- The Ancient Egyptians were noticing in the cemeteries
oh Grandma's mummified all of the sudden.
(laughs)
I think they started to experiment and
figure out how to make fake mummies.
(exotic music)
- Today we're talking about what we know about
Ancient Egypt and the Pyramids at Giza.
(exotic music)
- I'm pretty sure slaves built the pyramids.
- Sounds about right.
I remember that they didn't use the wheel or something.
They were just using, not levers, but they were
just pulling it up by hand or pushing it.
- No, yeah, yeah, yeah, right and they like
pulled it on ropes in a line.
- This is our first common misconception about
how the pyramids at Giza were built.
We actually know that it was a group of
Ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and not by force.
But you're right in that a lot of the stones
were actually moved with man power and
there was no wheels and a lot of sledges and everything
were used to transport the stones to build pyramids.
- So, where the Ancient Egyptians,
this was their job to build these pyramids?
- Basically we think that the Egyptians
did it in service to the king,
whoever was building the pyramid at the time.
Some archeologists like to think that perhaps
it was almost like a form of tax,
like we do today with our government
that these men and potentially women would
go and actually build the pyramids as
tribute to the king and as a form of tax.
(exotic music)
- So archeologists estimate that it took about
20,000 people over 23 years to build
the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
- Wow. - Wow.
- Just one pyramid?
- Just the one, yeah.
- Was the king that commissioned these pyramids,
or the Pharaoh, even alive to see the final product?
- Yeah, we think so. Khufu probably began building
his pyramid as soon as he got to the throne.
(exotic music)
- I think the pyramids were built to
house the Pharaoh's body after they died.
- Their main purpose was to serve as
a tomb for the dead king.
He was buried in there, all of his funerary offerings
and treasures were also put inside the pyramid as well.
But these pyramids also served as a
display of the king's power right?
You have this monumental structure out in
the middle of the desert and all the Ancient Egyptians
could see it from miles away and stuff.
And so it served as a type of reminder to the people
of who was in charge and who was king.
- So when they're building the pyramid
is it just building around one room
where the king would be be buried?
Or do they have other rooms with other things in them?
Is it like a house or is more just like one tomb?
- Inside each pyramid there's a series of rooms
that were used to house the mummy of the king,
to old his funerary offerings and stuff,
and these pyramids almost served as a
transformation machine to help aid the Pharaoh
go from the world of the living to the world of the dead.
- Because of that, is there any bad voodoo, if you will,
involved around like, were they not allowed
to see the room before they died or?
- There's a common thought that Ancient Egypt
has a lot of curses and this bad voodoo and everything
and we just don't have a lot of evidence for it.
We don't have any inscriptions inside
the pyramids that say don't enter.
- It's Indiana Jones.
- Yeah
(laughs)
- Telling you those things
- The booby traps and everything, yeah.
(exotic music)
- Not everybody in Ancient Egypt was mummified.
It definitely was reserved for the upper classes
or the elites and the Pharaohs and the royal family.
And there were even different levels of
mummification that you could have.
The more money you had, the finer your mummy could be.
- I took a class, a two week class,
but I don't really remember much.
(laughs)
- But I know that 'cause we had to mummify an orange,
that was our assignment.
'Cause I remember we put a bunch of
different spices on the orange and
then just wrapped it in gauze.
I don't know if that's actually how it works
but that was middle school.
(laughs)
- Okay, yeah, yeah.
Mummification was a process that we think took
maybe 40 days to complete.
Usually the person would die and then they would
start mummifying their body right away.
- Oh I remember they would scrape
their brains out through their nose.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause that was really gross.
- Part of mummification includes
removing all of the internal organs.
So the brain was taken out through the nose,
they'd cut an incision in your side and
they'd remove your lungs and your stomach
and intestines and all this stuff.
- Do you know how they figured out how to mummify?
Like, were there a bunch of kings that they experimented
on and they're like,
"Oh no, it didn't work"?
- So the earliest mummies that we have from Ancient Egypt
are actually just bodies that were preserved
by accident in the desert sand.
The desert sands can actually naturally
mummify a body and dry it out.
And so we think through time as Ancient Egyptians
were noticing in the cemeteries,
Oh, grandma's mummified all of the sudden.
(laughs)
- I think they started to experiment and
figure out how to make fake mummies.
(exotic music)
- So as an Egyptologist, part of what
I have to study is the hieroglyphic language
of the Ancient Egyptians.
I can read and write hieroglyphs.
- Didn't they have two languages?
One language that was reserved for
special documents and things.
Is that true?
- Mm-hmm. Throughout Egyptian history
what's pretty common is the nice hieroglyphs,
so what we think of the nice pictures and stuff
were written on tomb walls, on the walls of temples.
But then they had a different kind of script
called hieratic which is almost like cursive hieroglyphs.
So, it's like a short hand of the nice pictures and stuff.
And those were for more administrative documents,
love poetry, letters between people.
So, yes, in a way there is a more formal writing
and a more informal writing of the language.
- There's a lot that goes into making the pyramids.
- And a lot that we still don't know.
- Yeah.
- Which is interesting.
- Well this was so great and I'm really glad I got to
sit down with you guys and chat about the pyramids.
(instrumental music)