in Egyptian religion. The building itself represented, or re-created, the primeval mound that had emerged out of the watery chaos at the beginning of time—the
benben
stone on which the first god stood and brought to life all the other gods in the Egyptian Creation story.

More recent theories about the pyramids and their geographical alignment are related to Egyptian astronomy. The Great Pyramid of Khufu was called “Khufu’s Horizon” in ancient Egyptian times, meaning that it was the place where the earth met the sky. Since the word for “horizon” was also closely associated with the word for “inundation,” Egyptologists now believe that the pyramid went beyond being a physical memorial to the dead god-king and represented the totality of the belief in regeneration. The concepts of sun, horizon, inundation, the primeval mound, and the king’s resurrection were all tied together in these monumental buildings and the complexes of temples and burial grounds surrounding them.

In a modern context, a parallel of sorts might exist in America’s increasingly controversial presidential libraries. Why do some American citizens willingly contribute millions of dollars to finance the construction of large, expensive, but little-used—at least by the general public—buildings to house presidential papers? Critics dismiss these expensive monuments to former presidents and their papers as extravagant and wasteful. But admirers and the society wish to honor a former leader, even, in some cases, a disgraced one. Although presidents are not buried in their libraries, these new tributes fill a limited social purpose but are an expression of the society’s wealth, social legends, and desire for posterity—they may be as close as Americans might get to creating the pyramids of Egypt.

What’s so great about the “Great Pyramid”?

Practically since the time of Herodotus (484–425 BCE), there has been considerable disagreement over how the pyramids were built. Based on decades of research, it is now believed that the Egyptians, although lacking machinery or iron tools, cut large limestone blocks with copper chisels and saws. The extremely difficult work of quarrying was done in searing heat by slaves, usually prisoners of war. While most of the stone came from nearby quarries, other blocks were floated down the Nile from distant quarries, during the period of inundation. Not only was the Nile higher at this time, which would make it easier to get the massive stones closer to the pyramid complex sites, but the period of flooding was the time when most Egyptian farmers were unable to work their land and provided a large, available labor force. Unlike the slaves who quarried stones, the laborers on the pyramids were paid, conscripted by the pharaoh to spend three months of the year in service to the state.

The most likely method of construction involved a series of ramps. Without using wheels or pulleys, gangs of men dragged the blocks on sleds or rollers to the pyramid site and pushed the first layer of stones into place. Then they built long ramps of earth and brick, and dragged the stones up the ramps to form the next layer. As each layer was finished, the ramps were lengthened. Finally, they covered the pyramid with an outer layer of white casing stones, laid so precisely that from a distance the pyramid appeared to have been cut out of a single white stone. Most of the casing stones are gone now, but a few are still in place at the bottom of the Great Pyramid.

No one knows for sure how long it took to build the Great Pyramid. Herodotus claimed that the work went on in four-month shifts, with one hundred thousand laborers in each shift. Among Egyptologists who have studied the remains of what were practically small towns that housed and fed the workers, the modern consensus is that a workforce of between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, including the “service people,” who baked bread and fixed tools for the builders, completed the Great Pyramid in less than twenty-three years. Most of the labor was provided by farmers during the inundations. But there are still unanswered questions about the workers. As historian Charles Freeman notes, “What incentives were needed to keep so many men toiling for so long can only be guessed at.”