BUILDERS OF WONDER

The sweetest angel who ever walked the earth is not worth much in the memory of posterity, unless he had left behind him a permanent token of his greatness, aere perennius, to be remembered and admired by. An abject scoundrel, on the other hand, who may have been the bane of his contemporaries yet who survives in his great work for eternity, will be judged not by his personal failings, but by his transpersonal contribution to human civilization, which alone can mark any person as a bona fide genius.

Of the three builders of wonder, which are the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, the Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty Cheops (Khufu), Chephren (Khafre) and Menkaure (Mykerinos) are appropriately credited. The historically greatest two were apparently despicable despots who mercilessly exploited their people for the personal gratification of their vanity. In the sober words of Herodotus, “Cheops became king over them, and he brought them every kind of evil: he shut up all the temples and ordered all the Egyptians to work for him. (It would take them ten long years just to amass the stones and other building material at the selected site of the future Pyramid.) The making of the Pyramid itself took twenty years. Cheops, moreover, came to such wickedness that being in want of money, he caused his own daughter to sit before a house [as a prostitute]. (The woman obeyed her father with a vengeance, not only fulfilling Cheops’s financial requirements by fleecing her clients, but then managing to scrape together a sum of money large enough to build her own mini-Pyramid. This unpleasant story may well be a nefarious fable, but it still makes the larger point with a brilliantly wicked elegance.)

“Cheops reigned fifty years, and after he was dead his brother Chephren succeeded him. This king behaved like his brother, in all the rest, and also he made a Pyramid. He reigned for fifty-six years. (Chephren’s own Pyramid, although the second largest in Giza, is inferior to his brother’s colossal masterpiece. Even though he reigned longer than Cheops, the resources of his nation must already have been somewhat depleted, for him to be able either to raise or at least to match his brother’s tomb. But he did not have to! Aside from the fact that the Pyramid complex at Giza is rendered even more stunning by their assymetricity, Chephren had achieved a clear personal uniqueness in the catalogue of the world’s cultural treasures by the creation of the Great Sphinx of Giza, which is chronologically attributed to his reign.) Here then they reckon one hundred and six years, during which there was nothing but evil for the Egyptians, and the temples were kept closed during that time.”

It is fairly obvious that the superhuman effort required by their construction taxed every available national resource in blood and treasure, leaving nothing for the priests and their temples, which is why the latter had to be closed. It is amazing however how inferior was the power of the priests, compared to the royal power, so that no revolt during those hundred-plus years was either possible, or else, capable of success.

The third among the Builders of Wonder (this title phrase of the entry is of my invention) was Mykerinos, the son of Cheops, and now the incredible irony begins, again courtesy of Herodotus: “After him, they said, Mykerinos (Menkaure) became king over Egypt, who was the son of Cheops; and to him his father’s deeds were displeasing. And he opened the temples and gave liberty to the people to return to their own business and to their sacrifices. He also decided their causes more justly than the other kings. In regard to this, then, they commend this king beyond the other kings in Egypt before him; for, he not only gave good decisions, but also, when a man complained of the decision, he gave him recompense from his own goods (…All ways are my ways, says the Queen in Alice. On the one hand, being the third extravagant builder, even on a much smaller scale, “his own goods” simply had to be public goods, on the other hand, the story sounds too good to be true, and may have been based on a single episode, subjected to some rigorous spin) and thus satisfied him. (Here now comes the incredible irony I mentioned before!) But, while Mykerinos was acting mercifully to his subjects, and practicing this good conduct, calamities befell him. His daughter died, the only child he had in his house. Grieved beyond measure he made a cow of wood covered with gold and in it he buried his daughter. (Herodotus does not stop here, however:) Some, however, tell the following tale. Mykerinos was enamored of his own daughter, and raped her; the girl hanged herself, and he buried her in this cow.”

So how does this make him better than his two predecessors? Ergo, let us stay with what we know as a fact, which is the creation by these three of the world’s perennial the once and current wonder, and let us admire this great wonder for its own sake, as I admired it on my 1970 trip to Egypt, which would remain one of the defining moments of my life. As for the fables of history, let them be there as well, both highly entertaining and edifying, but no more personal now, many years after the fact, than the magnificent royal mummies of Egypt, whom we can admire as mummies, that is as relics of our ancient past, rather than quod mortalis fint (that is, whosoever and whatsoever they happened to be once very long ago in their far-removed mortality).