SECRETS OF THE PYRAMIDS

From sacred rituals to hidden treasure, uncover why these world wonders were built

- Ben Gazur

If you go looking for the seven wonders of the ancient world today, you are in for a disappointment. You will search in vain to find more than a few scraps of them.

The statues from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can be found in museums around the globe, but of the wonder itself little remains in the ground. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have so thoroughly crumbled to dust that academics debate whether they really existed at all. The Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the god Helios that towered over the harbour, was felled by an earthquake less than 60 years after it was erected. Time has left precious little other than their names.

Visit Giza however and the Great Pyramid of Khufu still stands. The oldest of the Seven Wonders, it is also the only one which has, largely, survived despite millennia of weathering and the despoliation of visitors. Stand before the geometrical perfection of the pyramid, built from millions of blocks of limestone, and you will be sharing the wonder experienced by everyone who has seen them for thousands of years. Pyramids have become symbolic of the public’s idea of ancient Egypt, sparking many misconceptions and pseudoarchaeological theories, but their real history can tell us much about life and death for the Egyptians.

PURPOSE OF THE PYRAMIDS

The pyramids of Egypt were so massive and so unlike any other human constructions that for thousands of years they have attracted legends about their origins and use. The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for nearly 4,000 years. When most people would only have seen buildings of one or two stories in height, it boggled the mind that such objects could have been made at all. The ancient author Diodorus Siculus commented that “they do not have the appearance of being the slow handiwork of men but look like a sudden creation, as though they had been made by some god and set down bodily in the surrounding sand.”