The level beneath the Louvre Museum's glass pyramid served as both entrance and reception hall. Whether by coincidence or design, this hall was called Napoleon Hall.
In many people's minds, pyramids were used to bury pharaohs. Yet not all pharaohs' tombs lay beneath pyramids.
Beneath the pyramids lay a lost underground world, with tunnels and caves. Not only were the elite buried there; ordinary people, and even animal mummies, could be laid to rest beneath the pyramids. One tomb contained an altar dedicated to Osiris, while the walls depicted Osiris, ruler of the underworld, who judged the dead.
In fact, long before Napoleon, many Egyptian royal tombs had already been plundered. The limestone casing of the pyramids had been hauled away to Cairo for construction, while valuable grave goods had been thoroughly looted by tomb robbers.
It would have been one thing if they had merely taken the gold and silverware. The problem was that those tomb robbers also destroyed the murals on the walls, leaving traces that they had been there. Even without Napoleon, Egypt's antiquities had been suffering "natural depletion."
Tomb robbing had existed since the first pharaoh was buried. To guard against these robbers, tomb designers had exhausted every means imaginable, constructing layer upon layer of traps and defenses.
Quicksand shafts, massive stone doors, hidden entrances. If the tomb entrance could be concealed, then with the pyramid's own solid structure, tomb robbers would be unable to get inside.
Beyond that, tomb designers also created "mazes." As long as intruders could be kept from reaching the place where the coffins were stored, there was no need to worry about grave goods being stolen.
Yet even after all that trouble, pharaohs who had held immense power in life still could not stop the tomb robbers' pickaxes.
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