Scientists have never come to a consensus as to why the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians and Mayans built the pyramids.
To date, several hundred pyramids are known on Earth - from very small to stone hulks as high as a skyscraper. At the mention of the pyramids, almost everyone in their heads has pictures of the Egyptian plateau of Giza and, most likely, the pyramid of Cheops, one of the tallest such structures, whose height reaches 140 meters.
Indeed, Egypt has long established itself as a "country of pyramids", but not everyone knows that they are found not only in North Africa and Latin America, but also in a number of other parts of our planet.
Mysterious ancient stone polyhedra can be found in Mexico, China, Iraq, Greece, India, Rome and even the Canary Islands.
Despite the fact that the pyramids scattered all over the planet vary in size, shape, and time of construction, they have much more in common than it might seem at first glance.
So why and why did the ancient builders erect pyramids?
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Researchers studying the pyramids have repeatedly noted similarities in the construction of these ancient megaliths - whether it is stone processing or its laying.
For example, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in many of his books explained the similarity of megalithic structures by the fact that ancient people exchanged experiences between islands and continents. With his expeditions, Heyerdahl more than once proved the possibility of our ancestors' long-distance swimming.
When looking at the pyramids, the question arises: why do ancient structures have exactly this shape?
According to a senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, candidate of historical sciences Maxim Lebedev, the peoples of antiquity possessed technologies that were very primitive by today's standards. And the use of stone columns, large arched, domed and other structures, human societies have been going for centuries, or even millennia.
The pyramid is one of the most stable forms for creating a high-rise building. Even a child playing in a sandbox knows this. If the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Aztecs or Mayans wanted to erect a building 50-150 meters high, then they had, by and large, only one option - a pyramid, - said Maxim Lebedev.
The largest Nuraghe towers in Sardinia were hardly more than 20 meters in height, since in order to build higher, one had to be able to lighten the structure or make the base very wide, and the top narrow, that is, build a pyramid. According to Lebedev, the peoples who lived in the copper-stone age were not able to build something like the Alexandria lighthouse, to which the Mediterranean civilization in the broadest sense of the word still had to go a very long way of technological development. And the pyramid could … The
pyramid-tombArchaeologists to this day find hidden rooms in the pyramids, which would have remained unknown for a long time without the participation of modern technologies, such as 3D scanning. So why were the pyramids built? According to one theory, ancient civilizations built stone pyramids as tombs for their rulers. Nevertheless, according to archaeologists, mummies have never been found in the pyramids - burials were made in necropolises. For example, the mummy of Tutankhamun was found in the Valley of the Kings, the mummy of Cheops was never found at all, the Chichen Itza pyramid in Mexico also turned out to be empty.
But for whom or what then were the so-called. burial chambers? In the book about Egyptian culture “Gods. Tombs. Scientists "Kurt Keram says that the pyramids were created for the pharaoh, for his soul and his" Ka ":
The pyramids were not, like the huge structures of Christians, temples or cathedrals intended for this or that pious community of believers; Nor were they, like the Babylonian ziggurat towers, the abode of the gods and at the same time a universal shrine. They were intended for only one person - for the pharaoh.
Perhaps, initially, burials were carried out in the Egyptian pyramids, but due to robberies, during which the pharaoh's mummy could be damaged, later, for security reasons, it was decided to bury the ruler's body in another place. The pyramids themselves began to be intended only for the soul of the great ruler.
Knowledge store
Another of the modern versions of the functional purpose of the pyramids is a repository of civilization's knowledge, expressed in the language of geometry.
So, domestic and foreign scientists found out that strict scales and proportions were observed during the construction of the pyramids.
For example, the ratio of the perimeter of the base of the Cheops pyramid to its height is 2 pi. Based on this fact, the scientists suggested that this pyramid served for the Egyptians as a cartographic projection at a scale of 1:43 200 of the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth.
It can be assumed that the main idea of all ancient societies was the same - to connect the earth and heaven, the world of people and the world of gods, the dead and the living, with the help of high cult buildings. Moreover, for each civilization that created pyramidal structures, these buildings, of course, had their own special original symbolism, - says Maxim Lebedev.
According to the scientist, among the Egyptians, the shape of the pyramid was apparently associated with the image of a staircase to the sky, with the sun's rays, and with the silhouette of the mountains of the Western Desert, and with the shape of the first hill of the earth that appears with the retreat of the annual Nile flood, and many other characters.
We will be able to discover some of the possible symbols in the future, because every year we understand the world of the ancient Egyptians better, - the Egyptologist hopes.
But the Mexican pyramids could very well be calendars. The 30-meter pyramid of Kukulkan, built between the 9th and 12th centuries, according to Olga Dluzhnevskaya, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, served as a calendar.
Along the entire perimeter, the pyramid is surrounded by stairs: on each side there are 91 steps - a total of 364, which is equal to the number of days in the year of the Mayan calendar. The stairs are divided into 18 flights, each of which corresponds to a month - this is the number of the Mayan calendar.
Another interesting feature: when the rays of the sun hit the steps, the light forms a shape like a huge snake that moves up the stairs along with the movement of the light.
Ancient observatories
Recently, scientists are increasingly inclined to believe that the ancient pyramids were observatories. In particular, this is indicated by the "astronomical orientation" of the pyramids: at sunset at the summer solstice, and at sunrise at the winter solstice.
The proof of this theory can be the ziggurats - pyramidal stepped buildings of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia. English astronomer Richard Proctor, while studying the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Proclus, also noted that the ancient pyramids could be used as observatories.
As you can see, there are a lot of theories that answer the questions of creating pyramids, and they all have a right to exist. Scientists cannot give a specific justification for the construction of a particular pyramid, since the true meaning of the construction of the pyramids can be understood only on the basis of the features of both religious and everyday views of ancient civilizations.
Erica Efremova