Pyramids of Giza

Day 87 19 November 2010 Friday

We made the obligatory trip to the pyramids and sphinx at Giza our third day in town. A painless 30 minute city bus trip southeast from the downtown area brought us to the famed area.

 

We must have entered the “locals” walking entrance near the sphinx because there were no tour buses and limited concession sales, and only 10 armed tourist police instead of the usual 30. The pyramids are indeed the massive iconic structures of heavy sacked stones that we have all heard about for our lifetimes.

In postcards and travel brochures the pyramids of Giza always appear isolated in the middle of a desert landscape. In reality, the suburb of Giza has grown all the way the to edge of the park. The sphinx is only a hundred yards away from the edge of town.

The pyramids of Giza were covered in polished limestone casing stones, and would have been brilliant white in their day. The scope of the building projects dating from the second millennium B.C. is phenomenal. The great pyramid of Khufu: Originally, 480 feet tall, built over 20 years, composing 5.5 million tons of limestone (2.3 million blocks), 8,000 tons of granite (imported from Aswan 500 miles upriver) some blocks weighing as much as 25-80 tons, and another 500,000 tons of mortar. If, indeed, the pyramid of Khufu was completed in 20 years, then 800 tons of stone would have been needed to be placed each day.