How I Almost Climbed Cheops’ Pyramid

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When I was 15 years old, my hero was Richard Halliburton—a Princeton graduate who in 1922, at age 22, had bummed around the world, visiting such then-exotic places as Ceylon, Tibet and French Indochina. He did the exciting, even the forbidden. He slept overnight in a restricted area of the heavily guarded Rock of Gibraltar; he swam the Hellespont; he spent a night inside the Taj Mahal.

But to me, in 1945, his most impressive feat was climbing the world’s greatest pyramid—Cheops’ at Giza—and spending the night there. Together with the Sphinx, he watched the sun rise in the east. I read that passage 058from Halliburton’s The Royal Road to Romance over and over again. “If he could do it, I can do it!” I said to myself. That’s how my dream began—and a lifelong fascination with the pyramids.

I was hardly the first person to be fascinated by the pyramids. Over 2,400 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus wondered how they were built. He told a story of how Cheops’ daughter (whose name is unknown) had accumulated the stones for her small pyramid, located immediately east of her father’s pyramid, by requiring each of her lovers to give her a stone in return for her “favors.”¹ The real story of how and why the pyramids were built is even more intriguing, if less scandalous, than the story about Cheops’ daughter.²

Pharaohs of the Ist and IInd Dynasties, beginning about 3100 B.C.E.,^a3 were buried in tombs consisting of one or more rooms built of mudbrick or stone and/or carved out of the living rock (that is, out of the bedrock itself). Into those tombs (called mastabas in Arabic) were placed the king’s mummy and all the good things he would want in the afterlife, including food, clothing, furniture, boats and games. Even servants! (Whether these servants were forcibly slaughtered and then placed in the tombs or went willingly to their deaths, convinced that they too would enjoy with their pharaoh all the blessings of the afterlife, we do not know.)

Surviving members of the pharaoh’s family soon realized that there were several disadvantages to burying precious objects with the deceased, including the fact that they, the living, could no longer enjoy them. Worse still, thieves almost always found ways of robbing the tombs, even the best-guarded ones. (An Egyptian papyrus dating to about 1120 B.C.E. tells of an “inside job” in which local politicians, priests and guards successfully conspired to rob some royal tombs.)

To overcome these problems, miniature clay or wooden models of objects—especially of larger things like buildings, boats and livestock—were increasingly placed in tombs instead of the real things. The Egyptians believed the deceased could, in some mysterious and inexplicable way, utilize these miniatures as well as the real thing. That way the mummy could, so to speak, have his “cake,” and the survivors could eat it, too.⁴

The world’s first pyramid was built by Djoser (ZOH-zer), a pharaoh of the IIIrd Dynasty (2630–2611 B.C.E.). It started out as a conventional stone mastaba. But having completed it with time and money to spare, Djoser proceeded to enlarge it on five separate occasions, adding breadth as well as height. The result was his now-famous Step Pyramid.

In less than two centuries, the pharaohs of the IIIrd and IVth Dynasties took Djoser’s rather primitive pyramid idea (actually, his scribe Imhotep was the real genius behind the project) and developed it into the classic pyramid.

In 1954 I was a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Although one of my professors, Dr. Gus Van Beek, had spent over a dozen years excavating in Israel, he visited Egypt for the first time while I was studying with him. On his return I asked him about the pyramids. “Carey,” he said, “I almost cried. They’re so unbelievably impressive.” An old dream was reawakened.

Then I took a year-long course in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Instructor Bill Kuykendall and I met individually for two hours every week. It was from him that I learned about the Meidum (my-DOOM) pyramid.

The pyramid at Meidum (early 26th century B.C.E.) sits in the sands about six miles west of the Nile and 50 miles south of Giza. It was built either by Pharaoh Snefru or by Pharaoh Hu about 50 or 60 years after Djoser’s Step Pyramid. Like Djoser’s pyramid at Saqqara, it was originally a step pyramid. Subsequently, however, it was built up so that it had four plane sides. Impressive though it still is, it was deemed a failure in its time. The angle of incline was too steep (75°); as a result, the outer layer of stone soon started sliding down to the ground. Another pyramid was being built at this time at Dahshur, about 30 miles north Meidum. Probably as a result of the failure of the Meidum pyramid, the plan for the Dahshur pyramid was revised part way through its construction. The result: the Bent Pyramid of Dahshur its original incline of 54° was abruptly changed to 42°.

Most laypeople still think the pyramids were built by slave labor. For this popular misconception, we can probably thank Herodotus and the countless Hollywood movies that have reinforced his ill-founded speculation. Just as there were a variety of religious, economic, political and personal motives behind, say, the building of medieval cathedrals in Europe, so it was with the building of the pyramids.

Instead of slave labor, some scholars have even argued that a few pharaohs were using, quite constructively, the time and energy of thousands of otherwise idle farmers and tradesmen during the time each year when the Nile inundated the fields. It is probably not a coincidence that centuries later, when pharaohs had ceased building pyramids, they would send their potential troublemakers off to foreign lands on military campaigns during flood time. The building of the pyramids may have been the Egyptian equivalent of Roosevelt’s WPA!⁵

One pyramidologist has suggested that the pharaohs, in addition to erecting tombs for themselves, intended to create in their workers a sense of national identity by gathering together Egyptians from thousands of 060separate and independent towns.⁶

Extending the architectural lessons learned from the pyramids at Meidum and Dahshur, Cheops (KEE-ops; Egyptian, Khufu) built his own pyramid at Giza, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Its corners are precisely oriented with the four points of the compass. It is a perfect square, 745 feet on a side and 449 feet high. It contains approximately 2,300,000 separate blocks of stone, each averaging about 2.5 tons.

On a sabbatical in 1968 (by then, I was an associate professor at my alma mater, Gettysburg College), I finally visited Cheops’ pyramid. I confirmed for myself the truth of the frequently made claim that some of its granite stones—cut with only bronze tools!—were so precisely cut and positioned, side by side, that even a penknife blade cannot be inserted between them.

Much of Cheops’ stone came from quarries in the immediate vicinity. The pyramid’s outer layer of white Tura limestone, however, was brought from the Mukattam Hills, about 17 miles to the east, and the granite used for the burial room and sarcophagus came from Aswan, over 600 miles to the south.

Transporting such megalithic stones, some weighing as much as 15 tons, was not quite as difficult as it might seem. The heavy granite blocks at Aswan were loaded on to large wooden barges and floated down the Nile during flood time. Given their enormous weight, the real problem was stopping the barges on their arrival at Giza.

With memories of Richard Halliburton swirling in my head, I scampered up Cheops’ first five stone courses, hoping only to get a better photograph of my wife Pat and our four children. A guard scolded me and made me come down; people are no longer allowed to climb the pyramids, I learned.

I was crushed! Richard Halliburton had done it, and for 23 years I had been dreaming of doing it. But now I couldn’t. Times had changed. Too many tourists since his day had lost their lives climbing it. And so, reluctantly, I gave up my dream. No pyramid climbing for me.

But that is not quite the end of the story. During another sabbatical in 1981 (by then, I was a 51-year-old, full professor), I paid another visit to the Giza 061pyramids. Casually looking around through my field glasses, I saw someone standing on top of the third largest pyramid, the one belonging to Mycerinus (2490–2472 B.C.E.). The old dream and its logic came back in a flash: “If he did it, I can do it!”

And I even knew how: baksheesh, that old and honorable Near Eastern custom of “tipping.”

As I approached the pyramid of Mycerinus, a wizened old man approached me and asked whether I wanted his nephew to guide me to the top.

“How much?” “Four [Egyptian] pounds.” I didn’t even bother to haggle, so eager was I to start climbing.

With my heart pounding, not so much from physical exertion as from excitement, I began climbing. On the way up I felt a twinge of guilt; my wife, back in Gettysburg, would not have approved of this somewhat risky and not altogether legal adventure. What, I thought, if I should fall and be killed? Small wonder Halliburton did it when he was age 22—and unmarried. Age and responsibilities, I observed to myself as I climbed higher, have a way of making some dreams increasingly more difficult to realize. But then again, realizing one’s dreams always involves some risk.

It took somewhere between 10 and 12 minutes to reach the top. The topmost stone, or pyramidion, was missing, leaving a flat area about 3-feet square to sit on. I could look down and see all four sides without even moving!

I was exuberant, victorious. My dream of 36 years had been at least partially realized. I had succeeded in climbing the third largest pyramid at Giza.

Sometime later, lying in bed in my Cairo hotel, smiling to myself and feeling smug about my accomplishment, I suddenly realized that what I had done just once, the people who had built that pyramid had to do every morning just to get to work!

When I got back to the States and showed the family my slides, my son-in-law Brad, a trombonist for Chorus Line on Broadway, casually observed: “I climbed Cheops’ pyramid and spent the night there in 1977.” What for me would have been a major accomplishment was for Brad an almost-forgotten, minor experience!

As I planned my 1988 sabbatical, the dream of climbing Cheops’ pyramid revived. I was back at Giza.

Once there, Pat refused to climb even the smallest pyramid, located just south of Mycerinus’. “And I don’t want you climbing that big pyramid, either!” she added.

“Well, if you feel that strongly about it. … ” Inwardly, I felt relieved. I’m getting too old for that kind of stuff, I said to myself; leave it to the young Halliburtons.

For better or worse, it’s the young who dream the dreams and do the “rash,” impossible things; the older, more mature among us “prudently” refrain.

But what we lose in not “climbing the heights” is occasionally compensated by an ability to look more deeply within. A case in point: A few weeks later, I again visited Djoser’s pyramid at Saqqara, where all the pyramid building had begun. Toward the end of the day, I went inside the relatively unimpressive pyramid of Unis (OO-nis), the last pharaoh of the Vth Dynasty (2356–2323 B.C.E.). Unis was buried close to the southwest enclosure wall of Djoser’s pyramid. His pyramid is only 62 feet high, and it is not well constructed. But I was thrilled to go deep inside, for there on the walls of his burial room were the earliest religious hieroglyphic inscriptions in Egypt. From my graduate school days, I could still remember that one of the inscriptions claimed:

“O King Unis, you have not all departed dead. You have departed living! For you sit upon the throne of Osiris [god of the dead] with your scepter in your hand that you might give command to the living.”

Deep inside Unis’ pyramid, I had seen something young Richard Halliburton had missed.

When I was 15 years old, my hero was Richard Halliburton—a Princeton graduate who in 1922, at age 22, had bummed around the world, visiting such then-exotic places as Ceylon, Tibet and French Indochina. He did the exciting, even the forbidden. He slept overnight in a restricted area of the heavily guarded Rock of Gibraltar; he swam the Hellespont; he spent a night inside the Taj Mahal. But to me, in 1945, his most impressive feat was climbing the world’s greatest pyramid—Cheops’ at Giza—and spending the night there. Together with the Sphinx, he watched the sun rise in […]