And it so happened that several years ago in one of the Penza newspapers an article was published … of a firefighter from Mokshan (we have such a regional center) that "he is interested" in the history of Ancient Egypt, and came to the conclusion that the Egyptian pyramids (and he sincerely believed that there are only three of them!) - these are … breakwaters from the flood! And the "flood" was supposed to happen due to the fact that sooner or later sea water will pour into the voids formed at the place of coal and oil production, and the earth … After reading "this", we thought for a long time why the newspaper published this? And then they wrote a response material, where the "comrade firefighter" was popularly told about the number of pyramids and about the geophysical features of our planet. In a word - let it be better to study the theory of firefighting.
Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser. Before her, both kings and their dignitaries were buried in mastabs
However, even on VO no yes no and there are comments, it's good that at least not articles about the fact that the pyramids in Egypt were built by the Russians, that “secret knowledge” is encrypted in them, that the Egyptians could not build them, and that the golden coffin of Tutankhamun is a fake archaeologist Carter. In general, as before, quite a few people believe that there are only three pyramids in Egypt, that our main knowledge about it comes from … it is not clear where, and all this is the invention of conspirators-scientists, but often all this is a consequence of a very superficial knowledge of the subject. A completely different picture arises when you are closely dealing with some topic, say, for twenty years, and when even your students are already working as managers of travel companies that take people to the same pyramids …
Mastaba of Pharaoh Shepseskaf in Sakkara. He ruled after Cheops and for some reason built a mastaba. Why?
We will consistently tell you about the wars of ancient Egypt (after all, wars are slaves who … "built pyramids"), about the artifacts found in them and about the pyramids themselves, of which, as it turned out, there are just a lot of them. Well, the story about the pyramids will have to start with the story about … mastabs - the beginning of the beginnings of the ancient Egyptian burial culture.
Mastaba (Arabic for "bench") was the direct predecessor of the pyramids and was a tomb for the nobility. There are several hundred (!) Such mastabas, built before the pyramids, simultaneously with the pyramids and even after the pyramids. Each mastaba, although very similar, is an original architectural structure. Everything is the same as with knightly armor - all are similar, but you will not find two identical ones! Outwardly, it is … a structure made of stone or overlaid with stone with sloping rectangular walls, somewhat reminiscent of modern gold bars. It had three compartments: an underground one, where there was a sarcophagus made of limestone or granite, always in the western side of the burial chamber (“to go to the West” means to die!). The second part is a warehouse for burial goods, and the third is a chapel. Some of the mastabas were very large. For example, the mastaba of Ptahshepses had 40 rooms!
Berlin Museum. Entrance to Mastaba Merida
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It is clear that all the mastabs were already robbed in ancient times. But … what the robbers could not carry away was the frescoes on the walls. The walls of the chapel and chambers, as a rule, were decorated with painted reliefs, which were ancient "comics" from the earthly or afterlife of the deceased. They depicted in great detail the labor of farmers, household life, music, dances, games, military campaigns and the afterlife. The paintings themselves are accompanied by explanatory texts.
Vaulted ceiling and wall painting in the room of the Imeri tomb in Giza. The painting depicts the process of making grape wine
There are thousands of figures on the walls of hundreds of mastabas, tens of thousands of small details. It is physically impossible to forge all of this - this is work for thousands of people for many years, to carry out which, among other things, would be inconceivably expensive, and why? Champollion was the first to penetrate the mastabas. Then such "actions" had no sense at all.
Mastaba Neferbauptah. Giza plateau
Mastaba was built for centuries. The labor of hundreds of people who worked for years was invested in it. The size of the largest mastabas is 50 by 30 meters, and their height is 7-8 meters. Many mastabas were fenced with walls up to 3 meters thick. The shafts leading to the burial chambers were covered with rubble and stones. That is, if it were not for the mastabas, we would not even know half of what we know about Ancient Egypt today. One can even say that pyramids are much less valuable for Egyptologists than mastabas. Moreover, they show how, as Egypt grew richer, the size of the mastabs increased!
Frescoes on the wall of the tomb of Neferbauptah
However, it took a whole three centuries from the moment Egypt became a single state, before the next king of the III dynasty named Djoser, apparently, was so filled with a sense of his own importance that he decided to build himself a mastaba of unprecedented size. Even then, Egypt was waging wars, as all the same mastabs told us about, but the influx of slaves, if there was, is small. And the wars themselves were also small in scale. After all, the soldiers went on campaigns on foot. And they also fought on their own two feet. Accordingly, the main prey was livestock, which could be driven and fed with grass. And the prisoners had to be fed with the same that the soldiers ate. That is why the ancient name of slaves in Egypt is "living slain", that is, initially all prisoners were simply killed.
Djoser, having conceived to create an unprecedented mastaba, began by deciding to build it not from raw bricks, but entirely from stone blocks. It happened around 2700 BC, and the supreme court dignitary Imhotep was appointed the architect. They began to study what he did back in 1837, after which the "Djoser's pyramid" was not studied except by the lazy one. As a result, they studied it in the most thorough way, and today it is one of the most studied "from and to" pyramids of Egypt.
Djoser's burial complex
It turned out that at first it was just a square mastaba 63 meters long and 9 meters high, built of stone and lined with limestone slabs. Then Djoser thought that it was small (apparently, he appropriated someone else's and decided to add something to it from himself), and he ordered to add another 4 meters of masonry in all directions. Then add another 10 meters to the east, and his mastaba became traditionally rectangular. And only now Djoser ordered to make the previous building wider by another 3 meters in all directions and put three terrace-like steps 40 meters high on it. So his mastaba became four-stage. But even this was not enough for him. He ordered to extend its base to the west and north and add two steps upward. Finally, the pyramid was also faced with slabs (the sixth phase of construction), after which the dimensions of its base were 125 by 115 meters,and the height is 61 meters. Thus, his tomb became the tallest structure that was then known.
Dungeon under the pyramid of Djoser
Later pyramids were built according to the rule: one pyramid - one king. But the pyramid of Djoser was the family tomb for all the wives and children of the king, so there were as many as 11 burial chambers in it! Moreover, the tomb of the king was located right under the center of the originally conceived mastaba, and not in the pyramid itself. Archaeologist Koneim about the internal structure of the pyramid of Djoser said that it was some kind of "giant hare hole."
The tiles that covered the walls in the dungeon of the pyramid of Djoser
It is clear that all the premises of this "hole" were robbed in antiquity, but in one of the premises they found two sarcophagi made of alabaster, in one of which there was a broken gilded wooden sarcophagus with the remains of a mummy of a child of about eight years old. But the most surprising find was a 60-meter corridor littered with an incredible amount of burial utensils. The number of stone vessels, according to archaeologists, was 30-40 thousand !!! Several hundred were made of alabaster and porphyry, and they were perfectly preserved, and of the rest, broken, they were able to glue about 7 thousand! If this is a fake, then it is simply phenomenal in its stupidity, since it does not prove anything, and making 40 thousand vessels in order to break most of them is generally idiocy.
The same tiles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The most interesting thing is that the Djoser pyramid, like many mastabas, was fenced with walls, and very high - 10 m in height. It was decorated with ledges and symbolic gates, but there was only one real entrance. The wall enclosed a rectangle 554 by 227 meters in size, which contained a memorial temple and two cult palaces - the North and South, which contained the symbolic thrones of the "Both Lands", pillar halls and altars. In a word, it was wholly and completely a cult structure, which had nothing to do with a "breakwater" and in general with any encrypted knowledge of the ancients.
View of the pyramid and the remains of the temple complex
The study of the pyramid also made it possible to find out that the stone blocks for it were hewn from coarse-grained limestone taken from a local quarry, but the facing was of fine-grained limestone, and it was brought from the other side of the Nile. In both quarries, traces of the work of ancient craftsmen and their tools were found. The stones were sent to the construction site roughly. Therefore, the outer surfaces of the blocks were leveled after placement with copper bits. The quality of the work was monitored with wooden boards smeared with red paint, which were applied to the boards in the same way that today dentists pin pieces of black carbon paper to our teeth.
"Guide" to the burial complex of Djoser
The dimensions of the blocks of the Djoser pyramid are small, so there were no difficulties with their delivery. Two people would be enough. The work intensity was seasonal. In the flood of the Nile, stones prepared in advance could be transported on rafts and barges almost to the base of the pyramid.
The relief of Ti's tomb. XXV-XXIV centuries. BC. Fragment. Stucco on stone, cutter, tempera. Saqqara
Again, do not think that there is a pyramid of Djoser, and then the pharaohs immediately began to build "true pyramids". Nothing like this! The second step pyramid was the Sekhemkhet pyramid, found in 1952 by the archaeologist Goneim. What was left of it was excavated, and it turned out that from the very beginning it was built as a step. The limestone blocks on it were the same size as Djoser's, but the design was more perfect. Inside, it has a core of rough stone blocks, the masonry of which tapers from base to top. If it had been completed, it would have had a height of 9 meters higher than that of Djoser, had seven steps and a size of 120 by 120 meters. The burial chamber was located exactly under the center of the intersection of the diagonals. Work stopped at the second stage, apparently due to his sudden death.
Statues on the west wall of Mastaba Idu in Giza
Then a step pyramid was built at Medum, fifty kilometers south of Cairo. It is believed that it was built by Pharaoh Huni - the last king of the III dynasty. All of it collapsed, but if it were built, then with a square base it would have dimensions 146 by 146 meters and a height of 118 meters. But the most important thing is that near this pyramid, the remains of building embankments were found, along which stone blocks were dragged upward. So modern research has confirmed what Diodorus was already reporting - "the pyramids were built with the help of embankments."
So … the ancient Egyptians did not use any "special" techniques in the construction of the pyramids. It is precisely known how slowly, step by step, the size of the tombs of the nobility - mastab - increased. Then there was a qualitative leap - the Djoser pyramid, which was followed by a stage of "progress", when the step pyramids grew, and their very design became more and more perfect.
Well, now how to get to the pyramid of Djoser, which, together with the entire complex of buildings, the preserved statue of the king in the chapel and all its dungeons, is, in any case, no less interesting than the Great Pyramids.
The image on the wall of one of the corridors of the dungeon of the pyramid of Djoser
The Djoser complex is located in the village of Sakara, and you can get to it by train from Cairo, but from the station, most likely, you will have to walk more than 3 km. You can - for fans of extreme sports, riding a horse or a camel from the pyramids in Giza, but this is 3-4 hours under the Egyptian sun! You can order an excursion from any popular hotel for Russians anywhere, but … not very many people go there. You can take a minibus from Cairo to Sakkara Village, but … you need to know where it stops and be able to communicate with the locals. Finally, the easiest way is to get in a taxi and say - Sakkara, Djoser - and you will be brought there. But it is expensive, more expensive than an excursion, and you have to bargain, but they will take you there, otherwise it’s hard to drag from one pyramid there to another. Entrance fee to the necropolis is 30 Egyptian pounds,but the pyramid of Djoser itself needs permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities in Cairo. You can get it simply by presenting a card of a member of the Union of Journalists of Russia - they say, I want to write a complementary article. That is, in fact, all your troubles, but you will visit the very first pyramid of Egypt.
Author: Oksana Milaeva, Vyacheslav Shpakovsky
