In The Footsteps Of Pyramids
Similar silhouettes, different worlds. From Giza and Meroe to the cities of Mesoamerica, explore the tombs and temples that rose towards the sky.
01 · Egypt · c. 2560 BC
Pyramids Of Giza
In 1954 an Egyptian archaeologist named Kamal el-Mallakh was clearing rubble along the south side of the Great Pyramid when he noticed a line of enormous limestone blocks set into the bedrock. They were a lid. Beneath them lay a pit, sealed for roughly four and a half thousand years, and inside the pit was a ship.
Read the story02 · Sudan · c. 300 BC
Pyramids Of Meroë
In the 1830s an Italian doctor named Giuseppe Ferlini stopped practising medicine and started taking pyramids apart. His method was simple and awful: put a crew on top of a royal pyramid in the Sudanese desert and work downward, prising the summit off stone by stone, on the theory that anything valuable would be near the peak.
Read the story03 · Mexico · c. 600
Chichén Itzá
In 1904, the American consul in Yucatán lowered a dredging bucket into a green sinkhole at the edge of a ruined Maya city and started pulling up the bottom.
Read the story04 · Mexico · c. 100 BC
Teotihuacan
In 2003 a heavy rainstorm opened a hole in the ground in front of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The hole dropped into a tunnel that ran about a hundred metres under the temple, eighteen metres below the surface, and had been deliberately sealed shut some eighteen centuries earlier.
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