What the Great Pyramid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleaming, Reflective White

The Great Pyra­mid at Giza—the old­est and most intact of the sev­en ancient won­ders of the ancient world—became a potent sym­bol of the sub­lime in the 19th cen­tu­ry, a sym­bol of pow­er so absolute as to eclipse human under­stand­ing. After Napoleon’s first expe­di­tion to Giza, “Egy­to­ma­nia… swept through Euro­pean cul­ture and influ­enced the plas­tic arts, fash­ion, and design,” writes Miroslav Vern­er in The Pyra­mids: The Mys­tery, Cul­ture, and Sci­ence of Egypt’s Great Mon­u­ments.

At the end of the cen­tu­ry, Her­man Melville sat­i­rized the trend that would even­tu­al­ly give rise to Ancient Aliens, ask­ing in an 1891 poem, “Your masonry—and is it man’s? More like some Cos­mic artisan’s.” Egyp­to­ma­ni­acs saw oth­er­world­ly mag­ic in the pyra­mid. For Melville, it “usurped” nature’s great­ness, stand­ing as “evi­dence of humankind’s mon­u­men­tal will to pow­er,” as Daw­id W. de Vil­liers writes.

The ancient Greeks believed the pyra­mids were built with a mas­sive slave labor force, a the­o­ry that has per­sist­ed. As Vern­er exhaus­tive­ly argues in his book, how­ev­er, they were not only built by humans—instead of aliens or gods—but they were con­struct­ed by trades­men and arti­sans whose skills were in high demand and who were paid wages and orga­nized under a com­plex bureau­cra­cy.

And as you can see recon­struct­ed in the Smith­son­ian video at the top, one of those arti­sanal tasks was to pol­ish the monument’s out­er lime­stone to a gleam­ing white fin­ish that reflect­ed “the pow­er­ful Egypt­ian sun with a daz­zling glare.” Once the pyra­mid was com­plet­ed, “it must have tru­ly added to the impres­sion of Giza as a mag­i­cal port city, bathed in sun­light,” says archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er in the clip.

In addi­tion to its glow­ing, pol­ished lime­stone sides, “the struc­ture would have like­ly been topped with a pyra­mid­ion, a cap­stone made of sol­id gran­ite and cov­ered in a pre­cious met­al like gold,” writes Kot­tke. “No won­der they thought their rulers were gods.” Or did ancient Egyp­tians see the Great Pyra­mid as a mas­ter­piece of human engi­neer­ing, built with the skill and sweat of thou­sands of their com­pa­tri­ots?

Who can say. But it’s like­ly that 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean explor­ers and artists might have char­ac­ter­ized things dif­fer­ent­ly had the Great Pyra­mid still scat­tered the sun over the desert like an ancient bea­con of light instead of sit­ting “dumb,” as Melville wrote, stripped of its facade, wait­ing to have all sorts of mys­te­ri­ous mean­ings wrapped around it.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

Human All Too Human: A Roman Woman Vis­its the Great Pyra­mid in 120 AD, and Carves a Poem in Mem­o­ry of Her Deceased Broth­er

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness