 Today, we're going to look at Egyptian architecture. And we're going to look at it in a kind of generalized way. That is to say, part of it will be historical. Part of it will be geographical. And part of it will have to do with basic organizational principles, basic formal ideas, basic ideas about the landscape, about technology, and building that give character to Egyptian architecture. But the first thing I'd like to do is call your attention to this quote by Ernst Gombrich, who is a great 20th century art historian. In looking at Egyptian art, he notices this. It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings, and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law, which the creation of all people seem to obey, a style. Now, Gombrich is talking about a period of over 3,000 years of an architecture following the same stylistic principles. If you think about the way style moves around nowadays, about how quickly things go into style and out of style, it's amazing. I mean, back in the 1980s, you would look at a building, I don't know, by Michael Graves, with columns shaped like the Disney Dwarfs. And you would say, cutting edge, avant-garde, very serious. If you were to see the same building now, you would think, yikes, what were people thinking? How could they ever do that? And I have to say, even now, when you look at certain Frank Gehry buildings, a little bit after the heyday of the swirly, brilliantly colored metals, you think, boy, this is a real period piece. It keeps going that architecture is eclipsed. Style is consumed, and new styles, new brands, new images are presented and equally quickly consumed and discarded. And when Gombrich was writing this, let's say, mid-20th century, this condition was already going on. Style was already something that was so unstable. And so he looked back at something like Egyptian architecture and thought, why can't we do this now? And one response that people in the 20th century had to this desire for a true style. We could represent the cultural and social aspirations of a people was to search for that style. I don't know if any of you have ever heard the term international style. Does that ring a bell? International style is more or less glass box architecture. You take a rectilinear prism, you clad it in glass. This is the style. This is the international style, a style that transcends place, a style that transcends time, a style expressive of the culture. And of course, by now, it's a period piece. You look at that and you see it with the same kind of historical frame that you would see the Disney Dwarf columns and Michael Graves building or the Swirly Medal in a Frank Gehry building. But in Egypt, for thousands and thousands of years, a style obtained and gave character to all the works of art and architecture. And that's kind of amazing. Just to situate Egypt on the map. Here it is. And here's Ur, where we saw our friend the great Ziggurat. This is the Mediterranean. And Egypt is organized in a linear fashion along the Nile River. This is probably no big surprise to any of you. But it's an unusual shape for a country to have. Because unlike, I don't know, say, Ohio, which extends across plains, prairies, this is a linear civilization that clusters along the fertile edge of the Nile River. And in fact, the farther you move away from the Nile, the more hostile the environment is. You have these extensive deserts where no farming can happen. Two great kingdoms emerged in the prehistory of Egypt. Lower Egypt, the delta of the Nile, where it spills into the Mediterranean and becomes fan-shaped, delta-shaped. And upper Egypt, toward the source of the Nile, up toward Nubia. And so these two civilizations in early history came together. And we'll look at that in a moment. But one interesting thing about this kind of orthogonality, the north-south direction of the Nile, is that it's met by another strong giver of form. And that's the east-west path of the sun. So easy to orient in Egypt. You're either walking along the Nile or you're walking along the path of the sun. And because of that, there's a strong preference for orthogonal form. Do you know the word orthogonal? Because I do. You probably know the word orthodontist. What does the orthodontist do? The orthodontist straightens your teeth, or the orthopedic surgeon straightens something else, something surgically, your bones. So the orthogonal means organized by right angles, organized by 90-degree angles. And if you look at Egyptian art here, and these are ones showing life on the river, you can see that this is not naturalistic representation of life, but a representation strongly conditioned by an orthogonal geometry, by the cardinal axes north-south east-west. Scenes of life on the river, the Nile is incredibly important. In fact, here we see a hieroglyph, an Egyptian hieroglyph, for world. And it's a nice little diagram. It reminds me of the diagrams we were doing last time in class. A circle, and in fact it's a gated circle. If we could see this well, you would see little towers. And east-west, north-south paths subdividing this. So in many ways, that's all you need to understand the organization of form in the Nile. Although it's not quite so clear as all that, because the Nile is not stable. The Nile is subject to seasonal floodings. And when the Nile floods, this marker of territory, this boundary line of property, swells, swallows up the land and disappears. And so because of the instability of the boundaries of the Nile, and because of the desire to tax people for the land that they had, and because of farmers' desire to reclaim their land, even when the boundaries have disappeared, surveying emerged very early on in Egyptian society, and with surveying geometry, kind of profound knowledge of geometry. So here we have Herodotus, historian, who says, this king divided the land so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size, and on each imposing a tax. But everyone who's part of the river tore anything away, he sent overseers to measure out how much of the land had become smaller in order that the owner might pay on what was left. In this way, it appears to me geometry originated, which then passed to Greece. So geometry, the Egyptians have their kind of clearly delimited terrain, and they have a way to measure it and quantify it, and an increasing sophistication in mathematics and technology. In fact, the word geometry itself, if you break it into its constituent parts, geo and metric is earth measure. So geometry in its origins is the science of measuring the earth. So this precision, this mathematical precision, this desire for the orthogonal and the geometrically clear begins to give form to everything they do. This is a line drawing that represents a relief sculpture inside a tomb, and what the sculptor shows you are workers sculpting giant statues. And it's interesting to look at the scaffolding that they have, because the scaffolding seems to act like a kind of grid that helps the workers over here, and the workers over here, and the workers in upper Egypt, and the workers in lower Egypt collaborate on projects, and the pieces come together, and they all fit. It's kind of unbelievable. And they didn't have sophisticated tools, of course. These are people really with very, very primitive technology available to them. But one trick they used for their geometry and their measuring of the earth was the simple rope, the knotted rope. And again, these are redrawings from things inside of tombs. So we have this as kind of archaeological evidence that really these techniques were adopted. If you take a rope and you knot it into 12 sections, you can then stretch it out and make yourself a triangle, 3, 4, 5. And that's great, because what's so great about the 3, 4, 5 triangle is that you're using simple whole numbers. But with these simple whole numbers, you get a right angle. And I'm proving it to you using mathematics here. This is the Pythagorean triangle, and we have the square of the hypotenuse being equal to the square of the other two sides. So this is a simple technique. And it's a simple technique that you can use at enormous scale for the kind of monumental projects people were using. But in an even more refined way, there was a sense of measure pervading everything that was done. There was a canon. And the word canon here means a rule or a law. And in the case of the Egyptian canon, it means a rule or a law of proportions. Again, this is something some German art historian observed and wrote about that he noticed that there were a number of relief carvings where you could still see this kind of grid work underneath the figure. And it was conserved over thousands and thousands of years so that you would begin to get this kind of proportional figure again and again and again. And that made it possible for these great projects to take place under the control of many overseers and many workers and for everything to fit together. There are other things about Egyptian form that are pretty interesting. And I think if we look at this little statue from 1480 BC, we can see that it really looks quite different from everybody in this room. None of you are little cubic people, for example. None of you have little baby heads sticking up on your cube because none of you are cubic. So something different is going on here than the representation or portraiture of human form. Something is happening here that's more driven by ritual than the desire to commemorate the fleeting presences of people on Earth. And here we have a good vocabulary word, hieratic. Hieratic is not the same as hierarchical. Hierarchical means an order of relationships from top to bottom. Hieratic means having to do with ritual, having to do with a kind of formalized behavior or formalized image that has ritual significance. It's also stereometric, another great vocabulary word, not so different from haptic, actually. Stereometric, in my really good definition of it, means something you could make out of cheese. That is to say, if you bought a block of craft cheese or velvita, let's go for the really good brand of cheese, and you wanted to carve art out of the velvita cheese, you would never get a bernini. Wouldn't happen. The cheese would flop. But you could make this out of cheese because it has to do with solid masses. It is haptic. It is stereometric. It is a solid form. It's abstract, and it's subtractive. The intricacies of form are not created through adding things together, but by removing material. Part of things that make it so ritualized, so hieratic, are the extremely formalized organization of parts. It is axial as an axis. It's symmetrical. Both sides reflect around the axis. It's static. This guy does not imply movement, but stasis. It's formulaic. It's almost more like writing than like portraiture. And in fact, if you look at the cube, you can see that on the cube, there is a kind of writing inscribed. So this is sort of a tablet that contains messages. And the image itself is kind of like writing, kind of like a message. So qualities of Egyptian art are really highly formalized. Axial, symmetrical, abstract, stereometric, haptic, subtractive, formulaic, and so forth, just like writing, just like hieroglyphs. We look at hieroglyphs, and we think, how is it that they're not pictures? How can we know that the hieroglyphs are actually telling us something? And one reason we have that information is that this astonishing artifact was uncovered in 1799. It's called the Rosetta Stone. And it has three different languages. On top, I believe it has hieroglyphs. In the middle, it has demotic, which is a kind of shorthand hieroglyphic way of writing grief. And in the bottom, there is classical Greek. And so any good scholar in 1799 or 1822, like Jean Chapeauillon, would be well-schooled in Greek. And so they could look at the Greek, and they could find recurrences of Greek words. They know that the word, let's say, cow happens here, happens here, happens here, and they find it again there. And so using the Rosetta Stone and the correspondence between Greek and hieroglyphs, the code was cracked. And it became possible for scholars and archaeologists to actually read these picture writings, the hieroglyphs, on tombs. And when they read them, it's usually stuff like 20 bushels of grain, 30 jars of olives, five bottles of oil. It's usually really boring. It's usually a kind of inventory of the crops. But occasionally, it's pretty interesting. For example, there is something called the Book of the Dead. And the Book of the Dead was translated from hieroglyph into knowable languages. And it really outlines this idea of the afterlife that animates so much of the art and the architecture of the Egyptians. It has to do with the notion of preserving a vessel that the spirit can reanimate. In fact, the word sculptor in Egypt, Egyptian, means he who keeps alive. So here we see our statue that we looked at before from 1480 BC. And here we see a fifth dynasty statue of Ranafer. Let's say that's about 2,500 BC. But they're more or less the same. It's the same little hairdo. It's the same preference for stereotomy. It's the same severe, motionless geometry. You see this striding pose. So there's a suggestion of movement, but it's not real movement. In fact, this leg is about five inches longer than this leg. But it's a conventionalized pose. And we see it again and again. These are figures moving forward, moving into the afterlife. Here we see statues of a couple of old kingdom pharaohs, Kafre and Menkaure. Notice in parentheses, I have Kifrin and Mycerinas. This will make you nuts. The pharaohs are frequently known by two names. There's the Greek name, which had been conventionally used. Let's say through most of the 20th century and before. And then there's the Egyptian name, which people are increasingly using because that's the real name. So Kafre is also Kifrin. Menkaure is also Mycerinas. Good luck with that. They're both easy to remember. You'll have no trouble with any of them. Either one will be fine for the purposes of this course. Look again at the posture, the impassive expression of the face, the clenched arm at the side. And look at this work by Mr. Picasso. Des Moises d'Avignon from 1906, one of Picasso's most famous paintings, really a painting that launched cubism, that defined the moment at which Picasso moved away from a more traditional kind of image making toward cubism. And you see this guy over here, or this lady over here, who very much reprises the basic posture of an Egyptian statue. Here's a little striding Egyptian guy. The rigid emergence from material that we see here and the adherence to the material in the Egyptian statue. In fact, Picasso uses this to set up a kind of narrative about the development of art from this moment of extreme stasis in Egyptian art through classical deployments of these kind of traditional odorless or nude figures in a full circle back toward what he might see as a more essential or more primitive, more authentic moment that he derives from African masks. So in many ways, it's a full circle. If we talk about this long arc of history from the oldest moment of Egyptian history forward toward the end of Egyptian history, we have more or less 3,000 years of continuous style, but it breaks into three more or less clear periods, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, with a couple of periods of pre-dynastic and intermediate periods in between. Old Kingdom is probably the stuff that you're familiar with. This is the time of the great pyramid building. This is the time when the capital was up in the Nile Delta. Middle Kingdom was really a period with lots of squabbling, lots of battles, not so much monumental architecture. But in the New Kingdom, there was a new flourishing of pharaonic power, partly because one pharaoh, Ramses II, lived and ruled for 60 years, which was a tremendously long time to rule. So let's look specifically at Old Kingdom, which is the third to the sixth dynasty. And you might say, well, why do we start with a third dynasty? And the answer is, because we have pre-dynastic stuff. And so the first pharaoh we can identify is King Narmer. And we know him because we can read hieroglyphics, of course. And there is a stone palette called the Palate of Narmer that tells a story. And the story that's told by the Palate of Narmer has to do with the unification of the two Egypts, upper and lower Egypt. If you look at the image here, you see a pointy hat man holding a stick or a staff and subjugating the man who's on his knees. People are swimming below, horus falcons, various gods are overseeing the whole operation. And we know who these people are specifically because their headdresses are associated with upper kingdom and lower kingdom. So pointy hat guy is wearing the crown of upper Egypt. And the other man is wearing the crown of lower Egypt. So back in around 3,100 BC, Narmer, also called Menace, because we like to use multiple names to mess with you, united the two Egypts. And that marks the moment of real consolidation of power and strength and the emergence of these great architectural works. We'd mentioned before when we were talking about translating hieroglyphics that one text that has come down to us is this book of the dead and that really much of Egyptian architecture, much of Egyptian art making, the production of cultural artifacts that are preserved have to do with funerary architecture and funerary art. That's probably because a lot of the everyday architecture, everyday artifacts, weren't built for eternity. You might take a river weeds, weave them together, give yourself a basket. You might take the same kind of, I don't know, papyrus shafts, weave them together, make yourself a little hut. And these things decay. These things get swallowed up by the flooding nile. And new ones take place. But when you are building something to last forever, you make a big effort to build it out of permanent materials. Hence the baked brick and stone clad funerary architecture. And you might even say, hence the mummy, right? You're taking the body and you're finding some way to take the transience and the ephemerality of human flesh and preserve it the same way that stone preserves shelter that would have otherwise been made of decaying materials. So the earliest kind of tombs we have for the Egyptians are called mastabas. And that's the same word as the Egyptian word for table or bench. You know what a bench looks like. So these are flat roofed things. But already in the third dynasty, the ambitions increase under the patronage of King Zoser. And he begins to build for himself a pyramid. We'll look at that in a moment. Let's just say a few more words about mummies, because you don't always get to talk about mummies for heaven's sakes. The body is preserved in this kind of ghoulish manner. And the reason you need the body is that the Egyptian idea about the being is that it has three entities, the ka, the ba, and the ach. And the ka is the spirit, the kind of animated spirit. The ba is the soul. And the ach is the reunification of these two elements that happens after death. So you need to have a vessel that can be the shelter, the new home for the body. And you make the mummy, but you also make statues as kind of backup mummies. So mummification, you all want to know, is a long process. But it's really ideal for Egypt, because it's such a dry climate that you can get the kind of desiccation, the drying out that you need. If you were trying to make mummies someplace like Scotland, it would never happen, because it would be too wet. But you remove the organs, you put them in canopic jars, special jars, and you dry the body in salt, and then you wrap it in bandages. Hundreds of yards of bandages. You put little trinkets and jewels and coins inside the bandages so that when the body is reanimated in the afterlife, it will be able to buy favor. Now, would you think that only really important people get mummified? I don't think so. I think you could mummify your cat if you want to. These are cat mummies at the Louvre, which are some of my favorites. You can also see cat mummies at the British Museum. And many years ago, let's say many years ago, I was in Egypt in the 1970s, long before you guys were even close to being born. And I had this guide take me on a mule across the valley of the kings. And he was an old man, and he claimed to have been with Howard Carter when the tomb of King Tut was found. And he was full of all kinds of anecdotes, you know? Carter, funny guy, King Tut, lots of gold, things that I could have said, actually. But he also said, and I don't know where he got this. I have no authentication of this, that when the railroads came into Egypt, there was no fuel, that you couldn't cut down trees and stoke the engines, because there were no trees. You couldn't mine coal and stoke the engines, because there was no coal. So the abundant source of burnable fuel, according to Ahmed, the mule driver, was mummies. That you had all these minor tombs of minor nobles, and you just threw them in the train and off you went. Who knows? Cat mummies, however. And along with, let's say, a royal burial, you might have lots and lots of grave goods. These are canopic jars that hold the internal organs. These are little servants, so that if in the afterlife, let's say Osiris, god of the dead, says, I would like you, Pharaoh, to perform this menial task, the Pharaoh can look at his little helpers and say, you do it for me. So enough of that. Let's look at some mastabas. These are the bench-like tombs. And you see that they're flat, box-like things, haptic solids with little chambers inside. Here's a plan. So you can see that here's a little chamber where there might be a place offerings. But beyond that chamber, there is a subterranean shaft that leads to the actual resting place of the tomb. So here's the shaft, here's the tomb, et cetera. With the idea of mastaba, we come to another important vocabulary word, and that word is type. And associated with type is typology. These aren't specific to Egyptian art and architecture, but they're words that architects use all the time. Because one of the big tasks in architecture is how can you make something as mute, as built form, carry meaning and be legible and understandable. And one way is through type. So a type is a class or a group of buildings distinguished by shared formal characteristics and derived from the same historical source. So in Egypt, anybody seeing a mastaba would say, huh, dead person there. I know what's going on. Typology is the study of types and formal organizations. And for the purposes of architecture, you can use typology to connect to this body of historically embedded meanings and tweak them toward your own ends. So here we can see a kind of transformation of the type of mastaba into the type of pyramid. Here's our little basic bench-like mastaba. And already here, this is the step pyramid of Zoser, third dynasty king. We see that the mastaba has become a stacking of mastabas so that it begins to resemble a kind of pyramid or a kind of ziggurat. It's an easy shift from this to this. And it's also an easy shift from the step pyramid of Zoser to one of the classical Giza pyramids, where it really is this kind of tapered geometry. Let's look more closely at Zoser's pyramid in Sakara, third dynasty, 2030 BCE. It's a great thing. It's a great thing in the same way that the ziggurat in Ur is a great thing. It really marks itself as a point of difference. You have this large, extending, flat surface of the desert. You get a precinct that already makes it special. And within that precinct, you begin to create concentric terraces and celebrate one point. It also is mountain-like. It's as if nature itself was being replicated in the architectural gesture. Here's a camel in case you were doubting that this was in Egypt. An interesting thing about the step pyramid of Zoser, and notice here we have two spellings for your convenience, DJ-Oser or Zoser. We know the architect. This thing was thought to be so amazing that in 2,630 BC, the architect was deified for conceiving of this thing. Zoser elevated him to the realm of the gods. Otherwise, how could this be done? So we have a couple of names of architects that are preserved to us from Egypt. And that's kind of amazing because we don't have that many specific historical facts. When we look at the Zoser complex, the thing we notice first, of course, is this giant step pyramid. But there are festival courtyards in the precinct, down and through here, all of these little buildings with the pyramid being in the center. And the festival courtyards are very interesting to look at. And one reason they're interesting is how they are articulated. And this word articulation is a vocabulary word that you will be hearing again and again in studio, as well as in architectural history classes. Articulation means a method of clarifying the relationship of parts to the whole. So when we look at these sheds or these pavilions, we see a series of verticals that begin to create a system of bays. A bay, simply B-A-Y, is the space between two columns. And so instead of saying this is one big lump, we can say this is four bays. It's been articulated. But the method by which these things have been articulated is memetic of nature. But memesis is imitation. And the forms in Sakara at the Hebsed Court, Hebsed as a festival, are all derived from river weeds, derived from these ephemeral grasses that would have been used in ordinary architectural construction. So there's some kind of idea here of preserving the body of the architecture in the same way that the mummy preserves the body of the human, petrifying the ephemeral and making it last forever. Ephemeral, by the way, means something that's very short-lived here for a moment and then decays. So these are some of the column capitals that you get in Egyptian architecture. And they pick up on these forms like the lotus and the papyrus that would grow along the banks of the delta. These are some images of papyrus from frescoes inside of tombs. And you can see the flaring of the papyrus and the flaring of the papyrus column capitals are not so different. We also begin to see a constructional system that's a little bit more sophisticated than taking lumps of heavy stuff and stacking them up, which is maybe what's going on in Ur with the ziggurat and maybe what's going on in the steppe pyramid of Zoser. And that is trabeation. Trabeation is another word for post and beam architecture. So for trabeation, what you need are some vertical supports and some horizontal things to span. And that's simple. That's easy. That's what you did with blocks when you were a little kid. So it's a kind of intuitive thing to do. But the tricky thing with trabeation is what are your materials? What can you use? And we've already mentioned who we were talking about burning mummies to keep the trains running, that they're really, even by this point, even by third dynasty Egypt, not so many trees. So you can't make a truss or you can't use a wooden beam. So what are you going to use to span? And what you're going to use to span is stone. So Egyptian architecture uses stone beams or lintel, L-I-N-T-E-L to span. And that is not a great material for making a beam because stone is brittle. I have here a piece of chalk. Chalk is calcium. Calcium is stone. I need a demonstrator. Sir, will you come here and see if you can break the chalk? I don't think he can. I stone. Try it. Oh my god. It's like a Superman in the class. It snapped right in half. Wait, wait, you're not done yet. Yeah. Push down on this and try to break it. Ugh, weakling, pathetic guy. So you see that stone is incredibly good in compression but incredibly bad in tension, which is what you have with a beam. So because of that, you get a very narrow spacing in Egyptian architecture between the columns because you're spanning the stone. This is one of the little Hebsed huts in this Akara complex. And you can see this kind of elaborate system of radiation that recalls the weaving together of reeds of a river hut. And right down here on the bottom, I've given you a river hut in case you're wondering what a river hut might look like. We spoke about the mastaba as a type and how that type transformed over time and finally gave us the pyramid. And the pyramid, too, had various incarnations. So this is Zosir's pyramid that we've seen before. This is the bent pyramid of Sneferu in Dasur. And finally, the pyramid of Kyaps in Giza, the great pyramids that you're familiar with. And it's a kind of interesting march toward perfection, you might say. If I were to look Corbusier, the great Swiss architect who wrote a lot about architecture, I would say what happened with Zosir is that the type was identified. And Corbus would say the architect is like the engineer. You look for the type, and once you've asked the right question architecturally, you can then begin to perfect the type. So I would say Sneferu's pyramid is getting toward the answer, but whoops, it bends. And one reason it bends is that the angle was too steep, and they could not continue executing it at that angle. And by the time you get to Kyaps, Corbusier would probably say the question was asked, the type was identified, and the type was perfected. I like Sneferu's the best, though. There's something so sweet about the bent pyramid, so kind of ambitious and goofy at the same time. Let's look at Giza for a moment, because I'm sure Giza is the stuff that you guys are yearning to hear about. We have the three great pyramids in Giza, the Kyaps pyramid, the Kifrin pyramid, and the Mysorenes period pyramid, also known as Khufu, Qavre, and Menkaure. This is the fourth dynasty, Egypt. And this is just on the outskirts of Cairo. If any of you ever go to Egypt, you would be crazy not to go take a look at all of this stuff. These are giant things. These are 760 feet tall, the Qafre pyramid, which is the great pyramid. 760 feet tall is enormous. That's like 75-story building. Ridiculous. And you have to say, how was this possible? How was it possible to build this kind of stuff? And in part, you have an absolute monarch in the person of the pharaoh, so you can conscript and enslave as many people as you want. But in part, it was really strategic and clever, because you don't want to conscript everybody. You need the agricultural workers to continue producing food. You also want to keep them busy when the Nile is flooded. You do not want the agricultural workers to start thinking about how much they're being taxed and how they could have a rebellion. So during the time that the Nile was flooded, many of these people who would otherwise be idle were brought aboard for the project of building these things. Also, the flooding of the Nile made it more convenient to transport stone to the construction site. And you have the pyramids. Fabulous. So this is Khufu. And if we look at the temple here, let's say, let's look at the Kifrin, or Khafre temple, over here, we have some interesting ancillary buildings. In fact, all of them have interesting ancillary buildings. These are a lot of mastabas and some queen baby pyramids. The nobles liked to be buried in these piranha complexes, because the idea was if anybody is going to have a lovely time and a smooth voyage to the afterlife, it would be the pharaoh. And if you could be buried near the pharaoh, he'll probably bring you along because you're a good cook or you are a good bookkeeper or you're a good architect or something like that. So we have all these mastabas, minor noble tombs. But here we also see remnants of something quite particular. This is a valley temple. And the valley temple has to do with this kind of procession, this movement from a, well, this is a causeway story. And the valley temple is down here, where the body is mummified, where the corpse is prepared. And then it makes its way processionally up to the pyramid and is subsequently entombed. So although we think about the Egyptian pyramids as these great haptic objects, these landscape-like artificial mountains, if we look at the whole complex, we begin to see something more spatial, something more processional. We also see the sphinx. Here's the sphinx. Just to give you a sense of the scale, this is the great pyramid in Giza. And this is, nobody's probably been to North Korea, so you don't know what that is. This is some crazy hotel they're building there. But right underneath it is the shard in London, a Norman Foster building that just recently constructed. Has anybody been to London? Have you seen this big pointy thing sticking up? It's giant, right? It is a huge thing. You see it from all over London. You can't believe how big it is. Built by the most sophisticated technology available in the 21st century, this is this thing built 3,000 years ago, or 4,000 years ago, kind of unbelievable. And again, we've seen that. There are all these kind of funny, subterranean passageways. Like the mastaba, the actual burial chamber is underground. But by the time they're building the great tombs in Giza, they're already making fake entryways, because these tombs are getting robbed like crazy. And they have to figure out ways to trick the thieves. In fact, all the great old kingdom tombs that we've discovered so far have been robbed multiple times. So next time, we will be talking about middle and new kingdom Egyptian art and architecture.