Inscription of Khaemwaset on the Pyramid of Unas

Ancient Egyptian history didn’t just happen an awfully long time ago, but their civilisation also lasted an almost unimaginable length of time. It’s often noted that Cleopatra is closer to our time than she was to the time of the builders of the pyramids at Giza.

And the Egyptians knew it. They didn’t have tales of giants building the ancient monuments, they didn’t think it was some vanished race of superhumans, they knew that this was their ancestors constructing these buildings in the same way that their own king commissioned his own.

This is one of the ways that we know this – the vaguely pyramid shaped heap of stone on the left of the picture is the pyramid built by Unas, who ruled around 2350 BCE as the last king of the 5th Dynasty during the Old Kingdom.

And the cleaner looking slabs laid up against it are a (reconstructed) inscription commissioned by a man called Khaemwaset (who was one of the many, many sons of Ramesses II) around 1250 BCE during the 19th Dynasty in the New Kingdom.

The inscription talks about how he found that the pyramid was in ruin, so restored it and made sure that Unas’s name was on it once more. This ruined pyramid wasn’t just a heap of rubble to him, but was known to be the tomb of a specific king some 1200 years after it was built.