page_title: Joseph's Granaries
section_title: Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph's Granaries / Renaissance
caption_attribution_description: A woodcut image showing the beehive-shaped ancient Egyptian granaries at Thebes. The original caption was: "Granary, showing how the grain was put in, and that the doors [at the bottom] were intended for taking it out."
context_page_description: Joseph's Granaries is a designation for the Egyptian pyramids often used by early travelers to the region. The notion of a granary being associated with the Hebrew patriarch Joseph derives from the account in Genesis 41, where "he gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities ... And Joseph stored up grain in great abundance, like the sand of the sea, until he ceased to measure it, for it could not be measured". "So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians". Similarly, in the Quran: " said: 'Give me charge of the granaries of the land. I shall husband them wisely'". The designation was used throughout the Middle Ages and only really abated in the Renaissance when travel to the region became easier and closer investigation revealed the implausibility of the structures serving as storehouses for foodstuffs.
context_section_description: By the 16th century most visitors who left accounts argue against the notion that the pyramids were originally granaries constructed by the patriarch Joseph, if they mention it at all.  Many of the visitors inspected the ruins rather closely, often entering the great Pyramid, rather than simply viewing them from a distance.  The French traveler Greffin Affagart (Seigneur de Courteilles) visited the Pyramids in 1533 and noted that "some call [them] the granaries of Pharaoh, but this is wrong because they are not hollow on the inside, rather they are sepulchers of some kings of Egypt."  The French explorer and naturalist Pierre Belon of Mans, a careful observer, records in 1546 that the great Pyramid "was the sepulcher of the King of Egypt."  Another French explorer André Thevet, who visited three years later writes: "The Jews have told me many times that they find in their Chronicles that these Pyramids were the support of the granaries of Pharaoh: that is not likely ... they are sepulchers of kings as appears from Herodotus ... since I saw in one pyramid a great stone of marble carved in the manner of a sepulcher."
    Finally, in the 17th century, John Greaves, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, published the first truly scientific work on the Pyramids, Pyramidographia (1646). He cites many of the ancient authors mentioned above, and dismisses the erroneous etymologies yielding notions of "receptacles and granaries," and calls attention to the obvious fact "that this figure is most improper for such a purpose, a Pyramid being the least capacious of any regular mathematical body, the straitness and fewness of the rooms within (the rest of the building being one solid and intire fabric of stone) do utterly over-throw this conjecture."  No longer could the notion be held credibly, though for over a millennium it had reigned supreme among European travelers.
caption: Egyptian granaries at Thebes.
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