Ancient Egypt


Book Description

"Describes ancient Egypt, including its government structure, major achievements, struggles, and rise to power, as well as its lasting influences on the world"--Provided by publisher.




How the Great Pyramid Was Built


Book Description

Going beyond even the expertise of archaeologists and historians, world-class engineer Craig B. Smith explores the planning and engineering behind the incredible Great Pyramid of Giza. How would the ancient Egyptians have developed their building plans, devised work schedules, managed laborers, solved specific design and engineering problems, or even improvised on the job? The answers are here, along with dazzling, one-of-a-kind color photographs and beautiful hand-drawn illustrations of tools, materials, and building techniques the ancient masters used. In his foreword to the book, Egypt's Undersecretary of State for the Giza Monuments Zahi Hawass explains the importance of understanding the Great Pyramid as a straightforward construction project.




Pyramids of the Giza Plateau


Book Description

The most remarkable piece of ground in the World as Flinders Petrie described the Giza Plateau. Here the Pyramid Complexes of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure have stood for 4,600 years. The Giza pyramids have been scientifically studied for the last 300 years; now for the first time all three are brought together in one book. Virtually all contemporary "pyramid" books address only Khufu's Great Pyramid. This book provides a complete detailed look at all three Giza pyramids and their complexes: the Sphinx, subsidiary pyramids, temples, boat pits, and enclosures. The descriptions are supplemented by almost 300 photos and drawings to provide the reader a detail look which can only be surpassed by being there in person with a very knowledgeable guide. But it is not just descriptions as the complexes are today, but how the early explorers entered the pyramids and what they found. In addition Charles Rigano provides new ideas on: * How Khufu was interred in his Great Pyramid. * How the first robbers gained entry and robbed Khufu's pyramid. * How Caliph Al Mamun in 820AD really penetrated the Great Pyramid. * Why Heterpheres "tomb" is at Giza. * Why there is a field of stone bases near Khafre's Pyramid. * The initial smaller plan for Khafre's Pyramid. * Conclusive evidence that ties the Sphinx to Khafre. * How Menkaure's Burial Chamber and Inclined Passage were built. In this book Charles Rigano combines both his on-site examinations and study of more than 200 references from the early explorers to the recent Egyptologists to form a complete picture of the Pyramid Complexes. This material is available nowhere else in a single volume.




Secrets of the Great Pyramid


Book Description




Pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty


Book Description

The Fourth Dynasty (2613-2498 B.C.) was Egypt's golden age of pyramid building, when great kings like Snefru, Cheops, and Chephren built their monuments for eternity on a scale unparalleled at any time previously or subsequently in Egyptian history. This book, fully illustrated with color photographs, diagrams, and computer reconstructions, tells the history of these remarkable monuments and how they were built.




The Legends of the Pyramids


Book Description

Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre–Ice Age civilization? Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids, Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic community, these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West. Colavito's The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop culture's view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the hidden history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology.




Pyramid Quest


Book Description

The Egyptologist acclaimed for re-dating the Great Sphinx at Giza sets his sights on one of the true mysteries of antiquity: the Great Pyramid of Giza. What is the Great Pyramid of Giza? Ask that basic question of a traditional Egyptologist, and you get the basic, traditional answer: a fancy tombstone for a self-important pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. This, Egyptologists argue, is the sole finding based on the data, and the only deduction supported by science. By implication, anyone who dissents from this point of view is unscientific and woolly-minded-a believer in magic and ghosts. Indeed, some of the unconventional ideas about the Great Pyramid do have a spectacularly fabulous ring to them. Yet from beneath the obvious terms of this controversy, a deeper, more significant question arises: how is it that the Great Pyramid exercises such a gripping hold on the human psyche- adding cryptic grace to the back of the one-dollar bill and framing myriad claims of New Age "pyramid power"? In Pyramid Quest, Robert M. Schoch and Robert Aquinas McNally use the rigorous intellectual analysis of scientific inquiry to investigate what we know about the Great Pyramid, and develop a stunning hypothesis: This ancient monument is the strongest proof yet that civilization began thousands of years earlier than is generally thought, extending far back into a little-known time. In tracing that story, we come to understand not only the Great Pyramid but also our own origins as civilized beings.




Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings


Book Description

Hapgood utilizes ancient maps as concrete evidence of an advanced worldwide civilization existing many thousands of years before ancient Egypt. Hapgood concluded that these ancient mapmakers were in some ways much more advanced in mapmaking than any people prior to the 18th century. Hapgood believes that they mapped all the continents. This would mean that the Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus. Antarctica would have been mapped when its coasts were free of ice. Hapgood supposes that there is evidence that these people must have lived when the Ice Age had not yet ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected with Siberia by the Pleistocene, Ice Age 'land bridge'.




A History of Ancient Egypt


Book Description

The ancient world comes to life in the first volume in a two book series on the history of Egypt, spanning the first farmers to the construction of the pyramids. Famed archaeologist John Romer draws on a lifetime of research to tell one history's greatest stories; how, over more than a thousand years, a society of farmers created a rich, vivid world where one of the most astounding of all human-made landmarks, the Great Pyramid, was built. Immersing the reader in the Egypt of the past, Romer examines and challenges the long-held theories about what archaeological finds mean and what stories they tell about how the Egyptians lived. More than just an account of one of the most fascinating periods of history, this engrossing book asks readers to take a step back and question what they've learned about Egypt in the past. Fans of Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra and history buffs will be captivated by this re-telling of Egyptian history, written by one of the top Egyptologists in the world.




The Story of Buildings


Book Description

Aspiring architects will be in their element! Explore this illustrated narrative history of buildings for young readers, an amazing construction in itself. We spend most of our lives in buildings. We make our homes in them. We go to school in them. We work in them. But why and how did people start making buildings? How did they learn to make them stronger, bigger, and more comfortable? Why did they start to decorate them in different ways? From the pyramid erected so that an Egyptian pharaoh would last forever to the dramatic, machine-like Pompidou Center designed by two young architects, Patrick Dillon’s stories of remarkable buildings — and the remarkable people who made them — celebrates the ingenuity of human creation. Stephen Biesty’s extraordinarily detailed illustrations take us inside famous buildings throughout history and demonstrate just how these marvelous structures fit together.