The palaces, tombs and memorials of the Pharaohs were a different matter; they were built of the stone abundantly available in some parts of the Nile valley. Though they were carefully dressed with first copper and then bronze tools and often elaborately incised and painted, the technology of utilizing this material was far from complicated. Egyptians invented the stone column, but their great building achievement was not so much architectural and technical as social and administrative. What they did was based on an unprecedented and almost unsurpassed concentration of human labour. Under the direction of a scribe, thousands of slaves and conscripts, and sometimes regiments of soldiers, were deployed to cut and manhandle into position the huge masses of Egyptian building. With only such elementary assistance as was available from levers and sleds – no winches, pulleys, blocks or tackle existed – and by the building of colossal ramps of earth, a succession of still-startling buildings was produced.
They began under the Third Dynasty. The most famous are the pyramids, the tombs of kings, at Saqqara, near Memphis. One of these, the ‘Step Pyramid’, was traditionally seen as the masterpiece of the first architect whose name is recorded – Imhotep, chancellor to the king. His work was so impressive that it was seen as evidence of the dynasty’s god-like power. It and its companions rose without peer over a civilization which until then lived only in dwellings of mud. A century or so later, blocks of stone of fi fteen tons apiece were used for the pyramid of Cheops or Khufru, and it was at this time (during the Fourth Dynasty) that the greatest pyramids were completed at Giza.
Cheops’s pyramid was twenty years in the building; the legend that 100,000 men were employed upon it is now thought to be an exaggeration but many thousands must have been, and the huge quantities of stone ( 5 – 6 million tons) were brought from as far as 500miles away. This colossal construction is perfectly orientated and its sides, 750feet long, vary by less than 8inches – only about 0.09 per cent. The pyramids were the greatest evidence of the power and self-confi dence of the pharaonic state. But each of them was only the dominant feature of a great complex of buildings which made up together the residence of the king after death. At other sites there were great temples, palaces, the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.
These huge public works were in both the real and fi gurative sense the biggest things the Egyptians left to posterity. They make it less surprising that the Egyptians were later also reputed to have been great scientists: people could not believe that these huge monuments did not rest on the most refi ned mathematical and scientific skills. Yet this is an invalid inference and untrue. Though Egyptian surveying was highly skilled, it was not until modern times that a more than elementary mathematical skill became necessary to engineering; it was certainly not needed for the erection of the pyramids.
What was requisite was outstanding competence in mensuration and the manipulation of certain formulae for calculating volumes and weights, and this was as far as Egyptian mathematics went, whatever later admirers believed. Modern mathematicians do not think much of the Egyptians’ theoretical achievement and they certainly did not match the Babylonians in this art. They worked with a decimal numeration which at first sight looks modern, but it may be that their only signifi cant contribution to later mathematics was the invention of unit fractions.
No doubt a primitive mathematics is a part of the explanation of the sterility of the Egyptians’ astronomical endeavours – another fi eld in which posterity, paradoxically, was to credit them with great things. Their observations were accurate enough to permit the forecasting of the rise of the Nile and the ritual alignment of buildings, it is true, but their theoretical astronomy was left far behind by the Babylonians. The inscriptions in which Egyptian astronomical science was recorded were to command centuries of awed respect from astrologers, but their scientifi c value was low and their predictive quality relatively short term. The one solid work which rested on the Egyptians’ astronomy was the calendar. They were the first people to establish the solar year of 365 ¼ days and they divided it into twelve months, each of three ‘weeks’ of ten days, with fi ve extra days at the end of the year – an arrangement, it may be remarked, to be revived in 1793when the French revolutionaries sought to replace the Christian calendar by one more rational.
Stronger Steps towards the Consolidation of Egyptian Civilization
