I guess the ancient Egyptians made quite a few mistakes in designing the pyramids. The mistakes are still around-take the famous “Bent” pyramid -t had tobe modified, because it started to collapse when half completed. Anyway, were the paramids abandoned as toms in antiquity? Whay were the burial chambers accessable via tunnels-would.nt have made more sense to have buried the burial chamber inside, as they wre constructed? that way, there would be no way to break in to them.
The pyramids were typically built during the Pharaohs’ lifetimes, not afterwards, so they wanted the burial chambers to be accessible. My WAG is that the Pharaohs’ immediate descendants might have wanted the option of being interred in the same chamber, so as not to bankrupt the kingdom with a new pyramid for every member of the dynasty, but I don’t recall if this was ever the case. IIRC, the king and queen were interred together even if they didn’t die at the same time.
A single well-placed capstone was enough to discourage tomb raiding back in the day (Most modern tombs don’t get even that much, for comparison’s sake). A bigger problem through the ages was to have marble scavenged from the edifice; Stolen marble had more practical uses than stolen mummies and sarcophigi.
AFAIK, there was no marble used on the pyramids. They were made of limestone and, it seems, concrete.
Pyramids were really only constructed very early on in the 3000-year-plus history of ancient Egypt. It was only in the Old Kingdom that pyramids as we know them were built. Many, if not most, of the big king tombs were robbed in antiquity. Occasionally, later kings would do a census of known tombs, realize how many had been robbed, and gather up all the mummies they could find, remove them from their tombs, and move them all to a stash where they would be safer. There have been a few of these mummy caches found.
As has been pointed out, they had to have the tunnels so they could get the body in there after the pharoah died. They were often walled up once the body was in place, but often times, the tomb robbers were apparently the same people as the tomb builders, so they knew where to go.
Was the “bent” pyramid ever used? The fact that the design was a failure argues against it. In any case, none of the pyramid’s burial chambers had the elaborate decoration found in the Valley of theKings tombs. So, were all of these pyramid tombs abandoned in antiquity?
Nope. The pharoah Sneferu built three pyramids during his lifetime. The first was a step pyramid, similar to Mesopotamian ziggurats. The second was the Bent Pyramid. The third is known as the “Red Pyramid”.
During Sneferu’s reign, the egyptians worked out the architecture and engineering techniques to build pyramids. Sneferu’s son, grandson and great-grandson (Khufu [aka “Cheops” to the Greeks], Djedefre, and Khafre) built the three great pyramids at Giza.
I’ve found a couple of mentions of Khufu (Cheops)'s tomb having been coated with, and over time stripped of, marble. Here’s the most adult-oriented of these:
http://interoz.com/egypt/cheops.htm
I also recall reading this in Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins circa 1975 (My abortive Science Fair project was based on this book), but can’t currently find my copy.
But that would put all the onus on the successor to construct it. Why take the risk of assuming that your successor will go to the expense and effort to glorify you by carrying out your wishes when he could just as easily divert that expense and effort to other projects to glorify himself? Far better to do it yourself to make sure that at least it gets done.
No, the outer casing was polished Tura limestone. This is what the British Museum has to say on the subject.