Architecture of the Afterlife

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Nothing brings together the scholar and the crackpot like a pyramid. Built more than 4,000 years ago, Egypt’s pyramids are among archaeology’s perennial fascinations—huge, geometric structures with mummified bodies inside.

Books about the pyramids have a long history, too, going back at least as far as the Pyramid Book, written by the medieval Egyptian historian al-Idrisi around 1230 A.D.¹ Egyptologist Mark Lehner has added to this formidable body of work with his new book, The Complete Pyramids. Given the breadth of what is available, to call one’s book The Complete Pyramids shows considerable chutzpah. But Mark Lehner 057has some justification. Since 1979, when he began studying the history of the construction and reconstruction of the great Sphinx at Giza, he has haunted the Giza plateau, becoming intimately familiar with its contours and characteristics. Lehner’s knack for hooking ideas together into sweeping patterns has changed the way we look at the pyramids, especially the monumental structures of the Fourth Dynasty (2575–2465 B.C.), where his work has been concentrated.

Lehner describes, for example, how the annual flooding of the Nile deposited layers of silt on the riverbanks, which then became the highest part of the valley. At flood time, when dikes along the banks were cut, natural basins behind the riverbanks were filled, irrigating the land. As the floodwaters drained back into the river, some of the water drained the other way, into the lower ground along the valley’s edge, just below the desert cliffs. Here it formed swamps and occasional swampy lakes. Lehner believes that these lakes, rather than perennial irrigation canals, determined the location of royal cemeteries. This is a novel and interesting interpretation; still, these lakes must have been connected to the Nile by perennial irrigation canals, since the whole point of building pyramids near water was to give their builders access to the Nile and therefore facilitate transport.

Why did the Egyptian pharaohs (and frequently their royal officials) build such expensive and elaborate tombs? Although Lehner is an archaeologist, he makes little use of archaeological evidence in discussing Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. He relies almost entirely on the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, which first appeared around 2350 B.C., soon after the largest pyramids were built. As a result, The Complete Pyramids appears to suggest that religious beliefs during Egypt’s Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods (from about 3000 to 2150 B.C.) remained uniform and unchanging.

But the architectural changes in pyramid construction during this period of 850 058years tell another story. Two major shifts occurred in the building and layout of the pyramids, and I believe these shifts are related to changing religious beliefs and new conceptions of the afterlife.

During the first 400 years of the Old Kingdom (the first three Egyptian dynasties), pharaonic burials were covered with rounded mounds, which later evolved into stepped pyramids. Associated with these tombs were huge niched enclosures, rectangular in shape, with their long sides running north-south. These early royal tombs were located in traditional ancestral cemeteries, first at Abydos and later at Saqqara. Like their kings, royal officials also built tombs oriented north-south; these tombs were located in ancestral cemeteries reserved for officials, apart from the kings’ tombs. Both royal and nonroyal corpses were buried underground, in a small suite of rooms that resembled a house. (During some periods, these rooms even included washstands and latrines.) The tombs were enclosed by long corridors lined with vast numbers of storerooms.

Both the orientation and the size of these early burial complexes provide clues to the ancient Egyptians’ beliefs about immortality. The tombs’ sloped northern entrance pointed to stars in the northern sky that never sank below the horizon—suggesting that immortality could be attained by joining these “unwearying” stars. The many storerooms would have contained huge quantities of food and supplies for the deceased kings and nobles. There is no evidence that cults dedicated to caring for the dead existed during this period (such cults came into being only later), so it is likely that these installations were visited for the last time during the funeral. King and commoner alike hoped to spend eternity in a well-stocked bunker.

Things changed at the end of the Third and the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (around 2600 B.C.). True smooth-sided pyramids supplanted the stepped pyramid—with passages that descended and then rose again to the inner burial chamber. The new pyramids were attached to strings of buildings extending east across the desert to the edge of the agricultural land. Unlike earlier pharaohs, the kings who built these smooth-sided monuments did not build their pyramid complexes near the tombs of their ancestors; they chose new, isolated sites along the line of cliffs west of the capital at Memphis. And there was another change: The vast complex of storerooms and domestic rooms surrounding the underground burial—the perpetual larder of the deceased—disappeared suddenly and completely.

The nonroyal tombs of this period also lost their storerooms. And royal officials no longer built their tombs in traditional ancestral cemeteries; instead, they chose sites near their kings’ pyramids. Frequently, kings even helped officials construct their own burial complexes by donating fine stone or by providing skilled craftsmen.

These changes in pyramid construction suggest that the diurnal death and rebirth of the sun supplanted the perpetual northern stars as the most important symbol of the afterlife. The descent and rise of the pyramid passage to the burial chamber mimicked the setting and rising sun; the sides of the pyramid were thought to represent rays of light descending from the sun; and the east-west complex of buildings was aligned with the sun’s passage across the sky. Clearly, kings no longer expected to live forever in underground burial chambers. They hoped to travel with the sun across the sky by day and through the realm of the gods at night. Texts from this period frequently mention the sun god Re, whose name also began to appear as a theophoric element in royal names and titles.

Lehner supplies additional evidence for the importance of the sun in this period. The Giza structures, he notes, are laid out symmetrically; the northwest-southeast axes of all three Giza pyramids align perfectly. Lehner suggests that this geometrical exactness, along with the striking symmetry of King Khufu’s pyramid, may be connected to new religious concepts of the Fourth Dynasty (2575–2465 B.C.), which, as we have seen, involved the rising and setting sun. This is very likely. The builders of the Giza pyramids used the sun to lay out their monuments, and various texts indicate that the sun god was in the ascendant during this period.²

This new focus on the sun, however, was 059not the only change. Now huge quantities of food were brought to the cult place of the pyramid complex. There is also evidence that agricultural land was set aside to supply these cults and support their corps of priests. Apparently the dead still needed food, but instead of being buried with their nourishment, kings arranged to have it supplied by an aboveground cult. The vastness of this enterprise—pyramids, burial complexes, agricultural estates—was doubtless meant to impress future generations with the power of the dead king and to ensure the maintenance of his cult.

These kings no longer looked to the traditional authority of ancestors. Rather, kings and their officials formed a community of mutual support: The afterlives of royal officials, whose tombs clustered around the pyramid of their king, seem to have become dependent upon their king’s success in the great beyond. And his success was linked to the greatness of his pyramid and the maintenance of his mortuary cult, both of which depended on the help of his courtiers.

These three ideas—the rebirth of the sun, the perpetual cult, and the mutual dependence of the king and his people—dominated mortuary religion for 250 years, until about the end of the Fifth Dynasty (2350 B.C.).

Then another major change occurred, marked by an emphasis on the underground part of the tomb and an increase in the decoration of the underground burial chambers. The walls inside the royal pyramids were now inscribed with the Pyramid Texts—consisting of hymns, litanies, dramatic texts, glorifications and magical spells. In nonroyal tombs, offering lists and depictions of food offerings were painted on the walls around the coffin, serving as a kind of picture-book narrative of the Pyramid Texts.

Although the Pyramid Texts mention earlier notions about the afterlife—spending eternity among the perpetual stars and traveling with the sun god—they also introduce new ideas. These texts contain some of the earliest references to the god Osiris and his consort, Isis—probably the best-loved divinities of ancient Egypt. Although the names of these gods had been unknown just a generation or so earlier, once Osiris appeared, he quickly took center stage. For example, the old mortuary offering formula, dating back to the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (around 2600 B.C.) and found in most tombs before the advent of Osiris, reads: “An offering that the king gives, and Anubis [the jackal-headed god].” But by the end of the Fifth Dynasty (around 2350 B.C.), the formula in every tomb became: “An offering that the king gives, and Osiris.” Sometimes Anubis is mentioned afterwards—but Osiris, once he appears, is always paramount.

The myth of Osiris and Isis has not survived intact from any period of Egyptian history. Though allusions to Osiris and Isis occur repeatedly throughout the Pyramid Texts, the only full version we have is a retelling in Greek by the first-century A.D. Roman writer Plutarch. According to the legend, Osiris is killed and dismembered; Isis brings him back to life so that he can impregnate her with a son and heir. Osiris then becomes ruler of the underworld. The myth of Osiris suggests that new life springs from death, much as wheat sprouts from seemingly dead seeds buried in the ground. The metaphor of the buried seed may explain why the realm of the dead, generally thought to exist above the sky in 060earlier views of the afterlife, came to be seen as an underworld—thus the tombs’ underground burial chambers.

The story of Osiris, as Lehner observes, was also associated with mummification. Lehner stresses the little-known (but now well-supported) early practice of cutting off the flesh from bodies before mummifying them. He explains this as a ritual disassembly and reassembly of the body, mimicking the dispersal and reunification of Osiris’s body. But Lehner is on shakier ground when arguing that the removal of soft tissue was not done to prevent the body’s decay. In early mummifications, the flesh was replaced by cloth padding and wrappings, which were less likely to decay than human tissue, transforming the corpse into a soft-sculpture statue (or in some cases, a plaster-coated one). Later, when it was determined that drying out the flesh prevented decomposition, it was no longer removed.

If Lehner offers little to help us understand what the ancient Egyptians believed, he does explain how they worked. He presents theories about the quarrying and transportation of the blocks of stone, the tools that were used and the ways in which ancient architects controlled the shape of the pyramid as it rose—all measured against his own practical experiments, conducted before the cameras of PBS’s science program, NOVA. These experiments show that a small crew can raise very large blocks, supported by wooden sleepers, on a ramp coated with the slick yellow mud abundantly found on the Giza plateau. Lehner has also demonstrated that most of the stone blocks in the Giza pyramids came from the Giza plateau itself—not from distant quarries, as once was believed. He has shown us that the vast hollowed-out areas south of each pyramid, thought to be natural land features by previous archaeologists, are actually stone quarries.

But Lehner is more uneven in describing the organization of the workforce. Apparently drawing on my work on Old Kingdom labor organization, he tries to calculate how many men worked in each administrative unit. The evidence, however, is neither so certain nor as straightforward as Lehner assumes. My work was based on masons’ marks left on the blocks of a few buildings.³ In their fullest form, these marks give the name of a work gang, the name of a phyle (a group that seems to represent an extended clan or tribe), and a single hieroglyph representing a division, the unit that moved an individual block.

The marks do not provide evidence for anything like the precise numbers Lehner gives. (He states that the pyramid workforce was made up of ten crews of 2,000 men each, with the crews divided into two 1,000-man gangs. A gang consisted of five phyles of 200 men, and each phyle was made up of 10 divisions of 20 men, or perhaps 20 divisions of 10 men.) But the masons’ marks do tell us something about the ancient Egyptian division of labor. The marks indicate, for instance, that two gangs usually worked together, one on the southern and one on the northern half of a project—perhaps to encourage competition between the gangs. It also seems that some gangs were trained to work with specific materials; the gang name written on the granite gable blocks that roofed the relieving chambers of Khufu’s pyramids does not match the names of the two gangs that built the chambers’ limestone walls.

Lehner believes that “Khufu’s pyramid could have been built by two crews of 2,000 men”—a surprisingly small number. But this was still a massive undertaking; getting the work crews in place was only the tip of the iceberg. Lehner estimates that another 2,000 men would have 061been needed for quarrying. More still would have been necessary to ferry the finer casing stones across the river and to build the ramps up which the stones were dragged. An even larger task force would have been responsible for growing and cooking the food to sustain this veritable army of workers. Much of the cooking, according to recent evidence unearthed by Lehner, seems to have taken place south of the Giza plateau. This area, once thought to have been a residential quarter, now seems to have contained kitchens that supplied pyramid workers with bread and dried fish.

Still more workers were needed to man the provincial estates and mortuary cults that became essential after the death and entombment of the king. The agricultural estates, located in remote regions throughout Egypt, supplied food for the mortuary cults, which kept up ritual worship in the pyramid complex. Lehner makes the interesting suggestion that by funneling supplies from the hinterlands to centralized pyramid complexes, these agriculture estates, or “internal colonies,” helped develop Egypt into the world’s first nation-state. This insight, like Lehner’s extensive treatment of the organization and maintenance of pyramid workers, and his discussion of the history of archaeological investigation of the pyramids, testifies to his attempt to view the pyramids in the broadest possible context—not as static objects in a dormant landscape but as dynamic elements of a living society.

Much of Lehner’s career has been spent fending off nutty theories about the pyramids. Were they built by space aliens, or by people from Atlantis, who used levitation to lift the stones? Do they contain buried treasure or ancient knowledge lost thousands of years ago? Although The Complete Pyramids addresses only a few of these theories, the entire book is, in a sense, a refutation of crackpot ideas. It shows convincingly that the Egyptians built their pyramids, that their methods are reproducible, that the pyramids fit in with Egyptian religious and political developments, and that the development of pyramid architecture reflects a continual evolution in Egyptian religion and technology. No book about such a vast topic as the pyramids could really be “complete,” but Lehner’s comes close.

Nothing brings together the scholar and the crackpot like a pyramid. Built more than 4,000 years ago, Egypt’s pyramids are among archaeology’s perennial fascinations—huge, geometric structures with mummified bodies inside. Books about the pyramids have a long history, too, going back at least as far as the Pyramid Book, written by the medieval Egyptian historian al-Idrisi around 1230 A.D.1 Egyptologist Mark Lehner has added to this formidable body of work with his new book, The Complete Pyramids. Given the breadth of what is available, to call one’s book The Complete Pyramids shows considerable chutzpah. But Mark Lehner 057has some […]