Structure in Their Lives

Egypt may be home to the most famous pyramids, but the new three-hour Learning Channel documentary “Pyramids, Mummies and Tombs,” airing Sunday, notes that these ancient, mammoth religious structures were also built in many locations around the world, including China, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Indonesia and the Sudan.

Hosted by mummy expert Bob Brier, who teaches at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, the program examines the universality of these pyramids and asks: Why did these man-made structures, which were separated by continents and diverse cultures, look so similar?

“For us, the answer sort of came out while we were doing the show,” Brier says. And that was: All of these cultures wanted to get as close as possible to their gods, and the only way to make these buildings--this was before steel beams or flying buttresses--was to use pyramidal shapes, enabling the stones to be piled high without collapsing under their own weight.

The documentary was two years in the making. “We wrote it for a while first,” Brier says. “We like to write the scripts first. It helps to know what you are doing before you get there rather than trying to make it up and shoot footage. We visited every single sight twice--first to look at it and scout it out and see if it is good, and then when we come with the full crews there were no surprises. It was quite an undertaking. We went to about 12 countries.”

Over the past five years, Brier has become a popular fixture on the cable outlet. He doesn’t see himself as a TV person, though. “I am an academic,” he says. “I haven’t given up my day job. I only work with TLC, and we have done 11 hours of shows before this”--including a six-hour miniseries called “The Great Egyptians.”

“Anything about Egypt and mummies is clearly something that fascinates people today,” says Roger Marmet, vice president of programming and acting general manager of TLC. “We have gone to that programming well a number of times and found really great stories. Rather than telling the same story, we are always finding new angles and ideas or discovering new sites. I’d say some of our most successful programs in this area have been with Bob Brier because he is enthusiastic and he’s an incredible conversationalist. He really is bringing it to life and bringing it down to everyone’s level.”

One of the aspects of pyramids that amazed Brier during his travels is that “people would put so much energy and so much economics into building these big pointy things,” he says. “There is a brief interview in the special with the director of the Egyptian antiquity service, and he said that in a sense, the pyramids made Egypt. Once you decided to build a pyramid, you had to have an architect. You had to have artists. In a sense, it was the tail wagging the dog.”

Though Egyptian pyramids were tombs designed to protect the pharaohs and their treasures for all eternity, the pyramids of the Aztec and Mayan cultures in Mexico were used for human sacrifice. At one point, 20,000 prisoners were killed in just three days. “Over the long run, it has to be hundreds of thousands,” Brier says. “It was kind of an ethic, a code of honor. You captured prisoners and the honorable thing to do was to sacrifice them. It went on and on for hundreds of years.”

The documentary also profiles several of the men who created these pyramids, such as Egypt’s Imhotep--who built the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara--and Hemienu, who designed the Great Pyramid of Giza. “We know the individuals,” Brier says. “There is some historical record. It’s a nice story to match a face with a pyramid.”

“Pyramids, Mummies and Tombs” can be seen Sunday at 8 p.m on the Learning Channel. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).