Pyramids Beyond Egypt

The pyramid did not begin, or end, in Egypt.

From the Mississippi floodplain to the highlands of Java, from the deserts of Sudan to the reefs of the Pacific, human societies across five continents independently piled earth, stone, brick, and coral into ordered heights. Pyramids Beyond Egypt is a wide-angle field guide to that global family of monuments, a journey that asks not which pyramids look most like Giza, but what raised, ordered mass has always done for the people who build it.

Travel to:

• Cahokia's Monks Mound, earthen heart of a vanished North American city
• Teotihuacan and Tikal, where stepped temples staged kingship and cosmic time
• Meroë's steep royal pyramids along the Nubian Nile
• The ziggurats of Ur and Chogha Zanbil, mountains raised for the gods
• China's imperial tomb-mounds, Borobudur, Angkor, and Nan Madol, and many more

Along the way, this book hands you the tools to read these monuments yourself: how archaeologists actually date them, what the evidence can and can't prove, and how to tell a real discovery from a viral "lost pyramid" hoax.

Rigorous yet readable, richly illustrated, and refreshingly free of sensationalism, Pyramids Beyond Egypt reveals why, again and again, and a world apart, people have looked up at the sky and decided to build toward it.