20 Pyramid Myths Hollywood Helped Spread About Ancient Egypt

The nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza is gone, and popular history has blamed Napoleon’s cannons from his 1798 invasion of Egypt. However, in 1737, a Danish captain named Frederic Louis Norden drew the Sphinx without its nose, 32 years before Napoleon was even born. The earliest surviving record is by the 15th-century historian al-Maqrizi, who wrote that a Sufi iconoclast named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr defaced the Sphinx in 1378. Napoleon got the blame instead.

There’s a major conspiracy theory that extraterrestrials helped build the Great Pyramid. However, this is unlikely to be the case. In 2013, researchers found the Diary of Merer, a papyrus logbook dating back to roughly 2570 BCE that mentions crews transporting limestone by boat for the pyramid’s construction. The pyramid also didn’t appear out of nowhere: Egyptian builders had been refining the design for generations, from Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara to Sneferu’s experimental pyramids at Dahshur.

Archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, and British tabloids quickly spread reports that the tomb held an inscription with a death curse on it. However, Carter died in 1939 at age 64 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, 17 years after visiting the tomb.

The pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure were built during Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty, roughly between 2589 and 2504 BCE. That was more than a thousand years before the period in which the biblical Exodus is traditionally placed. Although scholars debate whether the Exodus occurred as a single historical event, those who attempt to date it often place it around the 13th century BCE. Since there is no overlap between these time frames, it’s impossible for Hebrew slaves to have built structures that were already more than a millennium old by then.

We’ve all seen the movie trope: the inside of a pyramid with pressure plates, swinging blades, and poison darts. Well, guess what? No pyramid the ancient Egyptians built had any such spring-loaded contraptions. The only defenses were huge granite portcullis blocks, lowered down carefully carved vertical grooves to seal off the narrow passages once the pyramid was locked up. No traps, no triggers, just a big chunk of rock blocking the way in.

Films portray pyramids overflowing with piles of gold coins. But Egyptians didn’t mint their first coins until the Late Period of the 5th century BCE, well over 2,000 years after Khufu’s pyramid was built. In the Old Kingdom, Egypt operated with a barter system, along with a weight-based measure of value, known as the deben. So anyone looking for coins inside a pyramid would have been two thousand years off target.

In horror films, mummies reanimate as shambling zombies. In reality, Egyptian funerary texts, the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead, describe a very different process for resurrection. When a person died, the Ka and the Ba (two parts of the soul) became an Akh (a third, divine version of oneself). If those rites failed, Egyptians believed the body could be left to wander restlessly instead, which was a fate every Egyptian feared.

Movies frequently portray pyramids as containing winding passageways and hidden chambers. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, though, is nearly a solid block of stone: more than 95% of the pyramid is made up of masonry, leaving virtually no internal space. Its interior consists of just three chambers: the Subterranean Chamber, Queen’s Chamber, and King’s Chamber, linked by a handful of short, straight tunnels. No labyrinth.

Work at the Giza workers’ village of Heit el-Ghurab has shown that the laborers were not foreign slaves but native Egyptian conscripts doing seasonal state labor (known as corvée) alongside skilled tradesmen. They were fed on cattle, sheep, goats, fish, and beer, providing a better diet than most rural villages of the time. Skeletons from the site show healed fractures, amputations, and even skull surgery. Hard work, with real care.

Because the pyramids today are rough, weathered, and made up of visibly exposed stone blocks, it’s easy to imagine that they always looked that way. In reality, they were originally covered in smooth white Tura limestone casing stones that shone and reflected light. Each pyramid was also topped by a gilded capstone called a benben stone. A Cairo earthquake in 1303 knocked loose many of the casing stones from the pyramids. Much of the limestone was then reused in mosques and fortresses in Cairo, leaving the rougher core stone exposed.

Neither Egypt nor the Arab world holds the record for the most pyramids; that title goes to Sudan, once home to the ancient kingdom of Kush, which has somewhere between 200 and 255 pyramids, making it nearly twice as many as the 118 to 138 pyramids in Egypt. The pyramids of the Kushite capital of Meroë, built between about 800 BCE and 350 CE, are steeper and narrower than their Egyptian counterparts.

It was widely believed in medieval Europe that Joseph of the Bible had built the pyramids to be giant silos for storing grain. There’s no evidence of such a belief in ancient Egypt, but the idea spread around Europe and was kept alive for many centuries. Of course, a pyramid (essentially a block of stone with some smaller rooms within it) couldn’t possibly be used as a silo.

In 2018, researchers from Russia’s ITMO University published a paper demonstrating, through computer modeling, that a pyramid shape might be able to focus certain frequencies of radio waves. This is a theoretical model, not an actual experiment. The Great Pyramid has no wires, no conductive materials, and no mechanism to generate energy. It was constructed as a tomb for a king.

The whole mummification process took 70 days, using plenty of water and a lot of natron salt, a natural desiccant. That all happened in open-air spaces, namely the Ibu and the Wabet workshops, by the river, never inside the airless, unventilated pyramids where there was no water.

We see movies with hieroglyphics carved into the pyramids. But in Khufu’s Great Pyramid, the walls are smooth and bare. The Pyramid Texts, religious inscriptions, weren’t added until roughly 150 years later, in the Pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, ca. 2350 BCE. There is some red ink graffiti written by workmen in chambers above the King’s Chamber, but it was not formal decoration.

There are a couple of films that feature servants being killed to accompany their owner into the afterlife. Retainers were indeed sacrificed at Abydos in the early First Dynasty, around 3000 BCE. It continued for a little while, but stopped nearly 450 years before the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza were built. Thereafter, Old Kingdom funerary rites consisted of statues and rituals.

The majority of pyramid construction occurred during the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2686-1650 BCE). By the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1069 BCE), pharaohs like Tutankhamun and Ramesses II had ceased building pyramids entirely. Instead, their tombs were carved into the mountains of the Valley of the Kings, perhaps to deter tomb robbers.

Khufu’s father, Sneferu, built three pyramids trying to figure out how to build a pyramid with smooth sides: at Meidum, the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, and the Red Pyramid. In about 2600 BCE, work started on the Bent Pyramid, which was rising at an angle of 54 degrees. As it climbed higher, cracks appeared in the inner blocks because the weight became too much. Engineers decided to radically reduce the angle to 43 degrees.

The Giza pyramids were not constructed in an empty desert. During the Fourth Dynasty, a distributary of the Nile, called the Khufu Channel, ran straight to the foot of the Giza Plateau, allowing boats to dock and unload cargoes of limestone blocks very close to the construction area.

The large stone blocks were transported on wooden sleds, pulled by human teams. In a study published in 2014, physicists demonstrated that adding a small amount of water in front of the sled stiffened the sand, reducing the friction of sliding by about half. Indeed, in a painting from the tomb at Deir el-Bersha (c. 1900 BCE), we even see someone pouring water in front of a huge sled.

This content was created with the help of AI.