Mark Matcho

As with all earthly things, from the sparrow's wing to the Barry Manilow songbook, the pyramids took shape slowly. According to Lanny Bell, a visiting scholar of Egyptology at Brown University, first came the mastaba, a flat-roofed tomb with sloping sides. "Then," says Bell, "this brilliant architect, Imhotep, said, 'Listen, your majesty, I can do something more spectacular and get you closer to heaven,' which turned out to be the step pyramid. They're still doing the mastabas, but piling them up.

"The original concept was that the dead went up to join the stars. The step shape can be construed as a ladder — in the pyramid texts, the way to heaven is described in terms of a ladder. It was less than 100 years from the time they started building step pyramids until they had the true pyramid. When the idea of the sun as the most powerful force in the universe came into being, they said, 'We want something that looks more like the rays of the sun coming down to the four corners of the earth.' "

John Darnell, professor of Egyptology at Yale University, concurs: "The true, smooth-sided pyramid is an honest-to-God solar monument. What they seemed to do is convert — architecturally — the step pyramid into a true pyramid and transform this stepped object into an image of the sun.

"If the Egyptians had wanted to build giant cubes or rectangles, they would have done it. It really is symbolism — solar symbolism — that makes them love that shape."

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