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137 Fig. 38 tory tablet of the very first Pharaoh, Menes, which depicts his forceful unification of Egypt. On one side he is shown wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, defeating its chieftains and con- quering their cities. On the other side the tablet shows him (Fig. 39a) wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, marching through its districts and beheading its chieftains. To the right of his head the artist spelled out the epithet "Nar-Mer" acquired by the king; to the left the tablet depicts the most important structure in the newly acquired districts—the pyramid (Fig. 39b). All scholars agree that the tablet depicts realistically the places, fortifications, and enemies encountered by Menes in his campaign to unify Upper and Lower Egypt; yet the pyramid symbol is the only one that appears to have escaped the otherwise careful inter- pretation. We hold that this symbol, as all others on the tablet, was drawn and included so prominently in the Lower Egypt side be- cause such a structure had actually existed there. The whole Giza complex—pyramids and Sphinx—had thus already existed when kingship began in Egypt; its builders were not and could not have been the Pharaohs of the sixth dy- nasty. The other pyramids of Egypt—smaller, primitive by compari- son, some fallen even before completion, all crumbling—had indeed been built by various Pharaohs; not as tombs, nor as ceno- taphs (monumental symbolic tombs), but in emulation of the gods. For it was held and believed in antiquity that the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx that accompanies them showed the way to the Stairway to Heaven—the Spaceport—in the Sinai peninsula. Build- When Earth Was Divided