Building the Pyramids

One reason to read literary journals is to learn a bit about things through book reviews for books you’d never read on your own. For example, the Egyptian pyramids. I think archaeological discoveries are as great as the next person and Egypt’s climate means more can be recovered than in places with moist climates. But who has time to read about this stuff unless your interest is a lot more than passing? It’s not my field or even close to it and it’s not really the kind of thing I choose to read for fun either. But you can sure find out about some cool stuff by reading about those books. I was reading the recent issue of the London Review of Books and discovered this fascinating discussion of a book about a bunch of papyrus recovered that explained how the pyramids were built and the working conditions of the laborers and as a labor historian, I found this all super fascinating.

The Red Sea Scrolls comprise at least seven logbooks as well as additional economic accounts. The logs alone total more than five metres of continuous text. They record in extraordinary detail the movements and labours of 160 of Khufu’s workers, and provide information on everything from the delivery of food to the procurement of tools. Although it remains an open question why the papyri were deposited at an intermittently used port on the Red Sea, it is possible that they were intended to become part of – or form the basis for – an official archive.

The star of the Red Sea Scrolls is undoubtedly a man called Merer, a mid-level official or inspector who oversaw a team of forty men transporting limestone for Giza on a ship named The Uraeus of Khufu Is Its Prow (a uraeus was the figure of a sacred serpent, symbolising royal authority). For at least four months of the 26th year of Khufu’s reign, Merer dipped his reed pen in ink and described the activities of his team in a careful and precise hand. We first meet him in the vicinity of Giza:

“[Day 25] [Inspector Merer spends the day with his team [h]au[ling] st[ones in Tura South]; spends the night at Tura South. [Day 26]: Inspector Merer casts off with his team from Tura [South], loaded with stone, for Akhet Khufu; spends the night at She Khufu; Day 27: Sets sail from She Khufu, sails towards Akhet Khufu, loaded with stone, spends the night at Akhet Khufu. Day 28: Casts off from Akhet Khufu in the morning; sails upriver [towards] Tura South. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day with his team hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night in Tura South.”

Merer rarely deviates from this structure: sometimes he takes a delivery of bread; sometimes he gets instructions from a senior official; once he is delayed. He never preens or complains, and – maddeningly – he never describes what it was like to see a great pyramid, inhuman in its scale, rising from the Giza plateau. Tallet and Lehner speculate that he would have found it unnecessary to describe the construction for his contemporary audience. Merer’s text is more like a timesheet or a ship’s log than a memoir. He may have felt wonder, but was hardly compelled to write it down.

Merer and his team loaded their boat with limestone blocks at one of the two quarries at Tura. They sailed north to She Khufu (Lake of Khufu), before proceeding to Akhet Khufu (Horizon of Khufu), the funerary complex proper. Then they returned and repeated the process. On some trips, they stopped at Ro-She Khufu (Entrance to Lake Khufu). The whole journey is about a forty-kilometre round trip. Modern Giza lies in a desert, but Lehner’s work at the site has uncovered what was once a network of lakes and waterways, which made it possible to deliver the raw materials for the pyramids. Merer, too, offers glimpses of a system of water management. In one entry he refers to ‘the lifting of the piles of the dykes’ at the start of the flood season. At another point, he is involved in ‘carrying out works related to the dyke of [Ro-She] Khufu’.

…

Merer and his men did well too. In addition to ample supplies of bread and grain, they had access to poultry, fish, fruit, honey, cakes and several kinds of drink, from henket, a low-alcohol, high-carbohydrate beer, to more specialised brews called seremet and sekhepet. It was possible to overdo it: one group that worked for Khufu’s grandson were known as the ‘drunkards of Menkaure’. Beyond foodstuffs, Dedi records ‘rewards’, lengths of fabric that were given to workers, presumably as payment. It was hard work hauling large limestone blocks, but the picture Dedi and Merer paint is a far cry from Herodotus’ account of a mass of miserable men. The papyri show not only that those who built the pyramids were well compensated, but also how efficiently the work could be done. In the 26th year of Khufu’s reign, as few as 160 workers were transporting limestone. Every pyramid is a race against time, but the available evidence suggests that for all Khufu’s ambitions, his funerary complex was comfortably in hand.

When the Nile receded in December that year, Merer’s team was dispatched north to the Mediterranean to work on a structure called a ‘double djadja’, perhaps a double jetty. We hear nothing more of them until early April. It’s possible that they were given time off, but we may simply be missing the relevant section of the logs. We next encounter them on the Red Sea. The papyri contain references to sailing expeditions, mountainous areas, a place called Ineb Khufu (the ‘walls of Khufu’, perhaps the Tell Ras Budran fortress on the south-western coast of the Sinai Peninsula) and, finally, a place called Bat, the ‘Bushy Land’, which may be Wadi el-Jarf. It looks desolate now, but it was probably chosen for its topography, access to fresh water and connections to the Nile. One of the fragments discovered by Tallet’s team was a small, folded slip of papyrus, no larger than a business card, that belonged to ‘the great one of the carrying chair, the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality, the controller of the necklace makers and royal administrator Neferiru’. Neferiru presumably travelled to Wadi el-Jarf on one of many desert roads that are marked today only by a handful of scattered inscriptions, depositions of pottery and, occasionally, ancient tracks. The same roads almost certainly carried Merer and his men to the Red Sea.

Merer’s men painted their team’s name on dozens of pieces of pottery at Wadi el-Jarf, but hard evidence for their activities is scarce. Still, it’s not difficult to guess what they were up to. One of the earliest examples of Egyptian literature, Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, composed almost a thousand years after the pyramids, describes a sailor’s journey across the ‘Great Green’ to visit the royal mines. After a storm destroys his ship, he is stranded alone on a mythical island. There he encounters a talking snake, covered in gold and lapis lazuli, who declares himself ‘the lord of Punt’ and promises him a safe return. Egyptologists have often treated this tale as fantasy, arguing that the ancient Egyptians were not a maritime people. But recent evidence tells a different story. Besides Wadi el-Jarf, Tallet and others have excavated two so-called intermittent ports along the Red Sea, at Ayn Sukhna to the north and Mersa Gawasis to the south. All three sites share a similar arrangement of barrack-like structures and facilities for launching ships. Boats, tackle and other heavy and valuable gear were stored for safekeeping in rock-cut galleries that could be secured with giant limestone boulders. When one of the galleries at Ayn Sukhna was opened, it contained the carbonised remains of a boat that had been set on fire to prevent it from being looted. Wadi el-Jarf is the oldest port yet discovered, but seems to have had the shortest life, abandoned after Khufu’s reign.

In Merer’s time, the Egyptians had probably begun to use Wadi el-Jarf to sail to Punt, which was famous for its incense and myrrh. Punt – which may have been located anywhere from the coast of southern Sudan to Yemen – lay at the edge of the known world in the ancient Egyptian imagination. But Wadi el-Jarf was chiefly used for journeys to Sinai to retrieve turquoise and copper ore. Turquoise was prized for its beauty, and copper was used for a number of objects, including weapons and carpenters’ saws. Demand was so high that some three thousand furnaces were deployed in a giant smelting operation in Sinai. At Giza, copper chisels the width of an index finger carved each of the 67,137 square metres of limestone casing for Khufu’s pyramid; their tracks, like shoals of fish, are still visible in the Grand Gallery in the right light. No one would choose copper for such a task today – it is far too soft – but before the advent of bronze it was the best option for smoothing out rough surfaces. In some cases, copper saws could be improved by adding an abrasive, often sand, but most tools would have required constant sharpening and reforging. The quantity of metal expended is almost unfathomable. Modern experiments suggest that for every three centimetres of granite cut, one centimetre of copper was lost.

Just super fascinating.