The Great Pyramids - all the pyramids of Egypt, actually - are old. Really, really old. As people are fond of pointing out, the Great Pyramids in Giza were more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us today. They are staggeringly old. Western Europeans lived like animals when the Pyramids were being built. The Maya hadn’t even gotten their civilization started. China was still two thousand years short of being a unified country.
At some point people kinda forgot what the hell the Pyramids were built for, because much of the Egyptian Old Kingdom has just been re-figured-out in modern times. We still don’t know all the precise details of how they built them, though we have a generally good set of guesses.
So at what point were people like “Huh, those things are damn big. How the hell did that happen?” Would Cleopatra and the other Hellenic Pharoahs have seen them as a mystery?
Do you have any proof that they were ever a mystery? I’m pretty sure that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew that the ancestors of the Egyptians built them, as did people in the Middle Ages.
Remember, until recently, the general consensus regarding history is that people in the past were smarter than us, that mankind was deteriorating rather than progressing. Hence the whole concept of a Golden Age followed by a Silver Age and so on. The fact that they were built by the ancient Egyptians - who, they presumed, were much wiser and more powerful than people today - would have made perfect sense to people.
I’ll have to find a cite, but I believe there were still people who could read hieroglyphs when Cleopatra ruled. So it wouldn’t have been a complete mystery, since they could read what was written from the time of the pyramids.
They would probably have been astounded by the ingenuity and how many people it must have taken to create them, but if earlier people didn’t do it, then who did?
The latest known hieroglyphic inscription dates to 394 AD. Yes, AD, not BC. So knowledge of hieroglyphs survived for a very, very long time after the time of the pyramids - whose heyday only lasted for a few decades during the 4th dynasty anyway.
I would suggest that the reading of heiroglyphics was mainly done by the priestly class, much like education and letracy in the middle ages. A lot of the inscriptions dealt with religious subjects, religious legends, and the pharoahs as gods. Thus the ability to read them likely died a slow death as Christianity forced out older religions and the original Egyptian heirarchy disappeared with the Roman conquest. (We can’t discount too that the Greek or Roman alphabet was simpler to learn and use?)
Herotodus wrote about the pyramids, among other descriptions of ancient Egypt, about 450BC. Even then, the pyramids were about 2100 years old, but it was still known who built them. Back then, they didn’t know about space aliens, so they relied on facts. Also note he got information from the priests of the Egyptian pantheon, who still had a basic grasp of events 2000 years prior.
Herodotus was one of the first to write about the pyramid, and although he correctly attributed it to Khufu, the estimated period of his reign was off by a sloppy 1000 years, whoops! Even in Ancient Greece, the construction of these pyramids took place so long ago that exact dates and time periods were becoming impossible to pin down. We learn that most of his Egyptian knowledge comes from priests he interviewed. Fun fact: Herodotus describes an inscription near the entrance of the pyramid, which according to him described an amount of radishes, garlic, and onions that the workers would have eaten during the build. Researchers now agree that this is just one of the priests toying with Herodotus’ gullibility
In Book II of Histories, Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC about the building of the pyramids. He correctly attributed the Great Pyramid to Cheops (the Greek version of the name) and gave some information about it’s building, etc. His sources were local priests who supposedly could read hieroglyphics. Note that he was off by a 1000 years as to when it was constructed. As like anything by Herodotus you had take it all with a grain of salt.
But it does appear that in that era some general knowledge about the pyramids was known to some of the locals.
The priest Manetho in c.240 BC seems to have known quite a lot about Egyptian history, and wrote a competing account to that of Herodotus, which gave a fairly consistent list of kings going back to the First Dynasty.
As far as I can see he didn’t go into the practical details of the construction of the Pyramids, though.
Also, in a world where everything impressive was built of big stone blocks using manual labour, the pyramids wouldn’t have seemed as strikingly unusual as we make them out to be.
if you go through the Kotel Tunnels in Jerusalem, one of the blocks in the old Temple platform wall is the size of a Greyhound bus. A relatively primitive civilization dragged the Stonehenge blocks hundreds of miles. etc.
Much of the phenomenon of idiots on social media claiming “Aliens” or whatever must have built such things stems from the fact that they don’t know shit about history.
People in the past were not stupid. They didn’t know stuff we know, but they were clever, and if they wanted to build something big out of big rocks were smart enough to figure out how. Even more importantly, it MATTERED to them. It might seem pointless to us today to drag stones an incredible distance to build a monument to a Pharaoh, or an astronomical temple like Stonehenge, but it was really, really important to them.
My dad hated when people assume past people couldn’t figure stuff out. Like when people were in awe how the Nazca Figures were made. He said it’s not difficult to imagine if you place stones here and there that it would look like a specific design to the gods (sky).
Exactly. I’ve seen, for example, several different explanations on how the biggest heads on Easter Island could have been moved to their final sites. I saw a post where a science fiction writer mentioned in her job as history teacher, she had the school football team hauling around multi-ton weights by sliding them, to prove it could be done.
The stones for the pyramids, by the way, came mostly from the cliffs a ways across the Nile, so presumably during flood season they could be flaoted to almost the base of the pyramids back in the days before the Aswan dam. If you visit Cairo today, the Cave Church occupies the quarry area including a massive cave. Moving giant granite blocks for the assorted sculptures and obelisks was all in a day’s work. All those giant columns for Egyptian, Greek, and Roman construction were drums of rock stacked on each other, not to mention the lintel stone beams atop.
The general belief is that the pyramids were build by constructing a spiral ramp of mud brick around the pyramid as it went up. Something maybe 10 or 15 feet wide would not require a lot of brick, compared to a gravel ramp as depicted in other sources - that would have needed as much or more material as the pyramids themselves. The pyramids themselves would hae been faced with finished stone smoothed to a perfect smooth finish - which would have been done as the final step while ramp was removed progressively downward. (There are remnants of this facing near the top of the central pyramid.) No indication how intact this finish was in Herotodus’ time. Egypt had already been through 2 ages of anarchy and invasion since the pyramids were built 200 years before that.
I think this is the most honest answer. People who thought the only smart people historically had been Greeks and Romans who looked just like them (they presumed, and again looking to stolen white marble busts).
Another way of putting it, though not as pointed and not exactly scholarly, but accurate in terms of perception of discovery:
We in the West often speak of ancient sites being “rediscovered” at various points in history when mentions of them in our own historical records have subsided over time and when someone from our area visits this “forgotten” site and re-publicizes it. In other words, references to and knowledge of these sites may have disappeared from writings, scholarship, and conversations in Western societies, while common knowledge of the site may have persisted uninterrupted in societies located physically and geographically closer to them.
This type of “lost site” or “lost city” lore and fallacy can be understood well when we consider tales of the “rediscovery” of Petra in Jordan, for example. Petra was never actually lost. People continued to live around it and pass by it when traveling for thousands is years, although those included very few Europeans. When a Swiss explorer happened to come across this site in 1812, we in the West tend to say he “rediscovered” it because he publicized its existence to Western audiences who had largely never heard of this ancient but locally well known site before.
From a certain POV, this is and will always be true. I mean, lots of people (not that I always agree with them!) figure spending billions on space satellites looking at other star systems is a waste of effort when people starve or lack basic resources across the nation much less the world.
To add to earlier comments - we are just as smart, just as stupid and just as SELFISH as humans of antiquity were.
