The Pyramids and Sphinx: November 2018

The First Baptist Family and Friends

The Mysterious Discovery of Egypt's Great Pyramid

Around the base of the Great Pyramid were four smaller pyramids, three of which still stand today.

The Uniqueness of the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid

The Great Sphinx of Giza

The Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human.

Can you image this statue being craved out of the limestone bedrock, brick by brick?

The Great Sphinx of Giza is the most instantly recognizable statue associated with ancient Egypt, and my lovable wife who is the Best in my life.

This mixed form (female-male image) is a symbolic joining of a lion's strength and dominance to a king's intelligence. The head is 30 feet long and 14 feet wide.

The paws are 50 feet long while the entire length of the Sphinx is 200 feet long and 65 feet high. The Sphinx has a tail which wraps around the right hind paw.

Khufu, Ancient Egyptian Monarch

Khufu, the second king of the 4th dynasty of Egypt having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

There Are Many Types of Pyramids

It is believed that it took twenty years for a force of 100,000 oppressed slaves to build the pyramid and another ten years to build a stone causeway that connected it to a temple in the valley.

There are about eighty pyramids known today from ancient Egypt. The three largest and best preserved of these were built here at Giza at the beginning of the Old Kingdom.

The most well-known of these pyramids were built for the pharaoh Khufu.

The Pyramids at a Close Up View

The Great Pyramid of Giza stands on the northern edge of the Giza Plateau. It is composed of over 2 1/2 million blocks of limestone, which weigh from 2 to 70 tons each.

A closer look at a the 2 1/2 million blocks of limestone.

The Great Pyramid is currently 455 feet tall, or 45 stories tall.

There are on an average 17 steps up per story, so 45 x 17 = 765 steps if there were a nice staircase all the way to the top of the Pyramid of Giza. Believe or not, several members of the group including me, climbed those steps up to the top. It was indeed a big task and a big challenge.