Up close with the only surviving wonder of the ancient world
Our first day of filming in Cairo was unforgettable. We had arrived late the night before on Egypt Air, had been driven through the crazy, incomprehensible late-night traffic of the city (where horn beeping is used for everything from lane changes to friendly hellos), to arrive at our hotel – to get to which we had to pass through a dog bomb sniff test, put our belongings through airport style security x-ray machines and walk through a body scanner. We collapsed exhausted into bed, ready for an early start.
The day began at 4am. No breakfast in the hotel was available so our support team (three vans’ worth of equipment, location fixers and helpers), had kindly brought some fruit and cake. In the darkness we headed for the Giza plateau: a limestone hunk of rock reaching up from the surrounding landscape to form a plateau that had once had the Nile river running alongside it (the Nile’s path has slithered east and west across the landscape of Cairo over the millennia).
As the first light of dawn began to spread, the sun’s rays began to glint off the sand of the desert, and silhouette some of the most famous landmarks in the world: the Pyramids of Giza. We had organised that morning to have special early access to film in and around the Great Pyramid of Giza – built in the Fourth Pharaonic Dynasty of ancient Egypt, around 2560 BCE, for the Pharaoh Khufu. For centuries it was the tallest man-made structure in the world. Over two million individual giant blocks, some weighing more than a tonne, make up the Pyramid and it was once covered in a shiny limestone casing that would have made it sparkle for miles around.
It was freezing cold, with a high wind, as we started filming outside the Great Pyramid at 4.50am that morning. My initial reaction in approaching it was one of shock. We are so used to seeing images of the pyramids that in some ways, we become immune to it as a man-made wonder. But standing in front it, the sheer size and overwhelming power and majesty of it sweeps that feeling of deja vu away in an instant and you are left stunned at the scale and brilliance of its existence. It feels like a man-made mountain – a veritable work of super-natural beings rather than of humankind.
At 5.15am we were heading inside through the Robbers’ Tunnel, dug in centuries past to try and exploit the prize possessions that were once sealed in with the dead Pharaoh. The opulent size and scale of the Pyramid gave way to an ever-decreasing opportunity for movement as you twist and turn through this tunnel, losing all sense of where you are within the structure. An eerie silence follows you. You emerge into the grand gallery, stretching upwards at close to a 50-degree angle. It is a vaulted passageway stretching nine metres in height, composed of blocks so carefully carved and placed that you cannot slip a knife between their edges. You climb, knowing that you are reaching ever deeper into the Pyramid, and once again you are confronted by a tiny tunnel that you are forced to bend double to get through. And on the other side, you find yourself in a square chamber composed of massive red granite blocks brought in antiquity all the way up the Nile from Aswan. This was the King’s Chamber, and all that remains in it now is an empty sarcophagus. You are – we found out later when we completed our 3D laser scanning of the Pyramid – at the centre of the whole structure, in a small chamber surrounded on all sides by the crushing weight of stone. Five false ceilings above the King’s Chamber help to defray the weight of the structure above and keep the King’s Chamber from collapsing in.
We stood there at about 6.30am in the morning, the silence now screaming in our ears, imagining this as the final resting place of the Pharaoh, a chamber that had once had a large granite door bolted across its tiny entrance tunnel, and been contained within a building sealed by gigantic blocks and a limestone covering from the outside world. This was a space, I thought, that the ancient Egyptians never wanted people to find.
But come the opening of the site to the public at 7am, we were soon swept up in a continual tide of people emerging huffing and puffing from the climb into the chamber. It was both marvellous to see so many people who had made the journey to see this monument to the greatness of our ancient past, and dispiriting to see such a solemn place become such a conveyor belt. We headed off back to the Grand Gallery, to explore a different tunnel hidden behind heavy gates, an ancient tunnel heading down deep into the bowels of the Pyramid, always off limits to tourists because of the dangers of accessing it. An hour later, I was standing in a chamber hidden deep within the bedrock underneath the Great Pyramid itself, all 5.9 million tonnes of Pyramid and whatever the weight of the bedrock was above my head. Here there were no lights bar our flashlights. Consumed by the darkness, it felt like time really had stood still down here for the last 4,500 years since the ancients had hacked this chamber out of the rock. And as we stood there, we tried to figure out what this chamber was for. But this is a mystery that the ancient Egyptians will, I think, successfully manage to keep hidden from us for eternity.
By Professor Michael Scott (2003)
This article was written for Magdalene Matters Issue 48.
See passed issues of Magdalene Matters in the Publications section.