Word: snefru
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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...
Nonstop Munching. McDonald's statistical accomplishments are staggering. To illustrate: if all the 12 billion McDonald's hamburgers sold to date were to be stacked into one pile, they would form a pyramid 783 times the size of the one erected by Snefru. If a man ate a McDonald's hamburger every five minutes, it would take him 114,000 years of nonstop munching to consume 12 billion burgers. If all the cattle that have ever laid down their lives for McDonald's were to be resurrected for a reunion, they would stand flank-by-jowl...
...tory's richest archaeological deposits. Bone-dry Nubia, the "land of gold," over which black men and white bat tled for 50 centuries, will be drowned. Though the Nubians themselves once ruled all Egypt (750-656 B.C.), they were frequently the victims of invaders. The Pharaoh Snefru 4,600 years ago reported "Nubia hacked to pieces: 7,000 men and women, 200,000 cattle and sheep led away." Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and British followed, leaving hundreds of monuments, temples, fortresses, churches and works of art buried in the sand or exposed along the sear Nile Banks...