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The Great Pyramid at Giza—the oldest and
most intact of the seven ancient wonders How
of the ancient world—became a potent
symbol of the sublime in the 19th century, the Great
a symbol of power so absolute as to eclipse
human understanding. After Napoleon’s Pyramids
first expedition to Giza, “Egytomania…
swept through European culture and in-
fluenced the plastic arts, fashion, and de- of Giza

sign,” writes Miroslav Verner in The Pyra-
mids: The Mystery, Culture, and Science of Looked in
2560 BCE?
Egypt’s Great Monuments.

At the end of the century, Herman Melville
satirized the trend that would eventually

give rise to Ancient Aliens, asking in an 1891
poem, “Your masonry—and is it man’s?
More like some Cosmic artisan’s.” Egyp-
tomaniacs saw otherworldly magic in the
pyramid. For Melville, it “usurped” nature’s
greatness, standing as “evidence of hu-
mankind’s monumental will to power,” as
Dawid W. de Villiers writes.

The ancient Greeks believed the pyramids
were built with a massive slave labor force,

a theory that has persisted. As Verner ex-
haustively argues in his book, however,
they were not only built by humans—in-
stead of aliens or gods—but they were con-
structed by tradesmen and artisans whose
skills were in high demand and who were
paid wages and organized under a com-
plex bureaucracy.