Name: How Pharaohs Projected Divine Power | Lost Treasures of Egypt
Uploaded: 2022-03-21T16:51:02.000Z
Duration: 7 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

These iconic monuments are just shouting, screaming at us.

Together these pyramids and the Sphinx and the temples

NARRATOR: The huge sculpture protects the necropolis.

by many to have the face of Khufu's son, Khafre,

Despite many visits here, John has never been up close.

I've waited 50 years to be here, and now I'm here.

JOHN: I know what it's like to work with the living rock

This would have been a monumental challenge.

They only had copper chisels, wooden mallets.

And yet the workmen, the craftsmen, the masons,

they were all willing participants, loyal to pharaoh.

NARRATOR: It would have taken thousands of people decades

They didn't draw their power over the people from force.

John believes what stood these kings apart was

The sheer volume of stone has gone into building this,

and each individual block represents the loyalty

So why was nothing built on this scale again?

At the height of Khufu's reign, reliable seasonal rains

fed the crops that ensured Egypt's prosperity.

flooded and inundated the farmland, so farmers

The farmers were free to help build the King's enormous tomb.

They believed he kept the gods content and the country fed.

But soon after Khufu completed his pyramid,

As crop yields crashed, so did the taxes coming

into the state's treasuries, and despite the free labor

the Giza monuments almost bankrupted Egypt.

The King's tombs that followed got smaller

while Khufu's Great Pyramid remained, dominating

NARRATOR: It was a power his struggling successors

how the kings of the pyramid age held onto power as their wealth

He has spent his entire career trying to understand a very

his imagination in his very first student course

was once a sun temple dedicated to the most powerful

MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: Each king wanted a pyramid

was not enough for the five dynastic kings.

The king built this place to turn himself into a god.

NARRATOR: The Pharaoh Nyuserre didn't just

to be worshipped as a god while he was still alive.

Rising from the desert was an enormous obelisk,

It was not a traditional slender stone needle,

a courtyard in which people could come to worship the sun.

The temple aligned perfectly on an east west

This alignment is identical to that of the pyramids.

Records suggest that six of the pharaohs who followed Khufu

decided to build a sun temple as well as their pyramid

to underline their divine status to the people of Egypt.

But almost all of these temples are lost.

MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: We know that there were

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How Pharaohs Projected Divine Power | Lost Treasures of Egypt

crucial

absolutely

dedicated

enormous