The largest of them - the pyramids of Cheops, Khafre and Mikerin in El-Giza in ancient times were considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The erection of the pyramid, in which the Greeks and Romans already saw a monument to the unprecedented pride of kings and cruelty that doomed the entire people of Egypt to senseless construction, was the most important cult act and was supposed to express, apparently, the mystical identity of the country and its ruler. The population of the country worked on the construction of the tomb in the part of the year free from agricultural work. A number of texts testify to the attention and care that the kings themselves (albeit of a later time) devoted to the construction of their tomb and its builders. It is also known about the special cult honors that turned out to be the pyramid itself.
The pyramids are built on the left - western bank of the Nile (West is the kingdom of the dead) and towered over the whole city of the dead - countless tombs, pyramids, temples.
The largest of the three is the pyramid of Cheops (architect Khemiun, 27th century BC). Its height was originally 147 m, and the length of the side of the base was 232 m. For its construction, it took 2 million 300 thousand huge stone blocks, the average weight of which is 2.5 tons. The slabs were not fastened with mortar, only an extremely precise fit holds them. In ancient times, the pyramids were faced with polished slabs of white limestone, their tops were covered with copper lsites, sparkling in the sun (only the pyramid of Cheops preserved the limestone cladding; the Arabs used the covering of other pyramids in the construction of the White Mosque in Cairo).
One of the largest statues of antiquity and our time rises near the pyramid of Khafre - a figure-lying sphinx carved from the rock with portrait features of the Pharaoh Khafre himself.
The great pyramids were surrounded by a number of small tombs of the wives of the pharaohs and their entourage. Such complexes necessarily included the sanctuaries of Upper and Lower Egypt, large courtyards for the feast of Cheb-su, memorial temples, whose servants were supposed to support the cult of the deceased king. The space around the pyramid, surrounded by steles, was connected through a long covered passage to the temple on the banks of the Nile, where the body of the pharaoh was greeted and burial ceremonies began.
All pyramids are precisely oriented to the cardinal points, which testifies to the high level of astronomical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, the calculation of the angles of inclination of the faces is absolutely irreproachable. In the Cheops pyramid, the angle of inclination is such that the height of the pyramid is equal to the radius of an imaginary circle into which the base of the pyramid is inscribed.
A remarkable engineering find of the ancient architects and builders was the construction of five unloading chambers in the thickness of the masonry above the burial chamber, with the help of which it was possible to remove and evenly distribute the colossal load on its floors. In addition to the chambers, there are other voids in the pyramid - corridors, passageways and galleries, the entrances to which were carefully walled up and masked. Nevertheless, the burials in the pyramids were looted, apparently rather soon after the burial of the pharaohs. The thieves were well aware of all the traps, so they were most likely associated either with the builders or with the priests who carried out the burials.
The buildings in El-Giza, with their grandeur and apparent uselessness, amazed the imagination already in antiquity, which is best conveyed by the Arab proverb: "Everything in the world is afraid of time, but time is afraid of pyramids."
Promotional video: