The Pyramid Builder: Cheops, the Pharaoh Behind the Great Pyramid

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Description

Four and a half thousand years ago, the largest of the wonders of the ancient world was built. The Great Pyramid at Giza has fascinated and intrigued scholars ever since and it is the only one of the wonders listed by the Greeks to have survived intact to this day. By the time Tutankhamen ruled Egypt it was already 1500 years old; to Cleopatra it was an antiquity. But how was it built Why and by whom The Great Pyramid, thought to be evidence of a slave-culture on a truly despotic scale, has fascinated travellers and archaeologists since the nineteenth-century revival of interest in antiquities. And with it a fascination with the pharaoh who built it: Cheops.

Christine El Mahdy has turned her detective approach to Egyptology into a gripping and incisive look at the man behind the monument the life and times of Cheops, the greatest pyramid builder of them all.

Reviews

El Mahdy is something of a Egyptological vigilante and takes pleasure in debunking misconceptions. Clearly on fertile ground here, she starts by confessing that "it is hard to understand any of it [Egytology]", then fills several hundred pages with understanding - Sunday Times

Author Bio

Christine El Mahdy is a widely renowned Egyptologist whose interest in the subject started as a child (she taught herself to read hieroglyphics aged nine). She has worked in the Egyptian departments of Bolton Museum and Liverpool University Museum and, in 1988, she founded the British Centre for Egyptian Studies which she now runs. She has previously written three internationally bestselling books on ancient Egypt.