07 The Tomb Builders

THe Egyptians believed that when they died, their souls stayed near by their bodies. So when a person died, they put in the tomb with him all sorts of things that he had used in daily life—things to eat and drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies of the dead by soaking them in a mineral called natron and wrapping them round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the mummies of the Egyptians may still be seen. Most of them are not,however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although they are yellow and dried up, they still look like Little old men All skin and bones.

Tutankhamen’s tomb

At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to cows were also made into mummies.

When an Egyptian died, his friends heaped up a few stones over his body just to cover it up decently and keep it from being stolen or destroyed by those wild animals that fed on dead bodies. But a king or a rich man wanted a bigger pile of stones over his body than just ordinary people had. To make sure that his pile would be big enough, a king built it for himself before he died. Each king tried to make his pile larger than anyone else’s until at last the pile of stones became so big it was a hill of rocks and called a pyramid. The pyramids therefore were tombs of the kings, who built them while they were alive, to be monuments to themselves when they were dead. In fact a king was much more interested in building a home for his dead body than he was in a home for his live body. So, instead of palaces, kings built pyramids. There are many of these pyramids built along the bank of the Nile, and most of them were built, we think, just after 3000 B.C.

In Nubia, up the Nile farther south in Africa, in what is now the modern nation of Sudan, kings also built pyramids for themselves. This is not surprising since Egyptians and Nubians shared many of the same religious beliefs.

When a building is being put up nowadays, men use derricks and cranes and engines to haul and raise heavy stones and beams. But the Egyptians had no such machinery,and though they used huge stones to build the pyramids, they had to drag these stones for many miles and raise them into place simply by pushing and pulling them. The three biggest of all the pyramids are near the city of Cairo. The largest one of them, which is called the Great Pyramid, was built by a king named Cheops. That name is pronounced just like KEY ops. Here is his date:

Cheops……………………………2900 B.C.

It is said that one hundred thousand men worked twenty years to build his pyramid. It is one of the largest buildings in the world, and some of the blocks of stone themselves are as big as a small house. I have been to the top of it, and it is like climbing a steep mountain with rocky sides. I have also been far inside to the cave-like room in the center where Cheops’s mummy was placed. There is nothing in there now, however,except bats that fly about in the darkness, for the mummy has disappeared—been stolen, perhaps.

Cheops building

Near the Pyramid of Cheops is the Sphinx. It is a huge statue of a lion with a man’s head. Although it is big, it was carved out of one single rock. The Sphinx is a statue of the god of the morning, and the head is that of one of the Egyptian pharaohs who built a pyramid near that of Cheops. The desert sand has covered the paws and most of the body. Though the sand has been dug away from time to time, the wind quickly covers the body with sand again.

The Egyptians carved other large statues of men and women out of rock. These figures are usually many times bigger than life-size, and sit or stand stiffly erect with both feet flat on the ground and hands close to the body in the position some children take when they sit for their photograph.

Egyptian Temple

They built huge houses for their gods. These were called temples. These temples had gigantic—that’s the way it is spelled, though it means giant-ic—columns and pillars.Ordinary people standing beside them look like dwarfs.

Here is one of these temples, and you can see how different it is from a church.

They decorated their temples and pyramids, and the cases in which the mummies were put, with paintings. They did not try to make these paintings look real, however. For example, when they wanted to make a picture of water, they simply made zigzag lines to represent waves and colored them blue-green. When they wanted to draw a row of men behind a row in front, they put those in back on top of those in front. To show that a man was a king, they made him larger than the other men in the picture.

The Egyptians used bright colors in their pictures. They used a lot of red, yellow, and brown. You can see in their pictures that some people had dark skin and some had light tan skin. At first people from southern Egypt had darker skin,and people from near the Mediterranean had lighter skin.Over the years, people moved all over Egypt and then you could no longer tell where a person came from by the color of his or her skin.