Pyramids – they’re full of stone, geometry, and crowds… entrenched in the memory since childhood, as one crammed up the seven wonders of the world, they fade into, as much as they stand out in the desert… architecture at a scale that the modern world keeps trying to fathom, excavating for remnants and clues that could offer some closure to the ever piling hypotheses on the hows and whys…
The Giza pyramid complex is home to the largest Egyptian pyramid, that of Khufu, or Cheops as the school textbooks would tell us… an edifice of more than two million gargantuan blocks of limestone and granite assembled into a symmetry that one assumes smiles privately as most of us marvel, while some get caught in a whirlpool of conjectures and revisionist history, perplexed by the accuracy of measurements, or the quality of workmanship, or the levels of sophistication of a civilization now lost in the deep recesses of time… many a polymath have erred since trying to decipher their secrets… the more we learn, the less we know… makes one wonder – if these are the portals to higher realms, it’s only right that the secrets they hold aren’t meant for mere mortals maybe…
‘Twas a rather decent November day, the Saharan winter trudging in… the sun musing upon these stones it’s been baking for millennia as crowds started thronging the complex… in solitude, monuments embody history, one steeped in contemplation… when crowded, they are reduced to mere artefacts, backgrounds for photographic portraits, social media milestones in the journey of a modern-day tourist…
Khafre’s pyramid is the second highest in the complex, although it looks taller that Khufu’s due to the higher bedrock… there’s some casing stones remaining on the top hinting how they’d have been a common feature across all the pyramids… robbed by time, or robbed over time…
‘Tis an interesting juxtaposition of the ancient over the modern as these pyramids mull over the Cairo skyline… a city coming to terms with a burgeoning population and tourist traffic, a country trying to broker peace between the myriad phases of its conflicting past and present…
The Sphinx’s expression looked one of amusement to me at first sight, watching swarms of people circling its ancient auspices and workers settling around the scaffolding at its feet… built for Khafre whose pyramid overlooks the monolith, ‘tis one of the oldest examples of anthropomorphism… one that has definitely managed to look past its nose…
What’s the point of these pyramids… is the overarching thought as I wind my way out of the complex… their symmetry is sublime, aura overwhelming and history compelling… but the point?… we wander on that… from metrological and numerological theories traying to hack the math to the domains of pseudoarchaeology and the supernatural tiptoeing beyond logic to peek into some hallowed unknowns… the journey, conforming to the stereotype, might end up being more rewarding than the destination, one feels, rummaging through the records of excavations that throw open more questions than answers… there is circularity, not linearity in time maybe, civilizations disappearing after an epoch for the next ones to start from the ground up… all said and done, they’re humbling, these mysteries of the ancient world and picture postcards of the modern world…
Musing on the pyramids, Giza, Egypt
