Number of words – 262

Why were these particular pyramids built? Were they just individual tombs for individual pharaohs? Here’s where there’s some disagreement. Traditional Egyptologists suppose that a new pyramid was built for each new pharaoh. But if a pharaoh reigned 40 years, and his pyramid could be completed in 20, the huge work crews would have to be sent home. And then have to be reorganised at start of the next reign. The mammoth logistic problem of each new start up has led one analyst, Kurt Mendelssohn, to suggest that pyramid building may have been continuous. Fewer labourers were needed as they neared the top of a pyramid. But they weren’t sent home until time for the next pyramid. They were just ordered to a new site to start another pyramid, right away, independent of the reigns of the pharaohs. History’s first make-work project!

This argument fits the numbers better too – the number of workers needed to drag nine million stone blocks into place in a hundred and years. And it makes a plausible case for why this particular sequence of pyramids was built. Mendelssohn has proposed that because of the antagonism between the tribes of the Valley and Delta kingdoms, pyramid building was intended to weld the two kingdoms of Egypt into a unitary state. To engage the peasants in an all-consuming project that kept them busy and out of trouble every summer while the Nile flooded their farmland – to impose a single, national allegiance over the many tribal loyalties.

Excerpted from ‘Children of Promotheus: A history of Science and Technology’ by James McLachlan