Through the Eras

Architecture and Designthrough the Ascending Passage from which it is possibleto proceed through the Grand Gallery, which is 46.7 by2.1 meters (153.2 by 6.8 feet) with a height of 8.7 meters(28.5 feet). The King’s Chamber is lined in red graniteand also contains the king’s red-granite sarcophagus.W. M. F. Petrie, the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcenturyEnglish archaeologist, observed that the sacophagusis too wide to have fit through the present door,which suggests that it was placed in the King’s Chamberbefore the masonry for the higher levels of the pyramidwere put in place. This fact led Lehner to conclude thatthis chamber must have always been planned as the burialchamber or at least that was already the plan at thisstage of construction. The other unusual elements of theinterior of this pyramid are the so-called airshafts that extendfrom the Queen’s Chamber to the south and fromthe King’s Chamber to the south and north. Scholars interpretthese shafts as symbolically allowing Khufu tomerge with both the northern, circumpolar stars and thestars of the constellation Orion in the south. This interpretationof the “airshafts” shows how religious ideas canbe inferred from architectural details. Here it seems theoverall east/west orientation associated with the sun-godRe combines with the north/south orientation associatedwith the gods of the nighttime sky. It is important to rememberthat the associations of east/west with Re andnorth/south with the circumpolar stars are also inferredfrom later documents dating to the Sixth Dynasty. Thusthe architecture provides possible confirmation that ideasdocumented in later dynasties were actually present inthe Fourth Dynasty. The Egyptian archaeologist ZahiHawass located the foundations of the subsidiary pyramidat the southeast corner of the Great Pyramid in the1990s. It probably represented a parallel to such subsidiarypyramids at Meidum, the Bent Pyramid, and theNorth Pyramid of Dahshur, though each of these subsidiarypyramids occupies a slightly different location inrelation to the main pyramid. The southeast corner isimportant to the plans of many pyramid complexes. ForDjoser’s Saqqara complex, it is the location of the onlytrue door into the complex. The southeast corner is alsooften used in pyramid complexes to house the ka-statueof the king or to symbolize the ancient custom of a southerntomb in Abydos in a northern necropolis. The threeQueen’s Pyramids on the east side of the Great Pyramidof Khufu were each approximately one-fifth the size ofthe Great Pyramid. They each contained burial chambersreached from passages that began on the north sideof the pyramid and then turned to the west. Each of theQueen’s Pyramids had a chapel where offerings could bemade to the occupant. The most northern of the threepyramids is thought to belong to Hetepheres, Khufu’smother. The middle queen’s pyramid might have belongedto Queen Meritetes who lived during the reignsof Sneferu, Khufu, and his son Khafre. She is also thoughtto be the mother of Kawab, a son of Khufu buried inthe mastaba tomb directly east of this queen’s pyramid,but not the mother of the two sons of Khufu who ascendedto the throne—Djedefre and Khafre. The thirdQueen’s Pyramid belonged to Queen Henutsen, anotherof Khufu’s queens, according to an inscription carvednearly two thousand years later at the chapel attached toit. The prominence of these queens’ burials suggested theexistence of a matriarchal system in Egyptian history tonineteenth-century anthropologists, although modernEgyptologists have since abandoned the theory as beingdifficult to support with concrete evidence. Part of thetheory’s fragility rests on interpreting these buildingswhich cannot even be definitively proven to have belongedto queens. Only foundations and part of the basaltpaving stones of Khufu’s Pyramid Temple remain. Yetarchaeologists have calculated that it measured 52.5 metersby 40 meters (171.9 by 131.2 feet). The buildingcontained a large courtyard surrounded by pillars. Threerows of pillars separated this courtyard from a smallerbroad room containing cult statues. A door separated thebroad room and the courtyard also. This general layoutfeaturing a courtyard, a group of pillars without realstructural purpose, and a room for statues remained thebasic outline for all Egyptian tomb chapels for the 2,000years following the construction of Khufu’s PyramidTemple. Builders decorated parts of this temple with reliefsculpture, including a procession of estates and JubileeFestival (sed ) rituals. This decoration associates thepyramid temple with Sneferu’s statue temple at the BentPyramid and the Jubilee Festival (sed ) Court built byDjoser at the Step Pyramid Complex in Saqqara. Onlythe most tantalizing ruins of the causeway and ValleyTemple of Khufu’s Great Pyramid remain. Like Sneferu’scauseway, Khufu’s causeway must have been coveredwith relief sculpture. These sculptures might have beenthe ones described by Herodotus when he visited Gizain the mid-fifth century B.C.E. Hawass discovered thefoundations of the Valley Temple forty meters (131 feet)below the Giza Plateau, but the ruins have yielded fewclues about the original structure.DJEDEFRE’S INAUGURATION OF A PYRAMID COM-PLEX AT ABU ROASH. King Djedefre (2560–2555 B.C.E.)was Khufu’s first son to follow him to the throne. IfDjedefre’s brother King Khafre and nephew KingMenkaure—the next two kings—had not chosen tobuild at Giza and align their monuments with those builtby Khufu, Djedefre’s decision to build at Abu RoashArts and Humanities Through the Eras: Ancient Egypt (2675 B.C.E.–332 B.C.E.) 23