The pyramids at Giza - when awesome really does mean awesome!

The pyramids of Giza


Pliny the elder, writing around the year 50AD called the pyramids at Giza, an ‘idle and foolish exhibition of royal wealth. For the cause by most assigned for their construction is an intention on the part of those kings to exhaust their treasures, rather than leave them to successors or plotting rivals, or to keep the people from idleness.’

Florence Nightingale said that the pyramids ‘ looked as if they would wear out the air, boring holes in it all day.’ Napoleon famously said of them as he passed with his armies, ‘forty centuries of history look down upon you from these pyramids.’

The pyramids have been impressing since they were built to house the tombs of the Pharaohs. To gaze upon them, the novelist, Evelyn Waugh wrote, was like being at close quarters to someone famous – like sitting at a table near to the Prince of Wales, you keep glancing at them to see if they are still there.

The pyramids and the Sphinx below them irresistibly draw the eye. Approaching Giza from the centre of Cairo, a drive of about twenty minutes, they are not visible until quite close. The tenements, tower blocks and slums of that part of the city obscure their view until the taxi draws up in front of them.

By the illusion of foreshortening (something familiar to steeplejacks and mountaineers) they appear nearer than they are and much lower in height than they would standing atop the biggest one – the Pyramid of Cheops. They were already more than 2000 years old when the historian Herodotus visited them – what he would say now, looking at them from the Pizza Hut opposite we can only guess.

Cecil Beaton said that they had been degraded into commodities of an enormous tourist trade, and while that is undoubtedly true, it is impossible for anything to detract from their grandeur and scale. Standing right up against them really does make you aware of how very colossal they are.

In the wonderful Light and Sound Show later, we are informed of the number of blocks of stone that were used in their construction and we can only marvel at the feats of strength and engineering skills that were used to build them.

Without the aid of machinery save that which was manually operated, the 2.5 million blocks weighing 6 million tonnes were manipulated into position, after the Herculean task of getting them to the site in the first place. The organization of labour needed to achieve such a huge undertaking would impress even F.W. Taylor with his Scientific Management utilized so successfully by Henry Ford in his automobile factories in Detroit.

The power, the will and the ability to construct these mausoleums for the dead Pharaohs display all the greatness of the age of these kings of Egypt. They surely kept the people from idleness, as Pliny suggests, and in their building, the subjects would have continually been aware of their rulers’ hegemony.

Other, more recent rulers have had mausoleums constructed, and while they are admittedly much less impressive and smaller in scale, they nevertheless do have what it takes to inform present and future generations of the greatness of those interred within.
Robert L. Fielding