Propaganda of the pyramids

摘要

It seems obvious that huge ancient monuments, such as the three Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt, should be taken as testimony to a powerful ancient state behind them. As Joyce Marcus argues' in a contribution to a newly published book, that conclusion is indeed what the builders wanted us to draw―but it's the opposite of the truth. Often, the biggest monuments were built early in a state's history, before it reached its peak power. They were built for propaganda, precisely to conceal the state's lack of real clout. For example, among those three pyramids at Giza, Khufu's was the largest ever erected in Egypt, with a base area of 5 hectares, a height of 146 metres, and a mass of 6 million tonnes. It maybe the bulkiest single building erected in human history, and until recently it was the tallest. That is certainly not because Khufu commanded more resources than did any subsequent leader in history. Many governments today exercise far more power, but none would waste its resources on building a big pyramid just for display and lacking office space, auditoriums and theme restaurants. Khufu's dynasty came early in the Egyptian sequence; it was only the fourth of about 31 dynasties. Even Khufu's two successors didn't try to match him: Khafra's pyramid at Giza is slightly smaller, and Menkaura's is less than half of Khufu's in height. Later Egyptian dynasties drastically reduced the scale of their pyramids.