Were the Pyramids used to store grain?
November 5, 2015 6:01 AM Subscribe
Ben Carson stated his belief that the Pyramids of Giza were originally used to store grain, rather than royal corpses. I've never heard this hypothesis. Is there any archeological evidence to support this?
I'm no archeologist but those things aren't hollow, you know. It seems to me, as someone who might be slightly more informed than Carson (I've been to Giza where after hearing the warnings by our tour guide I declined to go inside the pyramids because I am just claustrophobic enough to have completely lost it in there) that grain elevators need not be and accordingly were not quite so fucking elaborate and labor intensive.
posted by janey47 at 6:07 AM on November 5, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by janey47 at 6:07 AM on November 5, 2015 [13 favorites]
Nope. This is not a hypothesis. This is Ben Carson being nonsensical. There is absolutely NO evidence of his assertion.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:08 AM on November 5, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by ChuraChura at 6:08 AM on November 5, 2015 [6 favorites]
Yeah, they're not hollow. To believe this, Carson has somehow managed to miss all of the cutaway diagrams of the internal structure and layout of pyramids, which means he's literally never read anything about pyramids.
posted by zjacreman at 6:12 AM on November 5, 2015 [34 favorites]
posted by zjacreman at 6:12 AM on November 5, 2015 [34 favorites]
janey47: "1I'm no archeologist but those things aren't hollow, you know. It seems to me, as someone who might be slightly more informed than Carson (I've been to Giza where after hearing the warnings by our tour guide I declined to go inside the pyramids because I am just claustrophobic enough to have completely lost it in there) that grain elevators need not be and accordingly were not quite so fucking elaborate and labor intensive."
I actually did lose it inside one of those things. Yeah, definitely not hollow.
posted by sundaydriver at 6:14 AM on November 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
I actually did lose it inside one of those things. Yeah, definitely not hollow.
posted by sundaydriver at 6:14 AM on November 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
Best answer: Carson's claim is a perfect example of the "grand" American tradition of anti-intellectualism: attacking knowledge gleaned from expert sources with inane theories that have no basis in fact, only "faith." For more on the anti-intellectualism movement, read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of The Free" by Charlie Pierce. The first chapter was originally published as an essay in Esquire in 2005 and in my not-so-humble-opinion, should be required reading for anyone who votes in this country.
Some basic facts;
* The Giza Pyramid is a tomb and shrine to the Pharoah Khufu, who reigned in Egypt from 2589 BCE to 2566 BCE.
* It is the sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
* Khufu was the second Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, which lasted from 2613 to 2494 BCE.
* The Greeks knew him as Cheops.
* The Pyramid at Giza was not the first pyramid used as a tomb for an Egyptian Pharoah or their family members: The first Pharoah of the fourth dynasty was Pharoah Sneferu, Khufu's father, and he was the first to be buried in a pyramid.
* Prior to Sneferu’s reign and death, the pharaohs were buried in rectangular burial structures called mastabas.
* Sneferu had three pyramids constructed in Dahshur, which allowed his builders to perfect the concept before building at Giza.
Further reading:
* Smithsonian: Inside the Great Pyramid
* The Ancient Standard: Just Who Actually WAS Entombed in the Great Pyramid?
posted by zarq at 6:28 AM on November 5, 2015 [41 favorites]
Some basic facts;
* The Giza Pyramid is a tomb and shrine to the Pharoah Khufu, who reigned in Egypt from 2589 BCE to 2566 BCE.
* It is the sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
* Khufu was the second Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, which lasted from 2613 to 2494 BCE.
* The Greeks knew him as Cheops.
* The Pyramid at Giza was not the first pyramid used as a tomb for an Egyptian Pharoah or their family members: The first Pharoah of the fourth dynasty was Pharoah Sneferu, Khufu's father, and he was the first to be buried in a pyramid.
* Prior to Sneferu’s reign and death, the pharaohs were buried in rectangular burial structures called mastabas.
* Sneferu had three pyramids constructed in Dahshur, which allowed his builders to perfect the concept before building at Giza.
Further reading:
* Smithsonian: Inside the Great Pyramid
* The Ancient Standard: Just Who Actually WAS Entombed in the Great Pyramid?
posted by zarq at 6:28 AM on November 5, 2015 [41 favorites]
I'm not an archeologist, but I've been inside the pyramid you can go inside of. The passages are very narrow and feature a lot of stairs. The chambers are tiny relative to the size of the entire pyramid. Of all the damn things you can imagine a pyramid was built for, grain storage seems the least damn likely. What an idiot.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:34 AM on November 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:34 AM on November 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
To answer the question: no, there is no evidence to support Carson's theory. It is demonstrably false.
To explain why he might hold his position: I suspect there are more biblical literalists among the GOP primary voter base than people with much knowledge of Egypt. This isn't Carson being an idiot, this is him signaling affiliation with an in-group. It belongs in the same category as rejecting evolution in favor of seven day creationism.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:46 AM on November 5, 2015 [13 favorites]
To explain why he might hold his position: I suspect there are more biblical literalists among the GOP primary voter base than people with much knowledge of Egypt. This isn't Carson being an idiot, this is him signaling affiliation with an in-group. It belongs in the same category as rejecting evolution in favor of seven day creationism.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:46 AM on November 5, 2015 [13 favorites]
Is there any archaeological evidence to support this?
No. It is a wacky hypothesis. Here's what he said.
If you did want to store lots of grain in Egypt in those days, you would have had to build big hollow warehouses of stone or wood, nothing like the pyramids, and they would have had to be a lot bigger or more numerous than the pyramids to feed the entire world, assuming you could get that much grain and then deliver it as needed to everyone in the world for seven years. It's the sort of scheme only Santa could pull off. Santa or God.
posted by pracowity at 6:51 AM on November 5, 2015 [18 favorites]
No. It is a wacky hypothesis. Here's what he said.
“I think of some of the things that Joseph did as the prime minister of Egypt. Here was a man who was basically able to save the entire world with his big thinking: building grain reserves that would last for seven years of famine. Can you imagine having the technology, the wisdom, the knowledge to be able to do that? We can’t do that now. He was able to do that back then.”That's the sort of hypothesis you would have to be entirely unknowledgeable about the pyramids to believe. But facts don't matter when you are trying to win over a certain type of voter, who in this case is the Bible literalist. And facts don't matter when you are one of those literalists and you want to believe the guy on stage offering you yet more obvious proof of how great your god is and how perfect your god's book is.
Here, Carson appears to be referring to a passage in Genesis where “Joseph stored up grain in great abundance like the sand of the sea, until he stopped measuring it, for it was beyond measure.” According to the Bible, Joseph then fed Egypt and the rest of the world during the seven-year famine that followed.
“Now, my own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson continued. “Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big — when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time — to store that much grain.”
If you did want to store lots of grain in Egypt in those days, you would have had to build big hollow warehouses of stone or wood, nothing like the pyramids, and they would have had to be a lot bigger or more numerous than the pyramids to feed the entire world, assuming you could get that much grain and then deliver it as needed to everyone in the world for seven years. It's the sort of scheme only Santa could pull off. Santa or God.
posted by pracowity at 6:51 AM on November 5, 2015 [18 favorites]
Far less than 1% of the interior of a pyramid is open space where you can store anything, period. The fact that anybody can assert this proves that they're just batshit stupid.
Granaries need to store lots of grain. They have to be big and *empty* to so. The pyramids are the former, but by far aren't the latter.
In fact, we've found many Ancient Egyptian granaries, because they needed a lot of them. Agriculture at the time was completely beholden to the annual Nile flood to both refertilizes the land and provide water for later irrigation. If there was no flood, the crops failed before they even started.
Now, the flood did fail about once every seven years, and sometimes more often. If it failed four years in a row, Egypt was in a bad place. So, they stored quite a bit of grain just in case.
Also: Stone is heavy and expensive. Pretty much everything not related to Gods or Funerals was made of mud brick, reinforced with straw, which lasted a pretty long time in the arid climate, was damn near free in materials, cheap to make, and easy to transport -- unlike giant stone blocks.
Carson's theory is wrong on so many levels that basically it proves he cannot science.
posted by eriko at 6:54 AM on November 5, 2015 [14 favorites]
Granaries need to store lots of grain. They have to be big and *empty* to so. The pyramids are the former, but by far aren't the latter.
In fact, we've found many Ancient Egyptian granaries, because they needed a lot of them. Agriculture at the time was completely beholden to the annual Nile flood to both refertilizes the land and provide water for later irrigation. If there was no flood, the crops failed before they even started.
Now, the flood did fail about once every seven years, and sometimes more often. If it failed four years in a row, Egypt was in a bad place. So, they stored quite a bit of grain just in case.
Also: Stone is heavy and expensive. Pretty much everything not related to Gods or Funerals was made of mud brick, reinforced with straw, which lasted a pretty long time in the arid climate, was damn near free in materials, cheap to make, and easy to transport -- unlike giant stone blocks.
Carson's theory is wrong on so many levels that basically it proves he cannot science.
posted by eriko at 6:54 AM on November 5, 2015 [14 favorites]
Mod note: The questions concerns archeological evidence specifically -- I'm going to be a stickler for protocol here and insist we limit our answers to that, as opposed to discussing possible motivations for Carson's beliefs about Ancient Egypt.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:55 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 6:55 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Definitely ahistorical and at odds with the evidence I'm familiar with (both archeological and agricultural - I live near a bunch of actual grain storage facilities.)
It's worth noting that I've never heard this idea in church, either. The claim is bizarre.
posted by SMPA at 6:56 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's worth noting that I've never heard this idea in church, either. The claim is bizarre.
posted by SMPA at 6:56 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
This belief was apparently quite mainstream about 700 years ago: "Medieval Europeans believed the pyramids were granaries described in the Old Testament. ... The description of the pyramids as 'Joseph's Granaries' stretches as far back as the sixth century, when they were identified as such by Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks. The theory was further popularized by works such as The Book of John Mandeville, a hugely popular 14th century travelogue..."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:27 AM on November 5, 2015 [16 favorites]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:27 AM on November 5, 2015 [16 favorites]
You also need to deny the reality of the mummified remains and burial chambers inside the things, plus the fact that the Egyptians said they were tombs.
Ancient Egypt was littered with burial pyramids, of all sizes. What's unusual about the Giza pyramids is their size, not their existence.
posted by justcorbly at 7:38 AM on November 5, 2015 [6 favorites]
Ancient Egypt was littered with burial pyramids, of all sizes. What's unusual about the Giza pyramids is their size, not their existence.
posted by justcorbly at 7:38 AM on November 5, 2015 [6 favorites]
You also need to deny the reality of the mummified remains and burial chambers inside the things,
Well...most of them in fact were emptied long before archeology came around. A few had later intrusive burials. But yeah, the burial chambers are pretty obvious. If the Great Pyramid was a granary, it was a really lousy one with only that one "bin" to store grain.
The problem with the pyramids as tombs is they say "I was really rich and really important and I probably have a whole lot of expensive stuff in here with me" really loudly.
So, as tombs, they didn't do so well. The buried tombs in King's Valley might have fared better except it seem that the 21st dynasty kings needed money and stripped the tombs, moving many of the buried to one of two tombs, KV35 or TT320. When the people who are charged with protecting your tomb are the ones desecrating it, you're pretty much screwed.
posted by eriko at 7:49 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Well...most of them in fact were emptied long before archeology came around. A few had later intrusive burials. But yeah, the burial chambers are pretty obvious. If the Great Pyramid was a granary, it was a really lousy one with only that one "bin" to store grain.
The problem with the pyramids as tombs is they say "I was really rich and really important and I probably have a whole lot of expensive stuff in here with me" really loudly.
So, as tombs, they didn't do so well. The buried tombs in King's Valley might have fared better except it seem that the 21st dynasty kings needed money and stripped the tombs, moving many of the buried to one of two tombs, KV35 or TT320. When the people who are charged with protecting your tomb are the ones desecrating it, you're pretty much screwed.
posted by eriko at 7:49 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
[The questions concerns archeological evidence specifically -- I'm going to be a stickler for protocol here and insist we limit our answers to that, as opposed to discussing possible motivations for Carson's beliefs about Ancient Egypt.]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:55 AM on November 5 [+] [!]
Eponysterical!
Anyway, I have -- like a few other mefites -- been inside an Egyptian pyramid. It is hard to think of anything they are less suited to, except perhaps as racquetball facilities. This is not well suited to storing anything, except perhaps the corpse of an exalted ruler and his bling. The only space that is anything other than claustrophobic is the grand gallery, which is about 3000 m^3. I don't know much about grain silos, but Wikipedia suggests:
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:57 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:55 AM on November 5 [+] [!]
Eponysterical!
Anyway, I have -- like a few other mefites -- been inside an Egyptian pyramid. It is hard to think of anything they are less suited to, except perhaps as racquetball facilities. This is not well suited to storing anything, except perhaps the corpse of an exalted ruler and his bling. The only space that is anything other than claustrophobic is the grand gallery, which is about 3000 m^3. I don't know much about grain silos, but Wikipedia suggests:
Storage silos are cylindrical structures, typically 10 to 90 ft (4 to 30 m) in diameter and 30 to 275 ft (10 to 84 m) in height with the slipform and Jumpform concrete silos being the larger diameter and taller silos.The bottom end of that range (4 m diameter, 10 m high) has about 5% of the volume of the grand gallery while the largest (30 m diameter, 84 m high) has about twenty times the volume, so you may draw your own conclusions.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:57 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
Wretch729 has the right idea. When it comes to politicians of certain stripes, I believe in Hanlon's Strap: never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by malice.
To me it sounds like a pretty clear dog whistle to evangelicals, like so many recent Republicans are using when they talk about 'states rights' or Dred Scott or whatever.
To wit, he's saying something that just sounds strange to most of us, but it resonates with a certain streak of American voters, the evangelical Christian streak, who hear it and nod sagely: Ah, he's one of us.
posted by rokusan at 8:18 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
To me it sounds like a pretty clear dog whistle to evangelicals, like so many recent Republicans are using when they talk about 'states rights' or Dred Scott or whatever.
To wit, he's saying something that just sounds strange to most of us, but it resonates with a certain streak of American voters, the evangelical Christian streak, who hear it and nod sagely: Ah, he's one of us.
posted by rokusan at 8:18 AM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't think there's evidence of them being anything other than funerary spaces.
And on the "pandering or dog whistling to Evangelicals" accusation, that accusation's just as dumb as Carson's theory: who else, other than Carson, today, believes this? No one. The only sense in which it might be pandering to anyone is to people who like the Bible as a general matter because he's referencing a biblical story in a positive way.
posted by resurrexit at 9:23 AM on November 5, 2015
And on the "pandering or dog whistling to Evangelicals" accusation, that accusation's just as dumb as Carson's theory: who else, other than Carson, today, believes this? No one. The only sense in which it might be pandering to anyone is to people who like the Bible as a general matter because he's referencing a biblical story in a positive way.
posted by resurrexit at 9:23 AM on November 5, 2015
And on the "pandering or dog whistling to Evangelicals" accusation, that accusation's just as dumb as Carson's theory: who else, other than Carson, today, believes this? No one.
I know a lot of Evangelicals*, and I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you there. I know that it is a metafilter stance that "no religious person could possibly really think this, it is just too stupid, they must be saying these things for some other more subversive reason", but no. A huge number of them just believe bizarre things. For no other reason than that they believe them.
What Carson is doing here is very familiar to me-- it is a lazy but extremely popular theological move.
step one: here is a story in the Bible
step two: here is a thing that exists in the world, and that people with advanced degrees have studied at length
step three: what if smart people are dumb? And the thing that exists is ACTUALLY Joseph's coat/Jesus' hacksaw/Agrippa's underwear???? WHAT THEN STUPID SMART PEOPLE????
step four: share this amazing discovery via misspelled memes/email forwards
To be fair, many non-religious people similarly hold fast to completely fictional urban legends, historical "facts", and "you only use 10% of your brain" pseudo-science, so I don't think this is remotely unique to evangelicals. But most of the world is full of people who find critical thinking to be exhausting and boring. And they believe some pretty weird stuff, without any irony or attempts to send secret signals.
(*being one myself, technically)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:40 AM on November 5, 2015 [12 favorites]
I know a lot of Evangelicals*, and I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you there. I know that it is a metafilter stance that "no religious person could possibly really think this, it is just too stupid, they must be saying these things for some other more subversive reason", but no. A huge number of them just believe bizarre things. For no other reason than that they believe them.
What Carson is doing here is very familiar to me-- it is a lazy but extremely popular theological move.
step one: here is a story in the Bible
step two: here is a thing that exists in the world, and that people with advanced degrees have studied at length
step three: what if smart people are dumb? And the thing that exists is ACTUALLY Joseph's coat/Jesus' hacksaw/Agrippa's underwear???? WHAT THEN STUPID SMART PEOPLE????
step four: share this amazing discovery via misspelled memes/email forwards
To be fair, many non-religious people similarly hold fast to completely fictional urban legends, historical "facts", and "you only use 10% of your brain" pseudo-science, so I don't think this is remotely unique to evangelicals. But most of the world is full of people who find critical thinking to be exhausting and boring. And they believe some pretty weird stuff, without any irony or attempts to send secret signals.
(*being one myself, technically)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:40 AM on November 5, 2015 [12 favorites]
The strange thing is even linking the building of the pyramids to Joseph. The timing is all wrong. There is very little hard evidence that Joseph was an actual historical person, but what evidence exists suggests that he would have lived about 1500 to 2000 BC, which is 500 to 1000 years after the pyramids were already built.
posted by JackFlash at 10:15 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by JackFlash at 10:15 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
The strange thing is even linking the building of the pyramids to Joseph. The timing is all wrong.
If you're thinking in exacting historical terms, yes. But in cartoonish mythological terms suitable for a credulous audience, it was all just a long time ago and the only thing we regular folk know about Egypt is that they had sand, pyramids, mummies, pharaohs, a funny pictorial writing system, a big river, and crocodiles, and they all walked around with a peculiar angular gait. They had to put that grain somewhere and the only known somewhere in Egypt was the pyramids. You couldn't hide it in the crocodiles or the mummies.
posted by pracowity at 12:34 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
If you're thinking in exacting historical terms, yes. But in cartoonish mythological terms suitable for a credulous audience, it was all just a long time ago and the only thing we regular folk know about Egypt is that they had sand, pyramids, mummies, pharaohs, a funny pictorial writing system, a big river, and crocodiles, and they all walked around with a peculiar angular gait. They had to put that grain somewhere and the only known somewhere in Egypt was the pyramids. You couldn't hide it in the crocodiles or the mummies.
posted by pracowity at 12:34 PM on November 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
No. This is the case of someone who somehow managed to get through decades of schooling without seeing a single page of a third grade Social Studies textbook.
In other words, you know when people argue about whether the Liberal Arts have any place in modern education what with how sciencey and futuristic our world is now? Yes. Yes they do.
posted by Sara C. at 1:44 PM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
In other words, you know when people argue about whether the Liberal Arts have any place in modern education what with how sciencey and futuristic our world is now? Yes. Yes they do.
posted by Sara C. at 1:44 PM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
Archaeologists To Ben Carson: Ancient Egyptians Wrote Down Why The Pyramids Were Built. Not just a great headline, also a strong indictment of the willful ignorance. "It matters that he brazenly denies the Egyptian people their rightful history because this marginalizes an entire culture and makes the U.S. look like an ignorant bully."
posted by Nelson at 1:58 PM on November 5, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 1:58 PM on November 5, 2015 [4 favorites]
When I did my own google searching to try to figure out where this idea came from, I found this page:
posted by willnot at 3:39 PM on November 5, 2015
The first pyramid to be built was the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser (Netjerikhet) which is part of a complex in Saqqara Egypt that appears to be a grain storage and distribution center. The Step Pyramid itself was built on top of a shaft that was originally used as a grain silo but then converted into a tomb for the Pharaoh.Did the writer on the page make that up, or was one of the first pyramids really built on top of a grain storage center?
posted by willnot at 3:39 PM on November 5, 2015
The Egyptians did actually have grain silos, just not inside the pyramids.
posted by irisclara at 6:04 PM on November 5, 2015
posted by irisclara at 6:04 PM on November 5, 2015
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