
Egyptian ‘bent’ pyramid dating back 4,600 years opens to public - everbody
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-bent-pyramid-dahshur-cairo-sneferu-pharaoh-a9003906.html
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trevyn
Related, physicist Kurt Mendelssohn’s _The Riddle of the Pyramids_ is a great
read. It proposes that the “bent” pyramid has its shape because of the
catastrophic collapse of another pyramid being built at the same time, which
led to choosing a safer angle for the remaining portion of the bent pyramid.

It took away a lot of the marketing “mystery” of the pyramids for me, instead
taking a very practical engineering, scientific, and analytical approach to
investigating the pyramid phenomenon.

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mcmoose75
I was there at the end of June- it's pretty spectacular. We arrived on a
Friday morning at 7am to beat the heat, and we were the only tourists on site
at all.

Extremely surreal to go down in to the middle of an engineering marvel that
large, and I couldn't believe that I was alone inside of it.

~~~
tcgv
That's awesome! I went to Cairo in 2016 and only got to see the Bent Pyramid
at a distance from the Step Pyramid site, since I didn't have much time there.
Even from afar it's an amazing sight.

I'm longing to go back there, even more now.

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hi41
It is hard to comprehend a large timescale of four thousand six hundred years.
I wonder how much of our current software would last that long.

~~~
walrus01
There's a well known science fiction novel where a "programmer-archaeologist"
on an interstellar fleet digs into a bunch of nested hypervisors and software
nobody has touched in thousands of years, to find things still running on the
unix time epoch.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky)

~~~
Nition
The best part of that was, being a space-faring civilization, the narrator
muses that its starting point is probably based on the date when humans first
left Earth to go to the moon!

~~~
drdeadringer
My second round of amusement and feeling impressed was that, after thousands
of years, the guy was off by only 1 year.

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throwaway3627
Pyramids are awesome feats of engineering and construction.

Also reminds me of the muon detection tech that can probe through solid
material. [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray-
muons-...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray-muons-reveal-
hidden-void-in-the-great-pyramid/)

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EGreg
_Tourists will be allowed inside the ancient structure after archaeologists
found “hidden tombs” containing mummies, masks and tools._

Did they miss a NOT? That seems like a strange reason to go from not allowing
tourists to allowing them!

~~~
Shendare
> Authorities are looking to promote tourism at Dahshur, located about 17
> miles south of central Cairo.

> The site, which lies in the open desert, attracts just a trickle of visitors
> and is currently free of the touts and bustle of Giza.

> The promotion of Dahshur is part of a wider push to boost tourism, an
> important source of foreign revenue for Egypt that dipped steeply after the
> country’s 2011 uprising before gradually recovering.

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ak39
Ah Sneferu ... the OG who started this whole pyramid for burial chambers
trend. If I'm not mistaken, before this fella, royal tombs were buried
(concealed) in caves dug into mountain sides - far from Cairo. This guy
Sneferu thought "why don't we build a mountain like tomb right here?"

The reason it is "bent" is because they ran out of boulders and so had to
reduce the pitch to reduce the number of blocks required to finish the
project.

~~~
pattisapu
Yes. Buried, then concealed, then Sneferu's attempts via "mastabas" (Arabic
for "bench"), building mastabas over mastabas for proof of concept of a
pyramid. These projects were on the scale of lifetimes. These were incredible
engineers.

~~~
pvg
_These projects were on the scale of lifetimes._

Not quite, given that Sneferu had at least three built.

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mosselman
Very cool, although that picture in the narrow tunnel does not look very
inviting. Especially not if I think about how crowded some landmarks can
become. Imagine being stuck with 400 other tourists for 2 hours in tunnels
like that.

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patientplatypus
Heh -

I've been reading some of Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology and he goes
into some of the early burial rituals. It's truly fascinating stuff. Did you
know that a lot of the early rulers of the area were buried with their entire
retinue (10s or 100+ servants) alive? Including sometimes the ruler himself.
Gruesome stuff, but also quite fascinating.

~~~
mattmanser
I don't know, it's a bit like mass murders, we should expunge their murderous
names from all records.

Sod them and their misery inflicting monuments.

~~~
WoodenChair
> I don't know, it's a bit like mass murders, we should expunge their
> murderous names from all records. Sod them and their misery inflicting
> monuments.

"Those who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it." It's important to
understand who (by our standards) bad people were, why they were bad, and what
circumstances enabled them to be bad. If you erase them, you can't learn from
them.

~~~
mattmanser
Doesn't mean we have to remember their names though, which is what they
wanted.

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darkpuma
> _" Tourists will be allowed inside the ancient structure after
> archaeologists found “hidden tombs” containing mummies, masks and tools."_

That's not true, is it? I'm under the impression the bent pyramid was looted
dry thousands of years ago, like the others.

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richardw
Pyramids represent such amazing engineering and such untold suffering. Farming
only started 10k years ago and 5k years later we had such an energy and time
surplus that we were moving mountains around for our rulers' ego's.

A lot of whippings would have to be handed out for me to move rocks around in
the sun.

~~~
keiferski
Most Egyptologists do not think the pyramids were built by slave labor.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt)

~~~
richardw
I didn't use the world slavery once, but I'll bite. They probably weren't
entrepreneurs.

None of that looks like a situation I'd want to have imposed on me. No
individuals say "you know what I want to do today? Move rocks for zero
economic use."

I quote from your page:

"Forms of forced labor and servitude are seen throughout all of ancient Egypt
even though it wasn’t specifically declared as the well known term we have
today, slavery.

... Conscripted workers were not owned by individuals, like other slaves, but
rather required to perform labor as a duty to the state."

Yeah awesome. Sign me up. The term is irrelevant. The pyramids are undoubtedly
both great works and massive causes of suffering.

~~~
keiferski
I’m certainly not arguing that it was an enjoyable or desirable profession. I
was simply responding to your “a lot of whippings” comment. It is a common
falsehood on the internet that the pyramids were built with slave labor. They
would be better described as peasants with no political power and few other
options. This would also describe the overwhelming majority of the population
until at least the renaissance.

 _There is a consensus among Egyptologists that the Great Pyramids were not
built by slaves. Rather, it was peasants who built the pyramids during
flooding, when they could not work in their lands._

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periya
Fascinating, is there a site with pictures taken on the inside of the pyramid.

