In the year 357, Emperor Constantius II ordered an obelisk from Egypt’s greatest temple
to be set up in the Circus Maximus at Rome.
After crossing the Mediterranean on a specially-built barge, the obelisk was floated up the Tiber,
rolled through the city on a wooden cradle, and raised onto its new base by thousands
of men straining at capstans.
Spectators marveled at the obelisk’s size – it was 105 feet (32 m) tall and weighed
more than 900,000 pounds – and puzzled over the hieroglyphs on its sides, which nobody
in Rome could read.
According to a treatise written in Egypt centuries before, the inscriptions on the obelisk recounted
the deeds of a certain King Ramestes.
But who this king was, or when he had reigned, none could say.
Like the Greeks before them, the Romans had an inexact sense of history’s depth.
They knew – or thought they knew – that Rome had been founded about eleven centuries
before Constantius set up his obelisk, and that the Trojan War had taken place more than
four hundred years before the foundation of Rome.
But of the vast gulf of time preceding the Fall of Troy, they knew only what the Greek
myths could tell them.
Greek civilization had grown up among the empty tombs and tumbled palaces of the Mycenaeans.
Some of these ruins came to be associated with the kings and heroes of the Iliad.
Others, with their gargantuan stone walls, were said to have been built by the mythical
cyclopes.
A few were connected with the Pelasgians, the people thought to have inhabited Greece
before the coming of the Greeks.
Myth also provided a guide for chance discoveries of ancient burials.
The Athenians hailed the bones of a tall man buried with bronze weapons, for example, as
the remains of the hero Theseus.
A stone coffin uncovered by a flood on the outskirts of Rome, likewise, was interpreted
as the resting place of the legendary sage-king Numa Pompilius.
Some antiquities, however, defied such ready identification.
When the Spartan king Agesilaus opened a tomb traditionally associated with Alcmene, the
mother of Hercules, he found a bronze tablet inscribed with mysterious symbols.
No Greek scholar could make sense of it, so Agesilaus sent the tablet to be deciphered
in the most ancient country he knew: Egypt.
The classical experience of Egypt began in the seventh century BC, when Greek merchants
and mercenaries began to travel up the Nile.
Alexander’s conquest of Egypt set the stage for three centuries of Greek rule, and the
establishment of Greek as Egypt’s second language.
After Augustus annexed the Ptolemaic kingdom, Egypt became a Roman province, and remained
so for nearly seven hundred years.
For a millennium, in other words, Egypt was an integral part of the classical world.
But in the eyes of the Greco-Roman elite, Egypt continued to be exotic, set apart by
its gods, its antiquity, and its wealth.
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Back to Egypt.
Some classical authors mocked Egypt’s animal-headed gods, or stereotyped the Egyptian people as
mystics and thieves.
But most Greeks and Romans seem to have regarded Egypt as a fascinating place – a land, to
paraphrase Herodotus, filled with wonders.
Under the emperors, this fascination found expression in the obelisks set up around Rome,
in the Nile scenes painted on the walls of villas, and in the pyramid tombs erected by
members of the Roman elite.
Although Pliny the Elder had criticized them as idle displays of wealth, the pyramids – and
especially the Pyramids of Giza – were universally ranked among Egypt’s greatest marvels, and
indeed as wonders of the world.
Roman tourists paid local villagers to scramble up the smooth sides of the Great Pyramid,
and carved graffiti into the casing blocks.
Like the Greeks before them, they knew that the pyramids were the tombs of pharaohs.
Their age, however, was a matter of controversy.
Herodotus, the first Greek historian, thought that the first pharaohs had reigned around
15,000 BC.
Diodorus, writing four centuries after Herodotus, pushed the beginnings of the Egyptian monarchy
back to around 23,000 BC.
Since the Egyptian kingdom actually coalesced shortly before 3,000 BC, these were dramatic
overestimates.
But when describing the pyramids at Giza – which we now know were built during the 26th century
BC – classical authors tended to miscalculate in the opposite direction.
Herodotus believed that the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid had reigned two generations
after the Trojan War – by his reckoning, around 1200 BC.
Diodorus dated the same king to the ninth generation after the Trojan War, or sometime
in the tenth century BC.
Other authors gave even more recent dates, especially for the Pyramid of Menkaure, which
a longstanding tradition attributed to Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl who became a famous courtesan
– or, by some accounts, wife of the pharaoh – during the sixth century BC.
In part, Greek and Roman ignorance about the age of the Pyramids reflected a broader breakdown
of cultural transmission.
Although many native Egyptians knew Greek, knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs was restricted
to a small group of priests, whose numbers steadily dwindled.
Long before the last hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the end of the fourth century,
the records inscribed on Egypt’s ancient monuments were as inscrutable to most of their
guardians as they were to everyone else.
Not all Egyptian history, of course, was hidden behind hieroglyphs.
Sometime in the third century BC, a learned Egyptian named Manetho composed a history
in Greek, which correctly dated the Pyramids to an early period of Egyptian history.
But instead of consulting Manetho’s treatise – which remained obscure until late antiquity
– the Greeks and Romans preferred to re-read Herodotus, whose chronologically chaotic account
of Egyptian history was regarded and respected as a classic.
The Greeks and Romans didn’t know how old the pyramids were, in short, because they
preferred to perceive Egypt through the lenses of their own culture and classics.
What those lenses could not show, they had no wish to see.
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You might also enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants.