Actually it was much more than simple labor force feeding and control. The engineering work itself was of a very high order. Aside from the complexity of alignment, planning, movements... little details show huge sophistication and technical insight and execution...
[Re Barry Kemp: T]his still does not speak to a Marxist analysis of social class conflict in Egypt, compared to other factors at hand. If Kemp is making or hinting at that argument he would need a lot more detail.
The Giza pyramids would be a challenge for erectors today, running to tens of billions of dollars. (Even the food service, featuring bakery-breweries on site, became a logistical complex.) Few ancient societies worked from architectural drawings; lines are plotted on the surfaces or grounds of the buildings themselves. Fitchen (1978) suggests heavy loads were jacked up from below using rockers and shims, at that time a safer procedure than attempting lift by crane. Jacks can handle more mass as well because the material they are made from needs possess only compressional strength, unlike the boom and cables in a crane, which must bear shear forces and tension.
Pyramid construction involved a learning curve. Seneferu, the first to build smooth-sided pyramids, undertook three projects to get what he wanted. His Meidum pyramid cracked after construction due to inadequate foundations, and eventually collapsed, a problem Hemiunu solved at Giza by choosing a firm site and digging to bedrock before laying any blocks for Khufu’s structure. The Bent Pyramid remained intact as a mid-height angle reduction cut weight and increased stability, but Seneferu wanted the straight sides achieved with the Red Pyramid he was buried in. Meidum remains interesting for the stepped structure of its core.
Rocker model, Hatshepsut temple
mcleanmuseum.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/4E21727A-F95A-4E7D-BBBA-909716875409Fitchen, 1978, “Building Cheop’s Pyramid,”
Jl. Soc. Architectural Historians (37)1, pp. 3-12.
DOI: 10.2307/989311
www.jstor.org/stable/989311Zahi Hawass has demolished Caminos’ notion that deceased peasants were abandoned at the edge of the desert. They were buried, though most graves outside the major cemetery find at Tell el-Amarna did not survive or haven’t been discovered, probably when later development covered them or, in some cases, erosion from infrequent but heavy rains exposed them to the weather (Nat. Geo., Nov. 2001).
Hemiunu statue, Dyn. 4
Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, Germany
www.rpmuseum.de/english/egypt/egypt-articles.html#c2204This was discovered in his mastaba at Giza with the head broken off; a modern restoration of the eye area, with the head reattached to the statue, is what’s seen in the museum. Text on the statue’s pedestal, giving his titles, was undamaged.
Museum translation: The Prince (
r-pat), Mayor (
HAt-a), Taiti [
TAtj, title of an official], Sab [
sAb, title of an official], Vizier and...bodily child of the king, Hem-iunu (
Hm-jwnw, “servant of Heliopolis”).
Assman says that Egyptian portraiture began with the particular (bust of Ankhaf) and evolved toward the general (officials in bas-reliefs, shabti figurines), in the direction opposite to that taken by Greek art. Later, figures became standardized, with only the hieroglyphic inscription distinguishing one individual from another, as in these unrelated husband-wife pairs likely commissioned from the same workshop:
Demedj and his wife (left, Metropolitan Museum), Kaemheset and family (right, child standing between them at knee level not shown, Cairo Museum)
Contrast Bust of Ankhaf, Boston MFA 27.442, Giza, Dynasty 4 (left), with Kai as seated scribe, Louvre N2290 (E3023), Saqqara, Dynasty 5 (right).
Assmann, 1996, “Preservation & Presentation of Self in Ancient Egyptian Portraiture,” pp. 55-81 in Pieter de Manuelien, Ed.,
Studies in Honor of William Kelly Simpson, Vol. 1, Boston Museum, p. 62.
www.gizapyramids.org/pdf_library/assmann_fs_simpson1996.pdfRealism of a sort made a comeback in the New Kingdom. The figures become less rigid, softer of shoulder and more expressive. The innovative Amarna art gave way to a return of traditional formalism during the Ramesside period, but self-expression would be revived in Roman-era mummy masks.
The bust of Nefertiti from Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna, Berlin Museum) displays women’s makeup customs we still retain today: eyebrow liner, mascara, and lip balm, although the ancient equivalents were all in jellied form and applied from a jar with a paddle. Yet if idealized in beauty, she is individual, too; no other women look like her. The unidentified official at right, Nefertiti’s contemporary (Cairo Museum CG 849), clearly wearing a wig, also seems to have his own personality.
For Kemp’s concordance with
Das Kapital, see his observation that bureaucratic formation requires violence (
Anc. Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization 2ed., p. 92); then, more notably, an interpretation of vertically stepped tick marks on a quarry face at Aswan as a supervisor’s measurements of daily production by each crewman (fig. 64, p. 185). Part II in this book is entitled “The Provider State.” Not that either of these passages is incorrect, yet they mark the departure from a dichotomy which had held sway before 1850: the divine right of kings and landowners, versus the Hobbesian and Lockean concepts of state as a social compact between individuals making their own living. One sees the older mindset in 19th century Egyptological classics, where the functions of the state are taken for granted, rarely critiqued on economic grounds.
Quashing the old desire to see Egypt, alongside Sumer, as a “proto-Greece” lacking only Athenian democracy and Roman law on its inevitable road to modern civilization, has improved matters. Current understanding is less hampered by projection of our values. Individualism and consultative governance or democracy are not recorded at the state level in Egypt. However, the prevalence of lawsuits, plus the labor strike at Deir el-Medina during Ramesses III’s reign, indicates Egyptian attitudes far from passive roboticity; they acted against gross unfairness when able to do so.
Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, who believed they had linked race to cognitive ability, fortunately steered away from the mouth of the Nile. They might otherwise have confronted the frowning opprobrium of Tiye, king’s great wife (
Hnwt nswt wrt) to Amenhotep III and probable grandmother of Tutankhamun, shown below in a Hathor-Amun-Re headdress and hairstyle later added to the original figure, which may have been part of a full statue. The Theban dynasties (11-12, 17-18) kept connections on the upper Nile beyond Egypt, and may have traded on the Red Sea coast; hence Hatshepsut’s Punt expedition, for which the boat harborage, thought to be accessed through Wadi Hammamat above Coptos, eludes discovery.
Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, 2005, on race and intelligence
(Should they have questioned the tests instead of the test-takers?)
www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdfTiye, Ägyptisches Museum Berlin
www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c52.php