Word: pyramides
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After puffing up 88 spiraling stone steps, Marcel Dupré, the greatest organist in France, sat down at the 500-year-old organ, a magnificent work of art whose 2,270 fluted pipes pyramid majestically into the vaulted heights of Chartres Cathedral. It was to be his first recital in that majestic shrine, an hour to remember. But as Dupré launched into Bach's Toccata and Fugue in G Minor, the organ balked and choked off a high note. The organist winced, but forged on, muttering "lamentable, lamentable...
...three fruitful decades Archaeologist Walter Emery of the University of London has been exploring the inexhaustible sands of Egypt. Much of his work was done near the great Step Pyramid at Saqqara, 15 miles from Cairo, where he excavated nine mastabas (tombs capping burial shafts) of the earliest Pharaohs. This season he picked a low-lying stretch of desert north of the pyramid, where the soil was colored by pottery fragments. Somehow, the archaeologists who have worked over the area year after year had all missed the promising spot...
...Step Pyramid itself is a monument to Imhotep. It was built as the tomb of Pharaoh Zoser, who reigned about 2980 B.C., but Imhotep was its architect. And because it is the oldest stone pyramid, the Egyptians have credited Imhotep with inventing the art of building with cut stone. He was also Zoser's prime minister, a magician, sage, proverb maker, and patron of the scribes who ran the Egyptian bureaucracy. Century by century through Egypt's long history his reputation grew. During the Ptolemaic dynasty (323-30 B.C.), when Greeks ruled Egypt, he was identified with Asclepius...
Healing Ibises. The most magnificent of these shrines, or Asclepieions, was somewhere near the Step Pyramid. It was especially holy because the body of the healer himself was believed to be buried near by. The pilgrims who came to Saqqara sacrificed ibises, which were sacred to Imhotep. Their carcasses were mummified and tucked away underground so that their souls would journey to the god and ask his healing favor. The shrine was deserted many centuries ago, and desert storms erased all surface traces of it. Not until Emery broke into its catacombs did anyone know what had become...
...more prosaically, the man who bequeathed his thrillers and shockers to Harvard--was George Andrew Reisner '89, an eminent: Egyptologist who won fame by "solving the mystery of the Sphinx." (He showed that its head is a portrait of Chephren, a fourth-century Pharaoh who built the second Pyramid.) Born Nov.5, 1867, in Indianapolis, Reisner was graduated from the College summa cumlaude and then earned a Ph.D. here in Semitic Languages...