The romance of excavation

by David Masters

Who can say what were the thoughts of the Roman emperor as he stood within the shadow of the age-old Pyramids? He was a powerful potentate, but the same thoughts must have flitted through his mind as have surged through the brains of countless unknown men when they first caught sight of the Wonders of the Desert. He must have meditated on their origin, and how they were built.

In modern times Napoleon, the greatest soldier the world has ever seen, paced in the shadow of these same Pyramids, and reflected on the eternal questions regarding them. Lord Kitchener, before he attained to fame, gazed on them hundreds of times. The great ones go to their eternal rest, but the Pyramids remain.

They were built to endure for all time. The Egyptians looked upon the tomb as their permanent home, which was to last for all eternity. This is the reason for the erection of these mountains of stone, for their solidity of construction, for their gigantic size. They have grown out of Egypt’s religious beliefs. They were built solid and big and strong, so that nothing should overturn them, so that they should defy the hand of Time and Man, and forever provide a resting-place, a home for the shadow-self of the King.

Directly a Pharaoh came to the throne, he began preparing for his last long sleep. His lifework was to prepare a tomb for himself befitting his rank and power, and he spared no pains nor means to accomplish his desire. He called his chief architects and his high priests around him, and demanded that plans be made and a site selected. Then he saw the foundation stone laid, and year by year watched the pile of masonry grow.

Judging by the number of Pyramids in existence and their size, it has been reckoned that the total man-power of Egypt was devoted for over a thousand years to building tombs for the rulers, that tomb-building, in fact, was the main industry of the country for centuries.

To build another pyramid the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu or Cheops would be a brilliant engineering feat even in our time, with all the engineering means we have at our disposal. The more we consider the Great Pyramid, the more amazing it seems that the Egyptians should have succeeded in erecting such an enormous monument some six thousand years ago. To this day it is not fully understood how it was done, but gradually evidence is accumulating which serves to indicate the principal methods that were adopted.

A few miles away, on the other side of the Nile, the limestone was quarried from the hillside at Turah. Thousands of men laboured at cutting out the mighty blocks. These were probably squared up roughly in the quarries, and then either transported to the barges on rollers made from the trunks of palm trees, or else mounted on wooden sledges that were dragged over the ground by the united efforts of hundreds of slaves. Great skill must have been required to get them safely aboard, and to unload them from the barges when they arrived on the other side of the river. There is little doubt that the site of the Pyramid was chosen close to the river and to the Turah quarries to make transport as simple as possible.

The Pyramid is built in a series of steps, the lower courses of blocks being 4 feet 11 inches high, the size diminishing as the Pyramid gets higher. Before a stone was cut or laid the Pyramid must have been carefully planned on papyri; for aught we know models may have been built to ensure its accuracy. It is plain that the builder must have calculated the sizes of all the stones course by course and the number required, for their regularity in size is not only amazing, but is also proof that the building of the Pyramid was most carefully worked out.

So extraordinary was the degree of accuracy attained by the ancient architects, that it is doubtful if a single building in all London is so correctly and accurately built as was the Great Pyramid sixty centuries ago. The Egyptians were clever enough to fix their site so that the sides of the Pyramid faced exactly north, south, east and west, without any deviation whatsoever. They had some means of measuring whereby they were able to build the lengths of the sides so truly, that there was not half an inch of difference in any one of them. The builder who is able to build four such walls over 750 feet long, without varying them half an inch in all that length, is a king of his profession. Probably there is not a house put up to-day that does not vary considerably more in the length of its small walls. For sheer accuracy in its measurements, the Great Pyramid is one of the most marvellous structures on earth, and the Egyptians were apparently able to do six thousand years ago what we find it difficult to accomplish to-day.

The Great Wall of China was built at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, and probably thousands of men perished in the building of the Pyramids. Accidents must have been happening all day long. The huge blocks were handled by men who dragged and pushed them to their positions. The labourers were kept hard at it by their taskmasters, whose one thought was to keep up the supply of stone. Mighty blocks weighing many tons must have often slipped and crushed the workers to death. Many of the labourers must have been maimed for life; legs were broken, arms smashed, heads and bodies crushed, as the blocks rolled and swerved in their progress.