Science: Make-Work on the Nile

For many years, Egyptologists have puzzled over a major archaeological riddle. If each pharaoh built a pyramid for use as his own tomb and his eventual ascension to the sun, why are there more pyramids than there were pharaohs? British Physicist Kurt Mendelssohn believes that he has discovered the answer. Writing in American Scientist, he suggests that the pharaohs directed the construction of several pyramids at the same time to achieve maximum employment. Building the pyramids, in other words, may have been history’s first great public-works project.

The Oxford University scientist, who is also an amateur archaeologist, came to his conclusion during a recent sight-seeing trip to Egypt. Straying slightly off the beaten tourist path, Mendelssohn visited the great pyramid at Medûm, one of the first built by the Egyptians, about 50 miles south of Cairo. Although archaeologists have long ascribed the ruined condition of the nearly 5,000-year-old structure to the pilfering of masonry by subsequent generations of Egyptians, Mendelssohn calculated that most of the stone missing from the pyramid was still near by, lying in huge mounds of rubble surrounding the rectangular inner core.

Giant Rockslide. That observation indicated that the damage had been caused by an accident rather than vandalism. Built at a time when the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were just merging, the Medûm project represented an obvious attempt by the early pyramid builders to improve upon their first effort, the Step Pyramid at nearby Saqqara. Rather than settling for the stepped inner structure, as they had done at Saqqara, they covered the Medûm pyramid with a smooth mantle that on each of the four sides ascended at a steep 52° angle. But, Mendelssohn says, as the heavy mantle grew, the stresses became so great that it eventually came tumbling down in a giant rockslide.

The disaster at Medûm, Mendelssohn is convinced, caused consternation 30 miles away at Dahshûr, the site of the so-called Bent Pyramid. Some scholars have suggested that the Bent Pyramid’s strange shape (its sides start up at an angle of 52°, but halfway to the top the slope changes abruptly to a more gentle 43½°) was brought about by the premature death of the pharaoh, which forced the workers to hasten completion of the pyramid. Mendelssohn, however, believes that the builders at Dahshûr, hearing of the avalanche at Medûm, prudently reduced the angle of the unfinished portion of their own pyramid to a safe 43½°. In fact, Mendelssohn notes, Egyptian pyramid builders did not return to the more dangerous 52° angle until many years later, when they had devised better techniques for construction of the outer mantle.

Economic Necessity. If two pyramids were actually being built during the lifetime of one pharaoh, it was for reasons beyond his desire for immortality. Those reasons, says Mendelssohn, were economic. Most historians agree that a huge labor force of perhaps 100,000 men, a large part of the Egyptian population, worked at pyramid building during the three-month-long Nile flood, when farming was at a standstill. Mendelssohn points out, however, that far fewer workers would be required when a pyramid was nearing completion. After that, none would be needed until the coming of the next pharaoh. No economy, he argues, could stand the strain of such a boom-bust employment pattern.

To maintain full employment, Mendelssohn says, the Egyptian rulers staggered construction starts; as work on one pyramid tapered off, another was begun. Pyramid building soon turned into an economic necessity, whether or not there was a pharaoh to be buried. Until that time, Egyptian society had consisted of loosely connected tribal units, each with its own god and social structure. By organizing enormous numbers of people into such a unifying task, writes Mendelssohn, the leaders of Egypt quickly and ingeniously achieved economic control over the populace. “In fact,” he writes, “they invented the state, a form of centralized and efficient organization which up to then was unknown to the human race.”