This link is to a video at the website for Smithsonian magazine, but you can skip it.
The relevant thing is in the title, quoted:
The Egyptian Pharaoh With the Biggest Ego
Though little is known about Khufu, the pharaoh who oversaw the Great Pyramid's construction, vicious rumors about him persist today.
End quote.
I love this: the title reveals a great example of a perspectivism which exemplifies modern assumptions about reality.
You can make a case for Khufu as a pioneer in advancing mankind's spiritual progress. Perhaps no one else has, but, regardless, it could go like this:
Man is a creature shot through with infinities, as a modern scientists might say he is by cosmic rays.
Mathematics demonstrated something similar in its own timeless dawn: for example a line is made up of points, but this is literally impossible since the point has NO dimension.
Khufu as a king and priest, may have overseen the bumilding of pyramids as an empirical quest for the connection of the visible and the invisible, via this heaping upwards of --- matter --- reaching a point -- the sharpened point in which the earthen pyramid ends.
And something also, else, begins -- the point at which the interpenetration of what we call mind and matter, is isolated and made OBVIOUS. At that point which defines the pyramidal shape.
So the pyramids may have a place in the history of mathematics, and religion.
This view I outline is plausible, and may be moreso than one which trys to fit an anthropology that truncates man, onto an earlier time.
The pyramids then, do not indicate ego, but a humble and exploratory adventure into the human and what might lie at the edges. From a time when our divisions of the world into economics, politics, religion, sociology, art, had it been communicable to the best minds of many millenia ago, would have been seen as, amusingly blockheaded.
Perhaps.
If my skeches above demonstrate merely the difficulty, maybe inherent limitations, of understanding previous historical eras, that could be a success.
