American Believes Giza Pyramids Had Origins in an Ancient Religion : Archeology: An Egyptologist says buried boats found near the monuments are the key to answering the age-old question.

Among the most tantalizing mysteries of Egypt are those shielding the origins of the pyramids. Who built the first ones? Where, and why?

A leading American Egyptologist is convinced that he is close to the answers.

David O’Connor of the University of Pennsylvania believes the three famous Giza pyramids near Cairo, built over a 70-year period 4,500 years ago, grew from a fully developed religion that had existed for centuries.

In September, 1991, O’Connor led an archeological team to Abydos, where Egypt’s earliest Pharaohs built monuments. The ancient religious center 280 miles south of Cairo honors Osiris, the god of resurrection.

Their amazing discovery at Abydos of 12 buried wooden ships belonging to Pharaohs who reigned almost 5,000 years ago made sense of an earlier find: a mound inside a Pharaoh’s funeral structure.

So much of the mound was destroyed in antiquity that O’Connor and his colleagues were unsure exactly what it was when they dug it out in the late 1980s. Was it an early pyramid, they wondered--maybe even the first?

Then in September, a quarter-mile away, they found boat pits covered by mud brick shaped in the contours of boats. Ancient priests had blessed the vessels inside with offerings of pottery, then sealed the pits.

To O’Connor, curator of the Egyptian section of Penn’s University Museum, the boats are the key, “important clues that link up with Egypt’s first pyramid.”

“I’m not saying this has to be the first pyramid,” he said, “but we know something must have come before the huge pyramids in the deserts around Cairo, some prototype that became the first stepped pyramid, then a true pyramid.

“I think I’ve found it at Abydos.”

He said the earliest evidence of the pyramid is in pictures on artifacts that predate the Pharaohs and depict a mound with sides in a stairstep design.

Much later, such a mound would be the model for the glorious six-step pyramid of Pharaoh Zozer in Sakkara, south of the Giza Pyramids. Royal architect Imhotep built Zozer’s 198-foot-high pyramid, the world’s first major architectural achievement in stone, at about 2,620 BC.

The classic straight-sided shape evolved within decades and true pyramids dominated 65 miles of the Nile Valley.

At Abydos, the Pharaohs thought small. By the time they reached the deserts around Giza, they thought big.

Many Egyptologists believe the pyramid represents the Pharaoh’s ladder to heaven, the buried boats his means of riding eternally across the sunlit skies by day and the starry skies by night. The eternal journey symbolized resurrection.

Zahi Hawass, antiquities director of the Giza Pyramids area, called the discovery of the Abydos boats “wonderful and amazing.” He agrees that O’Connor probably is on the road to answering the pyramid puzzles.

“Early in Egyptian history, priests developed a formula for burial to ensure the Pharaoh’s resurrection,” Hawass said. “You had a pyramid, boat pits and a funerary monument where prayers and offerings to the Pharaoh were given.”

Five pits surrounded the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. A dismantled vessel was pulled up in 1954, reassembled and put on display as the royal ship of Cheops, one of Egypt’s greatest archeological treasures. A second dismantled ship lies in an adjacent pit.

By Cheops’ time, 200 years after Abydos, boats were so important that his pyramid contains vents to allow the soul easy access to the buried boats for the eternal ride.

Unfortunately, pyramids were easy prey.

“They said to robbers, ‘Take me. I’ve got goodies inside’ ,” Hawass said. “So Pharaohs had to find another way of burial and means of resurrection.”

More energy went into temples, with the pyramid-topped obelisk replacing the traditional pyramid.

Pharaohs covered tomb walls with magical formulas. Instead of burying boats, they put boat scenes on tomb walls to transport their souls. Later tombs often had small pyramids on top.

In the New Kingdom, 1,000 years after the Giza pyramids, Pharaohs tried yet another trick.

They chose a forbidding wilderness across the river from Thebes, the ancient southern capital at the site of modern-day Luxor. Guarded by the goddess of silence on a hilltop, tombs were carved in the rocky Valley of the Kings for Pharaohs, in the Valley of the Queens for their consorts.

“Had they still been using the old formula, we would never have had a King Tut’s tomb filled with marvelous things,” Hawass said. “Robbers would simply have looked for pyramids and boat pits.”