This is one reason why little is left of Cairo’s earliest forebears. Rain and time and the annual Nile flood have simply washed the brick dwellings of Memphis and Heliopolis away. What survive are what the ancient Egyptians called The Castles of Eternity: the stone sepulchers of kings and nobles. Their greatest splendor is to be seen on the opposite side of the valley from the Muqattam, along the desert rim west of Memphis where the sun sets. There above the flood plain lies the sandy realm of Sokar, Memphis’s guardian god of tombs. His memory lingers in the modern name of Saqqara, the site which marks the center of the sprawling, fifty-mile-long cemetery that grew, over the 3,500-year life span of Memphis, into the most immense necropolis the world has ever known, and that remains today an inexhaustible archaeological mother lode.
The people of Memphis rated stonemasonry as important an invention as writing—so important that they ended by turning their first builder in stone, the Third Dynasty minister Imhotep, into a god.*1 Imhotep deserved the kudos. An inscription found at Saqqara ascribed an impressive list of titles to him: Chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, Second to the King of Upper Egypt,*2 Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary Lord, High Priest of Heliopolis, Builder, Sculptor. But the proof of Imhotep’s genius was not just scratched in stone. It also was fixed in eternity, for this was the man who built the first pyramid.
Before Imhotep, the grandest of the pharaohs’ tombs were massive, ingot-shaped bunkers made of brick. Already they expressed a concern with eternity, but Imhotep’s patron, the pharaoh Zoser (c. 2670–2650 B.C.), demanded something more comfortable for his afterlife. He wanted a monument that not merely would endure but also would tower over Memphis and encapsulate the glory of his kingship. Imhotep’s inspiration was to build a standard tomb, but square at the base and cased in white limestone, and then to pile on top no less than five more, of diminishing size, to the dizzy height of 200 feet. This innovation achieved nothing less than a monumental linking of worship for the sun god Ra—whose cult had largely superseded that of the creator god Atum at Heliopolis—with veneration of the ruler. The pyramid was both the pharaoh’s staircase to the sky and a colossal image of the sun’s rays fanning on the horizon.
On a clear day the six massive stories of Zoser’s Step Pyramid can still be seen from twenty-five miles away. Closer inspection reveals that nearly all the original stone casing has gone. But if Imhotep’s masterpiece is worn, careful reconstruction has brought back some fine details in the vast surrounding compound he built. Vestiges of the limestone enclosing walls—they frame an area the size of several Manhattan city blocks—have convinced archaeologists that Imhotep playfully meant them to echo the White Wall of the city of Memphis down below. Similarly, inside the jubilee court by the pyramid itself, the row of graceful chapels he built re-create in stone the varied building techniques of different parts of Egypt: here a limestone column looks like bundled reeds; there a ceiling evokes palm logs laid side by side. And beyond the jubilee court where Zoser and his successors ritually reunified Upper and Lower Egypt by tying lotus and papyrus reeds around a stake, beyond the high stone walls crenellated with cobra heads, spread acre upon desert acre of smaller pyramids and untold numbers of lesser tombs, many of which remain undiscovered—including Imhotep’s own.
Refinements followed quickly on Imhotep’s triumph, such that within a century the greatest pyramid builder of all time, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Seneferu (2575–2551 B.C.), was raising multiple pyramids that were both bigger and sleeker in profile. Seneferu ordered no fewer than four of them: one at Meidum, thirty-seven miles upriver from Zoser’s tomb; a small one at Seila, a little farther on; and two big beauties at Dahshur, just south of Saqqara, where they could also be admired with ease from the palace at Memphis. Seneferu’s determination to get it right demanded the shifting of some 9 million tons of stone, with no wheels and no pulleys yet invented to ease the load. But his efforts were not entirely successful. The outer limestone casing at Meidum collapsed, exposing the stubby tower of the core. His first attempt at Dahshur was also too ambitious: halfway through construction the foundations began to crack, so the angle of its slope was abruptly dropped from sixty to forty-three degrees, creating a neatly bent shape that may appear daring and attractive to the modern eye but that apparently failed to satisfy the pharaoh. Chastened by failure, Seneferu’s workers played it safe on their last try at Dahshur. His final pyramid rises to its height of 340 feet at the gentlest of angles.
All this backbreaking practice was put to good use by Seneferu’s son Cheops (or, in more accurate Egyptian pronunciation, Khufu—but the Greek version, Cheops, is more familiar). This pharaoh chose a new and even more spectacular site for his tomb. His pyramid on the plateau of Giza, just north of Saqqara, was to be the biggest, the most perfect, the most incontestable proof of the magnificence of the court of Memphis. Imagine the builders’ panic when they heard the contract specifications: Stack 2.3 million stone blocks of an average weight of 2.5 tons to a height of 480 feet upon a 13-acre base whose squareness and levelness must be accurate to within a thumb’s width. The sides must slope at an exact 51° 52’ to a precisely centered point. Carefully encase the whole in a smooth sheath of finest white limestone such that joints several yards long are invisible, or at any rate not thicker than a sheet of papyrus. Bury me inside. Let visitors to the plateau of Giza admire our might, our skill, our faith in our gods, until the end of time. And let them ponder how we made it.
There has been no shortage of pondering ever since, and still no modern engineer has tabled a leakproof explanation of how such a man-made mountain could be built in the thirty years of Cheops’s reign—which is to say, at a pace of one mammoth stone block put in place every two minutes (not to mention the fact that at least seventeen other pyramids of varying size were erected during the Fourth Dynasty’s brief century-and-a-quarter span). Some Egyptologists suggest that the scope of the project was so huge, the task of mobilizing men and materiel for it so challenging, that the building of Cheops’s pyramid must have greatly strengthened the centralized bureaucracy that made Egypt the most enduring of ancient states.
The Greek historian Herodotus, who stopped at Giza 2,000 years later, says that the priests of Heliopolis told him Cheops was an appalling tyrant who had driven 100,000 men to labor at the task. Modern scholars say such a number of workmen was possible, but probably only a third as many were required full-time. Moreover, apart from some Middle Kingdom (2050–1780 B.C.) texts that speak of Cheops as bloodthirsty, there is little to indicate that the workers endured particular hardship. Many were probably recruited during the annual flood, when the farmers’ fields were under water anyway. In that season the Nile brimmed to the edge of the desert, allowing ships to carry stone clear across to Giza from the Muqattam quarries. A permanent staff of skilled craftsmen—some 4,000 of them—were housed in a specially built village just next to the site, and were probably decently fed and paid. Even Herodotus admits that the recorded outlay on the workers’ radish, onion, and garlic rations alone was some 1,600 talents or 9.6 million silver drachmas.
Furthermore, dragging mammoth stone blocks is evidently not as hard as one might think. An archaeologist’s experiment with a replica sledge has shown that six men can easily pull a six-ton rock over level ground. Uphill would be more difficult, but then much of the undressed stone for the pyramid’s interior structure came from the nearby desert, not from the Muqattam quarries across the river. As for the quarrymen who did work these cliffs, for the pyramid’s outer casing, their graffiti bear no suggestion of excessive hardship. Scrawled in red ocher on numerous blocks, the quarry marks are simply proud advertisements, not unlike some modern brickmaker’s identifying stamp. One of them reads, “The craftsmen gang. How powerful is the white Crown of Cheops!” Perhaps these stonecutters were hoping that praise for the king would earn them an extra radish or two. But what, then, of “The Drunkards of Mycerinus”—the name of a work crew associated with the builder of the third great
pyramid at Giza?
Relying on his priestly informants, Herodotus had no evidence to dispute their stories of Cheops’s legendary wickedness. The Greek was told, for instance, that Cheops was so greedy he sold his daughter’s sexual favors. Her pyramid—the middle of three baby ones that stand next to her father’s—was said to have been built with the proceeds of her whoring, the payment being a one-ton rock for every trick. Moreover, both Cheops and his successor, Chephren—builder of the second of Giza’s three colossal pyramids—had themselves buried secretly elsewhere, for fear that their wrathful subjects would never let them rest in their graves.
Like tourists of all ages, Herodotus was duped by glib native guides, who in this case did not care to admit that their ancestors’ tombs had long since been plundered, which was why the pyramids were empty. But even Herodotus scorned to believe the tale related by another credulous ancient, the geographer Strabo. Touring Giza in 24 B.C., this citizen of Rome was told that the smallest of the three main pyramids—which archaeologists attribute to Cheops’s grandson Mycerinus—was in fact a monument to a Greek courtesan named Rhodopis. This lady of many charms, he explained, was the mistress of Charaxus, a rich Greek wine dealer in the Egyptian city of Naucratis who also happened to be the brother of the poetess Sappho. When Rhodopis was bathing in the Nile one day an eagle snatched one of her sandals, carried it to Memphis, and dropped it square into the pharaoh’s lap. “Struck by the shape of the sandal and the singularity of the accident,” continued Strabo, “the king sent over the country to discover the woman to whom it belonged. She was found and brought to him, and he made her his wife. At her death she was honored with the above-mentioned tomb.”
These tales—the last of which clearly presages that of Cinderella—represent just a very few links in the chain of pyramid fables that have entertained Cairenes right down to the present. The early Christians declared that the structures were not tombs but rather the granaries of Joseph, raised by the biblical dream reader to spare Egypt from famine. Jews have asserted it was they who labored at the pyramids, before Moses released them from slavery.*3 Medieval Muslims said it was the ancient prophet Idris who built them, to preserve all knowledge from the Flood (Idris being identified with both the biblical Enoch and the Greek Hermes, who in turn was linked to the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth). A thirteenth-century Arab treatise attributed miraculous powers to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, so that an adulterous couple who dared to profane its inner chambers was “cast along the ground, and dyed in a Phrensie” (as a seventeenth-century English translator phrased it). Modern fantasists have claimed the structures are giant water pumps, or observatories, or radios to receive the wisdom of outer space. And so the pyramids have continued to fulfill their purpose, being stairways to every changing conception of heaven.
A MILLENNIUM after Cheops, quarrymen still chiseled at the face of the Muqattam. The stone-built tombs of Memphis’s nobles remained sumptuous. The detailed scenes of daily life preserved by the shallow relief carvings on their walls, though not as perfect as the Old Kingdom reliefs nearby which depict the workshops and pleasure gardens of Memphis with cartoonlike clarity and humor, have amazed generations of visitors to Saqqara. Together they formed one of the most complete pictorial records of any civilization in history. But grand pyramids had fallen out of fashion. Try as they might by adding sphinxes and layers of pink granite and other flourishes, no one could top Cheops. It may have been that the kings no longer wielded such absolute sway; that they could not summon and supply 100,000-strong armies of workers. It was also true that in the interim the priests of Memphis and Heliopolis had learned a trick or two, and now claimed that a few correctly inscribed spells could do the work of a pyramid in terms of allowing the soul to commune with the gods.
At a time when the finishing touches were just being put to Stonehenge, Egypt and Memphis’s fortunes had already fallen and risen again, and still Muqattam limestone was in great demand. Ahmose, the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1320 B.C.), reunited a country reeling from foreign invasion and two centuries of unrest. In restoring the temple of the capital city’s patron god, Ptah, he had this inscription carved at a quarry just south of al-Khalifa:
His Majesty gave the order to open the rock chambers anew and to cut out thence the best white stone of the hill country for the houses of the gods, whose existence is for endless years, for the house of the divine Ptah at Memphis.
Jump forward a millennium or two. Rome has long since fallen. Europe wallows in its Dark Ages. Memphis is forgotten, but the temples of the mighty new city of Cairo—angled southeast to Mecca now and not toward the rising sun—are still being built of Muqattam limestone. So are the walls and towers of the Citadel, by the hands of thousands of captured Christian Crusaders. And so are the splendid tombs of Cairo’s Muslim rulers and holy men.
Another leap in time brings us to the present. Open your eyes to the distant crump of a dynamite blast. Follow the line of the Muqattam cliffs fifteen miles to the southern limit of the city, and a foaming white cloud belches skyward at a place called Tura. It is smoke from the factories that devour the same old stone and pulverize it into Portland cement, but which are so badly tuned that they spew a million tons of the product into the air every year—enough to blanch the whole surrounding district with a ghostly volcanic ash. Much of modern Cairo is built of this cement. So is the very last of the city’s tomb pyramids—actually a hollow pyramid-frame whose four huge slanting legs are carved in angular Kufic script with the names of fallen Egyptian soldiers. It dates from A.D. 1980, and was built to commemorate the unknown soldiers who died in wars against Israel. One of its occupants, however, is all too well known: Anwar al-Sadat, that late pharaoh of Egypt who died in a hail of bullets a few yards away while saluting his army on parade.
THEN AGAIN, this rock which the workmen of al-Khalifa chisel at so diligently may not be from the Muqattam at all. It might be translucent yellow alabaster, or gray marble from the eastern desert, or pink granite from Aswan. Perhaps, in the character of the city, it has been cannibalized from a nearby and long-neglected tomb. The possibility is not that remote. One of the bibles of Egyptology, the seven-Volume Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, lends it historical weight. This catalog of inscriptions hides enlightening gems. Here are some entries from a chapter titled “Monuments and Reused Blocks Found in the City of Cairo”:
Gray granite column of Amenophis III [1391–1353 B.C.] usurped by Merneptah [1224–1214 B.C.] and Setnakht [1196–1194 B.C.], probably from Heliopolis not Memphis, found in an eighteenth-century house in Cairo…now in the British Museum.
Part of lid of black granite sarcophagus of P-ar-kap [c. 500 B.C.] Persian, used as threshold in Mosque of Kikhya [eighteenth century A.D.] at north end of Abdin Street.
Green basalt stele with remains of trilingual decree of Canopus (almost illegible), year 9 of Ptolemy III Euergetes I [239 B.C.], used as a threshold in the Mosque of Amir Akhur [A.D. 1504], now in Louvre.
Fragment of recumbent Sphinx of Pepi I [2289–2255 B.C.], found in Haret el Roum [the ḥāra or quarter of the Greeks] east of the Mosque of Al Muayyad.
Black granite obelisk of Ramses II [1290–1224 B.C.], reused by Merneptah and Sethos II [1214–1204 B.C.], perhaps usurped from Middle Kingdom [2050–1780 B.C.]…used as threshold in a house in Cairo, now in Berlin Museum.
And these are just a few of the recognizable pieces, the ones with still-legible inscriptions. The point is that Cairenes have always quarried their own tombs and temples for choice bits of stone. The evidence is manifold. Whenever old pieties lost their sheen, the stones lost their significance and reverted to mere merchandise. For instance, from the earliest times it was common for nobles to inscribe their tombs with protests of innocence. “I have never cheated; I have never lied”—such is the gist of these pleas to the go
ds of the afterworld. But, by its very denial, an Old Kingdom inscription at Giza reveals how widespread one sin was: “I never brought anyone else’s property to this tomb…I built it in return for all the bread and beer I gave to the workers…I gave them much linen, too.”
New Kingdom tomb builders at Saqqara stole blocks from Old Kingdom sepulchers; not even the godly Imhotep’s constructions were spared. In the fifth century A.D. some of the same stones were then incorporated in a Christian monastery. When that was abandoned, peasants plundered it to build houses in the fields over the ruins of Memphis. Romans tore off the smooth limestone casing of the Giza pyramids to grind it up for plaster, just as a millennium earlier Ramses II had reused granite from the site. Muslim masons of the eleventh century found that decorative blocks from Heliopolis slotted nicely into the inner ramparts of the Cairo city walls, where the reliefs of hippos and crocodiles—they can still be seen at the city gate of Bab al-Futuh—must have puzzled and amused generations of bored soldiers. Nearly every column in all the hundreds of medieval mosques in the city was recycled from some pagan temple. Other ancient columns were sliced like loaves of bread into discs and inserted into the stone marquetry of pavings and walls. Mosque thresholds, too, were often choice pharaonic plunder, placed so the faithful could trample on the beliefs of idol-worshipers before shedding their shoes and entering the house of Allah.
Abd al-Latif of Baghdad, an erudite physician who visited Cairo at the end of the twelfth century A.D., was appalled to find no less a personage than a son of the great sultan Saladin (better known to Arabs as Salah al-Din) engaged in quarrying ancient sites. Courtiers had convinced the prince to tear down the smallest of the three main Giza pyramids—that of Mycerinus/Rhodopis—and sell the stone to contractors. The doctor came upon the team of demolishers eight months into their labors. He was not impressed: