Читать книгу The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody - Will Cuppy - Страница 7

EGYPT HAS BEEN CALLED the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists.

From the remotest times Egypt has been divided into two parts, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Lower Egypt is the part at the top of the map, so you have to travel south to find Upper Egypt. This seems perfectly all right to the inhabitants because the Nile rises in the south, and when you go up the river, naturally, you go south, finally arriving in Upper Egypt, with Lower Egypt away up north.¹

Egypt was also divided politically until Menes, King of Upper Egypt, went up and conquered Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3400 B.C.² Menes is said to have been devoured by a hippopotamus, a rather unlikely story, since this animal is graminivorous and has never been known to eat anybody else. Modern scholars, therefore, were inclined to regard Menes as a myth until recently, when it was pointed out that a slight error in the feeding habits of the hippopotamus does not necessarily prove that Menes never existed. Egyptologists are beginning to see this as we go to press. ³

The Egyptians of the First Dynasty were already civilized in most respects. They had hieroglyphics, metal weapons for killing foreigners, numerous government officials, death, and taxes.⁴

Some of the Egyptians were brighter than others. They invented mosquito netting, astrology, and a calendar that wouldn’t work, so that New Year’s Day finally fell on the Fourth of July. They believed that the sun went sailing around Egypt all day on a boat and that a pig ate the moon every two weeks.⁵

Naturally, such people would wish to record their ideas, so that others could make the same mistakes. Their hieroglyphics, or picture writing, consisted of owls, canaries, garter snakes, and the insides of alarm clocks.

Properly speaking, civilization is what we have today, but it is nice to know that more than fifty centuries ago they were beginning to be more like us in a tiny country many thousands of miles from New York.⁶ Some authorities believe the Sumerians were civilized before the Egyptians were. I don’t, myself. I have a feeling that the Sumerians will blow over. ⁷

In spite of this excellent start, little of importance happened in Egypt until the Third Dynasty, when Imhotep the Wise, architect and chief minister to King Zoser, invented the pyramid, a new kind of huge royal tomb built of stone and guaranteed to protect the body of the Pharaoh and a large amount of his property against disturbance for all time. That is to say, Imhotep the Wise originated the idea of concealing the royal corpse and his treasure in a monument so conspicuous that it could not possibly be missed by body snatchers and other thieves.⁸ Of course the pyramids were always robbed of their entire contents, but the Pharaohs went right on building them for several centuries before they noticed the catch in this way of hiding things.

Imhotep’s pyramid was not much good, really, for the steps, or terraces, were not filled in, and it was less than 200 feet high. Snefru, founder of the Fourth Dynasty, made a better one with smooth sides, filling in the steps with bricks, which, unfortunately, soon fell out.⁹ Snefru is now known merely as the father of Khufu,¹⁰ or Cheops, as the Greeks called him,¹¹ builder of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, once 481 feet high and still rising 450 feet with the top gone. Although this structure failed as a tomb, it is one of the wonders of the world even today because it is the largest thing ever built for the wrong reason.¹²

Cheops built the Great Pyramid of Gizeh about 3050 B.C. Then he felt better.

The Great Pyramid covers an area of thirteen acres and contains 2,300,000 blocks of limestone averaging two and one half tons, the whole weighing 5,750,000 tons, with total cubic contents of 3,057,000 cubic yards, not counting the hollow spaces such as the King’s Burial Chamber, a couple of air shafts, and a passageway on the north side for the robbers to enter.¹³ If these stones were cut into blocks one foot square and laid end to end, they would form a continuous line of square stones equal in length to two thirds of the circumference of the earth at the equator, or approximately 16,666 ²/³ miles. Yet you often hear that Khufu, or Cheops, was not a truly great man, worthy of our profoundest admiration and respect. There is just no pleasing some people.

Khufu built the Great Pyramid so that he could leave his mummy in it when he died and go on to the Field of Bulrushes.¹⁴ He may also have wanted a little publicity here below. Khufu seems to have known quite a lot about his fellow men. He knew that if he built the largest pyramid ever seen the world would beat a path to it, climb up and down it, and write articles about it for thousands and thousands of years.¹⁵

Of course Cheops, or Khufu, did not carry stones himself. He was a genius, so he made other people do all the hard work. He had discovered the fact that if you tell somebody to do something, nine times out of ten he will do it.¹⁶

It is very old-fashioned to call Khufu a cruel tyrant for making 100,000 fellahin, or peasants, work twenty years on his tomb. Scholars say he worked them only during the three months of the flood season, when they were not engaged in agriculture and were likely to find themselves at a loose end and get into mischief. The Egyptian lower classes were very immoral, always drinking or something. Thus Khufu was doing them a favor by keeping their minds occupied, and the whole affair was more or less one big picnic. At the same time, the exercise developed their characters and taught them the dignity of labor. The majority of the pyramid workers were not slaves, as we used to be told. They were free men, with rights and privileges specified in the Constitution.

Khufu let the fellahin live in nice unventilated mud huts near the pyramid, fed them on radishes, onions, and garlic, and provided them with plenty of castor oil for rubbing themselves.¹⁷ Sir Flinders Petrie tells us that the old stories of suffering among the fellahin are all nonsense. Sir Flinders just loved carrying armfuls of two-and-a-half-ton stones around in the hot sun and he thought everybody else did. Here and there, possibly, some of the fellahin would hint that Khufu had done enough for them and they wished he would hurry up and be a mummy and go to the Field of Bulrushes.¹⁸

In modern times much thought has been devoted to the methods used in constructing the Great Pyramid. Egyptologists marvel that such a task could have been accomplished before they were born, and our engineers say they would not have undertaken it with only some old copper tools and a complete lack of stainless steel machinery. It hardly seems possible that the ancient Egyptians were as smart as these experts. Still, they went right ahead and did it, and you can draw your own conclusions.

The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can’t help it.¹⁹ And once it is up, it stays there. Why wouldn’t it? In other words, it is not the nature of a pyramid to fall down, and that explains why the Great Pyramid is still standing after all these years.²⁰

Khufu also built those three small pyramids at the eastern side of the Great Pyramid. They were for three of his wives. Which brings us to another aspect of this Pharaoh, for you may be sure that he had one. Egyptologists say they have no idea what Khufu was doing when he was not building pyramids, since he left no inscriptions describing his daily activities, and they would give a good deal to know. Then they say he had six wives and a harem full of concubines. They do not seem to make the connection here, but you get it and I get it. We do not need any hieroglyphics to inform us that Khufu dropped around occasionally to see how things were getting along and to tell the ladies how many cubic yards of limestone he had laid that afternoon.

Personally, I would call the royal harem one of Khufu’s main interests in life and one of his claims to our attention. Although we lack statistics, it must have been one of the largest in the ancient world, completely equipped with the very best concubines obtainable in Africa, all skilled in dancing, singing, and playing on the bazinga, or seven-stringed harp. Khufu was no man for half measures, as we have seen, and he would hardly have been content with a mere seventy inmates, the number possessed by King Zer of the First Dynasty. He would have several hundred, if only to break the record, yet they ask how he spent his spare time. If you do not think managing such an establishment is a real job, at least the equivalent of building a few pyramids, you’ve never tried it. Khufu evidently brought to the task a high order of executive ability and a happy faculty of keeping everlastingly at it during a reign of twenty-three years.

Khufu’s six wives were probably not much fun. In accordance with custom, he had to marry some of his sisters and half sisters, not to mention one of his stepmothers and perhaps other close female connections with exactly the same line of family jokes and reminiscences. When he had stood enough, he could always go out to Gizeh and rush construction work on their tombs.²¹ The name of his chief wife and sister, the mother of Khafre, is lost. She is now known to Egyptologists as the lady who used to be in G I-a, the first small pyramid. Queen Henutsen, a wife and half sister, drew G I-c, and the occupant of G I-b, the middle small pyramid, appears to have been a blonde of uncertain origin, an outsider who broke into the royal circle somehow and made good. This queen must have been a great comfort to Khufu. At least she was not a relative.

We do not know much about this blonde lady. It seems, though, that Hetepheres II, one of Khufu’s daughters, was a blonde, perhaps the first of actual record. She is shown with bright yellow hair, striped horizontally with red, in a wall painting in the tomb of Meresankh III, and certain scholars draw the conclusion that she must therefore have had a mother with the same coloring – probably a foreigner, since all the Egyptian women were brunettes. I am afraid those are the only facts available at present.

If you want to make trouble, of course, you can say the picture does not prove either that Hetepheres II’s hair was like that in real life or that her mother was a blonde who was buried in G I-b. It does prove, rather neatly, that the artist who decorated the tomb of Meresankh III had some red and yellow paint.

Herodotus gives us a different story about the middle small pyramid. He states that Khufu, suddenly going broke, left it to one of his daughters to raise the necessary funds and finish the Great Pyramid. She demanded a staggering fee and a block of stone from each person she interested and did so well that she paid off the mortgage on her father’s pyramid and had enough stones to build a little one of her own. Seems her heart was in the work. All Egyptologists regard this story as false. According to their computations, founded on careful and repeated measurements of the pyramid, the base of which is 150 feet square, they say it can’t be done. I suppose they would know.

Anyway, Khufu’s son Khafre, or Chephren, built the Second Pyramid of Gizeh, not quite so large as the Great Pyramid and not nearly so good, and the Great Sphinx, a stone portrait of himself with the body of a lion, symbolic of the Pharaoh’s power.²² The Sphinx is also symbolic of Horus, who is symbolic of several other things. People who think the Sphinx is a feminine sculpture and speak of it as “she” are mistaken.²³

But Khufu’s line was slipping. The Third Pyramid of Gizeh, erected by Menkaure, or Mycerinus, the son of Khafre, was less than half as high as his father’s, and he had only twenty concubines. He was an honest, well-meaning man and a staunch friend of the fellahin, so the country began to weaken and never fully recovered. As he was always giving presents to those of his subjects who were in need, he lost their respect. They thought he must be a half-wit for being so nice to them and they refused to obey him.²⁴ His son Shepseskaf further lowered the royal dignity by permitting his favorite noble, Ptahshepses, to kiss his foot instead of the ground. That sort of thing does not get pyramids built. Shepseskaf left no pyramid, and the Fourth Dynasty just quietly petered out. There is, as a rule, only one Khufu to a family.

Little remains to be told. The Pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty were filled with loose chips and rubble. One of them was named Kakau or Kuku, and another turned out to be a punster. Pepy I of the Sixth Dynasty was a fine fellow, but something seemed to be wrong with his budget, and Pepy II tried to bring back prosperity by building another pyramid. As pyramids were causing the trouble, it didn’t help much. Then everybody got very bored with pyramids and took up checkers.

1 The ancient Egyptian word for south was “upstream.” It was the wrong word.

2 Or 3500 B.C., or possibly 3000 B.C.

3 Menes may have been Aha or Ohe.

4 Predynastic Egyptians beat their wives with naboots, or rough wooden quarterstaves. First Dynasty husbands used exquisitely wrought axes of porphyry capable of breaking an arm at one blow.

5 This was called the wisdom of the ancients.

6 Few people realize that the habitable portion of Egypt comprises only about 13,000 square miles.

7 I never argue with Sumerian enthusiasts. I just ask: “Then what about the Badarians?”

8 The Egyptians believed that the body must be preserved indefinitely in order to obtain immortality. Shows what they knew.

9 The later Pharaohs used stone for this purpose. It fell out, too.

10 Or Hwfw.

11 How the Greeks made Cheops out of Hwfw is at present unknown.

12 The Empire State Building is 1,248 feet high.

13 No radio programs were broadcast from the King’s Burial Chamber until February 7, 1938.

14 The main ambition of every Egyptian was to be a mummy, but only the rich could afford it. Later on, people of moderate means could be mummies.

15 The Great Pyramid is very wonderful, if you care for pyramids.

16 He was not aware that his mummy would be taken out of its coffin and thrown away. That might have worried him.

17 This was their idea of taking a bath. The upper classes used olive oil. All the ancient Egyptians were somewhat oily.

18 They called the pyramid Ekhut Khufu, or Khufu’s Folly.

19 You can get a solid stone facsimile of the Great Pyramid made to order for $156,000,000. It is cheaper to do it yourself – then you know it’s done right.

20 It probably could not fall down if it tried.

21 Queen Merytyetes or Mertitiones, the stepmother-wife, survived Khufu and was passed along to his son Khafre. Odd, I must say.

22 There was a minor Pharaoh between Khufu and Khafre. All we know about him positively is his name, which was Radedef, or Tetf-Re, or Didoufri, or Ratiosis.

23 Some interesting structural details were uncovered in 1925–26 by Monsieur Baraize of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

24 Thanks to General Vyse, who entered the Third Pyramid in 1837 and shipped part of its contents to the British Museum, the elaborate basalt sarcophagus of Menkaure is now at the bottom of the Mediterranean.