As I stood, feeling so tiny, before the world’s first pyramid at Saqqara, I was thrilled and fascinated; before the Great Pyramids at Giza I was overawed; the rubble of Userkaf’s monument left me puzzled and inside the trend-setting pyramid of Unas, I was captivated.
I could not comprehend their scale, beauty and incredible age of nearly 5000 years. And standing on the hauntingly beautiful desert plateau to the south-west of Cairo, looking out across the sands – I was amazed to see many more pyramids than I had expected.
Overawed, so many questions came to mind:
* How were they built?
* Why were they built?
* What were the artistic and funerary influences and architectural inspiration?
* Where did the engineering expertise, skills, manpower and resources come from?
When we think of pyramids, we think of the Great Pyramids at Giza – yet there are many more than these three incredible monuments. It is a story which lasted much longer than the mere 80 years it took to build the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau; it is a story of hundreds of pyramids, and around 2000 years of pyramid building. There is so much to the long story of pyramid building – too much to tell in just one talk.
In these three presentations I travel through the story of the magical and unmatched pyramids of ancient Egypt: from the incredible first pyramid at Saqqara – to the last, somewhat surprising pyramids – some 2000 years later ….
The Age of the Pyramids – A Series of Three Talks:
(Click on the blue line below to open each talk)
The World’s First Pyramid – The Step Pyramid of Saqqara
The Steps to Giza – Absolute Power and Divine Kingship
The Egyptian Renaissance – Early Decline and Late Resurrection
Unearthing Egyptology - Talks on Egyptology 