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One of the greatest mysteries, is why does the Great Pyramid not contain any significant writing, in a bizarre act of humility out of keeping with so-called builder Khufu's tyrannical nature? In fact it is one of the greatest of all questions, because in order to build a structure such as the Great pyramid, there must have been universities and libraries and all sorts of learned people who were obsessed with the written word and mathematics.
The traditional view, in the late 19th century, was that no pyramid contained any texts. A young archaeologist called Gaston Maspero challenged this when he uncovered pyramids at Saqqara dating from later dynasties than the enigmatic 4th, that is the 5th and 6th dynasties, which were covered with texts inside. The texts describe protections for the king in the afterlife and are dated to about 2400 BC. To be perfectly blunt, the pyramid texts are little understood by anybody. Robert Bauval holds that they may only be understood from the perspective of ancient astronomy, which is why they otherwise make so little sense. They are above all religious texts, discovered in fifth dynasty pyramids, and also found in the Egyptian book of the Dead.
Again, to be blunt, the content of the pyramid texts are primitive, savage, and ridiculous, and one wonders why they were scrawled in the chambers of fifth-dynasty pyramids to begin with. But then one looks at the pyramids themselves and there is not much to talk about. They were built from mud brick, very cheaply, and have all imploded into nothing. Even when they were new, they were very little to talk of in comparison with the earlier pyramids. They were certainly not built by the builders of the Great Pyramid, but probably inspired by it.
So why did a more advanced culture skip the writing, whereas a more primitive later culture, filled their pyramid with writing? It doesn't seem to make any sense!
The fact that all pyramids are built in the Delta area suggest that only tribes from the North which entered Egypt, taking the delta, actually built them. The similarity in terms of layout of Giza with the Chinese pyramids seems to suggest that tribes from somewhere in central Asia swept into Egypt, explaining why the fourth dynasty culturally seems to have built very different pyramids to the third dynasty. The third dynasty also may have emerged from the Assyrian region, with some mythical progenitor possibly later recalled as Abraham.
But again, why would a literate people fail to place hieroglyphics in their own pyramids?
Here we have confusion as our answer. We of course have the primitive khufu car touch or name graffiti discovered inside the so-called relieving chambers above the King's chamber, but these were never meant to be seen and in fact are quarry marks, or even forgeries based on quarry marks seen in nearby quarries, as speculated. Zacheriah Sitchin describes a scenario in which the infamous British archaeologist and adventurer Colonel Vyse, was caught forging the grafitti with red paint, so he could have a discovery but this information is contested. A series of discoveries in the last 20 years however, with robots crawling up shafts in the pyramid have revealed more of these red marks inside the Great Pyramid. It does seem to settle the question of who built most of the great pyramid. Nevertheless the idea of a stone-age civilisation having built the Great pyramid leaves one uncomfortable and unsatisfied. It must at least have been built by a people who knew their civilisation was collapsing, realising they were the last of a once far greater civilziation. They wished to incorporate information into the great pyramid, technical information, which was not necessarily information they had themselves come up with, but that their ancestors have come up with, however bizarre, and incorporate this information into the great pyramid, largely in the form of some number code, but with other clues also. By making the pyramid as huge as possible, they ensured the secret was lying in plain sight, just waiting for discovery. In fact Khufu's father Sneferu built at least three pyramids, similar to the great pyramid. Did he die three times and was he buried in three different locations? Of course not. The freakish tomb theory makes little sense, yet archaeologists still persist with it, perhaps a case of Occam's razor gone mad, even if this theory has never satisfied any person of broad understanding and curiosity.
Arab legends state that the Great Pyramid was built in the last days of a dying civilization, and before the flood, by a King, sometimes called Suphis or Surid, later mixed up with the memory of Cheops of Khufu, who realised that the end of Egypt or Pre-Egypt was approaching. He ordered the pyramid to incorporate the sum total of all ancient science and technology. It was then sealed. Thus for generations, the pyramids were plundered by people hunting treasure, inspired by this legend. Newton seems to have been aware of this legend, messing about with pyramid ratios in an attempt to work out the gravitational constant.
Maybe the builders just didn't want it to have any writing because then this would allow the splendid sculpture to become dated! They wanted to create something grand and magnificent for all the ages, forever! They were building something to last forever! Perhaps they did not want to create anything which would cause a future iconoclasm, to give people a reason to destroy, such a magnificent set of monuments!
It meant that the planning of this was incredible. We should perhaps bear in mind that the pyramids were built for a variety of reasons, most of them unknown. Of course this means that hundreds of committees, with meta committees of the finest minds, even brought from other lands for this purpose, would have churned out enormous amounts of paperwork! In the destruction of Egypt in the first intermediate period, centuries later, all this paperwork would have been burned in an orgy of rage and blodlust.
One of the reasons for the Great Pyramid's construction, and the overall Giza complex, may have been religion, for instance Robert Bauval with his stellar alignments theory postulates that state ceremonies of ressurection took place inside the great pyramid.
Secular examiners of the 20th century, such as Kurt Mendelshon held that the great pyramid was an arbitrary structure chosen for construction in order to unify the nation. right the beginning of Egyptian history, behind a massive singular project. This would increase the power of the Egyptian state behind the king. This was actually also an argument of several of the ancient Greeks and Romans. One still however has to ask where the knowledge came from and in this way the argument seems to fall to pieces.
Getting back to the argument for religion, most hieroglyphs are actually designed to have a visual impact, as well as a literary one. They are not necessarily just letters and syllables but a system known as logographic. Placing a picture next to a word, for instance, indicates the context of that word. Hieroglyphics were used for holy structures, like temples, with the shorthand version, hieratic used since old kingdom times for record keeping and business. By lacking any writing at all, the Egyptians or whomever, indicated that this was not a structure of business, or religion, or anything which they wished to define in any way but a mathematical and geometrical one. Then again, Herodotus in 450 BC wrote that the pyramids were covered in hieroglyphs which told the record of their construction, and that a ramp, which was more impressive than the pyramids, was also covered in hieroglyphs. No-one has ever reported this and there seems no evidence for it. Was he simply a babbling madman?
Another reason for the construction of the Great Pyramid, was to possibly incorporate ancient scientific libraries into the very design and architecture of the great pyramid.
In this way the science of the ancients would be transported to the future as a time capsule. Most knowledgeable people saw the way things were going and legend has it that astronomers had predicted an impending great catastrophe. Looking at pyramid ratios to make Biblical-style forecasting was invented in the 19th century but this is confused by even Wikipedia with everybody who seeks out ancient ratios in the design of the great pyramid. If so the builders of the great pyramid themselves could be accused of being pyramidologists for incorporating scientific information into the pyramid.
Pyramidology in a way was invented by the pyramid builders themselves! There is so much information here, possibly even underappreciated information such as atomic information, certainly measurements of the earth, as well as other planets and the solar system. It is as if the Egyptians used the pyramids as a time capsule, to replace the nearby great library at Heliopolis. Herodotus in 450 BC, held the priests of Heliopolis to be the most learned of all the Egyptians, with the most reliable histories. This was all shifted to Alexandria in later times. By Roman times authors describe a city almost totally abandoned, despite the fabulous architecture and obelisks everywhere. Only a few priests remained to guard over what was left, the eternal ancient city of Egypt. Some authors such a Pliny put two and two together and realised that the famous obelisks of Heliopolis, which have generally all been shifted to cities like Rome and Paris, could represent solar rays coming down from heaven. The fascination of Heliopolis with the Sun could mean that the pyramid also encode information about the Sun, as well as so many other things.
Since there always was a huge library at Heliopolis, and there must have been, engineering books, and so many other books, on mathematics, and other topics, I think we can remove the idea that the builders did not have writing. In fact recent discoveries even point to the presence of hieratic-like texts, or shorthand Hieroglyphcis from Khufu's time, even writing supposedly describing the construction of the pyramids, although I have a feeling it was more like a major renovation of a pre-existing structure. Particularly since the Inveotry stela, found on a Giza temple dating from 670 BC, descries Khufu has having found and renovated a pre-existing temple. Perhaps he merely added the casing stones, and carried out some internal renovations, itself worthy of a tremendous achievement, also possibly re carving the sphinx into the image of a face which seems to match his chin, possibly a member of his family.
Perhaps it was decided that the pyramids were simply replacing the Sun City's library and decided to encode as much information as possible into them. By skipping the writing, they possibly figured that they would produce a question in the minds of future people... what information is contained in the building itself?
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