Egyptian ‘bent’ pyramid dating back 4,600 years opens to public
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
It took away a lot of the marketing “mystery” of the pyramids for me, instead taking a very practical engineering, scientific, and analytical approach to investigating the pyramid phenomenon.
Extremely surreal to go down in to the middle of an engineering marvel that large, and I couldn't believe that I was alone inside of it.
I'm longing to go back there, even more now.
It'll probably outlast me!
(possibly You Are Not a Gadget, but could have been another)
Also reminds me of the muon detection tech that can probe through solid material. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray-muons-...
Did they miss a NOT? That seems like a strange reason to go from not allowing tourists to allowing them!
> The site, which lies in the open desert, attracts just a trickle of visitors and is currently free of the touts and bustle of Giza.
> The promotion of Dahshur is part of a wider push to boost tourism, an important source of foreign revenue for Egypt that dipped steeply after the country’s 2011 uprising before gradually recovering.
The reason it is "bent" is because they ran out of boulders and so had to reduce the pitch to reduce the number of blocks required to finish the project.
Not quite, given that Sneferu had at least three built.
The article contradicts you.
I've been reading some of Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology and he goes into some of the early burial rituals. It's truly fascinating stuff. Did you know that a lot of the early rulers of the area were buried with their entire retinue (10s or 100+ servants) alive? Including sometimes the ruler himself. Gruesome stuff, but also quite fascinating.
Sod them and their misery inflicting monuments.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Sure, there were murderous tyrants, but there were also the ancient Sumerians who executed their kings at the moment of ahem coitus. Something about completing the circle between life and death or some such.
They were a weird wacky bunch, and some of them were terrible, but I think it's a more complicated picture than you paint.
"Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it." It's important to understand who (by our standards) bad people were, why they were bad, and what circumstances enabled them to be bad. If you erase them, you can't learn from them.
That's not true, is it? I'm under the impression the bent pyramid was looted dry thousands of years ago, like the others.
A lot of whippings would have to be handed out for me to move rocks around in the sun.
None of that looks like a situation I'd want to have imposed on me. No individuals say "you know what I want to do today? Move rocks for zero economic use."
I quote from your page:
"Forms of forced labor and servitude are seen throughout all of ancient Egypt even though it wasn’t specifically declared as the well known term we have today, slavery.
... Conscripted workers were not owned by individuals, like other slaves, but rather required to perform labor as a duty to the state."
Yeah awesome. Sign me up. The term is irrelevant. The pyramids are undoubtedly both great works and massive causes of suffering.
There is a consensus among Egyptologists that the Great Pyramids were not built by slaves. Rather, it was peasants who built the pyramids during flooding, when they could not work in their lands.
I also read about analysis of their remains which brought out the fact that they were all well fed with plenty of meat and grains.