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At
the top of the Khafre causeway, 400m in length, there was
another temple, larger than the one at the valley end and
immediately in front of Khafre's pyramid. This was the feature
of a pyramid complex that Egyptologists call a mortuary temple.
It is now a badly eroded ruin, but once measured over 110
m by nearly 50 m. It was again part-faced with granite from
Aswan, but also with fine limestone from across the Nile at
Tura. It featured an entrance hall, an open court, statue
niches, storage magazines and a sanctuary close to the base
of the pyramid, with an altar for offerings. The pyramid itself
was surrounded by a high wall, and the area between the wall
and the pyramid was paved.
Khafre's pyramid was accompanied by one smaller pyramid to
the south, but the slightly earlier pyramid of Khufu has three
to the east, while the smaller Giza pyramid of their successor
Menkaure has three to the south. All three main pyramids were
equipped with mortuary and valley temples and causeways between
these temples, though most of the causeway and the valley
temple of Khufu is now invisible. The pyramids of Khufu and
Khafre (and probably Menkaure too) were additionally accompanied
by several boat pits in which wooden boats of some religious
significance were buried.
Around the Great Pyramid of Khufu there are numerous contemporary
tombs of relatives, courtiers and officials, laid out in ordered
lines. Subsequently, there was infilling with tombs of later
reigns, and more tombs were built to the south-east of Khafre's
pyramid.
To the south of Khafre's tomb field there is a priests' town,
where the priests who maintained the religious duties of the
necropolis were housed, and nearby there is another large
tomb, of an Old Kingdom queen. Rock-cut tombs occur along
the various natural and quarried edges of the escarpment including,
as we have seen, the northern side of the Sphinx enclosure.
To the west of Khafre's pyramid there is a line of ancient
storehouses.
The whole Giza site was a living necropolis for three millennia:
living because, with varying degrees of dedication from time
to time, the cults of the royal dead and their followers were
kept up by the priestly administration of the place. There
were periods of neglect, extreme at times, but also periods
of renewal. We have described the complex of monuments that
belonged together in Old Kingdom times, but Giza went on being
an important place till practically the end of ancient Egyptian
history.
New Kingdom pharaohs, ruling a thousand years after Khufu
and Khafre, built new temples close to the Sphinx. In the
latter days of ancient Egypt, two thousand years after Khufu
and Khafre, an atavistic passion for an idealized and (not
surprisingly) misremembered past led to more rebuilding on
the Giza site and fresh interpretations of the origin and
meaning of the Sphinx. The Giza complex lies at an elevation
of about 100m above sea-level on a latitude 30° north
of the equator, towards the northern end of a vast cemetery
of the ancient Egyptians associated with their Old Kingdom
capital city of Memphis. Both city and cemetery lay on the
west hank of the Nile.
About 10km north of Giza is the northernmost station of the
cemetery, where the very ruined pyramid of Khufu's successor
Djedefre (sometimes rendered Radjedef) lies at Abu Rawash.
About 7 km south of Giza, another pyramid was left unfinished
at Zawyet el-Aryan: to which king it belonged is now unknown.
There is also evidence of an unfinished Dynasty III structure.
About
the same distance south again is Saqqara, with more than a
dozen royal monuments ranging from Dynasty III to Dynasty
XIII, though none of them from Dynasty IV like the Giza pyramids.
There are more Dynasty IV pyramids at Dahshur, about 10 km
south of Saqqara, where Khufu's father (Snofru) built two
pyramids, one with a noticeably gentler slope than those of
any of his successors and the other with a change of angle
like a mansard roof that has earned it the modern name of
the Bent Pyramid.
Down
in the river valley, east of Saqqara lies all that remains of
the great city of ancient Egypt that the Greeks called Memphis.
Picturesquely forlorn and shrunken today, Memphis was really
the capital city of Egypt in Old Kingdom times, reputedly founded
by the first king and unifier of the ancient state, Menes as
he is named by the Greek writers. In a long history, until rivalled
by the southern city of Thebes in New Kingdom times (and totally
superseded the Arab foundation of Cairo, on the east hank of
the Nile) Memphis probably stretched at various times up and
down the west hank of the river for many kilometres.
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Its
no doubt abundant archaeological remains are now buried under
successive inundations of silt and modern settlement.
Memphis
got its Greek name under curious circumstances, after the
whole town had come to be known by the name of one of the
pyramids at Saqqara (that of Pepi I) called Mennufer. In Old
Kingdom times, the town was commonly called The White Wall,
probably because the king's residence was fortified with such
a wall. Much later there was a temple dedicated to the god
Ptah, who was always closely associated with Memphis, called
Hikuptah, and from this word it seems the Greeks derived their
name for the entire land of Egypt, Aiguptos.
At all events, Memphis was the greatest and most important
city of Old Kingdom Egypt, the seat of Menes and his successors.
It is because of Memphis that the pyramids of Giza are where
they are.
City and cemeteries were on the west hank of the Nile.
On the east hank at the time, south of modern Cairo, were
the quarries of Tura from which the hard high-quality limestone
used to case the pyramids at Giza was extracted, to be rafted
across the river on the annual flood to the foot of the plateau
on which the pyramids were built, with cores of softer stone
quarried on site.
Ahout 20km north of Memphis the river fans out into the Delta
of the Nile as it flows to the Mediterranean Sea, which the
Egyptians called 'The Great Green'. Formerly there were more
streams than there are today and the whole area of the Delta
constituted quite a different world, with its manifold creeks
and brooks running among swamps and patches of dry ground,
from the situation south of Memphis where the single stream
in its fertile flood plain was soon bounded on both sides
by desert and rock.
These two different worlds, Lower Egypt in the north and Upper
Egypt in the south, were throughout Egyptian history culturally
rather distinct, and more so during prehistoric times before
the unification of the state. The eastern part of the Delta
was probably the readiest way by which influences from the
other civilizations of the ancient world might come into Egypt
from the peoples at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and
beyond. Egypt was unusual among the early civilizations in
the degree of its isolation from the outside world, as a result
of geography. The route to Palestine up the eastern Mediterranean
coast was not the only avenue to the wider world but it was
probably always the likeliest.
It was also possible to go east from Memphis across the
desert to the top of the Gulf of Suez and on to Sinai, in
search of turquoise and copper for example; to go south down
that arm of the Red Sea into the Sea itself and so reach the
coasts of modern-day Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia; and to cross
the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. The Eastern Desert along
the whole length of the Nile in Egypt was never as barren
as the desert to the west. Probably nomad pastoralists tending
their flocks were often found there. The attraction of minerals
and precious metals was enough to draw the ancient Egyptians
on expeditions away from their river valley home. Granite
and greywacke, tin, copper and gold were to be found along
these routes. In the Western Desert, stretching away from
Memphis to the Libyan Plateau, there was less to lure the
ancient Egyptians, even in the wetter days before the Sahara
became completely desiccated, though there were substantial
oases of considerable importance to the Egyptians in later
times.
South of Memphis, into Upper Egypt, the valley of the Nile
reached for about a thousand kilometers towards Africa. The
first cataract of the Nile marked the frontier in Old Kingdom
times, the place where the river first becomes seriously difficult
to navigate as the waters tumble over rocks. The Old Kingdom
Egyptians of Dynasty IV exercised some kind of influence over
the region between the first and second cataracts - and this
was, of course, the place where imports from the Africa made
their way into Egypt: ivory, spices, ostrich feathers among
them. There were probably many middlemen along the route and
few if any Egyptians are likely to have travelled into the
heart of Africa.
But the source of the great river which made the civilization
of ancient Egypt possible were deep inside the continent.
Above the fifth cataract first the Atbara, and then above
the sixth the Blue Nile flow down from the Ethiopian Highlands
into the waters of the White Nile, which rises in central
Africa. It is the seasonal flooding of the Nile in Egypt as
a result of the mingling of the rivers in the Sudan that supplies
Egypt with the means to sustain life. Without this happy state
of affairs, there would have been no settlement on the Nile
Valley, no unification of the state, no great kings - and
no Great Sphinx.
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