In honor of the opening of the Bent Pyramid to the public, I offer you this excerpt from THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD. I loved writing this chapter about the pyramids...

"We know little about this first pharaoh of the Fourth
Dynasty, apart from records of now-standard expeditions to the mines of the Sinai and to the trading ports of Lebanon. (There is also a random story in the Westcar Papyrus of a day when Snefru, bored, ordered the twenty most
beautiful girls from his harem to row him around on the palace lake, dressed in nothing but fishnets.) But he was, if nothing else, tenacious. He turned from the failed Meydum experiment and began a new pyramid, this one in a
new location: Dahshur, a little bit south of Saqqara.

"From the beginning, this pyramid was different. It was designed from the start to be slope-sided, with a smooth facing of limestone which made it glitter in the sun.

"Much speculation has been centered around the pyramids, but one of the more fascinating unsolved mysteries is why Snefru, who has not been given enough credit for inventing a new architectural form, thought up the innovation
of making the pyramids smooth-sided rather than stepped. Did this have some religious significance? Did it symbolize a new way of thinking about the pyramids—as markers on the landscape, rather than centers of a complex for the spirit?

"We have no idea. But Snefru’s new smooth-sided pyramid became known . as the Bent Pyramid for the unfortunate reason that Snefru still hadn’t quite managed to figure out the angles. The pyramid was to have smooth and very
steep sides—but partway through the construction, Snefru and his chief of works seemed to realize that their measurements were off. If the pyramid continued
up at its current steep angle, the weight of the stones over the relatively narrow base would likely collapse it. So they made a quick alteration in the angle, with the result that the pyramid turned out hunch-shouldered; one of its sides makes a right-hand turn.

"This pyramid was completed, but never used. Snefru hadn’t yet managed to build an eternal resting place to his satisfaction. Near the end of his reign, he began work on his third pyramid. The Northern Pyramid, which stands a little more than a mile north of the Bent Pyramid, was wider, broader, and shorter than the pyramids which came
before. The Bent Pyramid had shifted its steep angle from 52 degrees to a more gradual 43 degrees; the Northern Pyramid was designed from its conception with sides that sloped at a 43-degree angle. In this last attempt, Snefru’s design was so well planned that even now, over four thousand years later, no cracks have appeared in the walls or ceilings of the chambers that lie beneath two
million tons of stone weight.

The Northern Pyramid (also nicknamed “the Red Pyramid,” since the limestone facing began to flake off and left the red sandstone beneath to glow in the sun) was probably Snefru’s final burial place. Archaeologists found a
body in it and shipped it off to the British Museum for identification; it was lost on the way and never found again.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-bent-pyramid-dahshur-cairo-sneferu-pharaoh-a90... ... See MoreSee Less

Egyptian ‘bent’ pyramid dating back 4,600 years opens to public

independent.co.uk

Tourists can now clamber down 79m tunnel of ancient structure built for King Sneferu

15 hours ago

I do love a semicolon. In fact, part of my editing process on a final draft is to go through and take half of them out...

"The semicolon itself was a Renaissance invention. It first appeared in 1494, in a book published in Venice by Aldus Manutius...The mark was a hybrid between a comma and a colon, and its purpose was to prolong a pause or create a more distinct separation between parts of a sentence...

"The problem with the semicolon is not how it looks but what it does and how that has changed over time. In the old days, punctuation simply indicated a pause. Comma, colon: semicolon; period. Eventually, grammarians and copy editors came along and made themselves indispensable by punctuating ('pointing') a writer’s prose 'to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax.' That is, commas, semicolons, and colons were plugged into a sentence in order to highlight, subordinate, or otherwise conduct its elements, connecting them syntactically. One of the rules is that, unless you are composing a list, a semicolon is supposed to be followed by a complete clause, capable of standing on its own. The semicolon can take the place of a conjunction, like 'and' or 'but,' but it should not be used in addition to it...."

www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/sympathy-for-the-semicolon ... See MoreSee Less

Sympathy for the Semicolon

newyorker.com

Cecelia Watson’s deceptively playful-looking book is a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization.

3 days ago

This lovely essay expresses so much of what I treasure about farming. Caring for livestock requires you to face unflinchingly up to the reality of death, and you can't face up to the death (and life) of animals without facing up to your own.

"No matter how skilled the gardener, something is always going wrong, and it’s easy to take these failures personally....The gardener must, as a wise man once said in a much different context, 'get used to disappointment.' I say gardening is mostly about heartbreak, then, partly as a form of self-protection, but also as a recognition that unbroken success is not the gardener’s lot. Living systems like a garden don’t permit of failure-proofing...

"Modernity tends to insulate us from death—in human life it does this by segregating death to hospitals and mortuaries, but it insulates us equally on the vegetal level: public landscapes are kept pristine and freshly planted year-round, and the grocery stores are always full of ripe fruit. Should we so choose, modern people can move about a world where the spectre of decay largely has been hidden from us...

"The annual heartbreaks of the garden serve to remind me of my mortality...Death is a regular feature of the garden year, from thinning the first seedlings of spring to enduring the last frosts of autumn. The gardener who must cut down a diseased sapling or pluck out an extra radish plant can preserve no delusion of endless youth and perpetual greenery. We observe death constantly as we care for our gardens, and indeed we may be called upon by the needs of the garden to deal out death ourselves.

"Moreover the gardener, at least in temperate regions, lives with a persistent consciousness of times and seasons. Constant attention to the changing of the seasons also means constant attention to the progress of time, progress that bears us ever closer to our end..."

www.frontporchrepublic.com/2019/07/learning-to-die-in-the-garden/ ... See MoreSee Less

Learning to Die in the Garden | Front Porch Republic

frontporchrepublic.com

Home Articles The Feed Store Learning to Die in the Garden ArticlesThe Feed StoreLearning to Die in the Garden By Matt Miller - July 15, 2019 2 Reading Time: 4 minutes Facebook Twitter Email Print I’m prone to say that the gardening year resembles nothing so much as a succession of heartbreaks, an...

4 days ago