Word: snefru
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Snefru, known to the Greeks as "the Good King," has long been overshadowed by "the Bad King," Khufu (also known as Cheops), his more famous son and successor. Because Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, is more accessible to tourists, it has become the picture-postcard landmark. Snefru's monuments, by contrast, sat on an army base in Dahshur, 13 miles away. For much of this century, they were concealed behind barbed wire and watch towers, off limits to all but a handful of archaeologists...
...newly opened site encompasses the remains of 11 pyramids, some of which were built 700 years after Snefru's reign, and many smaller rectangular mausoleums, known as mastabas. But it is Snefru's spectacular constructions that dominate the horizon. Most Egyptian kings gave themselves only one pyramid; Snefru built five, three of them at Dahshur...
...light of the setting sun. It is the first pyramid in the classic smooth-sided shape so familiar to schoolchildren. Previously, only step-sided pyramids had been built (a shape that was also seen in Mesopotamia and turned up, much later, in Latin America). It was Snefru who conceived of the more difficult smooth-sided form. "He made the intellectual jump," says Rainer Stadelmann, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Enlisting two of his sons as architects, Snefru perfected a system of earthen ramps that allowed his workers to line up the huge stones; when the stones were...