Dan Snow's History Hit - The Great Pyramid of Giza

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Built by Pharaoh Khufu some 4,500 years ago, the Great Pyramid was the first ancient wonder to be built and is the only one still standing. Towering above the Giza Plateau, this stone behemoth was to be Khufu's tomb, the place from which he would travel to the afterlife.For this episode, Dan is joined by broadcaster and historian Bettany Hughes, author of 'The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World'. She explains how the Great Pyramid was built, what this awesome structure would have looked like at the time, and what it would have meant to the ancient Egyptians.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today we're going to be talking about the most famous building in the entire world. It's always nice when you can use a superlative that you're pretty confident might actually be true. I think it's the most recognisable building in the world. It was the tallest building in the world for nearly 4,000 years. I'm of course talking about the Great Pyramid of Giza, just outside Cairo in Egypt. It was built in around 2500 BC, making it four and a half thousand years old. It was the oldest, the so-called Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and it's the only wonder that has remained largely intact.

But that's probably because a pyramid is a naturally, incredibly sturdy structure. That's why they built them. And it is made out of 2.3 million large stone blocks. It's basically just a huge cone of stone weighing about 6 million tons in total. So it's quite hard to damage, to steal, or to take apart. It was built probably over a generation or two, perhaps 30 years, as the tomb of the pharaoh Khufu. And the weird thing about the pyramid is it's only part of a giant funerary complex for Khufu. There were two mortuary temples, there were tombs for his

immediate family, members of his court. There were three mini pyramids nearby for Khufu's wives and friends. My favourite part, there were five flat-packed buried solar barges, one of which has been reconstructed and put back together and which I think is a wonder on the scale of the pyramid itself. I've seen the pyramid many times. I've crawled through tunnels inside it and underneath it and truly it remains one of the most wonderful things ever created by human beings one of my favorite pub quiz questions which sadly may not be true is that the great pyramid was the tallest building on earth until it was overtaken arguably arguably, by Lincoln Cathedral. Well, I didn't expect it in that way. Lincoln Cathedral, which apparently could have had a 160-metre high, over 500 feet high, central spire, which was built in 1311.

Now, we're not sure it was that tall. That's the problem. It may have been that tall. The spire collapsed in 1548, and it was never rebuilt, sadly. But it's a great fact, if it's true. Joining me on the podcast to talk about the wonder that is the Great Pyramid is a woman who spent a lot of time there. She is a national treasure. She's a legend of screen and the written page. She's Bethany Hughes, TV presenter, broadcaster, thought leader, writer. She's written a new book called The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. She was on the podcast a little while ago talking all about that. But here she is back talking about one in particular,

the Great Pyramid. Enjoy. Bethany Hughes, thank you for coming on. So lovely to be here and chatting to you we're talking about the uh building yes i mean this is it yeah it is it's one of the most extraordinary buildings on the planet you and i've been to it i've been to it so many times i can't remember but every time i go i'm just on the floor with awe and let's start with its age, because it's basically a contemporary of sort of Stonehenge. I mean, it's fantastically ancient. It is. So this is the Great Pyramid of Giza, Khufu's Pyramid, King Khufu's Pyramid. And we have to remember, he was the ruler of Egypt, but they haven't started to call them pharaohs yet. So he's still a king. Can I just tell you a very exciting thing about the age?

Well, yes. Because if we'd been speaking six months ago, I'd have gone, yep, you know, it's 4,500 years old. We think it's 100 years older than we thought before. So we think it's 4,600 years old, because there's this extraordinary cache of documents on the Red Sea at a place called Wadi al-Jaf, which is a current archaeological site. I mean, it's just like a dream. I'm just, it's actually making my mouth water talking to you about that. It's weird, isn't it? But it's so amazing. So it's this site of 31 cave complexes on the Red Sea coast. They're a hundred feet deep and they've discovered all these papyri from the time of the building of the Great Pyramid.

That's fantastically old writing, isn't it? It's fantastic. I mean, that's extraordinary. So it's the oldest inscribed papyri that we've discovered to date. And up until now, people said, oh, you know, the thing about the pyramid, we know it's amazing, but we don't know how they built it. We don't know who built it. We do now.

We've got their names. So we've got details of the work that they did. There's a guy called Merer, M-E-R-R, I was looking at how it transliterates, and he's in charge of 40 workers and boatmen. And it's this really, really, really detailed log of shipping the raw materials to build Khufu's Great Pyramids. You're blowing my mind. I had no idea. That's extraordinary. It is extraordinary. And just, yeah, just even pausing on the fact that we have writing from that period, because I mean, that's thousands of years before Homer was written down.

I mean, it's mind boggling. It is. It is totally mind boggling. And what's it doing there in this cave? Well, because this is a port, like a Red Sea port, where they would... On the Egyptian shore? On the Egyptian shore, yeah, with a kind of sister port on the other side, on the coast of what's now Arabia, which would keep an eye on the Egyptian port to check it wasn't being attacked by pirates. It was tough. The Red Sea was

a tough environment then as it is now. So this is somewhere that would import all those incredible things like incense probably coming from Southern Arabia. And the preservation is so extraordinary there because it's on the coast and it's within the sands. So we've got ship's rope from 4,500 years ago and little sort of fragments of sailcloth and shoes from the people who were manning these ships. So it's an extraordinary find. And if you can jigsaw puzzle together that new evidence with the work that's being done on the Giza Plateau itself, it looks as if it's almost certainly nudging the day to the Great Pyramid back 100 years. Does that mean we have to nudge Khufu back as well? I think it does. Yeah, it does.

So it's going to be very annoying for everybody who's written a book. That is super annoying. Thoughts and prayers for our Egyptology friends. In the last thousand years, exactly. Oh my goodness. Exactly. But you know, it's good. That's what you, again, you know, you and I share this. That's what I love about archaeology and history, that it's so dynamic. It's just evolving the whole time.

Electrifying. So raw materials were being shipped from the Red Sea, because I've always thought they came from a quarry quite nearby. So where do we now think this stuff was coming from? Well, so you're absolutely right. So the sort of bulk of the pyramid, so the limestone blocks, there are 2.3 million limestone blocks that make up the pyramid. The bulk of those come from a quarry on the Giza Plateau itself. And you can still go and look down on that if you go to Egypt. Don't fall into it because it is a quarry. So, you know, you're staring down. And the white casing of the pyramid is from a quarry called Tura, Tura Limestone. Right, because the big blocks that we see today, they were encased, weren't they?

Yes. In this shiny, beautiful... I mean, it must have been like a sort of sci-fi movie. You've got the, interestingly and importantly, not just the sands of the desert, because it was much closer to the Nile than it is now. So the Nile's moved. The pyramid, let's be clear, the pyramid hasn't moved. Right, okay. the Nile than it is now. So the Nile's moved. Let's be clear, the pyramid hasn't moved.

So the Nile's moved and it used to flood more, the Nile. So the pyramid would have been reflected in the waters of the Nile. So it was a much kind of greener landscape than we imagine today. And during that annual flood, the water would have come right up to it. Yes. And that's how everything was about boats transporting heavy materials. Exactly. And going back to our mate Merah and his team of people who are transporting all these raw materials. So it's not the stone, but if you think if you build something, if you're a project manager, there's a whole load of stuff. You need stuff. You need wood.

You know, you need giant scaffolding. You need food supplies, rope and all of this stuff that's coming in. So anyway, so the floodwaters of the Nile, because it's closer, and it would have risen by about seven metres at one point. So we think they're actually using the power of the floodwaters to raise some of those blocks. It's not just for transport. They're actually using that hydraulic energy. Amazing.

So we've got the blocks very nearby. Then this shiny outer casing is from sort of quite nearby? Yes. So my place is called Tura where you can still go and again you can go and visit there's um in fact it was a kind of Egyptian orthodox community who traditionally have been there and there are still a few of them they've made homes some of them out of the ancient quarry so you can go you know if anybody wants to go and visit that in Cairo so you can see where that came from too. What was the top? Benben, the Benben stone. So there's this sort of mounting capstone that was probably covered

in electrum. So it's a mixture of gold and silver, I'm sure bronze as well. And so that would have gleamed out and it would have caught the sun. So, I mean, it's just all bonkers, basically, when you think about it. It would have been astonishing today. And we live in a world where we know that we can put a drone on Mars. Yes. And so what would it have been like four and a half thousand years ago? It would have blown people's minds. It would have blown their minds. Almost 500 feet tall. I mean, it's still the heaviest constructed building on earth. I'm waiting for the letters to come in when somebody tells me, but it's 6.5 million tonnes. And as far as I know, I did a lot of research for the book,

like there isn't a heavier building that's been made. So it was this kind of behemoth, absolutely gargantuan statement about humans' ability to do things and make things. And the pyramid itself is a very strong structure, isn't it? That's why it's never been fallen down, I guess, in the earthquakes and things. It's pretty solid. That's right. I mean, so there's a tiny bit of earthquake damage, and there was this big earthquake in 1303, which actually also collapsed the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, so one of the other seven wonders of the world.

And that shook a lot of the casing stones from it. So there would have been more casing stones up, you know, at the beginning of the 14th century. But yeah, apart from that, it's pretty... So it's not they were nicked. Well, I'm sure they were, but it's actually, they got shaken off. Yeah, they got shaken off by the earthquake. And the other damage, of course, is from us gorgeous humans blasting our way in, in the 19th century to try to see if there was treasure

inside. So people dynamited the entrances to try and get in. Very bad. Very smart. Well done them. So what else is in these texts? Is there any sort of idea about why? Have we learned more about why it's there? Not from those texts. So they're pretty, you know, they're the kind of logbook of logistics. So again, not yet, but never say never. There could be something because what you also have are these hundreds of inscribed anchors with names on. So we might get a hint, there might be a prayer on one of those or something, but okay. So why was it built? I'm really going to put my neck out there and say it wasn't built by aliens. I know that some people, I know, you know, stay with me

because it's still exciting. It was built for Khufu, the king. It was built as this extraordinary tomb, but more than that, it was a resurrection machine because you have to try to shift your mind back to the ancient Egyptian worldview. And for them, really fascinatingly, they got there four and a half thousand years before we did. We're now scientifically realizing that we're a natural part of the cosmos. All that stuff that we're made up of stardust, that every carbon molecule in our body has come from outer space at some point. And the Egyptians knew that instinctively. They didn't necessarily know it scientifically, but they knew it spiritually. They knew that we were part of

the cosmos. And so the notion was that the great king of the united Egypt could never die. So he has his mortal death, he's mummified, he's buried with all his belongings, and then he will resurrect and join the cosmos and travel through the universe and the stars and the sky to ensure that the world keeps on turning. So they just sort of thought that we were very wrapped up in the beat and the pulse and the energy of the cosmos as we are. I don't want to kind of, the cosmos can do without us, but we are absolutely part of its natural cycle. So that's why they build it so that he can ascend to the stars. You listened to Dan Snow's History Hit. Don't give up on us just yet. There's more coming.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Were there other little pyramids before, or is this a brand new idea? No, so there have been other pyramids before.

Sneferu, Sneferu, for instance, builds one. And the stepped pyramid is famous in Saqqara, the red pyramid. So there have been really good experiments with pyramids. And again, I think we're sometimes, we can go like, yeah, but they weren't all perfect. And then we get the great pyramid and that's perfect. They're not bad. Well, how do you do better? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's one called the bent pyramid. I don't know if you've seen it, which does look weird, frankly, because it's like a normal pyramid shape and then it becomes a slightly sort of disappointing tip. So, and Khufu goes, I don't want my pyramid to look like that. I want it to be perfect. So he obviously hires

other engineers and has another go and And, you know, whoever, there would have been a brilliant mathematical mind who worked on that. Say that again. And do we have any idea how long it would have taken? Yeah. So a generation, so about 25 years, basically most of Khufu's lifetime. So sort of between 21 and 25 years. Did he see it complete? He would have seen it, we think, pretty much complete. We're told that he was active in laying out its footprint so that he went to the Giza plateau in this kind of

amazing religious ceremony and worked out where it would go. So we think he would have seen its rising and we think it was probably completed before he died. And when he died, there would have been this extraordinary procession of pomp and ritual, taking that mummified body with priests around. There was a sort of covered walkway that he'd have gone through. You know, then there would have been walls, perimeter walls. Yes, there was an enclosure, wasn't there? There was an enclosure, so hugely high walls.

Some people think as high as eight metres tall. So it would have looked very different to how it does today. So, I mean, can you imagine how, well, both how exciting and how weird psychologically. I don't think it can be good for you as an individual to look at something as big as that and think, it's all for me. Betty, I think we're learning that extraordinary amounts of power is not great for us little old humans. I think we've got plenty of examples there. I know. So, he died in a, he was, you know, I was just going to say he died in a tomb that kept him safe, but of course he didn't because his body's not there and all the treasure's been robbed.

So actually, the whole point of it didn't work anyway. But I genuinely wonder whether sometimes he'd have looked at it from the valley temple and gone, oh, when have I started? Or like, oh, you know, is this a crazy idea? A, is it going to work practically? And also, but is this a good thing for me to be doing spiritually? I don't know, maybe not. Maybe he wasn't bothered by doubt at all. Who knows? Who knows? If he was a teenager, probably not. When you've been inside it, you've crawled through all the pastures and done amazing things. Are we really confident we know how the building

worked in itself, like where he was, where his stuff was? Well, you know, there's the rub because there's a great king's chamber, which has got this giant red granite sarcophagus in it, in this kind of incredible lined room. And that's in theory where he was buried. But we know that above that, there's this mysterious gap, this void that's been identified

by an amazing Japanese and Egyptian team working together and that's going to be explored pretty soon that could be where he's actually buried I mean it's definitely a void so was the king's chamber was that a massive sort of decoy so that all the robbers who came in went oh you know I've arrived maybe it was somebody else's body and like you know second rate treasure and he's still there up at the top that's an extraordinary thought so there could be a well we could get another wonderful pharaonic experience in our lifetime it's not impossible well that's enough for me yeah so like i mean toot and carmen on a grand scale buried with stuff buried with what do we think was in there well Well, it must have been, you know, if you think what Tutankhamun,

who's a kind of pretty minor, in some ways sort of failed imperial ruler, I think you've gone and looked at the stuff in his tomb. We've both been in those. Can we just say that we are the luckiest people? I'm for sure. We're some of the luckiest people on earth because when I stood in front of Tutankhamun's, not just his gold, but his duck-shaped lunchboxes

and his childhood toys and his walking sticks and, you know, leaves, herbs that were left. And you're in the lab with the people conserving them. It's just a huge privilege, isn't it? It's a huge privilege. And it really, you know, it helps you sort of understand that world and connect you to all those people who lived all that time ago. I think that would have been small fry in comparison to what went into Kufi's tomb.

It's certainly like, I actually don't know, but it's sort of 20 times bigger. The chamber, you know, where the sarcophagus currently is. So, yeah, he would have been buried with loads of treasure. And we get a little hint of that because his mother was buried in a sort of mini pyramid nearby, which was only discovered in the contents in the 20th century. And it's exquisite. I mean, it's all the exquisite stuff that you'd expect. Inlaid furniture and gold and crystal and, you know, it's really amazing. But there isn't a scrap, as far as we know, left in the Great Pyramid.

Do we know when it would have been first penetrated, robbed? I mean, are there later pharaohs going, oh, poor old Khufu? Or did it endure for quite a while? Again, we can't put a date on it. We know that there's a robber's tunnel that goes in pretty early because that's what, if anybody goes to the pyramid, that's what you go through. Yeah, you're going through the robber's entrance. So if you think about it, if you look at it, there's that sort of gabled ceremonial entrance way and we go in just to the right of it, which was where the robbers went in as well. So it was pretty early. And you were risking a lot because if you were discovered having robbed a pharaoh's tomb or a king's tomb, you'd be impaled. It was not a good way to die. So we don't know. And there are these slightly fanciful writings from the medieval period

saying, oh, it's full of eggs made of solid gold and emeralds and crystals. Some people say Alexander the Great was buried there, but I think that is all a bit made up. But the Alexander the Great thing is interesting because that does imply, and in your brilliant book, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, you talk about the afterlife of that pyramid. I mean, everyone's been obsessed with it ever since. They have. Because it's been so, you can't disguise it. It's not one of these ones that's been lost and rediscovered. Exactly. So every generation has had their own stories and relationship with that building completely completely and i've got to say that has been one of the deep joys of writing the book is tracking

the story of the other travelers and tourists who've gone to visit it through time there's my new favorite character in my life is a woman called agaria in the fourth century and she's from portugal and she goes by herself on a tour of the Holy Land. She might have been a nun, we don't know, but she comes from this kind of community of sisters and she writes a book, which is still in print, about her journey through the Holy Lands. And she goes to the Great Pyramid and we should, you know, hold her to count because she's the person who says, oh, and by the way, that massive pyramid building, that was the granary of Joseph. And ever since then, I mean, for over a thousand years, it was known as the granary of Joseph and people thought it was,

yeah, that it would sort of tie in with that Judeo-Christian religion and tradition. So if you go to St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, for instance, and you look at the representation of the great pyramid there, it is Joseph's granary with these little windows in it and kind of Joseph hanging around outside. I don't know. Anyway, so some of the travellers, you know, it was great that they went, but they shouldn't have written what they did. And then these Arabic travellers who go and do this really sort of detailed forensic analysis of the pyramid. Again, we have to remember this, that so many books have said that Robert Greaves from Oxford was the first person to scientifically analyse the pyramid i mean that was happening at least 300 years before there's a guy called al edrisi who says we've got to understand how it was engineered you know the

substance of the building how it was made so travelers have been loads of people have climbed to the top um i was just i was just gonna say you've never done that i've never no i've always been very well behaved although i think when I went as a kid with my parents, I think you were still allowed on it at that point. But every time I've gone as a grown-up TV person, it's been quite strict. Mishmumpkin, as they would say in Egypt. Not good.

Not a good idea. But you're right. Up until the 1930s, 40s, you have black and white pictures of people climbing up to the top of the pyramid to have a picnic. It's quite a climb. In a way, fair blade at them because that's quite an achievement. But even in 1610, there's this fantastic account by a German writer, all

carefully illustrated, showing these little kind of stick figures climbing up and climbing to the top of the pyramid. So it's been this tourist attraction for at least 4,000 years. And then in terms of, you mentioned people dynamiting their way inside. Yeah. At some stage, do we know if ancients were going inside? Was it sort of an exciting mystery of people trying to get inside, Alexander the Great, Romans? Or is this something that had to wait

for the 19th century and Europeans armed with gunpowder? Yes. No, they definitely went in. Okay. And we know that because we've got bits of graffiti, Greek and Roman graffiti.

So even if you go down, my sort of favourite and worst place in the world, when you crawl down it, right the way down in the thing called the Descending Passage, and you go right into the bedrock itself underneath the pyramid. And as people might know, I'm claustrophobic. I'm not scared of anything apart from the dark and small enclosed spaces. Well, it hasn't stopped you. It hasn't stopped me, but what a stupid job I have. You know. I spend loads of my life in tombs. I mean,

it's absolutely, and I'm slightly scared of snakes and scorpions, and literally that's where they are. So this descending passage you have to get in, I mean, it is like a nightmare. You have to crawl on your hands and knees eventually, and it gets smaller and smaller, and then it opens up, thank goodness, into this chamber. But there's some sort of soot graffiti there from the Greeks and Romans, so we know that they went in. And terrible graffiti up on chambers above where the King's sarcophagus is, that is now called things like Davison's Chamber, because loads of Brits went there and graffitied and it's named after them. So we should change that. But yeah, people have always had a go at the pyramid. And then was it Belzoni? Who was using the dynamite? Because they were trying to get

what? To the main burial chamber? Yeah, well, Belzoni who was using the dynamite because they were trying to get what to the main burial chamber? Yeah, well, Belzoni, I don't think for once, I don't think he did use dynamite, but some Brits did. So there's a man called Pering, for instance, who, yeah, was a bit overenthusiastic in the way that he wanted to explore. Amazing, isn't it? Yeah. How do people think that was a good idea? It's just a hubris, I don't know. I don't know, strange, isn't it?

Just, yeah, extraordinary. And then I guess there are still images of pyramids. There's still things called pyramids all over the world today. I mean, so Khufu didn't perhaps fulfill his primary purpose of mortality or whatever else, but he created something, an idea, a symbol that lasted forever. He did. And it makes me chuckle the fact that we talk about it as a pyramid because the ancient Egyptian for pyramid was Mer, M-E-R, which means a place of ascension. And a pyramus is actually the Greek word for a little bun or a cake. Because if you think about it, it is like a bun shaped. I guess so. a giant bun, basically. But you're right. But it's the pyramid that has inspired so many around the world. You think of the glass pyramid in the Louvre. It's an idea that's kind of burnt into

our memory. And there's fantastic work at the moment now about epigenetics and us being born with memory. But even more than that, people now think we're born with something called symbolic inheritance, that we're born because generations worth of our ancestors have talked about the pyramids, for instance, and indeed the seven wonders, that we're born thinking about them. You know, that we sort of somehow like this, because if you think about it, it's nuts. The seven wonders don't really mean anything. They're extraordinary, but they're not really a thing. But we are sort of born somehow thinking that they matter.

We need to know about them. We need to understand about them. And that could be that they are genetically within us, that we're born with this notion of the seven wonders of the ancient world mattering. Speaking of seven wonders, give the audience a quick sense of your top three picks for Bethany Hughes. It doesn't have to be on the seven wonders list,

but where do you love visiting? Oh, well, again, can we be here for the next week? Talking about that, I just... Hughes doesn't have to be on the seven wonders list but where do you love visiting oh well again can we be here for the next week talking about that I just worst question I know no no I thought you were going to ask me the worst question which is which is the eighth wonder okay which I also haven't got enough I won't ask but it would be people who are listening to this podcast please write to both of us and say which you would nominate for your eighth one okay I will answer that because I don't have a top three but three things that bring me nothing other than joy are traveling by boat to sites well obviously not because it's just quite a lot of fun but because

that's how people got around most of the time that's how people arrived yeah so you're kind of i did this um series about odysseus following, you know, Odysseus' trail. And it really helped me understand the Odyssey and Homer and how petrifying it was. And we nearly died one night. And, you know, there's a moment where I'm going completely off subject now, where we hear from Homer that Odysseus gets washed up after a storm on an island and he decides to stay for seven years. And we spent a night where we nearly thought that we were going to die.

And we ended up on Mykonos. And I thought, I'm just going to stay here for a bit you know i'm not going to carry on to the next time i'm going to hang out and you know meet some hot young locals i've worked with the team that you're working on that occasion and they've told me all about your dramatic night oh yeah yeah it's a real it's a real thing the real thing the fixer passed out not even made up no it's not even made up someone was sick the cameraman was sailing the boat still here to tell the story so anyway

so by boats I would say you know that's an extraordinary thing I adore going to Turkey Turkey A's we should now call it because there are more

archaeological remains there than proportionally than any other nation so you know there's always something to discover but my next journey is I'm going through arabia

so i'm on the trail of the nabateans oh yeah very good that's exciting new sites yeah very exciting new sites as in new to many people yeah but i have to say i i do love the it's a cliche but i love the pyramid mainly also because next door to it is that astonishing boat yes royal barge which is the sort of overlooked when people go there but it's just the most beautiful sailing vessel well river craft i've ever seen in my life completely again four and a half thousand years old and you can flat packed at the base of the pyramid they've rebuilt it yes yeah yeah and there's this you know almost certainly kufu would have traveled in that on the niles it would have been a royal barge and they put it there because it's an ocean that he might ascend

to the heavens by barge. So I know, beautiful. It's a beautiful site. I mean, the one thing I would say about the Giza Pyramid is don't do what a lot of people do is think, I'm going to go to Egypt. Go just to the pyramid.

Go and spend a week there. You'll have a- And walk around, get all those strange angles, different light, different times of day. Exactly, exactly. Wonderful. Bethany, different light, different times of day. Exactly. Exactly. Wonderful. Bethany, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

You've written a wonderful book called The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. So go out and get that, everybody. Pyramid's on the front. The pyramid is on the front. There's not much debate about that. Probably not. No, there was about how much gold we should put on it because it's got gold on it. And I said, no, it should just be gold on the top because that was what happened in real life. Then people said, your book cover isn't real life. It's a book cover. So there's a gold all over the pyramid on the book.

And we should say that of all the seven ones in the ancient world, the only one really standing that you get a full sense of today is the pyramid. It's the pyramid. It's virtually intact. It's the oldest. And if I had to choose one, I would say that one. It is a marvel of humankind. Thank you very much. You're a marvel. Thank you. Thanks for listening, everybody. Hope you're enjoying our Egypt week. We have more tomorrow. Ramesses II. Was he great? Was he just a master of self-promotion? And don't forget to follow the show wherever you're listening for your next episode to drop into your feed.

See you next time. you