At the start, I did find it a bit too casual and fond of exclamation marks, but that feeling disappeared as I read on. I was a little confused about how El Mahdy envisioned the pyramids being built from outside-in, but that probably comes down to me needing to see it visually.Įl Mahdy writes a popular history, her writing style seemed to me ideal for the casual reader. That said, I did find it a worthwhile read because El Mahdy did tackle some of the most common assertions and theories about pyramid-building, such as the ramp theory. For example, there's a 100 pages dedicated to figuring out how they build the pyramids, but it was a bit old-hat to me: I wanted to read about Khufu, not how the pyramids were built for the nth time. I expected this to be the case, but was a little disappointed all the same. This isn't, strictly speaking, a biography of Khufu but an exploration of pyramid building in the Old Kingdom which uses Khufu as a jumping off point. It was a surprise to me, though – I wasn't aware there was enough material to pad out a biography of Khufu without resulting to fiction.Īnd I was right. I was happy enough to stumble upon Christine El Mahdy's The Pyramid Builder, a book that posits itself as a biography of Khufu, the pharaoh of the Great Pyramid.
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