The eye-sore
Just south of Saqqara there is a pyramid that is rarely visited by tourists because tour buses generally don't make it that far and cruise ships, who generally stop at every site, simply don't sail in that region. This pyramid is the result of a mistake, like an art project that fell off the table and then was stuck in a corner because it seemed like such a shame to throw it all away. It reminds us that life is a cliff upon whose edge we must remain grounded or else we shall surely plunge to our death. It might have been an engineering miscalculation or perhaps it was an overestimation of the size of the quarry from which the builders would extract the granite that make up it's construction. It amazes me that among all the Egyptian revival architecture we see in this day and age not one has copied the bent pyramid. From hospitals to cemeteries, police stations to churches, theaters to museums all borrow from the motifs and imagery that have somehow found a way to stay on the top of that cliff.
The straightness of lines are of utmost importance to the designer who requires an edge that does not waver. If it does, it's simply a curve. Now don't get me wrong here. I know that curves are needed and that they can serve to strengthen the foundation. This is well known and quite evident in the foundation of the Parthenon. Or consider a circle, if you will, and the invention of the wheel. If it we're not for the existence of a truly closed curve, modern transportation would not exist as we know it today. The ellipse most certainly would not have made a good wheel. Why I'd prefer the seasick rocking back and forth of a dromedary than to sit in the backseat of a car wobbling down the road on four would-be wheels. The delicate rear-ends of the Romans would not have tolerated roads of inverted catenaries simply to allow such naive engineering. But this is a digression from the point I'm trying to make. In order to understand why the bend is so blasphemous to the ancient Egyptians, you have to understand that straight lines were just as important as the annual flooding of the Nile. The straight edge is reliable, just as life and death, it gets you from point A to point B in the least amount time. The flood was time, if the flood stopped, time was frozen. Life ceased to exist until time was allowed to continue again. This was one of the metaphorical challenges facing the architect of a pyramid or temple in ancient Egypt. If the pyramid was truly a resting place for the paharaoh, for God on Earth, it absolutely had to prove itself immune to the flood and to time. The straighter its lines in the face of the harshest flood, the more omnipotent the pharaoh, the more loyal his subjects became.
This is why the mistake of the bent pyramid is so significant. The Pharaoh Sneferu got the angle of the slope wrong and had to lower its height because of it. From many angles the pyramid actually looks like the top of a large obelisk whose shaft is buried deep in the ground. If his son Khufu were alive today, I'll bet he'd say that his Dad was a royal fuck up. And he certainly wasn't going to allow the same mistake twice. In fact, he was able to build what would become the tallest man-made structure for the next 3,800 years. Among all of the 118 pyramids known in Egypt, there is only one that every child or elder, investment banker or mill-hand, tourist or backpacker can recall, the great pyramid of Khufu. We've all seen the child's imagination at work. In my case it was when I watched a nine year old boy construct a model of the pyramid from a bin of Legos at the local science museum. I can't tell you how many times I've reluctantly indulged some wide-eyed new ager describing their astral projection right to the very spot where the Pharaoh was buried, only then to carry on about her little good luck benben replica that she kept in her sailcloth bag from France. About a month ago, I sat next to a very tired man on the subway, most likely finishing a 12 hour sprint to stave off some downward market trend and watched this Wall-street workaholic delete a picture of the pyramid on his phone. I thought nothing of it until he received a follow-up message telling him to use his vacation days before he dies. He deleted that message also, presumable to tell the party at the other end that he never received it. But truth be told, he wasn't deleting a picture of the bent pyramid on his phone. He was deleting what many have described as one of the greatest moments in their lives.