Fame For Eternity

The Kings of Ancient Egypt were worshipped like gods. Monumental tombs were built to testify to their fame for all eternity. And indeed, to this very day, the ancient high culture of the Pharaohs has lost nothing of its mysterious fascination.

Siptah must have limped: his left leg was shorter than his right as a result of a childhood polio. We know this even though the pharaoh from the 19th dynasty died more than three millennia ago. Just 200 years ago, a new scientific discipline i.e. Egyptology arose, so as to teach us much about the ancient empire on the banks of the Nile. No other culture has been researched so painstakingly down to the very last details and yet remained as mysterious as the unfathomable smile of the Sphinx.

How was it possible that here of all places, between the deserts of North Eastern Africa and South Western Asia, such a highly developed civilisation was able to arise within the space of few centuries? After the end of the last ice age, roughly 10,000 years BC, North Africa, which had hitherto been hot and humid, dried up. People were only able to survive in the immediate vicinity of water. As a result, nomadic hunters settled on the banks of the River Nile, building clay huts, growing cereals, breeding goats and catching fish in the river. Life became easier. However, as is always the case with social groups which settle a certain area, hierarchical structures soon developed: the leaders of the strongest clans wanted to suppress the weaker and poorer members of the settlement. We will never know whether in these prehistoric times individual villages merged to form a kingdom.

In any case, the founders of the early high culture were the kings of the 1st and 2nd dynasty: they were the ones who constructed the political, religious and social structures of an absolutist state in the short Thinite age between 3000 and 2655 BC.

The rapid progress made in this era was nothing short of remarkable. The earliest Egyptians cultivated their Semitic-Hamitic language, developing writing, the secret of whose symbols and signs - hieroglyphics - was not unlocked until the 19th century. They divided time into a year comprising 365 days and marked the boundaries of their territory using the world's first map. The upper classes lived very comfortably in their clay houses complete with toilet and bathroom. They liked wearing jewelry and occasionally glanced at themselves in a mirror. They saw life only as a first step towards eternity after death. No other ancient people were so engrossed by death and the afterlife. Real mortal life was considered to be nothing more than a pleasant illusion. However, the end of this short dream, this life on earth, was mourned dramatically by family and friends. Men stopped shaving until the end of the ritual burial ceremony and women covered their faces in mud and ran through the streets in white robes screaming "Alas, what misfortune!"

Why misfortune? After death, a person followed the setting sun on a journey to the "golden west"; he believed in eternal life in his grave as the final existence in the kingdom of Osiris, the god of death. In Egyptian mythology, Osiris was slain by his brother Seth and cut into small pieces. His sister, Isis, to whom he was also married, immediately asked Anubis, the embalming god, to put him together again and to mummify him; only in this way was Osiris able to rise from the dead and rule over the kingdom of death. No-one dared to lightly approach this, the most powerful of all the gods, whose judgment decided on whether the dead went to paradise or hell. Only a body which was undamaged on the outside was able to enter the second "true" life.

In order to mummify a corpse, the highly respected embalmers - who wore dog masks in honour of their jackalheaded god, Anubis - removed the brain and the inner organs. These were also mummified, placed in special vessels, called Canopic jars, and placed with the coffin. The empty body was washed with palm wine and filled with a mixture of cloth soaked in resin, saw dust, wax, cedar oil and crushed herbs such as myrrh and aniseed.

Then the body was laid out to dry in sodium bicarbonate (the Ancient Egyptian word "netertj" means "divine substance") for 70 days, following which it was wrapped in strips of linen up to several hundred metres in length. Amulets placed on certain parts of the body between the various layers were designed to protect the dead person on his journey to the other world. Finally, the mummy was laid in a human-shaped wood coffin and taken to its tomb accompanied by an enormous procession.

Singers and musicians led the way, lamenting the person's death with songs of sorrow. Lightly-dressed dancers provided entertainment on this final journey. And at the end of the procession, servants carried endless quantities of trinkets to be buried along with the mummy to make life as pleasant as possible in the "house of eternity": furniture, clothing, jewelry and games to let time pass. Murals, pictures of people and animals or models of houses not only documented the dead person's "first" life but made his burial chamber seem more familiar to him.

It is obvious that only kings and the rich were able to afford such pompous burials. The poor were simply wrapped in rush mats, carried to the west of the town or village and buried in the sand. But no one, regardless of whether he was king or slave was spared Osiris judgment. Before his throne, the dead person's heart was weighed down by sin and vice if the dead person was to enter the "holy realm". Otherwise, the "Great Eater" a monstrous, devil-like figure with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion and of a hippopotamus, relentlessly pulled him into a burning inferno.

The earliest kings' sarcophaguses were placed in subterranean mastaba tombs holding up to 50 rooms. The Ancient Kingdom (2665 - 2115 BC) marked the commencement of the age of the pyramids, the most glorious and greatest era in Egyptian history. The powerful kings, who ruled the world from Memphis (known at that time as Menefer Pepi) wanted to scale new heights. They strove for the sun, whose god, Ra', gave them life, love and luck. A multitalented man called Imhotep helped them to do this: he was not only a doctor and a high priest, but above all else a brilliant constructor, who developed stone architecture, the basis of the "sky-scrapers".

Cheops, who was originally called Chnumchufu (Chmum is the one who protects me) was the second king of the 4th dynasty. He must have had an unusually strong megalomanical streak for his tomb was to be the largest of all time. Exactly 146.60 metres high and with a perimeter of 230.38 metres, his pyramid near Giza was erected between 2551 and 2526 BC. To this very day, this monumental construction weighing six million tons is the world's largest stone building, with a surface area large enough.

All the pyramids were aligned precisely to the west, east, north and south with only minimal deviations. With the gigantic Cheops Pyramid, for instance, the deviation was no more than between 1' 57" and 5' 32". How the ancient architects were capable of such precision of work remains a mystery as they have left neither blueprints nor written records behind them. In fact, not so much as a single hieroglyph on papyrus or a sketch carved in stone exists about this. All we can do is speculate on how 2.5 million stone blocks, some even as heavy as 200 tons, were piled up to a height of almost 150 metres without even such simple technical tools as wheels or block and tackle.
In any case, tremendous manpower must have been required. 10,000 stone masons dug the stones using heavy sharp wedges made of extremely hard dolerite. 36,000 men, from workers to engineers, supervised by officials and priests, took over 20 years to pile up the enormous blocks to form what was probably originally a gold-plated tip. Just a few years ago, it was generally believed that this murderous work was performed by volunteers who saw it as their religious duty and even an honour, but it was also claimed that the god kings of the Ancient Realm tyrannised their 1.5 million subjects as if they were serfs.

According to contemporary reports, anyone who took a day off work, was punished by 50 lashes of the whip. If there were not enough local workers, slaves had to help out. The soldiers of Snefru, one of Cheops' predecessors, apparently brought back 17,000 black Africans after a raid through Nubia.

A rigidly organised system controlled the entire economy right down to the very last workshop. There was no private ownership of commodities. Thousands of farmers worked the gigantic, state-owned fields, so-called "domains". The workers were given beer to keep their spirits up.