Showing posts with label Pyramid Complex of Khufu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pyramid Complex of Khufu. Show all posts

Pyramid Complex of Khufu

The complex  pyramid of Khufu has all of the elements of the traditional pyramid, though many are now long gone. Around the pyramid's walls there are 5 huge boat-shaped pits. In 1954 the pit on the south-eastern side was found to contain a completely dismantled wooden boat, the 'Solar Boat', thought to be used in the king's funerary procession. This boat has now been rebuilt and is now on display in a businesslike museum near where it was found. Although it has not yet been excavated, in 1987 the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation tried the second boat pit on the south-east, using a special probe. This was also found to arrest a boat similar to the first. The mortuary temple on the oriental side of the pyramid today comprises only of the clay of a large perpendicular courtyard covered with basalt paving material, which must have been over 50m wide. It was destroyed in antiquity and its plan is now tough to reconstruct, but of the few fragments of reliefs got there, motives include the sed-festival and the festival of the white Hippopotamus Amphibius. Khufu's causeway has now Almost disappeared and has only been partly tested. Its original length has been guessed at around 810m, abruptly changing direction before it gave the valley temple. The destroys of the valley temple, which was mostly burned in antiquity, are now engrossed by the modern village of Nazlet es-Simman to the north-east. Recent diggings by the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation in 1990 have revealed the remains of a dark green basalt pavage and the continuance of the causeway at the base of the escarpment. At the edge of the pavement a mudbrick wall meant to be 8m thick, proposes that a pyramid-town may have existed near the valley temple.

Better continued are Khufu's 3 small queens' pyramids on the eastern side of the Great Pyramid and across the road running or so the monument. The first pyramid to the north (G1-a), goes to Khufu's mother Hetepheres which was turned up by American Egyptologist George A Reisner in 1925. Hetepheres was the wife of Sneferu and probably the mother of Khufu. Reisner's team found Hetpheres's pretty funerary furniture and other inhumation equipment in a shaft tomb (G7000x) to the north of the queen's pyramid. Her empty coffin, gold jewellery and covered canopic chest was observed with broken wooden furniture now rebuilt and on show in Cairo Museum. The queen's remains were missing, however, and this has puzzled Egyptologists and has led to many hypotheses about the location of her latest sepulture. The second queen's pyramid (G1-b) plausibly belongs to to Meretites who lived during the dominates of Sneferu, Khufu and Khafre reported to an inscription in the nearby mastaba of Kawab, Khufu's son. The third small pyramid (G1-c) may have belonged to Henutsen, daughter of Sneferu and Khufu's half-sister. Her name is known only from an dedication in the pyramid's chapel which was converted to a Temple of Isis during Dynasties XXI to XXVI. The goddess Isis (or Isi) was wanted as 'Lady of the Pyramids' at Giza until Roman times. The pyramids of Khufu's queens gave for the first time ever in 1998 after the restoration of the exterior masonry and the removal of black situations and salt stains from the chamber walls, by the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation. Wooden staircases, new lighting and respiration were installed. Recent archeological sites at the south-east corner of Khufu's pyramid have revealed a destroyed satellite pyramid with T-shaped inner chambers and a descending corridor ending in a rectangular vaulted burial chamber. A larger limestone block with three sloping sides was found on the satellite pyramid's south side which proved to be the base of its pyramidion. Other stones of the pyramidion were found a year later on the north side of the pyramid. Not a single image of King Khufu has been observed in the total of his pyramid complex. The only known figure of the builder of one of the world's greatest monuments is a small ivory statuette only 7.6 cm high, which was got at Abydos. The statuette of the king on his throne has the Horus make of Khufu, Hor-Mejedu.

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