I went shopping. This is what I got.
So if you're anything like me, you went to fifth grade,
you got hit with a bunch of ancient Egypt stuff. But here's one thing I don't really know:
why are the pyramids pyramids? The answer is filled with best
guesses, but it includes religion, politics, history, conspiracies—
"Pyramids!" Actually, no we're we're leaving out the crazy
in this video. "Pyramids!"
It's all and it helped me appreciate ancient Egypt for the first time.
Now let's start off this video with a montage of everything i knew
about ancient Egypt before i started this video. (A slew of crap including The Mummy, King Tut,
the Sesame Street special that forever scarred me, and Stargate, the greatest film of all time)
So i am going to excavate this pyramid, uh, during the course of this video.
Apparently there is one of six different objects inside. Which one is inside this pyramid, that
is the hook — also knowledge of the history of ancient Egypt.
So this is the new chapter in my series Why the Thing is a Thing.
Here's an awesome graphic i cooked up.
And so as a result of that, I'm not giving you an overview of Egyptian history.
I'm giving you a shape-obsessed view of the pyramids: shape, shape, shape, shapes. Can i
say shapes more? Okay.
There is also a lot of crazy stuff out there that i had to wade through.
"The great pyramid was sending microwave signal to a satellite."
So eventually this paper here, it unlocked some awesome books and info that i ended up using,
and i think i have a pretty good answer, but i want to stamp a giant asterisk right here.
"Ancient histories present unique challenges for historians and even the most certain
of stories are best thought of in terms of probabilities...also aliens there are aliens
that were communicating through these pyramids!!!" So right now, I've put on screen the first
pyramiddy pyramid around 2550 BC, but what do you have before then?
Drawn from this book, you're starting out with pits and sand: we're talking 4300 to 3000 BC.
Then these people are like, "Wait a second, somebody's gonna rob my grave if i'm just putting
it in a pit. Hey, I don't want that." So they develop another plan. So as
Egyptian dynasties ramp up, they start building these things called mastibas—
these mud houses that are protective and maybe like 10 percent as cool as a pyramid.
And underground they start building these massive structures that are completely fascinating — but
you know what, this is violating my shape only focus.
You can learn more about mastabas if you want. I'm telling you all this because around 2650 BC
a pharaoh named Djoser changes the game. Yes, that is my picture of him.
I'm going to stick with this portrait style, just as a reminder
of how hard this ancient history stuff is. Anyway Djoser builds a pyramid that changes
the game: a step pyramid. Look at this one closely.
This isn't what historians call a true pyramid, it's a step pyramid, because it's not totally
smooth on the sides. How did it happen?
Djoser had his architect Imhotep. "Imhotep!"
See, the Mummy was not so useless. Although to our knowledge
Imhotep never met Brendan Fraser. But what Imhotep did was he, in theory,
designed mastabas that could be stacked. That's what a step pyramid is: stacked mastabas.
Two things here: yes, this really is like shaving companies throwing more blades onto razors just
because they could stack the mastabas. But also, Imhotep is using a more durable
form of construction — one that can lead to bigger structures. And with this step
pyramid we're getting a lot closer to this pyramid shape. But then it takes
another pharaoh to actually make it happen. All right, there he is my main man, Snefru.
If you ask me, he is the reason that pyramids are pyramids.
But he is also the culmination of religious, and historical, and even construction trends.
So, for context, I probably made it sound like the pyramid shape was basically just a
Carvana but for mastabas. That's not really the full picture.
It was a really attractive shape because it reflected some Egyptian creation stories.
The idea is that there was this big mound, BenBen,
from which creation sprang forward, with a little coaxing.
Some people say they got it because of the way big piles of silt showed up when the Nile receded.
Ben Ben is essentially a pyramid and the pyramid-shaped stone that sits atop a lot
of pyramids and obelisks it's called a benben, or it's called a pyramidion.
The connection between the myth and the shape is pretty clear.
So this shape, it symbolized an important part of creation, and Snefru was around when sun
worship was getting big in Egypt too. Suddenly, everyone was focused on Re
the sun god in a bunch of ways. Okay this one i will give you a
historical picture of. With the sun trending
as an object of religious veneration, the pyramid got reoriented from North/South to East/West and
a true pyramid shape like the sun's rays was suddenly a lot more appealing.
"He is making all of this up." Well, no, I'm just paraphrasing
the work of Roth and Edwards. "People can't even agree how to spell Snefru
and you think i'm dumb for suggesting aliens?" Yes.
So Snefru had a clear religious goal: a true pyramid that built off what Djoser had started,
and the pyramid at Meidum it was his masterpiece...no, yeah it looks like
that. It turns out that building a true pyramid is super hard, they think that it collapsed.
But then he succeeded with his next masterpiece,
the Bent Pyramid...Okay, yeah you could probably tell by the name Bent Pyramid
that this one didn't go so well either. They think that they had to adjust course
about halfway through to make it more stable, so that's why it looks like that.
Finally, Snefru makes the Red Pyramid the first true pyramid.
Was it supposed to be red? Well, no, you know it wasn't red at the time
it still looks better than the the Meidum one.
All these pyramids took so much stone that people theorized that conquests in Libya and Nubia
actually funded the work. This was a big deal.
And this is the momentum that you've got going into the Pharaoh Khufu — you might
know him as Cheops— with the great pyramid of Giza. With the sun worship trend growing and
growing bigger pyramids were the way to go. This is how much bigger the great pyramid is.
But after the Giza group, pyramids became kind of spotty. And today we're just left with the shape.
(Tap tap tap tap tap - in reality this went on for a few minutes)
Now I'm gonna have pyramid all over my floor. I got an Egyptian queen.
All right, so what is the takeaway? "What's the takeaway? Aliens!
Aliens are the takeaway, they're right here and they're gonna take away us!"
No. So even with the
uncertainty surrounding the history here, I am struck by how short-lived the pyramid trend was.
You have super-sized mastabas lead to a mega Mastaba lead to a golden age of true pyramids and
then it's over. Egyptian culture evolved. Yeah, of course.
But these things have been around so long that I didn't at least think of that kind
of cultural evolution happening. But it's obvious that it did.
These things seem so permanent because they've been around
so long. For a brief period, powerful people were convinced that these were the machines that could
help grant them some sort of eternal life. And in some ways, maybe they were right.
Thanks for watching. If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel where I do
personal videos, history videos, stuff like that. I hadn't gotten into much of this ancient history
before and I kind of enjoyed it. So I posted links to a lot of the resources that I used
in the description. I was summing up a lot of stuff really quickly,
so if you want to learn more, do feel free to nerd out on that or let me know in the comments
what you think I should have included in the video that would have been helpful.
That's it for this one, uh, please subscribe, like, or comment, uh, if you can. It helps
out this channel. And thanks a lot for watching. Gonna go get rid of this now. Bye.