The Old Kingdom pharaohs believed that death was the beginning of eternal life. That they would rise from their tombs to skimmer in the deep blue night as an unsetting star. Or that they would sail endlessly across the watery heavens in the shining boat of the sun god, Re.To help them on their way they built pyramids: huge ramps or stairways charged with the most powerful magic, leading directly to the sky. These massive monuments came to symbolise the might of a powerful nation ruled by a semi-divine god-king.
The first pyramid, the Step Pyramid built for king Djoser, appeared early in Egyptian history. But it didd not spring out of a technological void. To understand the skills and beliefs of the earliest pyramid builders we must look backwards, to the period before Egypt was a united land. In this book the pyramids are set into their historical, even pre-historical, context. By tracing the pyramid building society back to its roots, we see not only how and why the Egyptians were able to build their pyramids, but how the pyramids helped to build Egypt herself.
Joyce Tyldesley is a British archaeologist and Egyptologist, academic, writer and broadcaster.
Tyldesley was born in Bolton, Lancashire and attended Bolton School. In 1981, she earned a first-class honours degree in archaeology from Liverpool University, and a doctorate in Prehistoric Archaeology from Oxford in 1986. She is a Teaching Fellow at Manchester University where she is tutor and course organiser of the three-year distance learning (internet based) Certificate in Egyptology programme run from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology.
She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology at Liverpool University, an ex-trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society, Chairperson of Bolton Archaeology and Egyptology Society, and a trustee of Chowbent Chapel.
In 2004 she established, with Steven Snape of Rutherford Press Limited, a publishing firm dedicated to publishing serious but accessible books on ancient Egypt while raising money for Egyptology field work. Donations from RPL have been made to Manchester Museum and the Egypt Exploration Society: currently all profits are donated to the ongoing fieldwork at Zawiyet umm el-Rakham.
She is married with two children to Egyptologist Steven Snape and lives in Lancashire.
Eu recomendo e muito esse livro. Eu era um dos que aceitava (não acreditava, mas não descartava) a teoria dos alienígenas terem construído/ensinado os egípcios a construir as pirâmides. Aqueles que acreditam nisso deveriam ler esse livro. Assim como a ciência não ter explicação para tais eventos não é desculpa para o uso do deus das lacunas, a não-existência de explicações satisfatórias sobre a construção das pirâmides não é desculpa pra inventar teorias absurdas sobre elas.