The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

fed, not the slaves of popular myth;

Why would ten thousand men toil for twenty years to build an artificial mountain of stone?

phenomena as parts of a deliberate and coordinated government policy designed to snuff out local autonomy and replace it with a new, absolute dependency on central authority.

neb Maat. The common translation, ‘lord of truth’, scarcely does it justice

Egyptians’ penchant for monumentality

breathtaking precision, its orientation to true north diverging by only one-twentieth of one degree.

It is tempting to see these phenomena as parts of a deliberate and coordinated government policy designed to snuff out local autonomy and replace it with a new, absolute dependency on central authority.

Yet despite its massive size, it is engineered and aligned with breathtaking precision, its orientation to true north diverging by only one-twentieth of one degree.

For forty-four centuries, until the completion of the Eiffel Tower in AD 1889, it was the tallest building in the world.

Step forward Khasekhem.