Against the Grain

My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain.

The opening words of a video clip from a speech by the 2016 US presidential candidate Ben Carson; ones which did little to help his campaign. To be fair, the speech from which it was taken, to graduating students at Andrews University in Michigan, had been made nearly eighteen years before, in 1998, but when he was contacted by CBS News, after the clip had been posted on the Internet news site Buzzfeed on 4^th November 2015, he confirmed that “It’s still my belief, yes.”¹ Even Daniel Weber, a spokesman for the Seventh Day Adventist Church of which Carson is a member, described the theory as “his [Carson’s] own interpretation [of biblical scripture]”.² Now, there have been plenty of Egyptologists to explain, as patiently and positively as they can manage, exactly why they believe that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed for funerary rather than agricultural purposes, so that’s not what this article is about. It’s not even about the views of Dr Carson. He is welcome to believe whatever he likes, as long as he doesn’t try to impose those views on others, and he did emphasise that it was a personal belief. Rather, it is a response to the surprising comments with which the Adventist spokesman Daniel Weber followed his metaphorical swift step back from Carson’s views. Weber went on to say:

“Of course we [Seventh Day Adventists] believe in the biblical account of Joseph and the famine, but I’ve never heard the idea that pyramids were storehouses of grain.”

This is a bit surprising, given how far back belief in the Pyramids of Giza as the Granaries of Joseph goes. In an article on the BBC web site³, Professor John Darnell, of Yale University, refers to the thirteenth century mosaics in the narthex of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice which illustrate the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, and show the Pyramids as granaries. His article goes on to quote the 6^th century AD St Gregory of Tours, who wrote:

“And on its [the Nile’s] bank is situated, not the Babylonia of which we spoke above, but the city of Babylonia in which Joseph built wonderful granaries of squared stone and rubble. They are wide at the base and narrow at the top in order that the wheat might be cast into them through a tiny opening, and these granaries are to be seen at the present day.”⁴

Gregory spent his life in what is now France, and so could not have written from first-hand experience. The primary source for the San Marco mosaics showing the story of Joseph and the life of Moses is believed to be the Cotton Genesis MS, probably an Alexandrian Greek manuscript of the Book of Genesis from the 4^th-6^th century AD, and this or a similar manuscript may have been one of Gregory’s sources. (It takes its modern name from its place in the 17^th century collection of Sir Robert Cotton, which was one of the foundations of the British Museum and subsequently the British Library.) The earliest references to the pyramids as the Granaries of Joseph may be the Cosmographia of the 4^th century AD Roman writer Julius Honorius, and the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus, 4^th century Archbishop of Constantinople.⁵

Pilgrims and Pharaohs

Darnell notes that “If you didn’t have access to the structures, the idea [that they had been built as granaries] had some currency.” Interestingly, even when people did have access to them, the belief was not dispelled. It was probably most popular during the Middle Ages, and an important factor in this was the influence of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, via Egypt. The earliest account by a pilgrim mentioning the pyramids as the granaries of Joseph seems to be that of Egeria⁶, in the late 4^th century AD. Little is known for certain about her, and the portion of her text covering Egypt only survives in a 12^th century summary, but she seems to have been Spanish. The late 13th century Hereford Mappa Mundi, showing the world as it was perceived at that time, probably drew on 5th century sources, and includes a number of sites and features in Egypt, including what are described as Joseph’s Barns, although they are shown as a conventional building with a pitched roof and three doorways in the long side facing the viewer, rather than as a pyramid.⁷ In the early 14^th century, the Irish Franciscan Symon Semeonis undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with his companion, the splendidly named Hugo Illuminator, who sadly was to die of dysentery in Cairo. Symon’s account describes the Giza pyramids as the three barns of Joseph. Another source describing them in the same way is the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which began to circulate in the second half of the 14^th century. However, there are doubts as to whether he actually existed, or was simply created as the ‘author’ of a work based on passages from other authors. Far more credible is the account of their pilgrimage by Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli, three members of a group of thirteen Tuscans and their seven servants who left Florence on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1384. Gucci describes their visit to Giza, and the “granaries of Pharaoh” in some detail, saying that there are fifteen pyramids in an area of about twelve miles, and that they are in groups of three. His group measured one pyramid, by pacing the distance or measuring with a stick, and also went inside it.

Silos or Sepulchres?

Darnell is quoted in the BBC article as saying that the idea of the pyramids as the Granaries of Joseph began to fall out of favour during the Renaissance, when more detailed studies of them began to be made. In fact, assuming the Renaissance to have begun in Italy around 1350, there had been sceptics long before this. In the late 6^th and early 7^th century AD, St Isidore of Seville viewed the pyramids as places of burial, and Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz in the late 8^th and early 9^th centuries, expressed the same view.⁶ The German Dominican Wilhelm von Boldensele, who travelled to Egypt in the first half of the 14
^th century, expressed his doubts that the pyramids could have been granaries, and another Dominican, Felix Fabri of Ulm, who made two pilgrimages to Egypt in the 15
^th century, entered the Great Pyramid and commented on the lack of space inside it.

It was certainly not the case that the idea of the pyramids as the Granaries of Joseph was uncritically accepted until the beginnings of modern scientific investigation, but the tradition linking Joseph and the pyramids was a remarkably resilient one, and as late as the first half of the 15^th century, when the Castilian traveller Pero Tafur visited Egypt, he not only referred to the Pyramids of Giza as the Granaries of Joseph, but described how he believed they had been used

“The next day we went to see the Granaries of Joseph, which are three leagues from the mouth of the river, in the desert. Although they say that there are many more further inland, there are only three here, two great ones, and one lesser one. As one enters through the door there is a wall joined to another, making a circular stairway which reaches to the top, with many windows. And the beasts, when they are laden, climb up and are unloaded through those windows, and so they fill the granaries to the top.”⁸

It is difficult to reconcile this description with the Great Pyramid, most likely to be the one referred to (it is believed to have been opened in the 9^th century AD), and overall it seems strange that while authors who had not seen the Pyramids could accept that they might have been royal tombs, travellers who had seen them, and even entered one, could apparently fly in the face of logic and maintain that they had been constructed as granaries.

Travellers’ Tales

One explanation for this is that not all the accounts can be taken at face value. Certainly this is the case with Sir John Mandeville, who may have been invented to link together a collection of accounts from other authors, but even the account of a historical figure like Arnold von Harff, who visited Egypt in the late 15^th century, can be problematic.

Not only is his treatment of dates haphazard, but his claims to have climbed the Mountains of the Moon, visited the source of the Nile, and travelled back down it to Cairo are clearly fantasy. Pilgrimages to Egypt were costly and risky, with deaths among pilgrims common, but they offered the opportunity to acquire the status, and the religious benefits of indulgences, that went with having visited its holy and secular sites. Practical issues of cost, time, and security may often have meant that some sites could not be visited, or were seen only briefly or from a distance, but the temptation on returning home to embroider the truth or even invent an account must have been powerful. Another factor is the effect of what is sometimes called Received Authority Syndrome. Father Eugene Hoade, one of the translators of the accounts of Frescobaldi and the other Tuscan pilgrims, observes of the account of Symon Semeonis, who travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land in 1322-23, that many things in it

“are the silly talk of guides, from whom the Holy Land and the adjoining countries have always suffered”⁹

Nonetheless, on the basis that the guides are local experts, much of this has always been accepted by travellers. (Herodotus, who went on to become an authority himself, springs to mind.) Gucci noted that the ‘granaries’ were said to have been made by Pharaoh at the time of Joseph and the great famine in Egypt, but also expressed his opinion that

“to see them they appear to be works for perpetual memory rather than granaries”¹⁰

Von Harff, similarly, was told by his Mameluke guides, while they were eating lunch after having climbed the Great Pyramid, that ‘King Pharaoh’ had built them to store grain, but noted that some said that they were the tombs of the old kings of Egypt. However, for every sceptic, there must have been many more believers. The accounts of Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli are valuable not least because they enable us to compare accounts by different people on the same pilgrimage, and while Gucci noted his doubts, Frescobaldi simply records the pyramids as thirteen granaries which Joseph had made in the days of famine, and Sigoli, after describing the three Giza pyramids and their huge size, says that the corn was placed inside them, and observes wonderingly

“just imagine the very great amount that inside would take”¹¹

We can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that none of them entered the Great Pyramid, or that if they did they they assumed that they had only seen a portion of its vast interior, but over six hundred years later, after all that has since been learned about it, Ben Carson could still say

“it would have to be something awfully big… to store that much grain, and when you look at the way in which the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they would have to be that way for a reason.”

Ultimately, many pilgrims saw perhaps not so much what they wanted to see, as what they believed they would see. For them, the biblical account of Joseph, the famine in Egypt and the stores of grain were matters of faith. The biblical narrative is not specific (the King James version of the Bible simply refers to food being laid up “in the cities” and “storehouses” being opened), and it would not be contradicted by assuming that this was done in many ordinary granaries. The story was not one of prudent planning and management of food stocks, however, but of miraculous prophecy revealing the will of God. The pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to survive, were suitably impressive structures to associate with this, and were surviving evidence of the power and splendour of Ancient Egypt, also testified to in the Bible. It is not difficult to see why many pilgrims chose not to examine what they were told too closely, and why the urge to see the pyramids as the Granaries of Joseph still endures.

1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/natemcdermott/ben-carson-egyptian-pyramids-built-for-grain-storage-not-by#.vsbbKae7Bd ↩︎
2. http://nypost.com/2015/11/05/ben-carson-has-a-crazy-theory-about-egypts-pyramids/ ↩︎
3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34741010 ↩︎
4. http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.asp ↩︎
5. 
   Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt p. 295, Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt p. 155, and Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition p. 59. ↩︎
6. 
   Also known as Aetheria. ↩︎
7. The Barns of Joseph (Orrea Joseph) can be found in the portion of the map representing Egypt, to the left of the Mandrake and above the Salamander. ↩︎
8. 
   Letts, Malcolm, trans. & ed. The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff London, Hakluyt Society 1946 ↩︎
9. 
   Eugene Hoade OFM, Western Pilgrims. Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press. 1952, reprinted 1970. P. vi. ↩︎
10. 
    Hoade, Western Pilgrims p. 104. ↩︎
11. 
    Hoade, Western Pilgrims p. 169. ↩︎