The collective imagination owes a lot to cinema: since Indiana Jones to video games such as tomb Raider Or Unchartedthe pyramids are readily represented as deadly labyrinths, filled with trapdoors, twisted mechanisms and bloody traps. However, scientists are clear that these scenarios are fiction.
“No, they didn’t use traps in the pyramids, but they made it damn difficult to get in!”explains Egyptologist Reg Clark, specialist in security in ancient tombs, in an interview with the Live Science site. For another expert, Rolf Krauss, no trap system, mechanical or lethal, has ever been found in the pyramids.
If the idea appealed so much to the public, unfortunately it would not have worked in reality: the grave robbers worked in teams and a trap such as it is envisaged in fiction could only have stopped a man or two, leaving the rest of the group to continue their pillaging. This does not mean, however, that nothing was done by the builders, who favored other methods to discourage the curious.
The Egyptians excelled in the art of mystification: false entrances, deceptive corridors ending in dead ends, narrow labyrinths of dead-end passages – all ways of leading intruders astray. Sliding blocks of stone could obstruct access and make the path to the burial chamber particularly difficult. The very mass of the pyramid offered formidable protection: unlike the older tombs, the mastabas, the pyramids required serious effort to reach the royal burial.
No sign of curse
Sometimes, the simple structure of the monument could be fatal to looters or curious onlookers: during excavations of the Sekhemkhet pyramid in the 1950s, an accidental collapse killed a worker and injured two others, illustrating the danger inherent in these places. It was not, however, a trap, simply an accident aggravated by the complexity of the passages sealed by the architects of the place.
More symbolic than real, the protection of the pharaoh mainly involved the writing of magical texts, the famous “Texts of the Pyramids” inscribed on the walls of the tombs. They could, for example, proclaim the omnipotence of Osiris, supposed to keep ill-intentioned people away from the grave and preserve the eternal rest of the deceased. However, no real curse has been attested: it was above all a matter of protecting the king during his journey to the afterlife and not of cursing visitors.
Another proof that the pyramids were not particularly well protected: almost all of them were plundered in Antiquity or throughout the Middle Ages. If caught, desecrators faced punishments including mutilation or death, but the promise of treasure often outweighed fear. The pharaohs eventually abandoned the pyramid format in favor of the hidden tombs of the Valley of the Kings, surely hoping to escape the covetousness of future generations.
The idea of the death trap in the pyramids, as attractive as it may be, is therefore a pure product of the modern imagination, going against the architectural subtleties deployed by the ancient Egyptians. Their genius, very real, did not produce killing machines, but complex masterpieces that have withstood time and, sometimes, men.
