Who Built the Pyramids? Posted 02. 04. 97
Download 272.34 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- INTERVIEW WITH MARK LEHNER, Archeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and Harvard Semitic Museum PEOPLE POWER
- NUMBER THEORY
| Who Built the Pyramids?
Posted 02.04.97 NOVA Egyptologists and historians have long debated the question of who built the Pyramids, and how. Standing at the base of the Pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these enormous monuments could have been built in one pharaoh's lifetime. Yet scholars think they were built over mere decades for three pharaohs who were father, son, and grandson (Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure). 
Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass agree wholeheartedly: Egyptians built the Pyramids. But who were they exactly? EnlargePhoto credit: © Ugurhan Betin/iStockphoto Egyptologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the 20,000 or 30,000 laborers who are thought to have built the Pyramids lived. Ultimately, they hope to learn more about the workforce, their daily lives, and perhaps where they came from. In the meantime, Lehner has been excavating the bakeries that presumably fed this army of workers, while Hawass has been unearthing the cemetery for this grand labor force. The two scholars believe that Giza housed a skeleton crew of workers who labored on the Pyramids year-round. But during the late summer and early autumn months, when the Nile flooded surrounding fields, a large labor force would appear at Giza to put in time on the Pyramids. These farmers and local villagers gathered at Giza to work for their god-kings, to build their monuments to the hereafter. This would ensure their own afterlife and would also benefit the future and prosperity of Egypt as a whole. They may well have been willing workers, a labor force working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, and country. In the following interviews, Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass address the long-standing question of who actually built the Pyramids at Giza: 
"Every time I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it," Mark Lehner, here standing atop the Khufu Pyramid, says of the ancient Egyptians who built the Pyramids. EnlargePhoto credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation INTERVIEW WITH MARK LEHNER, Archeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and Harvard Semitic Museum PEOPLE POWER NOVA: In your extensive work and research at Giza have you ever once questioned whether humans built the Pyramids? Mark Lehner: No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or super-intelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in 1972 and ended up living there 13 years. I was imbued with ideas of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive. And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very technologically sophisticated people who built these things; they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, and bakeries we actually find. Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Every time I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development. Rather than just copping out and saying, "There's no way they could have done this." I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find. 
Who carved the Sphinx? Lehner and others believe it was Khafre, the builder of the second Great Pyramid. EnlargePhoto credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation NUMBER THEORY Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 272.34 Kb. Share with your friends:
|