In 2013 excavators in Egypt’s Eastern Desert on the Gulf of Suez uncovered the world’s most ancient harbour installation at Wadi el-Jarf. Here they unearthed a cache containing the oldest extant inscribed papyri (c.2607-5 BCE). And in that they found ‘unique and unprecedented testimony relating to one of the world’s most famous monuments’ which has inspired and perplexed visitors for almost five millennia: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Little green men or Atlantean speculation is both a failure and an overuse of the imagination. But the pyramids, of course, are mind-boggling. For the Great Pyramid, King Khufu’s quarrymen hand-sculpted more than six hectares of rock to level the plateau and form a basic foundation, to legendary degrees of accuracy with regard to both the Earth and heavens. The block-hauling ramps alone are thought to have contained as much as 400,000 cubic metres of sand and rock – and perhaps only reached a fifth of the way up the edifice. The masons dressed precisely ‘67,127 square metres of the outer surface of the pyramid casing with copper chisels the width of an index finger’. The outer surface!
A ‘human disturbance on a geological scale’, the funerary complex of the Great Pyramid was so large that it incorporated other pyramids. The building site also contained an entire administrative city – ‘a kind of Old Kingdom Egyptian equivalent of Versailles’ – complete with an artificial inland port to take hydraulic advantage of the Nile flood.
In this book, handwritten scribal records – the ‘oldest known explicitly dated Egyptian documents’ – pick up the story of the middle-ranking inspector Merer and his 40-man naval gang. Merer was the captain of ‘Team Great’, an elite, adaptable outfit that transported the ‘grunt’ labour force and maintained the waterways around Giza, ferried limestone blocks up and down the Nile, provisioned and managed stores at the plateau and undertook expeditions to Sinai and Punt – lands, if not of milk and honey, of turquoise, myrrh and much needed copper for stone-working tools. ‘The builders of the gigantic pyramids of the 4th Dynasty must have amassed more copper... than was being accumulated anywhere else in the world.’
Interestingly, Tallet and Lehner argue that Merer and his men represented not vast slave labour, exploited by a biblical despot, but ‘the employment of a highly skilled, well-rewarded workforce’. Team Great worked in proximity to power – also performing royal guard duties and religious rituals – and were part-paid in luxury cloth. But it is also estimated that four teams like Merer’s might have spent 20 years transporting just the facing stone for the Great Pyramid. READ MORE...
