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 […]

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Footnotes

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the scholarly alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

Endnotes

The tale is told by Herodotus in his History (Book II, 126).

Two very popular yet accurate books on the pyramids are lorwerth Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (New York: Viking, 1980) and Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). For more information on various aspects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom period (c. 3000–2200 B.C.E.), see Walter B. Emery, Archaic Egypt (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1961).

Inasmuch as the pyramids were built so long ago, it is not surprising that their construction dates are much debated by Egyptologists.

For an account, complete with pictures, of such objects in a noble’s tomb, dating to c. 2000 B.C.E., see H.E. Winlock, Models of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt: From the Tomb of Meket-Re’ at Thebes, Metropolitan Museum of Art series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955).

In other words, Works Progress Administration, which provided employment for needy persons on public works projects.

Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids (New York: Prager, 1974).