GREATEST OF ALL THE WORLD'S ANCIENT WONDERS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23103, 30 July 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

GREATEST OF ALL THE WORLD'S ANCIENT WONDERS

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

" OOLDIERS," said Napoleon rhetorically, "forty centuries look clown on you from the top of the pyramids." Napoleon is under the dome of Les Invalides, and another century has gone. In another forty the pyramids of Egypt will look much the same, and if some great catastrophe destroyed all life on earth to-day, most of them would still be landmarks in the desert long after the creeping jungle had eaten up all the cities of men. "Monuments," said someone, "of senseless ambition." Yet one of their purposes was to secure the immortality of those who built. And if a living name is immortality of sorts, who of Eastern kings is better known than Khufu, the Cheops of Herodotus, who built the Great Pyramid? Khufu neither raided tho Sudan, nor fought with his neighbours, but spent much of his reign and much of tho wealth his predecessor had accumulated in piling himself a funeral monument and tomb, which ages would be unable to destroy. Senseless ambition or not, Khufu did what ho set out to do. Stones and Arithmetic The Great Pyramid is probably the ono building in tho world that modern bombing 'planes could not obliterate; it is the one among the seven ancient wonders of tho world which modern art or engineering would hesitate to reproduce. Tho Hanging Gardens of Baby-

Khufu and His Pyramid

lon, if the archaeologists are right in their identification of the site, would not be beyond a good landscape gardener with plenty of materials and a flair for rockeries. The Pyramid was different—To say that it contains six million tons of stono means nothing. Suppose we say that it contains enough stone to build a fine garage for every house in New Zealand? Those interested could then calculate the tonnage required to land it here. Cut into blocks a foot square placed end to end this mass of stone would extend two-thirds of the way round the earth at the equator. ]n other words, if we may risk more arithmetic, it would build a garden wall some ten feet thick and between forty and fifty feet high from Whangarei to Dargaville. We could call it the Bishop's Wall and give the five millinn Japanese all to the south of it. We could manage with the sunny sido to the north. An Engineering Feat All this stone was quarried twelve miles away across the Nile. Working in shifts of one hundred thousand during the three months of the inundation, Khufu's subjects cut the stone out for him, while Egypt's finest architects and engineers gave the best years of their lives to the task of fitting it together. The ruins of a camp large enough to house four thousand men have been found behind the Second Pyramid. These were probably the skilled masons who sawed the great blocks of stone into shape with bronze saws nine feet long equipped with jewelled cutting points. Thev did it well. "It is a triumph of skifl," writes Sir Flinders Petrie, the

noted archaeologist. "The errors both in length and angles could be covered by putting one's thumb on them. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the same class. The faces are so straight and so truly square, that when the stones were built together, the film of mortar left' between them is on the average no thicker than one's thumb nail."

The dignity and beauty of the finished work is a thing to be imagined. [ Centuries of use as a quarry has made no impression on the bulk but has destroyed the beauty. In the fourteenth century, Sultan Hassan used a large section of the Great Pyramid's facing to build his mosque in Cairo. The fact that he produced one of the finest examples of Saracenic architecture is poor excuse for the vandalism. Vanity of Human Wishes But Hassan was only one of many. The knowledge of the entrance to the inner passages was lost by the time of the Arab Conquest, and Khalif Mamun distinguished himself by driving a jagged tunnel in to find them. Only less destructive have been the tourists, who from Greek mercenaries six hundred years before Christ, to Cook's trippers to-day have vied with one another in scratching names on the ancient stone. Why did Khufu build his Pyramid at all? For the same reason that the other Pharaohs built theirs. They were tombs and monuments. The piled stone has kept their memory green, but in the greater object they failed one and all. The builders planned to keep their bodies intact. But the very grandeur of the pyramids attracted greed and hatred, and every one of the sixty Egypt boasts, was rifled in ancient times. It is a pathetic comment on the futility of human endeavour, that mummies of kings and commoners in less pretentious graves have escaped unharmed, while the royal occupants of the pyramids have long since been blown about the desert sand, leaving the stone mountains to mock the hopes that reared them. Klmfu did not mean to puzzle posterity. He believed that much in a future life depended on the safety of his mortal remains, and he set all Egypt to work to mako sure of that. But puzzle posterity he did. "The theories," says Baikie, "which have been formed about the Great Pyramid, are almost as monstrous as itself, but have none of its solidity." The Real Message of the Pyramid Such precision of workmanship, men have thought, must have aimed at constructing something more than a mere tomb. A gigantic sun-dial, perhaps, to mark the inundations, or perhaps, an astronomical observatory, but not simply an abode for a body! In 3400 8.C., the entrance, it was found, bore directly on the Polo Star, when the star was on the meridian below the Polo. Therefore (the steps in the reasoning are not clear) the great gallery up to the King's Chamber must be a transit instrument! The astronomers are presumed to have watched the stars from thwarts across its width. Surely this would be the most laborious telescope ever built. Moreover, the galleries were closed and hidden when Pharaoh's body lay under its dark mass of stone. Then the sarcophagus has been supposed a supernatural standard of measure of which the British quarter is an uncanny fourth. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Khufu's sarcophagus is of loss accurate workmanship than that of Khafra in the Second Pyramid, being, indeed, one of the poorest specimens of the period. Such flimsy theories only obscure the real messago of the Pyramid.

It stands, and will stand for how long, a monument to human faith and grim endeavour, a mighty reminder of the power of man's hands and keen intelligence, a memorial to a great race who knew how to bend the organised toil of a myriad men to the service of a great ambition.