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Herodotus gives us a different story about the middle small pyramid. He states that Khufu, suddenly going broke, left it to one of his daughters to raise the necessary funds and finish the Great Pyramid. She demanded a staggering fee and a block of stone from each person she interested and did so well that she paid off the mortgage on her father’s pyramid and had enough stones to build a little one of her own. Seems her heart was in the work. All Egyptologists regard this story as false. According to their computations, founded on careful and repeated measurements of the pyramid, the base of which is 150 feet square, they say it can’t be done. I suppose they would know.
Anyway, Khufu’s son Khafre, or Chephren, built the Second Pyramid of Gizeh, not quite so large as the Great Pyramid and not nearly so good, and the Great Sphinx, a stone portrait of himself with the body of a lion, symbolic of the Pharaoh’s power.22 The Sphinx is also symbolic of Horus, who is symbolic of several other things. People who think the Sphinx is a feminine sculpture and speak of it as “she” are mistaken.23
But Khufu’s line was slipping. The Third Pyramid of Gizeh, erected by Menkaure, or Mycerinus, the son of Khafre, was less than half as high as his father’s, and he had only twenty concubines. He was an honest, well-meaning man and a staunch friend of the fellahin, so the country began to weaken and never fully recovered. As he was always giving presents to those of his subjects who were in need, he lost their respect. They thought he must be a half-wit for being so nice to them and they refused to obey him.24 His son Shepseskaf further lowered the royal dignity by permitting his favorite noble, Ptahshepses, to kiss his foot instead of the ground. That sort of thing does not get pyramids built. Shepseskaf left no pyramid, and the Fourth Dynasty just quietly petered out. There is, as a rule, only one Khufu to a family.
Little remains to be told. The Pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty were filled with loose chips and rubble. One of them was named Kakau or Kuku, and another turned out to be a punster. Pepy I of the Sixth Dynasty was a fine fellow, but something seemed to be wrong with his budget, and Pepy II tried to bring back prosperity by building another pyramid. As pyramids were causing the trouble, it didn’t help much. Then everybody got very bored with pyramids and took up checkers.
1 The ancient Egyptian word for south was “upstream.” It was the wrong word.
2 Or 3500 B.C., or possibly 3000 B.C.
3 Menes may have been Aha or Ohe.
4 Predynastic Egyptians beat their wives with naboots, or rough wooden quarterstaves. First Dynasty husbands used exquisitely wrought axes of porphyry capable of breaking an arm at one blow.
5 This was called the wisdom of the ancients.
6 Few people realize that the habitable portion of Egypt comprises only about 13,000 square miles.
7 I never argue with Sumerian enthusiasts. I just ask: “Then what about the Badarians?”
8 The Egyptians believed that the body must be preserved indefinitely in order to obtain immortality. Shows what they knew.
9 The later Pharaohs used stone for this purpose. It fell out, too.
10 Or Hwfw.
11 How the Greeks made Cheops out of Hwfw is at present unknown.
12 The Empire State Building is 1,248 feet high.
13 No radio programs were broadcast from the King’s Burial Chamber until February 7, 1938.
14 The main ambition of every Egyptian was to be a mummy, but only the rich could afford it. Later on, people of moderate means could be mummies.
15 The Great Pyramid is very wonderful, if you care for pyramids.
16 He was not aware that his mummy would be taken out of its coffin and thrown away. That might have worried him.
17 This was their idea of taking a bath. The upper classes used olive oil. All the ancient Egyptians were somewhat oily.
18 They called the pyramid Ekhut Khufu, or Khufu’s Folly.
19 You can get a solid stone facsimile of the Great Pyramid made to order for $156,000,000. It is cheaper to do it yourself – then you know it’s done right.
20 It probably could not fall down if it tried.
21 Queen Merytyetes or Mertitiones, the stepmother-wife, survived Khufu and was passed along to his son Khafre. Odd, I must say.
22 There was a minor Pharaoh between Khufu and Khafre. All we know about him positively is his name, which was Radedef, or Tetf-Re, or Didoufri, or Ratiosis.
23 Some interesting structural details were uncovered in 1925–26 by Monsieur Baraize of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.
24 Thanks to General Vyse, who entered the Third Pyramid in 1837 and shipped part of its contents to the British Museum, the elaborate basalt sarcophagus of Menkaure is now at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
HATSHEPSUT
IN THE Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt was ruled by Queen Hatshepsut1 and Thutmose III,2 and every so often Hatshepsut would catch Thutmose III3 right behind the ear with a piece of rock. You can hardly blame her, for all her life she had been completely surrounded by Thutmoses, a family of ugly little Pharaohs with retreating foreheads, bulging eyes, and projecting front teeth, and it was getting on her nerves. She was suffering from an advanced stage of Thutmose trouble, a condition in which you see one or more Thutmoses in any direction you look. It became second nature to throw something whenever she saw one, real or imaginary.
Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I and had helped him govern Egypt when she was a mere girl. He was too lazy and shiftless to do it alone. Then she had married her half brother, Thutmose II, in order to strengthen his position on the throne, as she was of royal blood on both sides and he wasn’t. Thutmose II was the son of Thutmose I and some outsider, a fact to which Hatshepsut doubtless called his attention from time to time.4 He was a frail, effeminate youth with a blotchy complexion, the weakest of all the Thutmoses, but Hatshepsut was the managing kind and they had two daughters, Neferure and Merytre.
Thutmose II died in 1501 B.C., leaving Hatshepsut face to face with Thutmose III, his nine-year-old son by one of his concubines. Modern research shows that the shoulders, hips, pelvis, and breastbone of Thutmose II had been broken. His nose was deformed, too, as if somebody had let a flatiron slip, and there were symptoms of rat poison. Egyptologists have no idea who did all this.5
So there she was with another one on her hands. Thutmose III was easily the ugliest of the lot, with almost no forehead at all and a nasty habit of talking back.6 The back of his head was perfectly flat.7 As she was the only surviving child of Ahmose, the Great Royal Wife of Thutmose I,8 Hatshepsut had to act as regent and do all the work during the minority of her young nephew and stepson, and the arrangement proved a little difficult on both sides. She even married her daughter Neferure to Thutmose III for the good of the family, thus becoming his mother-in-law as well as his stepmother and Aunt Hattie. It didn’t seem to work out somehow.
When
