The empty pyramids

photo from pixabay.com

were almost empty. Of course, it was not always so, but those who devastated them did not leave a story behind them. The sarcophagus of the pharaoh Khufs of red granite (the same granite is decorated with walls of the burial chamber) was "gutted" back in antiquity. Did not get along better with his heirs. In 818 Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian from Padua at the court of the famous Mameluk fighter Muhammad Ali, entered the Chephren pyramid. Here, not only the sarcophagus (from black granite, the lid broken in two) was empty, but the Arabic inscription on the wall said that the camera had already been opened by the people of Emir Ali - six centuries earlier.

The memorial temple of Khafre was also empty (memorial temples, as well as the so-called "valley temples", there is again at each pyramid) - an empty hall at the entrance, an empty wide courtyard with columns, five niches for royal statues are empty, five rooms for the storage of sacred objects are deprived of these objects, as well as the sanctuary.

The walls on the inner side of the courtyard, quite probably, once contained reliefs. Only in the vestibule of the valley temple was found the famous diorite statue of Khafre in the image of Horus (the pharaoh is the earthly embodiment of this god), which now is the decoration of the Cairo Museum. In 1837, in the era of "dynamic archeology," British officer Richard Howard Wise managed to breach and get to the camera Menkaure, where he found the most elegant work of the sarcophagus. By the time of the find, it no longer had a cover. As in the case of Chephren, the walls were dotted with Arabic script. The sarcophagus was hardly removed and sent to distant England, but the ship with the romantic name "Beatrice" sank into a cruel Mediterranean storm. "The vengeance of the mummy's house," which the science fiction writers have been talking about for so long and say from Egyptology, thus took place - at least this time.