​As soon as a pharaoh of the Old Kingdom came to power, he began planning the pyramid that would be his tomb. The great bureaucracy of builders and architects was set in motion. Each village sent its quota of laborers to the quarries or the construction site, and royal storehouses issued tools and clothing. They faced a colossal chore. The Great Pyramid, built for Khufu at Gizeh was constructed of more than two million stone blocks, most weighing about two and a half tons. Despite the magnitude of the task, it was completed within the Pharaoh's 23 year reign in about 2600 BC, by men working with the simplest of implements, without draught animals or even the wheel.

Khufu's architects, planning their Pharaoh's enormous pyramid had first to chose an appropriate site in the desert. As a rough substructure for the tomb, they chose a rocky knoll rising above the surrounding desert floor. Surveyors then marked out the site so that the pyramid's base would form a perfect square.

   With that accomplished, the architects directed work gangs to cut step like terraces into the irregular sides of the hill. These terraces, which would serve as the foundation on which all the stone blocks were laid, had to be absolutely level if the entire structure was not to be askew,. To assure this level foundation, the pyramid builders erected an extensive system of water-felled trenches about its base. Then, using the water level as a standard, they were able to lay out the 13 acre site so evenly that experts using modern instruments have found that the southeast corner of the pyramid stands only an inch higher than the northwest corner.

   The Great Pyramid's size challenges the imagination. Its peak towers as high as a present-day skyscraper of 40 stories. Its base covers an area large enough to hold 8 football fields.

For its outward size alone, the Great Pyramid was called one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But the interior, with its corridors, passageways, air shafts, Grand Gallery and King's Chamber, is no less an architectural marvel. The Egyptians demonstrated outstanding engineering skill in designing these interior structures to withstand the massive weight of the stone above them. The Grand Gallery for example, was built with a tiered, braced ceiling; the King's Chamber was designed with six roofs to displace the weight of overhead blocks. The Grand Gallery, a sloping room 153 ft long and 28 ft high, was built with stone sealing plugs already inside. When workmen on the side ramp removed restraining crossbeams the plugs slid down to seal the Ascending Corridor. Once this was sealed, workmen blocked the other passages (including the tomb's entrance) with stone slabs. These extraordinary measures foiled even the most ingenious tomb robbers for at least 400 years. Finally however, the pyramid was broken into and the mummy and funerary treasures were stolen.

n the 1820s CE, Frenchman Jean-François Champollion first deciphered hieroglyphs using the 2nd century BCE Rosetta Stone with its text in three "languages" of Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek.

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Egyptian hieroglyphics were composed of three basic types of signs: logograms, representing words; phonograms, representing sounds; and determinatives, placed at the end of a word to help clarify its meaning. As a result, the number of signs used by the Egyptians was much higher compared to alphabetical systems, with over a thousand different hieroglyphs in use initially.  This was later reduced to about 750 during the Middle Kingdom.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are read either in columns from top to bottom or in rows from the right or from the left.  

​This image is an example of the casual style of the Amarnan period of Akhenaton.  The queen is rubbing oil on her husband.

It took three weeks to clear the rubble from the 25' corridor leading to this first room of the tomb. There were four in all, containing more than 2,000 articles.  

Greater than all the treasure in the tomb's outer rooms was the mummy itself, enclosed in its massive interior shrine.  Archaeologists had never before unearthed a royal mummy still encased in its original state.  The mummified king was locked away at the center of a series of cases, each fitting inside another...four outer shrines of gilded wood; then a sculptured stone sarcophagus; then three inlaid coffins, the innermost, weighing 242 pounds of solid gold.  Each coffin was shaped in the figure of the King.  Each depicted him wearing a crown composed of the vulture and cobra, symbols respectively of Upper and Lower Egypt.  Even within the final coffin the face of the mummy was concealed by a beaten gold mask.  

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The mask itself weighed about 24 pounds.  Its inlays covered almost the entire surface.  The stripes of the headdress and the beard contain colored glass in imitation of lapis lazuli.  The eyebrows are inlaid parts around the eye, and are real lapis lazuli.  The whites of the eyes consist of quartz, and the areas of the iris and pupil are obsidian.  Since no distinction is made between these two parts, there is no defined pupil and the eyes never focus on any one point.  The collar includes sections of colored glass, turquoise, quartz, and semi-precious stones.

​Selket was one of four goddesses attached to a larger golden shrine.  They were guarding Tut's internal organs.  She is an example of the Armarnan style.  She is freestanding (not relief) and breaks the rule of frontality.