Word: giza
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...people worshiped the sun as the beneficent provider of light and life, and as a god, called Ra by the Egyptians, Helios by the Greeks and Sol by the Romans. To the Aztecs, the sun god was Huitzilopochtli, whom they nourished with human sacrifices. Egypt's great pyramids at Giza were built with their sides aligned with the rising sun at the vernal equinox, and the temple complex at Karnak was dedicated to Ra. The ancient circle at Stonehenge, in England, was apparently constructed so that the sun would rise over one of the great stones at the time...
Sitting impassively on the sunbaked Giza Plateau on Cairo's outskirts, the pyramids look from a distance as though they have hardly aged in the more than 4 1/2 millenniums since they were built. But up close they look anything but eternal. Rubble and rock dust crumbling from the pyramid of Chephren have accumulated in piles on its lower levels. In the pyramid of Cheops, encrustations of salt, left by the evaporation of brackish groundwater, have eaten away at the walls of the burial chamber. The Sphinx, a few hundred feet away from the pyramids, has lost...
...Hosni Mubarak, visiting the site in February, called for a thorough restoration. Nearly a fifth of the wall paintings at the tomb of Nefertari, across the Nile from Luxor in the Valley of the Queens, have been destroyed by salt deposits. In fact, says Zahi Hawass, who supervises the Giza Plateau for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, "all the monuments are endangered. If we don't do something soon, in 100 years the paintings will be gone, and in 200 years the architecture will be gone...
...number of Egyptians increases, people have spilled out of the cities in search of housing. The Giza Plateau, once far from urban sprawl, now lies almost in the shadow of modern apartment buildings. Nearby factories and old vehicles spew forth noxious clouds of particulate-laden exhaust, which becomes corrosive when dissolved by rain. Vibrations from traffic produce cracks in the monuments. More serious still is the damage caused by water. An estimated 80% of Cairo's incoming water supply escapes from leaking pipes into the ground. And the aging sewerage system, built 75 years ago to serve a population...
Under the circumstances, the Egyptians have done remarkably well. Their largest and most visible project is a $17 million effort to clean up the pyramids' site and restore 15 tombs on the Giza Plateau. Workers have begun clearing away tons of sand and rubbish, thus eliminating one source of wind- borne erosion. They have also begun shoring up about 30 ft. of the crumbling stones at the base of the pyramid of Cheops...