HIST-3520 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Bent Pyramid, Pyramid Texts, Khafra
Document Summary
Building something monumental: need a community, workers, resources (stone, mud, etc), and technology: mud brick limits you, stone is more important for building large. No large-scale building until well along in the times of egypt. Incentive: (for non-skill workers) food, some kind of ideology (unifies the people, will feel less angry, maybe even enthused about doing it, understand it as national, patriotic) Deemphasized the king as the unifier and more of him as his embodiment/manifestation of a god in the old kingdom, starting with the 3rd dynasty. Divinity is important, but also seems to stress the king as king by birth. Golden horus thing taken at birth, hereditary monarchy more important that you were descended from someone in power. Djoser and imhotep build first stone structures, step pyramid. Tombs of the nobility look like mud brick that people had in village houses.
