{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "This is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu. \u00a0Everybody knows the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, but you probably don\u2019t\u00a0know about the...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/137200025488/", "html": "

ironychan:

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This is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu. \u00a0Everybody knows the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, but you probably don\u2019t\u00a0know about the Shit Pyramids of his father, King Sneferu. \u00a0This is a shame, because they are amazing.

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When King Sneferu came to the throne of Egypt, the cool thing that all the pharaohs had was a Step Pyramid, like the original one built by King Djoser and designed by Imhotep (not the mummy). \u00a0King Sneferu could easily have had one one because his predecessor King Huni had died before his\u00a0could be finished. All Sneferu had to do was step in and put the last few blocks on.

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But King Sneferu had a vision. \u00a0He didn\u2019t want any old Step Pyramid. \u00a0He was going to build Egypt\u2019s first smooth-sided pyramid, and make King Huni\u2019s pyramid way taller in the bargain. \u00a0It didn\u2019t work. \u00a0The core of Huni\u2019s pyramid couldn\u2019t handle the modifications and nowadays the Step Pyramid at Meidum looks like this:

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It\u2019s not on a hill - that\u2019s the outer layers of the pyramid that have fallen down all around it. \u00a0The name of the structure in Arabic is Heram el-Kaddaab, which means something like The Sort-Of Pyramid.

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Anyway, King Sneferu was understandably disappointed and made his pyramid-builders start over from scratch at a different site. \u00a0Apparently having learned nothing\u00a0about the Big Fat Nowhere that hubristic pyramid ambition was going to get him, this\u00a0pyramid was designed to be even taller and pointier than the last effort! \u00a0Too\u00a0tall and pointy, in fact - the bedrock proved to be less stable than he might have hoped, and by the time the pyramid was half-finished stuff was already moving and cracking inside of it. \u00a0There are ceilings in this pyramid that are to this day\u00a0partially held up by wooden beams.

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The builders seem to have panicked and decided that the only way to finish the pyramid without another disaster was to make the top half lighter than the bottom half. \u00a0They did this by changing the angle of the slope, ending up with a pyramid that looks like this:

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Egyptologists call this one the Bent Pyramid for fairly obvious reasons. \u00a0Uniquely among Egyptian Pyramids, it has most of its smooth outer blocks intact, rather than having them all stolen to build other stuff (most of medieval Cairo is built from the skin of the Giza pyramids). \u00a0I\u2019m guessing this is because nobody dared touch the thing for fear the whole structure would come down like a giant limestone game of Jenga.

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I\u2019m sure the pyramid-builders were very proud of this solution. \u00a0Sneferu appears to have been less so. \u00a0He had them move over about half a mile and start over. \u00a0Again. \u00a0Why only half a mile when he had them move 34 miles between the Sort-of Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid is a mystery. \u00a0I think he wanted to keep them in sight of the Bent Pyramid so they could look at it and feel ashamed every once in a while.

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And there they built Sneferu\u2019s third\u00a0pyramid, which is called the Red Pyramid. \u00a0As pyramids go, it\u2019s a very cautious one - it\u2019s got the shallowest slope rise of any Egyptian pyramid, and while it\u2019s the same height as the Bent Pyramid it spreads its weight over a much greater base area, making it far more stable. \u00a0Sneferu seems to have been happy with this one, because he was buried in it. \u00a0Either that, or after a forty-eight-year reign he just finally died and that was the pyramid they used because it was the nicest of the three.

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These three pyramids together actually contain substantially more\u00a0stone than the Great Pyramid of Sneferu\u2019s son Khufu. \u00a0By the time Sneferu died, his workforce had honed themselves into a lean, mean pyramid-building machine. \u00a0They had already made every possible\u00a0pyramid mistake. \u00a0So when Khufu announced that he didn\u2019t just want a\u00a0great pyramid, but The\u00a0Great Pyramid, these guys built him a pyramid so fucking great that we now think aliens must have done it.

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It was as true in Ancient Egypt as it is now.

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