The Nomadic Alternative – Page 49

Some Greeks came to Egypt and inspected the unfamiliar monuments
of that country. The man-made mountains of white limestone that lay
by the Nile appealed to their sense of the ridiculous, and they
called them pyramides from their resemblance to the small wheaten
cakes sold in Greek street markets. But other travellers counted
the Pyramids among the wonders of the world. "Man's sense of
sovereign power in triumph over material forces", wrote the Egypt-
ologist, J.H. Breasted, "...a document in the history of the human
mind." And while Napoleon sent his generals and topographers
panting to the top, he calculated that the stones of the Great Pyramid
would build a wall ten feet high and a foot thick round the circum-
ference of France.

"Masonry", said Melville, "and is it man's ... I shudder at the
idea of the ancient Egyptians." The scale is superhuman, the function
anti-human. Individual blocks weigh up to two hundred tons, hacked
from the shining quarries at Tura, hauled by slaves across the Nile,
hewn, chiselled and abraded, then levered into place by sweated
labour. The visitor cannot squeeze his knife blade between them.

A conspiracy of official silence obliterated the magnitude of
the work. The chanting of Old Kingdom slaves is reduced to ritual
formulae engraved on monuments of stone. "Let us work for the noble",
they cheerfully cry from hieroglyphic inscriptions unwritten by
them. But millennia smother their screams, and two thousand years
later the hideousness of those times scarred popular memory. Herod-
otus found that the local inhabitants of Memphis could hardly bring
themselves to pronounce the hated names of the Pyramid builders,
Cheops and Chephren. They preferred to call the structures after
the name of a shepherd, Philitis, who had once grazed his flocks
under their shadow.

The builders attempted to defy human mortality by a wilful
command of materials and labour. And these incorruptible hierarchies