Pyramid Scheme

I´ve been wondering what would it need to create a huge monument to celebrate your afterlife? I mean the way the ancient Egyptians did, the Pyramids! How, in a modern western society, you could make something like that?

First of all, I have always thought that it would be sweet to donate my body to science when I die. I always imagined my dead body hanging from the ceiling of some local university main entrance. But more recently, since I´ve been reading lot´s of books about the Egyptian culture, I have created a lust for something more spectacular. I want everyone to remember my contribution thousands of years later, the same way the Pharaoh Khufu is remembered!

Since I live in Finland, I have to consider this trought Finnish society and I have to obey Finnish legislation. I assume that some of these matters would be easier to handle in some other parts of the world.

Anyway, the first thing is the location of this forthcoming monument (I´ll speak later on about a Tomb and this means generally a Pyramid). Obviously it should be somewhere where it could be admired by the future generations. There is two problems: the prize of the site and the city planning. If I wanted to build the tomb into the center of a major city, for example Töölönlahti in Helsinki, it would cost insane amounts of money to get hold of the land. And since the city planning is often politically administered I would need to be inside of the ruling party to get proper license to use the site.

This would propably mean that I would have to make some compromise about the location. Easiest option would be to move the project into some municipal that is suffering a loss of jobs and inhabitants, ie. somewhere in the countryside. That´s not too bad a choice if you manage to find a site close to some highway that is not too far from the major cities. The prizes for this kind of land are often way smaller than in the big cities. However the planning might still be a problem. Obviously you should somehow convince the local administrators about the benefits of a massive pyramid. They may attack this plan by saying that enormous tomb would be useless structure and it woul prevent the future use of the said areas. You will have to provide them a larger perspective since the politicians usually care only about the coming two years, not several millennias further.

Tourism is very good argument! Tourism only gets better when time passes by! Employment is another good viewpoint and it is also related to tourism. But that is not all, the project itself would employ huge group of people for very long time. This is because the building of this kind of monument would take at least 20 years of time I assume.

But this brings in another problem: Ancient Egyptians used slavery as construct workers and the pesants during the Nile floods. This meant very small costs from the work force, though they did have to organize the catering and related stuff. When the Pharaoh was considered as a deity, it was much easier to get everyone on your side. These days we do have powertools and big machines to move the blocks, but still it would take fair amount of workers to get this done.

Materials is another concern. In Egypt they used limestone that is somewhat easy to shape. But in Finland there is not any limestone available. Therefore I should propably use granite. I´m not an expert but I assume it´s a little bit harder to work, but it´s widely available. You have to remember that this project differs from house building. There will be lots of savings when you don´t have to connect the tomb to pipelines or provide electricity to the whole building. You don´t need to care about insulation or air conditioning apart from the building phase. All you need is a good general plan and an artist to create the wall scripts!

For the wall scripts you will have to list all your accomplishments and exaggerate them! It´s the same procedure the Egyptians did. Also remember to leave all the negative things away and concentrate on the overall benefits your presence provided to the nation. You could also add some hints to divinity, but more efficient way is to be incoherent and generally silly. That way you can guarantee that the excavators in the future will definitely be confused about the meaning of your inscriptions. They tend to interpret these writings as riddles, hidden messages and occult secrets. When things seem like mystical events they create more efficient remembrance in the future populace.

Funding of this project is also a bit complicated, but not that hard in the end. Of course it will be a struggle when you go first time to the bank to ask for the mortgage to build a tomb. But when you reach the politicians and manage to convince them about previously mentioned benefits the ball starts to roll by itself.

The only thing I´m really worried here is the timespan. 20 years is actually quite optimistic schedule to get this done. It could actually take anything from 20-80 years to complete the task. Therefore you would need to get the main chamber ready when you eventually pass away and create a huge fanbase in the social media to support the project when your time on this planet is over.

Thankfully there is lots of architechtural pictures available for pyramids and the basic structure is really simple. And you don´t need to build treasure rooms or traps to secure the place since there will not be any treasure to store. Actually you could leave the front door open so that everyone could visit the tomb and seek for inspiration from the wall paintings and the mummified body (I suppose, effective mummification should be pretty easy with modern medical approach). Actually, now that I think, the local University might be interested about this project... Maybe I should contact them next!