In the last two decades much has been written on the pyramids, anchored not with archaeological evidence, but instead with wishful thinking and un-evidenced, fanciful imagination. This scholarly error has resulted in a general public that believes the pyramids, Khufu’s in particular, are mysterious, magical monuments that appear overnight and with no architectural or cultural evolution. This could not be further from the truth; the Egyptian pyramid is the result of centuries of development, experiment and adaptation to various evolving cultural manifestations.

For thousands of years in the Predynastic Period the dead were buried in shallow oval pits, sometimes surrounded by their personal belongings and covered with sand. The first significant development came when the Egyptians altered the shape of their burial pits from oval to rectangular and roofed the pit with timber (Edwards 20). While no remains of a superstructure has been found, it probably consisted of sand, which could have easily blown away revealing tomb goods to any potential grave robbers (Edwards 21). In the beginning of the dynastic period the kings of Egypt overcame this issue by constructing a mud-brick superstructure over their burial pit (Edwards 21) which is known today as a mastaba, named so for their resemblance to the brick benches outside houses in modern Egyptian villages (Fakhry 3).

The tombs of Egypt’s earliest historical kings are found in Upper Egypt at Abydos and date ca. 3200 B.C.E (Fakhry 3). The introduction of mastabas coincided with an increase in the amount of highly valuable and increasingly elaborate equipment being buried with the king (Edwards 27), and serve as an evolutionary missing-link between the unrefined burial practices of the Predynastic Period and those of an emerging, solidified Egyptian state.

The mastabas of high officials who served in the court of the various kings of the First Dynasty were found by W.B. Emery at Saqqara north during his excavations there between 1935 -1956 (Edwards 21). While Emery initially believed these early mastabas belonged to the kings of the First Dynasty, more recent work at the site has resulted in their reattribution to high officials. Regardless of their ownership, the mastaba previously believed to belong to King Hor-Aha serves as an excellent example of the evolutionary progress made between more recent predynastic burial pits and the early pyramids. Excepting the brick superstructure which housed 27 cells for storage of funerary goods (Edwards 21), the tomb is simply an enlarged version of the later predynastic burial pits.