The Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, site of the deadly race run between condemned grand viziers and their executioners.

The executioners of the Ottoman Empire were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death by “compression of the testicles”–as contemporary chronicles put it–at the hands of an assassin known as Pehlivan the Oil Wrestler. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, in fact), the Ottoman dynasty flourished—ruling over modern Turkey, the Balkans and most of North Africa and the Middle East—thanks in part to the staggering violence it meted out to the highest and mightiest members of society.

Seen from this perspective, it might be argued that the Ottomans’ decline set in early in the 17th century, precisely at the point when they abandoned the policy of ritually murdering a significant proportion of the royal family whenever a sultan died, and substituted the Western notion of simply giving the job to the first-born son instead. Before then, Ottoman succession had been governed by the “law of fratricide” drawn up by Mehmed II in the middle of the 15th century. Under the terms of this remarkable piece of legislation, whichever member of the ruling dynasty succeeded in seizing the throne on the death of the old sultan was not merely permitted, but enjoined, to murder all his brothers (together with any inconvenient uncles and cousins) in order to reduce the risk of subsequent rebellion and civil war. Although it was not invariably applied, Mehmed’s law resulted in the deaths of at least 80 members of the House of Osman over a period of 150 years. These victims included all 19 siblings of Sultan Mehmed III—some of whom were still infants at the breast, but all of whom were strangled with silk handkerchiefs immediately after their brother’s accession in 1595.

Osman II: death by crushed testicles. Image: Wikicommons.

For all its deficiencies, the law of fratricide ensured that the most ruthless of the available princes generally ascended to the throne. That was more than could be said of its replacement, the policy of locking up unwanted siblings in the kafes (“cage”), a suite of rooms deep within the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. From around 1600, generations of Ottoman royals were kept imprisoned there until they were needed, sometimes several decades later, consoled in the meantime by barren concubines and permitted only a strictly limited range of recreations, the chief of which was macramé. This, the later history of the empire amply demonstrated, was not ideal preparation for the pressures of ruling one of the greatest states the world has ever known.

For many years, the Topkapi itself paid mute testimony to the grand extent of Ottoman ruthlessness. In order to enter the palace, visitors had first to pass through the Imperial Gate, on either side of which were two niches where the heads of recently executed criminals were always on display. Inside the gate stood the First Court, through which all visitors to the inner portions of the palace had to pass. This court was open to all the sultan’s subjects, and it seethed with an indescribable mass of humanity. Any Turk had the right to petition for redress of his grievances, and several hundred agitated citizens usually surrounded the kiosks at which harassed scribes took down their complaints. Elsewhere within the same court stood numerous armories and magazines, the buildings of the imperial mint and stables for 3,000 horses. The focal point, however, was a pair of “example stones” positioned directly outside the Central Gate, which led to the Second Court. These “stones” were actually marble pillars on which were placed the severed heads of notables who had somehow offended the sultan, stuffed with cotton if they had once been viziers or with straw if they had been lesser men. Reminders of the sporadic mass executions ordered by the sultan were occasionally piled up by the Central Gate as additional warnings: severed noses, ears and tongues.

Selim the Grim. Image: Wikicommons.

Capital punishment was so common in the Ottoman Empire that there was a Fountain of Execution in the First Court, where the chief executioner and his assistant went to wash their hands after decapitating their victims—ritual strangulation being reserved for members of the royal family and their most senior officials. This fountain “was the most feared symbol of the arbitrary power of life and death of the sultans over their subjects, and was hated and feared accordingly,” the historian Barnette Miller wrote. It was used with particular frequency during the reign of Sultan Selim I—Selim the Grim (1512-20)—who, in a reign of eight short years, went through seven grand viziers (the Ottoman title for a chief minister) and ordered 30,000 executions. So perilous was the position of vizier in those dark days that holders of the office were said not to leave their homes in the morning without tucking their wills inside their robes; for centuries afterward, Miller points out, one of the most common curses uttered in the Ottoman Empire was “Mays’t thou be vizier to Sultan Selim!”

Given the escalating demands of the executioner’s job, it seems remarkable that the Turks employed no specialist headsman to tackle the endless round of loppings, but they did not. The job of executioner was held instead by the Sultan’s bostancı basha, or head gardener—the Ottoman corps of gardeners being a sort of 5,000-strong bodyguard that, aside from cultivating the Sultan’s paradise gardens, doubled up as customs inspectors and police officers. It was the royal gardeners who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosphorus—it is said that another Sultan, Ibrahim the Mad (1640-48), once had all 280 of the women in his harem executed this way simply so he could have the pleasure of selecting their successors—and the tread of an approaching group of bostancıs, wearing their traditional uniform of red skull caps, muslin breeches and shirts cut low to expose muscular chests and arms, heralded death by strangulation or decapitation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years.

A bostancı, or member of the Ottoman corps of gardener-executioners. The artist, a European who worked from travelers' accounts, has incorrectly shown him wearing a fez rather than the traditional skull cap.

When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the bostancı basha in person, but—at least toward the end of the sultans’ rule—execution was not the inevitable result of a death sentence. Instead, the condemned man and the bostancı basha took part in what was surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history: a race held between the head gardener and his anticipated victim, the result of which was, quite literally, a matter of life or death for the trembling grand vizier or chief eunuch required to undertake it.

How this custom came about remains unknown. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, accounts of the bizarre race began to emerge from the seraglio, and these seem reasonably consistent in their details. Death sentences passed within the walls of the Topkapi were generally delivered to the head gardener at the Central Gate; and Godfrey Goodwin describes the next part of the ritual thus:

It was the bostancibaşi‘s duty to summon any notable.… When the vezir or other unfortunate miscreant arrived, he well knew why he had been summoned, but he had to bite his lip through the courtesies of hospitality before, at long last, being handed a cup of sherbet. If it were white, he sighed with relief, but if it were red he was in despair, because red was the color of death.

For most of the bostancıs’ victims, the sentence was carried out immediately after the serving of the fatal sherbet by a group of five muscular young janissaries, members of the sultan’s elite infantry. For a grand vizier, however, there was still a chance: as soon as the death sentence was passed, the condemned man would be allowed to run as fast as he was able the 300 yards or so from the palace, through the gardens, and down to the Fish Market Gate on the southern side of the palace complex, overlooking the Bosphorus, which was the appointed place of execution. (On the map below, which you can view in higher resolution by double clicking on it, the Central Gate is number 109 and the Fish Market Gate number 115.)

A plan of the vast Topkapi Palace complex in Istanbul, from Miller's Beyond the Sublime Porte. Click to view in higher resolution.

If the deposed vizier reached the Fish Market Gate before the head gardener, his sentence was commuted to mere banishment. But if the condemned man found the bostanci basha waiting for him at the gate, he was summarily executed and his body hurled into the sea.

Ottoman records show that the strange custom of the fatal race lasted into the early years of the nineteenth century. The last man to save his neck by winning the life-or-death sprint was the Grand Vizier Hacı Salih Pasha, in November 1822. Hacı—whose predecessor had lasted a mere nine days in office before his own execution—not only survived his death sentence, but was so widely esteemed for winning his race that he went on to be appointed governor general of the province of Damascus.

After that, though, the custom languished, along with the empire itself. The Ottomans barely saw out the 19th century, and when the Turkish state revived, in the 1920s under Kemal Atatürk, it did so by turning its back on almost everything the old empire had stood for.

Sources

Anthony Alderson. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956; Joseph, Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall. Des Osmanischen Reichs: Staatsverfassung und Staatsverwaltung. Vienna, 2 vols.: Zwenter Theil, 1815; I. Gershoni et al, Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions. Boulder [CO]: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002; Geoffrey Goodwin. Topkapi Palace: an Illustrated Guide to its Life and Personalities. London: Saqi Books, 1999; Albert Lybyer. The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1913; Barnette Miller. Beyond the Sublime Porte: the Grand Seraglio of Stambul. New Haven [CT]: Yale University Press, 1928; Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson. Tableau Général de l’Empire Ottoman. Paris, 3 vols., 1787-1820; Baki Tezcan. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

A Roman chariot race, showing men from two of the four color-themed demes, or associations, that produced the Blues and the Greens. From a poster advertising the 1925 film version of Ben-Hur. Image: Wikicommons.

“Bread and circuses,” the poet Juvenal wrote scathingly. “That’s all the common people want.” Food and entertainment. Or to put it another way, basic sustenance and bloodshed, because the most popular entertainments offered by the circuses of Rome were the gladiators and chariot racing, the latter often as deadly as the former. As many as 12 four-horse teams raced one another seven times around the confines of the greatest arenas—the Circus Maximus in Rome was 2,000 feet long, but its track was not more than 150 feet wide—and rules were few, collisions all but inevitable, and hideous injuries to the charioteers extremely commonplace. Ancient inscriptions frequently record the deaths of famous racers in their early 20s, crushed against the stone spina that ran down the center of the race track or dragged behind their horses after their chariots were smashed.

Charioteers, who generally started out as slaves, took these risks because there were fortunes to be won. Successful racers who survived could grow enormously wealthy—another Roman poet, Martial, grumbled in the first century A.D. that it was possible to make as much as 15 bags of gold for winning a single race. Diocles, the most successful charioteer of them all, earned an estimated 36 million sesterces in the course of his glittering career, a sum sufficient to feed the whole city of Rome for a year. Spectators, too, wagered and won substantial sums, enough for the races to be plagued by all manner of dirty tricks; there is evidence that the fans sometimes hurled nail-studded curse tablets onto the track in an attempt to disable their rivals.

In the days of the Roman republic, the races featured four color-themed teams, the Reds, the Whites, the Greens and the Blues, each of which attracted fanatical support. By the sixth century A.D., after the western half of the empire fell, only two of these survived—the Greens had incorporated the Reds, and the Whites had been absorbed into the Blues. But the two remaining teams were wildly popular in the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, and their supporters were as passionate as ever—so much so that they were frequently responsible for bloody riots.

The Byzantine Empire at its height under the Emperor Justinian in c. 560. Map: Wikicommons.

Exactly what the Blues and the Greens stood for remains a matter of dispute among historians. For a long time it was thought that the two groups gradually evolved into what were essentially early political parties, the Blues representing the ruling classes and standing for religious orthodoxy, and the Greens being the party of the people. The Greens were also depicted as proponents of the highly divisive theology of Monophysitism, an influential heresy which held that Christ was not simultaneously divine and human but had only a single nature. (In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., it threatened to tear the Byzantine Empire apart.) These views were vigorously challenged in the 1970s by Alan Cameron, not least on the grounds that the games were more important than politics in this period, and perfectly capable of arousing violent passions on their own. In 501, for example, the Greens ambushed the Blues in Constantinople’s amphitheater and massacred 3,000 of them. Four years later, in Antioch, there was a riot caused by the triumph of Porphyrius, a Green charioteer who had defected from the Blues.

Even Cameron concedes that this suggests that after about 500 the rivalry between the Greens and the Blues escalated and spread well outside Constantinople’s chariot racing track, the Hippodrome–a slightly smaller version of the Circus Maximus whose central importance to the capital is illustrated by its position directly adjacent to the main imperial palace. (Byzantine emperors had their own entrance to the arena, a passageway that led directly from the palace to their private box.) This friction came to a head during the reign of Justinian (c. 482-565), one of Byzantium’s greatest but most controversial emperors.

The ruins of Constantinople’s Hippodrome in 1600, from an engraving by Onofrio Panvinio in De Ludis Circensibus. The spina that stood at the center of the chariot racing circuit was still visible then; in modern Istanbul, only three of the ancient monuments remain.

In the course of Justinian’s reign, the empire recovered a great deal of lost territory, including most of the North African littoral and the whole of Italy, but it did so at enormous cost and only because the emperor was served by some of the most able of  Byzantine heroes—the great general Belisarius, who has good claim to be ranked alongside Alexander, Napoleon and Lee; an aged but vastly competent eunuch named Narses (who continued to lead armies in the field into his 90s); and, perhaps most important, John of Cappadocia, the greatest tax administrator of his day. John’s chief duty was to raise the money needed to fund Justinian’s wars, and his ability to do so made him easily the most reviled man in the empire, not least among the Blues and Greens.

Justinian had a fourth adviser, though, one whose influence over him was even more scandalous than the Cappadocian’s. This was his wife, Theodora, who refused to play the subordinate role normally expected of a Byzantine empress. Theodora, who was exceptionally beautiful and unusually intelligent, took an active role in the management of the empire. This was a controversial enough move in itself, but it was rendered vastly more so by the empress’s lowly origins. Theodora had grown up among the working classes of Byzantium. She was a child of the circus who became Constantinople’s best known actress—which, in those days, was the same thing as saying that she was the Empire’s most infamous courtesan.

The Emperor Justinian, from a mosaic at Ravenna. Image: Wikicommons.

Thanks to the Secret History of the contemporary writer Procopius, we have a good idea of how Theodora met Justinian in about 520. Since Procopius utterly loathed her, we also have what is probably the most uncompromisingly direct personal attack mounted on any emperor or empress. Procopius portrayed Theodora as a wanton of the most promiscuous sort, and no reader is likely to forget the picture he painted of a stage act that the future empress was said to have performed involving her naked body, some grain, and a gaggle of trained geese.

From our perspective, Theodora’s morals are of less importance than her affiliations. Her mother was probably an acrobat. She was certainly married to the man who held the position of bear-keeper to the Greens. When he died unexpectedly, leaving her with three young daughters, the mother was left destitute. Desperate, she hastily remarried and went with her infant children to the arena, where she begged the Greens to find a job for her new husband. They pointedly ignored her, but the Blues—sensing the opportunity to paint themselves as more magnanimous—found work for him. Unsurprisingly, Theodora thereafter grew up to be a violent partisan of the Blues, and her unswerving support for the faction became a factor in Byzantine life after 527, when she was crowned as empress—not least because Justinian himself, before he became Emperor, had given 30 years of loud support to the same team.

Justinian’s empress, Theodora, a leading supporter of the Blues, rose from the most humble beginnings, captivating the emperor with her beauty, intelligence and determination.

These two threads—the fast-growing importance of the circus factions and the ever-increasing burden of taxation—combined in 532. By this time, John of Cappadocia had introduced no fewer than 26 new taxes, many of which fell, for the first time, on Byzantium’s wealthiest citizens. Their discontent sent shock waves through the imperial city, which were only magnified when Justinian reacted harshly to an outbreak of fighting between the Greens and the Blues at the races of January 10. Sensing the disorder had the potential to spread, and eschewing his allegiance to the Blues, the emperor sent in his troops. Seven of the ringleaders in the rioting were condemned to death.

The men were taken out of the city a few days later to be hanged at Sycae, on the east side of the Bosphorus, but the executions were botched. Two of the seven survived when the scaffold broke; the mob that had assembled to watch the hangings cut them down and hustled them off to the security of a nearby church. The two men were, as it happened, a Blue and a Green, and thus the two factions found themselves, for once, united in a common cause. The next time the chariots raced in the Hippodrome, Blues and Greens alike called on Justinian to spare the lives of the condemned, who had been so plainly and so miraculously spared by God.

Soon the crowd’s loud chanting took on a hostile edge. The Greens vented their resentment at the imperial couple’s support for their rivals, and the Blues their anger at Justinian’s sudden withdrawal of favor. Together, the two factions shouted the words of encouragement they generally reserved for the charioteers—Nika! Nika! (“Win! Win!”) It became obvious that the victory they anticipated was of the factions over the emperor, and with the races hastily abandoned, the mob poured out into the city and began to burn it down.

For five days the rioting continued. The Nika Riots were the most widespread and serious disturbances ever to occur in Constantinople, a catastrophe exacerbated by the fact that the capital had nothing resembling a police force. The mob called for the dismissal of John of Cappadocia, and the Emperor immediately obliged, but to no effect. Nothing Justinian did could assuage the crowd.

On the fourth day, the Greens and Blues sought out a possible replacement for the emperor. On the fifth, January 19, Hypatius, a nephew of a former ruler, was hustled to the Hippodrome and seated on the imperial throne.

It was at this point that Theodora proved her mettle. Justinian, panicked, was all for fleeing the capital to seek the support of loyal army units. His empress refused to countenance so cowardly an act. “If you, my lord,” she told him,

wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest winding-sheet.

Belisarius, the Byzantines’ greatest general—he once conquered the whole of Italy with fewer than 10,000 men–led the troops who massacred 30,000 Greens and Blues in the Hippodrome to put an end to the Nika Riots.

Shamed, Justinian determined to stay and fight. Both Belisarius and Narses were with him in the palace, and the two generals planned a counterstrike. The Blues and the Greens, still assembled in the Hippodrome, were to be locked into the arena. After that, loyal troops, most of them Thracians and Goths with no allegiance to either of the circus factions, could be sent in to cut them down.

Imagine a force of heavily armed troops advancing on the crowds in the MetLife Stadium or Wembley and you’ll have some idea of how things developed in the Hippodrome, a stadium with a capacity of about 150,000 that held tens of thousands of partisans of the Greens and Blues. While Belisarius’ Goths hacked away with swords and spears, Narses and the men of the Imperial Bodyguard blocked the exits and prevented any of the panicking rioters from escaping. “Within a few minutes,” John Julius Norwich writes in his history of Byzantium, “the angry shouts of the great amphitheater had given place to the cries and groans of wounded and dying men; soon these too grew quiet, until silence spread over the entire arena, its sand now sodden with the blood of the victims.”

Byzantine historians put the death toll in the Hippodrome at about 30,000. That would be as much as 10 percent of the population of the city at the time. They were, Geoffrey Greatrex observes, “Blues as well as Greens, innocent as well as guilty; the Chrionicon Paschale notes the detail that ‘even Antipater, the tax-collector of Antioch Theopolis, was slain.’ ”

With the massacre complete, Justinian and Theodora had little trouble re-establishing control over their smoldering capital. The unfortunate Hypatius was executed; the rebels’ property was confiscated, and John of Cappadocia was swiftly reinstalled to levy yet more burdensome taxes on the depopulated city.

The Nika Riots marked the end of an era in which circus factions held some sway over the greatest empire west of China, and signaled the end of chariot racing as a mass spectator sport within Byzantium. Within a few years the great races and Green-Blue rivalries were memories. They would be replaced, however, with something yet more threatening–for as Norwich observes, after Justinian’s death theological debate became what amounted to the empire’s national sport. And with the Orthodox battling the Monophysites, and the iconoclasts waiting in the wings, Byzantium was set on course for rioting and civil war that would put even the massacre in the Hippodrome in sorry context.

Sources

Alan Cameron. Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; James Allan Evans. The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002; Sotiris Glastic. “The organization of chariot racing in the great hippodrome of Byzantine Constantinople,” in The International Journal of Sports History 17 (2000); Geoffrey Greatrex, “The Nika Revolt: A Reappraisal,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997); Pieter van der Horst. “Jews and Blues in late antiquity,” in idem (ed), Jews and Christians in the Graeco-Roman Context. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006; Donald Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007; Michael Maas (ed). The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: CUP, 2005; George Ostrogorsky. History of the Byzantine State. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; John Julius Norwich. Byzantium: The Early Centuries. London: Viking, 1988; Procopius. The Secret History. London: Penguin, 1981; Marcus Rautman. Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire. Westport [CT]: Greenwood Press, 2006.

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. Photo: Wikicommons

There is a story, regrettably apocryphal, about Napoleon and the Great Pyramid. When Bonaparte visited Giza during his Nile expedition of 1798 (it goes), he determined to spend a night alone inside the King’s Chamber, the granite-lined vault that lies precisely in the center of the pyramid. This chamber is generally acknowledged as the spot where Khufu, the most powerful ruler of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c.2690-2180 BC), was interred for all eternity, and it still contains the remains of Pharaoh’s sarcophagus—a fractured mass of red stone that is said to ring like a bell when struck.

Having ventured alone into the pyramid’s forbidding interior and navigated its cramped passages armed with nothing but a guttering candle, Napoleon emerged the next morning white and shaken, and thenceforth refused to answer any questions about what had befallen him that night. Not until 23 years later, as he lay on his death bed, did the emperor at last consent to talk about his experience. Hauling himself painfully upright, he began to speak—only to halt almost immediately.

“Oh, what’s the use,” he murmured, sinking back. “You’d never believe me.”

As I say, the story is not true—Napoleon’s private secretary, De Bourrienne, who was with him in Egypt, insists that he never went inside the tomb. (A separate tradition suggests that the emperor, as he waited for other members of his party to scale the outside of the pyramid, passed the time calculating that the structure contained sufficient stone to erect a wall around all France 12 feet high and one foot thick.) That the tale is told at all, however, is testament to the fascination exerted by this most mysterious of monuments–and a reminder that the pyramid’s interior is at least as compelling as its exterior. Yes, it is impressive to know that Khufu’s monument was built from 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing on average more than two tons and cut using nothing more than copper tools; to realize that its sides are precisely aligned to the cardinal points of the compass and differ one from another in length by no more than two inches, and to calculate that, at 481 feet, the pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for practically 4,000 years—until the main spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed in about 1400 A.D. But these superlatives do not help us to understand its airless interior.

The interior of the Great Pyramid. Plan by Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1877. Click to view in greater definition.

Few would be so bold as to suggest that, even today, we know why Khufu ordered the construction of what is by far the most elaborate system of passages and chambers concealed within any pyramid. His is the only one of the 35 such tombs constructed between 2630 and 1750 B.C. to contain tunnels and vaults well above ground level. (Its immediate predecessors, the Bent Pyramid and the North Pyramid at Dahshur, have vaults built at ground level; all the others are solid structures whose burial chambers lie well underground.) For years, the commonly accepted theory was that the Great Pyramid’s elaborate features were the product of a succession of changes in plan, perhaps to accommodate Pharaoh’s increasingly divine stature as his reign went on, but the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner has marshaled evidence suggesting that the design was fixed before construction began. If so, the pyramid’s internal layout becomes even more mysterious, and that’s before we bear in mind the findings of the Quarterly Review, which reported in 1818, after careful computation, that the structure’s known passages and vaults occupy a mere 1/7,400th of its volume, so that “after leaving the contents of every second chamber solid by way of separation, there might be three thousand seven hundred chambers, each equal in size to the sarcophagus chamber, [hidden] within.”

But if the thinking behind the pyramid’s design remains unknown, there is a second puzzle that should be easier to solve: the question of who first entered the Great Pyramid after it was sealed in about 2566 B.C. and what they found inside it.

It’s a problem that gets remarkably little play in mainstream studies, perhaps because it’s often thought that all Egyptian tombs—with the notable exception of Tutankhamun’s—were plundered within years of their completion. There’s no reason to suppose that the Great Pyramid would have been exempt; tomb-robbers were no respecters of the dead, and there is evidence that they were active at Giza—when the smallest of the three pyramids there, which was built by Khufu’s grandson Menkaure, was broken open in 1837, it was found to contain a mummy that had been interred there around 100 B.C. In other words, the tomb had been ransacked and reused.

The subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid, photographed in 1909, showing the mysterious blind passage that heads off into the bedrock before terminating abruptly in a blank wall after 53 feet.

The evidence that the Great Pyramid was similarly plundered is more equivocal; the accounts we have say two quite contradictory things. They suggest that the upper reaches of the structure remained sealed until they were opened under Arab rule in the ninth century A.D. But they also imply that when these intruders first entered the King’s Chamber, the royal sarcophagus was already open and Khufu’s mummy was nowhere to be seen.

This problem is one of more than merely academic interest, if only because some popular accounts of the Great Pyramid take as their starting point the idea that Khufu was never interred there, and go on to suggest that if the pyramid was not a tomb, it must have been intended as a storehouse for ancient wisdom, or as an energy accumulator, or as a map of the future of mankind. Given that, it’s important to know what was written by the various antiquaries, travelers and scientists who visited Giza before the advent of modern Egyptology in the 19th century.

Let’s start by explaining that the pyramid contains two distinct tunnel systems, the lower of which corresponds to those found in earlier monuments, while the upper (which was carefully hidden and perhaps survived inviolate much longer) is unique to the Great Pyramid. The former system begins at a concealed entrance 56 feet above ground in the north face, and proceeds down a low descending passage to open, deep in the bedrock on which the pyramid was built, into what is known as the Subterranean Chamber. This bare and unfinished cavern, inaccessible today, has an enigmatic pit dug into its floor and serves as the starting point for a small, cramped tunnel of unknown purpose that dead-ends in the bedrock.

Above, within the main bulk of the pyramid, the second tunnel system leads up to a series of funerary vaults. To outwit tomb robbers, this Ascending Passage was blocked with granite plugs, and its entrance in the Descending Passage was disguised with a limestone facing identical to the surrounding stones. Beyond it lies the 26-foot-high Grand Gallery, the Queen’s Chamber and the King’s Chamber. Exciting discoveries have been made in the so-called air shafts found in both these chambers, which lead up toward the pyramid’s exterior. The pair in the Queen’s Chamber, concealed behind masonry until they were rediscovered late in the 19th century, are the ones famously explored by robot a few years ago and shown to end in mysterious miniature “doors.” These revelations that have done little to dampen hope that the pyramid hides further secrets.

The forced tunnel in the north face of the Great Pyramid, supposedly dug on the orders of Caliph Ma'mun early in the ninth century.

It is generally supposed that the Descending Passage was opened in antiquity; both Herodotus, in 445 B.C., and Strabo, writing around 20 A.D., give accounts that imply this. There is nothing, though, to show that the secret of the Ascending Passage was known to the Greeks or Romans. It is not until we reach the 800s, and the reign of an especially curious and learned Muslim ruler, the Caliph Ma’mun, that the record becomes interesting again.

It’s here that it becomes necessary to look beyond the obvious. Most scholarly accounts state unequivocally that it was Ma’mun who first forced his way into the upper reaches of the pyramid, in the year 820 A.D. By then, they say, the location of the real entrance had been long forgotten, and the caliph therefore chose what seemed to be a likely spot and set his men to forcing a new entry—a task they accomplished with the help of a large slice of luck.

Popular Science magazine, in 1954, put it this way:

Starting on the north face, not far from the secret entrance they had failed to find, Al-Mamun’s men drove a tunnel blindly into the pyramid’s solid rock…. The tunnel had progressed about 100 feet southward into the pyramid when the muffled thud of a falling rock slab, somewhere near them, electrified the diggers. Burrowing eastward whence the sound had come, they broke into the Descending Passage. Their hammering, they found, had shaken down the limestone slab hiding the plugged mouth of the Ascending Passage.

It was then, modern accounts continue, that Ma’mun’s men realized that they had uncovered a secret entrance. Tunneling around the impenetrable granite, they emerged in the Ascending Passage below the Grand Gallery. At that point, they had defeated most of Khufu’s defenses, and the upper reaches of the pyramid lay open to them.

That’s the story, anyway, and—if accurate—it adds considerably to the mystery of the Great Pyramid. If the upper passages had remained hidden, what happened to Khufu’s mummy and to the rich funerary ornaments so great a king would surely have been buried with? Only one alternate route into the upper vaults exists—a crude “well shaft” whose entrance was concealed next to the Queen’s Chamber, and which exits far below in the Descending Passage. This was apparently dug as an escape route for the workers who placed the granite plugs. But it is far too rough and narrow to allow large pieces of treasure to pass, which means the puzzle of the King’s Chamber remains unresolved.

The granite plug blocking access to the upper portion of the Great Pyramid. It was the fall of the large limestone cap concealing this entrance that supposedly alerted Arab tunnelers to the location of Khufu's passages.

Is it possible, though, that the Arab accounts that Egyptologists depend on so unquestioningly may not be all they seem? Some elements ring true—for instance, it has been pointed out that later visitors to the Great Pyramid were frequently plagued by giant bats, which made their roosting places deep in its interior; if Ma’mun’s men did not encounter them, that might suggest no prior entry. But other aspects of these early accounts are far less credible. Read in the original, the Arab histories paint a confused and contradictory picture of the pyramids; most were composed several centuries after Ma’mun’s time, and none so much as mentions the vital date–820 A.D.— so confidently stated in every Western work published since the 1860s. Indeed, the reliability of all these modern accounts is called into question by the fact that the chronology of Ma’mun’s reign makes it clear he spent 820 in his capital, Baghdad. The caliph visited Cairo only once, in 832. If he did force entry into the Great Pyramid, it must have been in that year.

How can the Egyptologists have got such a simple thing wrong? Almost certainly, the answer is that those who spend their lives studying ancient Egypt have no reason to know much about medieval Muslim history. But this means they do not realize that the Arab chronicles they cite are collections of legends and traditions needing interpretation. Indeed, the earliest, written by the generally reliable al-Mas’udi and dating to no earlier than c. 950, does not even mention Ma’mun as the caliph who visited Giza. Al-Mas’udi attributes the breaching of the pyramid to Ma’mun’s father, Haroun al-Rashid, a ruler best remembered as the caliph of the Thousand and One Nights—and he appears in a distinctly fabulous context. When, the chronicler writes, after weeks of labor Haroun’s men finally forced their way in, they:

found a vessel filled with a thousand coins of the finest gold, each of which was a dinar in weight. When Haroun al-Rashid saw the gold, he ordered that the expenses he incurred should be calculated, and the amount was found exactly equal to the treasure which was discovered.

It should be stated here that least one apparently straightforward account of Ma’mun’s doings does survive; Al-Idrisi, writing in 1150, says that the caliph’s men uncovered both ascending and descending passages, plus a vault containing a sarcophagus which, when opened, proved to contain ancient human remains. But other chroniclers of the same period tell different and more fantastical tales. One, Abu Hamid, the Andalusian author of the Tuhfat al Albab, insists that he himself entered the Great Pyramid, yet goes on to talk of several large “apartments” containing bodies “enveloped in many wrappers, that had become black through length of time,” and then insists that

those who went up there in the time of Ma’mun came to a small passage, containing the image of a man in green stone, which was taken out for examination before the Caliph; when it was opened a human body was discovered in golden armor, decorated with precious stones, and in his hand was a sword of inestimable value, and above his head a ruby the size of an egg, which shone like fire.

What, though, of the earliest accounts of the tunnel dug into the pyramid? Here the most influential writers are two other Muslim chroniclers, Abd al-Latif (c.1220) and the renowned world traveler Ibn Battuta (c.1360). Both men report that Ma’mun ordered his men to break into Khufu’s monument using fire and sharpened iron stakes—first the stones of the pyramid were heated, then cooled with vinegar, and, as cracks appeared in them, hacked to pieces using sharpened iron staves. Ibn Battuta adds that a battering ram was used to smash open a passage.

Nothing in either of these accounts seems implausible, and the Great Pyramid does indeed bear the scar of a narrow passage that has been hacked into its limestone and which is generally supposed to have been excavated by Ma’mun. The forced passage is located fairly logically, too, right in the middle of the north face, a little below and a little to the right of the real (but then concealed) entrance, which the cunning Egyptians of Khufu’s day had placed 24 feet off center in an attempt to out-think would-be tomb robbers. Yet the fact remains that the Arab versions were written 400 to 500 years after Ma’mun’s time; to expect them to be accurate summaries of what took place in the ninth century is the equivalent of asking today’s casual visitor to Virginia to come up with a credible account of the lost colony of Roanoke. And on top of that, neither Abd al-Latif nor Ibn Battuta says anything about how Ma’mun decided where to dig, or mentions the story of the falling capstone guiding the exhausted tunnelers.

Given all this, it is legitimate to ask why anyone believes it was Ma’mun who entered the Great Pyramid, and to wonder how the capstone story entered circulation. The answer sometimes advanced to the first question is that there is a solitary account that dates, supposedly, to the 820s and so corroborates Arab tradition. This is an old Syriac fragment (first mentioned in this context in 1802 by a French writer named Silvestre de Sacy) which relates that the Christian patriarch Dionysius Telmahrensis accompanied Ma’mun to the pyramids and described the excavation that the caliph made there. Yet this version of events, too, turns out to date to hundreds of years later. It appears not in the chronicle that De Sacy thought was written by Dionysius (and which we now know was completed years before Ma’mun’s time, in 775-6 A.D., and composed by someone else entirely), but in the 13th century Chronicon Ecclesiasticum of Bar-Hebraeus. This author, another Syrian bishop, incorporates passages of his predecessor’s writings, but there is no way of establishing whether they are genuine. To make matters worse, the scrap relating to the pyramids says only that Dionysius looked into “an opening” in one of the three monuments of Giza—which might or might not have been a passage in the Great Pyramid, and might or might not have excavated by Ma’mun. This realization takes us no closer to knowing whether the caliph really was responsible for opening the pyramid, and leaves us as dependent on late date Arab sources as we were before.

As for the story of the falling capstone–that remains an enigma. A concerted hunt reveals it first appeared in the middle of the 19th century, published by Charles Piazzi Smyth. But Smyth does not say where he found it. There are hints, which I still hope to run to ground some day, that it may have made its first appearance in the voluminous works of a Muslim scientist, Abu Salt al-Andalusi. Abu Salt likewise traveled in Egypt. Very intriguingly, he picked up much of his information while held under house arrest in an ancient library in Alexandria.

The problem, though, is this: even if Smyth got his story from Abu Salt, and even if Abu Salt was scrupulous, the Muslim chronicler was writing not in the 820s but in the 12th century. (He was imprisoned in Egypt in 1107-11.) So while there may still be an outside chance that the account of the falling capstone is based on some older, now lost source, we certainly can’t say that for certain. It may be equally likely that the story is a pure invention.

You see, the forced entry that has been driven into the pyramid is just a little too good to be true. Put it this way: perhaps the question that we should be asking is how a passage dug apparently at random in a structure the size of the Great Pyramid emerges at the exact spot where the Descending and the Ascending Passages meet, and where the secrets of the upper reaches of the pyramid are at their most exposed.

Coincidence? I hardly think so. More likely someone, somewhere, sometime knew precisely where to dig. Which would mean the chances are that “Ma’mun’s passage” was hacked out centuries before the Muslims came to Egypt, if only to be choked with rubble and forgotten—perhaps even in dynastic times. And that, in turn, means something else: that Khufu’s greatest mystery was never quite as secret as he’d hoped.

Sources

Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos & Thomas Lamy. Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Ecclesiasticum... Louvain, 3 volumes: Peeters, 1872-77; Anon. ‘Observations relating to some of the Antiquities of Egypt…’ Quarterly Review XXXVIII, 1818; JB Chabot. Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré. Quatrième partie. Paris, 2 vols: É. Bouillon, 1895; Okasha El Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings. London: UCL, 2005;  John & Morton Edgar. Great Pyramid Passages. Glasgow: 3 vols, Bone & Hulley, 1910; Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte. Edinburgh, 4 vols: Constable, 1830; John Greaves. Pyramidographia. London: J. Brindley, 1736; Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: the Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Ian Lawton & Chris Ogilvie-Herald. Giza: The Truth. London: Virgin, 1999;  Mark Lehner. The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; William Flinders Petrie. The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. London: Field & Tuer, 1873; Silvestre de Sacy. ‘Observations sur le nom des Pyramides.’ [From the “Magasin encyclopédique.”]. Paris: np, 1802; Charles Piazzi Smyth. Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. London: Alexander Strahan, 1864; Richard Howard Vyse. Operations Carried Out at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. London, 3 vols: James Fraser, 1840; Robert Walpole. Memoirs Relating to European and Asiatic Turkey. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818; Witold Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiskell International, 1987; Witold Witakowski (trans), Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre Chronicle (Also Known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.