The Sphinx and the Long Afterlife of the Site

Giza did not stop being religious when the Fourth Dynasty ended. More than a thousand years after the pyramids were finished, the Great Sphinx had been buried to the neck in sand and was being worshipped under a new name as a form of the sun god, by people who no longer knew which king had built it. A New Kingdom prince cleared the sand, set up a carved stone between the paws recording a dream in which the god promised him the throne in exchange, and a small temple grew up on the spot. That is a second religion practised on top of the first, in the same place, with the original meaning largely lost.

The pattern repeats. Classical visitors treated Giza as one of the wonders of the world and left graffiti; medieval writers explained the pyramids as granaries or as libraries of antediluvian knowledge; and from the nineteenth century a steady stream of modern esoteric movements has attached its own claims to the Great Pyramid's dimensions. The atlas records these as later uses of the site rather than as evidence about what its builders intended. The reason the distinction matters is that the builders left their own evidence. The Pyramid Texts, carved in slightly later royal tombs, and the layout of the complexes themselves say what the pyramids were for, and it is not what most of the later theories propose.