Copied Pyramids
Pausanias, in his famous Guide to Greece, describes the area around Corinth and mentions some curious monuments.
Returning to the road to Tegea, on the right of the Wheel, you see Kenchreai. There is a common monument here to the Argives who won the battle victory of Hysiai over Sparta. ... As you go from Argos to Epidauros you come to a structure like a pyramid on your right; it has shields carved in relief on it like shields fom the Argolid. This is where Proitos fought Akrisios for the throne; they say it turned out an even battle and afterwards, since neither of them could win by force, they came to terms. In this battle, so the legend says, they and their forces were the first men ever to carry shields. The fallen on both sides were fellow-countrymen and kinsmen and this memorial was built for all of them together.
Archaeologists have long been puzzled by these two pyramids, as well as by a third near the Mycenaean site of Ligourio. About the size of a large room, with four sloping sides that probably rose to a point, the pyramids are now so ruined that most people pass them by without realising what they are. Excavations conducted earlier this century discovered pottery from about the time of Alexander and the experts felt safe in dismissing Pausanias‘ tale of a legendary origin for the pyramids. They dated the pyramids to around 400 BC and concluded that they were built in poor imitation of the better known Wonders of the World, the pyramids of Egypt.
However Pausanias has been found to be so accurate in other matters, that archaeologists could not quite bring themselves to declare the case closed and recent studies have shown how right those were who suspended judgement.
Thermoluminesence is a dating technique developed to help distinguish genuinely ancient pottery from modern fakes. As light shines on a surface come of the energy it imparts is held in the crystalline structure of the surface, raising electrons into higher orbits where they become trapped. Even if the surface is subsequently shielded from light, the trapped electrons retain the extra energy, only gradually losing it and returning to their proper place.
If you take a piece of this surface and heat it up in the laboratory, the heat causes the atoms to become excited and makes it easier for them to drop back down into their usual orbits. As they do so, they release the extra energy they had acquired, which can be measured as tiny flashes of light — hence the name of the technique: thermo-luminesence. The older the surface, the less energy will be released, thus allowing the scientists to estimate the date at which the surface was last exposed to light.
Dr P. S. Theocaris and his colleagues reasoned that when the blocks of stone that made up the pyramid were cut, they would have been left standing around in the bright Mediterranean sunshine for at least a day, time enough to have "reset" the thermoluminescent clock. Once they were cemented into place in the pyramids, however, they were shielded from further sunlight, thus allowing the energy to decay away undisturbed. Dr Theocaris therefore scraped a tiny quantity of limestone off the inner surface of some of the blocks of stone — presumably working at the dead of night — and carried it off to his laboratory.
Just to act as a test of the technique, Dr Theocaris carried out the same experiment on stone from a Mycenaean wall which could be confidently dated on archaeological grounds to around 1280 BC. Thermoluminesence gave a date of 1100 BC ±340 years. Dr Theocaris therefore heated up his oven and stuck in the first sample taken from the pyramid. The results caused his jaw to drop. According to his instruments, six separate samples averaged out at 2730 BC ±700 years, which would make the pyramids some 4,000 years old — possibly older even than the pyramids of Egypt! A certain amount of pre-Helladic pottery from this pre-historic era has, in fact, been found near the pyramid at Hellenikon, but it was disregarded by the excavators who saw no reason to associate the sophisticated stonework of the pyramid with the presumably primitive capabilities of the Bronze Age.
Of course, seven centuries is quite a margin of error and one may legitimately question the accuracy of the thermoluminescent techniques in establishing absolute dates, but there can be no doubt at all that the Greek pyramids are considerably older than at first thought. In view of the known trade routes linking Mycenaean Greece with Cyprus, Egypt and Asia, we are also faced with the intriguing possibility that one group may have directly copied from the other — and we don‘t know which one!
