The peerless excellence that was Egypt

And now, here we are, in Giza, at the entrance of the Mother of all Pyramids. Only one of the 104 pyramids across Egypt (that have superstructure above desert surface level), this biggest and tallest of them all is named after Khufu (= Cheops), the pharaoh during whose reign it was built or completed. 

Historians and archaeologists reckon that it took several decades to construct and was completed around 2,560 BC. Like all other pyramids elsewhere in the world of antiquity, its construction was for purposes of serving as tombs for rulers and their spouses, temples for gods, or centres of cultural rituals and ceremonies. 

The only one of the seven wonders of antiquity that is still surviving, the Pyramid of Giza stands on one square mile of wilderness, on ground levelled to a decimal of an inch, and rises from a base of 13 acres (13 x 8 = 104 Ugandan housing plots of 50 x 100 feet!).

Comprising limestone and granite blocs that stretch from two to 70 tonnes a piece – and reportedly totalling more stone than all the stones of all the churches ever built in Christian Britain – it majestically rises on cornerstones of the largest and hardest granite, to the equivalent of a perpendicular ladder of 80 tall men standing on one another’s heads; and that is the equivalent of 481 feet, or a storeyed building with 48 floors. Its edges and joints are straight and precise to within a fraction of finger-nail thickness!

This is the wonder building, of amazing antique geometry and architecture, which for close to 3,000 years had stood sealed in mystery and superstition, not a hint bequeathed by its prehistoric designers as to the location of its entrance – until the year 820 AD, when it all changed. 

That year the treasure hunter, by the name of Abdullah Al-Mamum (with engineers, architects, builders and masons, hammers, chisels and battering rams), hacked and burrowed with persistent toil through 100 feet of tempered rock – till he tunnelled into a passage of the Pyramid!

But, to their utter and inconsolable disappointment, the speculators found ‘no gold, no documents, and no kingly corpse – but an empty coffin’!

Elsewhere, ‘yours truly here’ has provided an info write-up for future pilgrims and tourists (from our planet and other planets) to the Pyramid of Giza.

The info write-up spells out how, from the age the European Renaissance and Voyages of Discovery, the chambers that you now behold on entrance, “have been frequented by scientist and historian; by sight-seer, fortune-teller, and bandit; by Egyptologist, and pyramidologist; by archaeologist and antiquitologist – who have crawled with measuring tapes, slide rules, spirit levels, and plumbing lines; with chemicals, magnets and thermometers – and have given names to all the spaces: King’s Chamber and Queen’s Chamber, Davidson’s Chamber and Grand Gallery, Ascending Passage and Descending Passage, The Grotta and the Pit.”

The said info write-up concludes with observing how the Pyramid of Giza was sited on Earth’s most ideal plain for withstanding the ravages of wind, rain, frost and earthquake; and how human civilisation did once wax to a lofty climax – and waxed thus on Africa’s Plain of Giza!

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist. [email protected]