Roxana Cooper Wrote:
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> Son Khufu then proceeded to take Dad's design to
> unprecedented heights, (pun
> intended) at considerable cost to Egypt's GDP.

This brings to mind Mendelssohn's Riddle of the Pyramids and the idea that the building of the 4th Dyn. pyramids was a massive national job creation scheme more than anything else.
I vaguely recall this being a popular theory in the Seventies but it has, so I believe, fallen somewhat by the wayside in recent years.


> Sons Djedefre and Khafre tried to
> match his monument - though the former's barely
> got above the blue-print stage.

To my current way of thinking Djedefre's pyramid is a case in point.
If, as I have read, Djedefre's pyramid was never completed, what happened to Djedefre's spirit?
Was it/where they condemned to wander the Abu Roash site for all eternity?
Or did it/they reach its/their destined place in the heavens or wherever because the pyramid did not need to be actually completed to fufill its task?
I see that Graham mentions in a later post the certainty that Sekhemkhet's and Khaba's pyramids were never completed; so I apply the same question to them.

I can see Khafre politically and cleverly opting for a pyramid physically smaller than his father's but locating it in such a position as to make it appear bigger.


> But grandson Menkaure was a bit more modest in his expectations a trend that
> was followed by later dynasties up to the Eighteenth.

I'm inclined to see Menkaure's change of direction as evidence that the nation could no longer sustain such a massive building programme and so switched the emphasis from the pyramid to the comparatively smaller and therefore easier to build mortuary (?) temples.
The unfinished or roughly finished state of Menkaure's pyramid suggests to me once again that the pyramid was not an essential part of the rituals involved in the transporting of the king's/pharaoh's spirit/soul from one realm to another - and, arguably, never had been.
Suggesting (at least to me) that the pyramid itself was predominantly a monument to the departed king/pharaoh.

MJ