The last major engineering task was the positioning of the capstone, basically a small pyramid, on the very top of the Pyramid. The pyramidion, as it is called, was made of fine limestone and probably covered with electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, and might have weighed as much as fifteen tons.48 We don’t know the details of how it was raised, but it certainly would have required advance planning because it is too large to be moved through the cramped internal ramp. After weeks on the computer, Jean-Pierre figured out a possible
scenario for the capstone’s movements. During the fourteenth year of Khufu’s reign, the pyramidion and
the beams and rafters for the King’s Chamber were pulled up the exterior ramp to the top of the Pyramid, which was now 150 feet high.

For the next five years the capstone moved upward, course by course, as the Pyramid was being built. It could have been suspended in a wooden pyramid-shaped cradle. The ropes holding the capstone could
be twisted, much the same way children twist the chains supporting swings. As the ropes twisted, they shortened, and the capstone was raised a bit. Wedges were slid under the capstone, and using wedges,
the cradle was raised the same height.

It was a momentous day when Sneferu, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Great God, died sometime around 2590 b.c., but the date of his death and the details of the funeral of one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs went unrecorded. This seems incredible to us, living in a society that wants every possible detail of Princess Diana’s death and is still debating how JFK died, but things were different in ancient Egypt. Death was a defeat and Egyptian scribes only recorded victories. History was not intended to record objective facts; it was to present the glories of a nation for others to see and wonder at. This leaves Egyptologists with the task of sifting through fragments of information to piece together the details of a pharaoh’s death.

For the reign of Sneferu, one of the most important fragments is the Palermo Stone, a chunk of black diorite in the Regional Museum of Archeology in Sicily. Originally the stone was more than six feet long, and inscribed on its polished surface were the names and reigns of more than 200 kings of Egypt. The fragment in Palermo is only thirteen inches wide and ten inches long, but it lists the earliest pharaohs, including
Sneferu. It recounts the major events during the various kings’ reigns and from it we learn that Sneferu sent a trading expedition to Lebanon to obtain cedar for building boats and the doors of the great temples of Egypt.

It must have been a successful mission; forty ships laden with huge logs returned home to Egypt. Fragments like the Palermo Stone are the bits and pieces from which Egyptologists reconstruct ancient lives, but they don’t give us the exact date of a pharaoh’s death. There are two reasons for this. As we noted before, the Egyptians viewed death as a defeat, but they also had a unique calendar. The Egyptians didn’t number their years consecutively. Our year 2008 will be followed by 2009, but in ancient Egypt when a new king like Sneferu ascended the throne, the calendar began anew with: “Day 1, Year 1 in the reign of Sneferu.” The only reason we know Sneferu died in 2590 b.c. is that a few events such as total solar eclipses mentioned in ancient Egyptian records can be dated accurately in terms of our calendar. Let’s say that an ancient Egyptian papyrus written during the reign of Ramses the Great mentions that a solar eclipse took place. Using our calendar, astronomers calculate exactly when the solar eclipse took place and then Egyptologists count backward to get dates for reigns of the earlier kings. Based on evidence like this, our best bet for Sneferu’s death is 2590 b.c. We can be sure, however, that when Sneferu died, all of Egypt
mourned. Under his rule Egypt became an international power, sending trading expeditions to Lebanon for cedar and to the Sinai for turquoise and copper. Sneferu ushered in the era of the great pyramids, but there
is another reason to believe Egypt mourned his passing. It is recorded on the Westcar Papyrus, located in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Before the Egyptians invented papyrus, writing was done on clay
tablets. After being inscribed, the damp clay tablets were baked in a kiln to be preserved. It was an expensive and tedious process to form a tablet out of clay, inscribe it with a stylus, and then bake it. Sending
letters abroad was not easy; great care had to be taken that the tablets didn’t crumble and break. The Mesopotamians even had special envelopes, also baked, to protect them.

The invention of papyrus (from which we get our word “paper”) created a literary boom. All of a sudden, writing was easy. Sheets of paper made from strips of the papyrus plant were glued together in long rolls that could be written on with a brush. No more baking of tablets, no problem transporting the writings—the publishing industry took off. The Egyptians wrote everything on papyrus, religious texts, battle accounts, magical spells,even fiction. The Westcar Papyrus, named after its owner, contains a series of magical stories told by Sneferu’s grandson, Prince Bauefre, the Stephen King of ancient Egypt .

Before a single block was put in place, the angle of the pyramid had to be determined. The Egyptians did not think in terms of degrees; they never divided the circle into 360 degrees as we do. Rather, their unit for angles was called the seked. Their unit of length was the cubit, roughly the distance from elbow to the end of the middle finger. This was, of course, standardized. Their measuring rod, the cubit stick, was divided into seven palms, and each palm into four fingers, similar to the way we divide a yardstick into feet and inches. When Egyptian architects were considering angles, they thought in terms of how many cubits you built outward for each cubit of height. For example, if the pyramid rises one cubit and you build out one cubit, you will have a 45-degree angle.The ratio doesn’t have to be in terms of cubits; we could also think in terms
of palms. So if you built upward one cubit but out ten palms, you would have a seked of ten, which is the same as our 35-degree angle.

All pyramids may look pretty much alike to the layman, but they are not. At Meidum, the first attempt at the true pyramid, the exterior angle is 52 degrees. The Bent Pyramid begins at 54 degrees, but toward the top it changes to 43 degrees. The Red Pyramid is 43 degrees and the Great Pyramid is 52 degrees. These pyramids all had white casing stones that were crucial to ensuring that the pyramids’ angles were constant throughout construction.

The thousands of casing stones needed for the Great Pyramid would have been finished at the quarry with their 52-degree angles before transportation to the site. When the angle is carved on the rough block,
the weight is reduced by several hundred pounds. By completing the blocks in the quarry rather than shipping them in rough form to the construction site, you save the shipping and hauling of thousands of tons of what will eventually be rubble. Herodotus was told that the Pyramid was completed from the top down—that the casing stones were put on the surface of the Pyramid while still in their rectangular shape and then, when all were in place, the blocks were given their 52-degree angle by carving from top to bottom. The economic reason mentioned above gives one argument against Herodotus’s account, but there are other arguments. First, where would the workers stand when carving from the top down? There isn’t enough room at the top. Second, as a pyramid rises, the angles at the corners must be repeatedly checked to make certain that the four sides will meet perfectly at the top to create a point. This requires that finished blocks be in place as the pyramid grows. Third, if all the external blocks were finished at the end of the project, this would add several years to the construction time. Thus, for all these reasons, it makes sense to complete each facing block in the quarry before it is placed on the pyramid.

There is also empirical evidence to show that the blocks were finished first and then put in place. The Bent Pyramid at Dashur has more of its casing stones in place than any other pyramid. When these blocks
are examined carefully, one sees numerous blocks with chips that have been repaired with matching limestone plugs. This suggests that the blocks were finished and some damage occurred either during transportation or while setting the blocks in position. If the blocks had been set in place when rough and then finished in situ from top to bottom, we wouldn’t expect to find many chips and repairs.

Imhotep’s great creation, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, sparked a frenzy of construction in Egypt, and a nation of farmers became a nation of builders. It is even possible that Imhotep went on to design a second step pyramid for Zoser’s successor, King Sekhem- Khet, whose pyramid was discovered in the 1950s (see Appendix II). After building several step pyramids, Egypt would go on to erect even greater monuments—and one of the strangest of these is the Medium Pyramid.

The pyramid at Medium sits isolated in the desert about fifty miles south of Saqqara. Rarely visited by tourists, it is a crucial step in Egypt’s march toward the Great Pyramid. As soon as you see the Medium Pyramid you know something went wrong. Looking more like a medieval fortress than a pyramid, it seems almost sinister. In the 1960s, Kurt Mendelssohn, an Oxford University physicist, theorized that the walls
of the pyramid collapsed during construction because the angle of the pyramid was too steep.13 He believed the mound of sand at its base hid the top of the pyramid that came crashing down. However, recent
excavations of the mound show that the collapse theory is wrong; the mound consists primarily of windblown sand.

Egyptologists now agree that the reason for the pyramid’s ruinous state was that local villagers used it as a quarry for stone, stripping it of its fine white limestone casing. But there’s still a mystery. The pyramid was never used for the pharaoh’s burial, and no one knows why. There is a temple next to the pyramid where priests would have made offerings for the dead king. On top of the temple are two stelae— round-topped stones that served as ancient Egypt’s bulletin boards. If you wanted something known, you carved it on a stela and put it where everyone could see it. The two stelae at the Medium Pyramid should have the king’s name and titles, but they are totally blank; they were never inscribed—a dead giveaway that the king never used the pyramid. The unfinished burial chamber inside the pyramid offers another clue that the pyramid was never used, but within it rests a milestone in the history of pyramid building.

The burial chamber inside the Medium Pyramid is the first above ground burial in Egypt, a radical break from the underground burial chamber concept of the Step Pyramid. The owner of the Medium Pyramid
was going to be buried in the pyramid, not under it. To be buried inside a pyramid, a major engineering problem had to be solved. If the burial chamber is inside the pyramid, then the ceiling of the chamber must support the hundreds of thousands of tons above it. Constructing a room inside a pyramid had never been tried before and the architect of the Medium Pyramid came up with an ingenious solution—a cor belled
ceiling. With a cor belled ceiling, the walls narrow as they get higher. As you build the wall out of stone blocks, each level is placed about six inches in from the one beneath it, so it overlaps and looks like an upside-down staircase. Thus, when you get to the top, the block spanning the walls and forming the ceiling is only a few inches wide. A block only a few inches wide is not going to crack under the weight above it, thus the problem of how to build an internal room is solved.

One might wonder how a pyramid can be lost, but that’s what happened just a few hundred yards from the Step Pyramid. In 1951, Egyptian Egyptologist Zakariah Goneim discovered the remains of a pyramid that was never completed.58 Unlike Zoser’s, which had six steps, it was apparently intended to have seven. Almost totally covered in sand, its excavation took several years and yielded much information about the early days of pyramid construction. One graffito on the pyramid’s enclosure wall reads “Imhotep,” so it is quite possible that Imhotep outlived Zoser and designed a second pyramid. During the 1953–54 season, the entrance was found on the north side, with the door still sealed, indicating that although the pyramid was unfinished,
the pharaoh evidently had been buried inside. There was tremendous excitement; an intact royal burial of the Old Kingdom had been found. To make it even better, fragmentary inscriptions indicated the king was
Horus-Sekhem-Khet, a little-known pharaoh who was about to roar back into history.

Goneim opened the door and found a descending corridor framed by an arch—so much for the Romans inventing the arch! At the bottom of the corridor, huge limestone blocks and rubble still blocked the entrance to the burial chamber. Carefully removing the debris, Goneim found gold jewelry on the corridor f loor: twenty-one gold bracelets, 388 hollow beads, and the remains of a wooden magical wand covered in gold. Why had such a treasure been left on the f loor? Perhaps to appease tomb robbers, in the hope that after clearing the corridor they would find the jewelry, be satisfied, and leave. It wasn’t necessary: they never got that far, and the door to the burial chamber was still intact when Goneim reached it. It must have occurred to Goneim that his discovery could be the next Tutankhamen. If there was gold jewelry on the floor outside the burial chamber, what was inside? Various officials and news media were told of the great discovery, and on the day of the opening, the corridor was packed with reporters.

The door was carefully taken down and Goneim peered in. Everyone was shocked. The burial chamber was virtually empty! There were no treasures as in Tutankhamen’s tomb—no furniture, no boxes with clothing, no statues or vases, just a translucent alabaster sarcophagus. Once the disappointment subsided, everyone’s attention turned to the sarcophagus. It was still sealed and on the lid were plant remains, perhaps incense used in a burial ritual. The sarcophagus had obviously not been touched since it was placed beneath the pyramid more than 4,500 years ago, so once again spirits rose. The intact mummy of an Old Kingdom pharaoh was still a fabulous discovery. It took several hours of hard work to open the sarcophagus, as its five-ton sliding side panel had to be lifted. Again Goneim peered in; again disappointment. The sarcophagus was empty; it had never been used. Where was Horus-Sekhem-Khet? The pyramid was a decoy, intended to throw thieves off the trail of the pharaoh’s true burial. If this is correct, it may explain why the pyramid was never plundered. Robbers frequently obtained inside information from tomb builders. If they did in this case, they would have known the unfinished pyramid of Horus-Sekhem-Khet was a dud, not worthy of robbing .