The Pyramids by Ahmed Fakhry

Ahmed Fakhry
The University of Chicago Press
1961
U.S.A.
Library of Congress No. 61-8654

This 249 page read from the University of Chicago press contains many images and schematics to help in the explanation of the monuments including at the back of the book a listing of all the known Egyptian pyramids as of 1961 and their base measurements. The author is extremely knowledgeable on the subject and introduces interesting information that I have not heard before. Mr. Fakhry explains the pyramids in their apparent chronological order including their associated mortuary and valley temples.

     "The approach to the southern pyramid complex of King Snefru at Dashur is through a Valley Temple situated near the edge of the cultivation. At the time of writing, this is the earliest Valley Temple discovered." "... there was no temple of this type for the Step Pyramid of Zoser, nor any remains of a causeway which would suggest that such a building had never existed."1

The author explains the rise of building of these monuments culminating in the great pyramids on the Giza plateau and their accompanying causeways, temples, and boat pits, including the discovery of royal statues found during excavations. We are told about the previous excavator's discoveries to the various sites including the measurements of the monuments which at times caused me to glaze over. Mr. Fakhry gives admirable insight into the enigmatic pyramid site at Abu Rawash excavated in 1901 by E. S. Chassinat.

     "South of the Mortuary Temple on the east side is a large rock-cut boat pit. With its long axis pointing north-south, it measures 35 meters long, 3.75 meters wide at its widest part, and 9.3 deep. At the bottom of the debris filling this boat pit, Chassinat found three beautiful heads from statues of Rededef. They had been wantonly knocked off the bodies and flung there during the upheavals that followed the Old Kingdom. (Two of the heads are now in the Louvre, and one is in the Cairo Museum.)"2

When Perring and Vyse entered the third pyramid at Giza, that of Menkure in the late 1830's they found a wooden coffin and the mummified body of a man, the inscription on the late period style coffin reads.

     "Osiris, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Menkure, living forever. Born of the sky, conceived by Nut, heir of Geb, his beloved. Thy mother Nut spreads herself over thee in her name of 'Mystery of Heaven.' She caused thee to be a god, in thy name of 'God,' O King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Menkure, living forever."3

As the Old Kingdom descended into anarchy the pyramids of the fifth and sixth dynasties became smaller and built in poorer quality work. The burial practices changed and the pyramid texts appeared carved on the walls of these kings and a number of their queens. It is during the following period that most of these monuments were opened with the royal burials robbed and destroyed leaving only fragments of their once opulent contents.

The rise of the Princes of Thebes in the expulsion of the foreign overlords who ruled over the northern half of Egypt resulted in the reunification of the country with a period of great prosperity. It is in the Twelfth Dynasty that the kings returned to building pyramids but this time with complex corridors and hidden entrances to baffle looters who found the entrances of the Old Kingdom pyramids in the north face.

In Egypt, the pyramid age dwindles down to small mudbrick pyramids above simple tombs both royal and commoner. In the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, pyramidal burials are found south of Egypt in Sudan at sites like El Kurru, Kerma, and later at Moroe. These royal constructions are much smaller and much steeper.

Mr. Fakhry's presentation of the pyramids was both of interest and knowledgeable as I had suspected he would be, and though almost sixty years later this book is well put forward and suitable for ages ten and up.

     "...they are perished also,
Those walls of Thebes which the Muses built;
But the wall that belongs to me has no fear of war;
It knows not either the ravage of war or the sobbing.
It rejoices always in feasts and banquets,
And the choruses of young people, united from all parts.
We hear the flutes, not the trumpet of war,
And the blood that waters the earth is of the sacrificial bulls,
Not from the slashed throats of men.
Our ornaments are the festive clothes, not the arms of war,
And our hands hold not the scimitar,
But the fraternal cup of the banquet;
And all night long while the sacrifices are burning
We sing hymns to Harmakhis (Hor-em-akhet),
And our heads are decorated with garlands." 4


Notes:

1. page 80
2. page 129
3. page 150
4. page 165, An ancient Greek visitor to the pyramids on the Giza plateau wrote this poem on a toe of the Great Sphinx.

The Tombs of the Kings

Where the mummied Kings of Egypt,wrapped in linen fold on fold,
Couched for ages in their coffins, crowned with crowns of dusky gold,

Lie in subterranean chambers, biding to the day of doom,
Counterfeit life's hollow semblance in each mazy mountain tomb,

Grisly in their gilded coffins, mocking masks of skin and bone,
Yet remain in change unchanging, balking Nature of her own;

Mured in mighty Mausoleums, walled in from the night and day,
Lo, the mortal Kings of Egypt hold immortal Death at bay.

For - so spake the Kings of Egypt - those colossal ones whose hand
Held the peoples from Pitasa to the Kheta's conquered land;

Who, with flash and clash of lances and war chariots, stormed and won
Many a town of stiff-necked Syria to high-towering Askalon:

"We have been the faithful stewards of the deathless gods on high;
We have built them starry temples underneath the starry sky.

"We have smitten rebel nations, as a child is whipped with rods:
We the living carnation of imperishable gods.

"Shall we suffer Death to trample us to nothingness? and must
We be scattered, as the whirlwind blows about the desert dust?

"No! Death shall not dare come near us, nor Corruption shall not lay
Hands upon our sacred bodies, incorruptible as day.

"Let us put a bit and bridle, and rein in Time's headlong course;
Let us ride him through the ages as a master rides his horse.

"On the changing earth unchanging let us bide till Time shall end,
Till, reborn in blest Osiris, mortal with immortal blend."

Yes, so spake the Kings of Egypt, they whose lightest word was law,
At whose nod the far-off nations cowered, stricken dumb with awe.

And Fate left the haughty rulers to work out their monstrous doom;
And, embalmed with myrrh and ointments, they were carried to the tomb;

Through the gate of Bab-el-Molouk, where the sulpher hill lie bare,
Where no green thing casts a shadow in the noon's tremendous glare;

Where the unveiled Blue of heaven in its bare intensity
Weighs upon the awe-struck spirit with the world's immensity;

Through the Vale of Desolation, where no beast or bird draws breath,
To the Coffin Hills of Tuat - the Metropolis of Death.

Down - down - down into the darkness, where, on either hand, dread fate
In the semblance of a serpent, watches by the dolorous gate;

Down - down - down into the darkness, where no gleam of sun or star
Sheds its purifying radiance from the living world afar;

Where in labyrinthine windings, darkly hidden, down and down,-
Proudly on his marble pillow, with old Egypt's double crown,

And his mien of cold commandment, grasping still his staff of state,
Rests the mightiest of the Pharaohs, whom the world surnamed the great.

Swathed in fine Sidonian linen, crossed hands folded on the breast,
There the mummied Kings of Egypt lie within each painted chest.

And upon their dusky foreheads Pleiades of flaming gems,
Glowing through the nether darkness, flash from luminous diadems.

Where is Memphis? Like a mirage, melted into empty air:
But these royal gems yet sparkle richly on their raven hair.

Where is Thebes in all her glory, with her gates of beaten gold?
Where Syene, or that marvel, Heliopolis of old?

Where is Edfu? Where Abydos? Where those pillared towns of yore
Whose auroral temples glittered by the Nile's thick-peopled shore?

Gone as evanescent cloudlands, alplike in the afterglow;
But these Kings hold fast their bodies of four thousand years ago.

Sealed up in their Mausoleums, in the bowels of the hills,
There they hide from dissolution and Deaths swiftly grinding mills.

Scattering fire, Uraeus serpents guard the Tombs' tremendous gate;
While Troth holds the trembling balance, weighs the heat and seals its fate.

And a multitude of mummies in the swaddling clothes of death,
Ferried o'er the sullen river, on and on still hasteneth.

And around them and above them, blazoned on the rocky walls,
Crowned with stars, enlaced by serpents, in divine processionals,

Ibis-headed, jackal-featured, vulture-hooded, pass on high,
Gods on gods through Time's perspectives - pilgrims of Eternity.

There, revealed by fitful flashes, in a gloom that may be felt,
Wild Chimeras flash from darkness, glittering like Orion's belt.

And on high, o'er shining waters, in their barks the gods sail by,
In the Sunboat and in the Moonboat, rowed across the rose-hued sky.

Night, that was before creation, watches sphinxlike, starred with eyes,
And the hours and days are passing, and the years and centuries.

But these mummied Kings of Egypt, pictures of a parished race,
Lie, of busy Death forgotten, face by immemorial face.

Though the glorious sun above them, burning on the naked plain,
Clothes the empty wilderness with the golden, glowing grain;

Though the balmy Moon above them, floating in the milky Blue,
Fills the empty wilderness with a silver fall of dew;

Though life comes and flies unresting, like the shadow which a dove
Casts upon the Sphinx, in passing, for a moment from above;-

Still these mummied Kings of Egypt, wrapped in linen, fold on fold,
Bide through ages in their coffins, crowned with crowns of dusky gold.

Had the sun once brushed them lightly, or a breath of air, they must
Instantaneously have crumbled into evanescent dust.

Pale and passive in their prisons, they have conquered, chained to death;
And their lineaments look living now as when they last drew breath!

Have they conquered? Oh, the pity of those Kings within their tombs,
Locked in stony isolation in those petrifying glooms!

Motionless where all is motion in a rolling Universe,
Heaven, by answering their prayer, turned it to a deadly curse.

Let them fixed where all is fluid in a world of star-winged skies;
Where, in myriad transformations, all things pass and nothing dies;

Nothing dies but what is tethered, kept when Time would set it free,
To fulfill Thought's yearning tension upward through Eternity.

Mathilde Blind
1847-1896

Source: The Universal Anthology, edited by Richard Garnett, The Clarke Company, limited, London, 1899, Vol. I, pgs. 116-119.

The Secrets of the Pyramids

Michael Feeley
Sazmick Books
2017
United Kingdom
ISBN: 978-0-9954554-4-3

With all the Egyptian books I have reviewed I can usually get a good sense of the content, the authors knowledge, and sense of the writers taste. It appears from the start that this book will be spiritual by nature. The book opens with a number of quotes including from Leonardo Da Vinci but more concerning is a quote from fiction writer Dan Brown author of the Da Vinci Code which left me cringing as I am no fan of contorting history to fit into a narrative no matter how entertaining.

The author is apparently a descendant of Celtic Irish kings and a former United Kingdom police detective the latter gives me some hope of a trained inquisitive mind. The author believes in paranormal and supernatural powers and on a couple of occasions has witnessed dimensional portals open up in front of him and other hallucinations. I am only at the biography of the author and trepidation is rushing over this reviewer.

In the introduction, Mr. Freeley puts forward the very popular belief that an advanced civilization has left a message to humanity encoded within the monuments. This nineteenth-century theory is usually linked exclusively to the Great Pyramid. The reader is met with a hieroglyphic alphabet of twenty-two letters which I have never seen before and are anything but Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author gives dictionary definitions of enlightenment, consciousness, and Kundalini Awakening in the concept of Dharma.

Prior to the authors trip to Egypt, he is contacted by a UK Psychic who lacks the ability to spell properly. In her note includes the sentence " You need to first look passed the tourism" in large letters. Chapter one opens with Mr. Freeley's trip to Egypt including the hope to meet the famous Dr. Zahi Hawass whose last name is misspelled. The chapter ends with another example of the misspelled word passed when the word intended was past.

In chapter two the author presents a good traditional view of Egypt with the belief that slaves built the pyramids of which there is no evidence for this. Mr. Freeley then begins with explanations of the meaning of words including the famous so-called helicopter found carved in a lintel of the temple of Seti I at Abydos. Heli meaning Helios/sun and copter with Coptics together meaning "Christian Egyptian", and including the god Horus whose name is an anagram meaning hour(s).

The book moves forward to the gods of ancient Egypt and the roots of Egyptian royalty and government. We for some reason are on to the transcript of the 1953 coronation ceremonies of England's Queen Elizabeth II which occupies more than thirty pages of a 131-page book.

The author is all over the place in this book and cannot be recommended as serious reading for Egyptologists, and Egyptology lovers. Unfortunately, the book is filled with spelling mistakes and dubious theories that are not suitable for young people to learn from nor was it particularly entertaining. In the end "The Secrets of the Pyramids" should remain a secret.