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The funerary mask of King Tut.
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Rock of Ages
by Peter Tyson
March 8, 1999
As I write this, the recorded voices of muezzin urging the
faithful to prayer waft in the open, fourth-floor window of my
hotel in Luxor. We arrived here this afternoon from Cairo,
prepared to investigate some of the finest monuments of the
New Kingdom, including three standing obelisks, before heading
south to Aswan. The air is sultry and languid, and the only
sound to compete with the muezzin is the collective chirp of a
flock of birds in garden trees below. The tranquil scene could
not be further from that of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo
yesterday.
The museum made my head spin. And not because of the crowds.
We spent most of the day within the museum's musty,
high-ceilinged rooms, and I barely noticed my fellow oglers,
even though at times I was half-conscious of bobbing amidst a
roiling sea of humanity. No, it's the sheer quantity of
stunning artifacts—the mummies of Ramses the Great and
other pharaohs, the amazingly lifelike wooden statue known as
the "Headman of the Village," and, of course, the luxurious
golden treasures of King Tut.
Menkaure's schist statue.
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After awhile you become numb with over-stimulation, as I did
yesterday. But then my eye fell on a stone sculpture of the
pharaoh Menkaure, he who built the smallest of the three Giza
Pyramids about 2500 B.C. I stopped dead in my tracks. It is
one of the most arresting statues I have ever seen (see image
at left). Standing about three and a half feet tall, it shows
Menkaure flanked on his right by Hathor, the goddess of life
and love, and on his left by the personification of one of his
districts in Upper Egypt. With an aura of almost supernatural
self-assurance, Menkaure steps forward with the traditional
left foot first, looking for all the world as if he owned it
(which, of course, he did). The sculptor's beautifully carved
and polished handiwork, especially the figures' finely modeled
anatomy, arguably rivals the best stone sculpture to come out
of ancient Egypt.
Carved from a single piece of schist, the sculpture epitomizes
the Egyptians' skill in working with stone. Even if you've
never visited, you know that Egypt's early inhabitants had a
remarkable way with rock. Our team spent the weekend on the
Giza Plateau, where some of the two-and-a-half-million blocks
of the Great Pyramid alone fit so snugly together that, as the
12th-century Arab historian Abd el-Latif noted, neither a hair
nor a needle could be edged between them. In the Valley Temple
of Khafre, builder of the second-largest pyramid, similarly
tight blocks "turn" corners (see photo). And then there's the
Sphinx—the Greek word may derive from the Egyptian
Shesepankh or "living statue"—one of the most famous
stone sculptures ever produced.
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Curved lintel joint in Khafre's Valley Temple.
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But the Pyramids and Sphinx are of limestone, a much softer
stone than the granite of which obelisks would be carved 1,000
years later in the New Kingdom. Obelisks are as smooth and as
finely carved with hieroglyphics as any work in limestone, if
not finer. How did the ancients master such exquisite
workmanship? Our team went to the Egyptian museum to search
for some compelling clues.
Once inside the vast, classical-style museum,
Mark Lehner
led us into a broad atrium, where my eye was immediately drawn
to the enormous seated statues of the pharaoh Amenophis III
and his wife perched at one end. But Lehner stopped at the
lidless granite sarcophagus of a lesser-known pharaoh of the
21st Dynasty. (The top lay a few feet away.) Leaning over the
coffin, he pointed to a rectangular, cigarette-box-sized hole
cut into the upper edge of one end. Matched by similar holes
on the other three sides, it once held the sarcophagus lid in
place. I could see cylindrical marks etched into its sides,
ending in dime-sized circles. We were looking at ancient drill
holes (see photo).
Iron tools did not come into wide use until the 26th Dynasty,
about three centuries after this coffin was carved. To the
assembled team, Lehner explained how Egyptologists believe the
ancients used copper or bronze drills enhanced by sand, whose
quartz crystals performed the actual cutting. They're only
guessing—no one really knows. (Denys Stocks, an ancient
tools specialist, will join the team in Aswan to demonstrate
his notion of using copper tools to cut granite.)
Drill holes in granite sarcophagus.
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The same held true for the next object he showed us: another
stone coffin, this one from a 4th Dynasty mastaba or private
tomb uncovered east of the Great Pyramid. The black
sarcophagus was lying on its side to reveal the deep slice in
its base, like the cut left by a knife sliced through a slab
of butter. But this was granite, one of the hardest rocks in
the rockpile. What saw could have accomplished this 46
centuries ago? Again, experts think it must have been a copper
blade with quartz-laden sand, the archaic equivalent of a
diamond-studded chainsaw.
"What confidence they had to risk cutting the lid off the base
like this," Lehner laughed, running his finger down the
striated slice. The sawyer had abandoned his task after the
lid broke in half, leaving half a lid half- attached to the
bottom of the sarcophagus. (Scholars live to find such
cast-offs, which can tell far more about archaic techniques
than finished pieces can.)
Confidence: Throughout the museum, it showed both in the
superior craftsmanship of pieces and in the faces like that of
Menkaure gazing out from his schist statue. As we drove back
to the Pyramids through Cairo's traffic-clogged streets,
thoughts of Menkaure's bold gaze were fixed in my mind.
Tomorrow we head to the Valley of the Kings, where the tomb of
Ramses VI and Merenptah lie.
Peter Tyson is Online Producer of NOVA.
Obelisk Raised! (September 12)
In the Groove (September 1)
The Third Attempt (August 27)
Angle of Repose (March 25)
A Tale of Two Obelisks (March 24)
Rising Toward the Sun (March 23)
Into Position (March 22)
On an Anthill in Aswan (March 21)
Ready to Go (March 20)
Gifts of the River (March 19)
By Camel to a Lost Obelisk (March 18)
The Unfinished Obelisk (March 16)
Pulling Together (March 14)
Balloon Flight Over Ancient Thebes (March 12)
The Queen Who Would Be King (March 10)
Rock of Ages (March 8)
The Solar Barque (March 6)
Coughing Up an Obelisk (March 4)
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