In Gold and Lapis Lazuli

Wadi el-Jarf​ lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the port is hardly visible: deep galleries carved out of limestone bluffs, the low walls of a few comb-like structures, a sandy beach, the rocky remnants of an ancient jetty. But on 12 March 2013, a team of French and Egyptian archaeologists led by Pierre Tallet discovered six fragments of papyrus in a depression near the limestone cliffs five kilometres from the shore. Hundreds of thousands of texts written on papyrus have been discovered in Egypt – ritual and religious instructions for the afterlife, works of literature, bills, contracts, tax receipts, lawsuits and orders for grain – but none as old as these. Over the next month, Tallet’s team uncovered more than a thousand fragments of papyrus. They had found, almost by accident, a first-hand account of the men who built the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Few monuments from antiquity have inspired more curiosity than the Great Pyramid. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world; Herodotus called it ‘greater than words’. Today visitors travel through a security checkpoint, past the Sphinx and up a meandering road to enter the complex. Inside, you climb through steep, cramped passageways to the Grand Gallery, a broad and tall corridor of corbelled stone, which leads up to the King’s Chamber, constructed out of gigantic slabs of granite. In 2605 bce, Khufu was buried here, but his body has never been discovered. All that remains is an empty sarcophagus.

Khufu did not invent the pyramid – Djoser and his architect, Imhotep, designed the Step Pyramid about a century earlier – but he did come from a family of pyramid builders. His father was responsible for three, culminating in his magnum opus, the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, which is more than a hundred metres tall and is the first true pyramid with smooth sides. In total, 23 major pyramids are known from the Old Kingdom, all within a 72-kilometre stretch of desert south of Cairo. Each is part of a complex of temples that served not only as tombs and monuments of royal power, but also portals to the afterlife, designed to bring about the unification of the king’s ‘individual renown’ (ba) with his ‘life-force’ (ka), so that he might become a ‘spirit’ (akh) among the stars. The pharaoh Unas, who died about two hundred years after Khufu, imagined himself devouring the power of his ancestors and of the gods:

Unas eats their magic, swallows their spirits:
Their big ones are for his morning meal,
Their middle ones for his evening meal,
Their little ones for his night meal,
And the oldest males and females for his fuel.

The text – inscribed on the east gable of the antechamber of Unas’ pyramid – is described in virtually all modern discussions as the Cannibal Hymn, but that is a misnomer. It is neither a hymn nor a depiction of cannibalism in any ordinary sense, but rather a description of Unas’ preparation for the afterlife. ‘For Unas is of those who risen is risen, lasting lasts,’ it concludes in Miriam Lichtheim’s translation. ‘Nor can evildoers harm Unas’ chosen seat/Among the living in this land for all eternity!’

The pyramids are so central to the modern view of Egypt, and to Egyptian tourism, that it is hard not to speak about them in clichés. Yet visiting them, one is reminded how mysterious and extraordinary they are. Khufu’s pyramid, just shy of 150 metres tall, required some two and a half million cubic metres of stone. It would dwarf St Paul’s Cathedral, and its base, nearly a kilometre in perimeter, would cover more than half the Louvre. It sits on an almost perfectly level square of bedrock, each side deviating only slightly from the cardinal directions. The individual blocks are as tall as a person and can weigh more than fifteen tonnes. The largest granite beams are around seventy tonnes, the weight of an M1 Abrams tank. What we see today was not even the outermost layer: the original limestone casing, still visible on the cap of Khafre’s pyramid at Giza, was removed and repurposed over the millennia. There is still much about their structure that we do not understand. Using advanced muon tomography, an international consortium has recently discovered additional chambers or cavities in the Great Pyramid. Their function remains unknown.

The most enduring mystery of the pyramids is the fact of their existence. There has been serious scholarly disagreement over the number of workers, their status and how they went about their monumental task. Herodotus, who stands roughly equidistant between Khufu’s time and ours, writes that Khufu ‘drove [the Egyptians] into complete misery’, with teams of a hundred thousand men compelled to haul stones for three months at a time. As Herodotus has it, workers first built a set of steps and then used levers to fill in the gaps and produce the pyramid’s smooth sides. Four hundred years later, Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who wrote in Greek, proposed that the stones were moved on earthen ramps, so that the pyramid seemed ‘not the slow labour of humanity, but a sudden creation of some god, set down in the surrounding sand’. The whole project, Diodorus and Herodotus agree, took twenty years. Archaeologists have found evidence – ranging from the remains of ramps to modern trials with levers and ropes – for techniques similar to those they describe, but both accounts, written two thousand years after the fact, leave much to be desired.

In The Red Sea Scrolls, Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner, an American archaeologist who has worked extensively on Giza, don’t pass judgment on Herodotus and Diodorus, at least directly. They can’t explain all the mysterious cavities of the Great Pyramid, nor can they provide a new account of the way its gargantuan blocks were moved into position. But what they can reveal is perhaps more consequential. The papyri of Wadi el-Jarf, written between 2607 and 2605 bce, specify who worked on the pyramid, how they were compensated and what they did each day. Tallet and Lehner also trace the story of the papyri’s journey from the Nile Valley and the Giza plateau to the Red Sea coast, and describe the painstaking process by which they were excavated, studied and pieced back together.

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’.

It’s likely that Merer kept records for the rest of the year, which don’t survive. (A significant proportion of the papyri were destroyed by rising water levels.) Nonetheless, among the finds at Wadi el-Jarf were logs that belonged to Merer’s boss, a scribe called Dedi. Tallet and Lehner surmise that it would have taken the four teams under Dedi’s supervision about twenty years to supply the limestone for Khufu’s pyramid, lending some credence to the accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus. By the time Merer was writing, the limestone was probably destined for other projects in Giza. It is clear that Khufu’s funerary complex was far larger than the site which can be seen today. Engineers digging for a sewage project in the late 1980s discovered large basalt blocks and mud brick walls half a mile away. Dedi implies that Khufu built a palace and created a hub of royal operations close to his pyramid. He refers to both the royal residence and the granary, which were managed by work teams like Merer’s. Modern excavations closer to the pyramid confirm that there was a substantial settlement at Giza, including bakeries, workshops, houses and barracks – some just the right size to accommodate Merer’s team – that would have housed and fed those who worked on the construction.

Besides Merer and Dedi, we meet many others in the Red Sea Scrolls: Ideru, ‘the director of six’, who sails to Heliopolis for food and returns with forty sacks of grain; Hesi, ‘the director of ten’; and, most intriguing of all, Ankh-haf, a close relative of Khufu, who held the title ‘director of Ro-She Khufu’. Ankh-haf has long been known to experts from the astonishing bust discovered in his grand, bench-shaped tomb in the early 20th century. He described himself as ‘overseer of all the king’s works’ and ‘vizier’, positions that he may have held under Khufu’s successor. He doesn’t mention his role in the pyramid’s construction but perhaps he didn’t need to. His burial place at the edge of the Eastern Cemetery at Giza overlooked his domain at the Ro-She Khufu. Pyramid building had its rewards in this life and the next.

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.

After September, Merer and his men disappear from view and the Red Sea Scrolls come to an end. We don’t know why they left Wadi el-Jarf, after storing Merer’s diary, Dedi’s logs and other papyri in a pit in front of one of the rock-cut galleries. Were they under threat? Was Merer fired? Did Khufu’s death mean his meticulously compiled records were no longer relevant? Tallet and Lehner find the last option most likely, but we can’t know for sure.

Khufu’s​ funerary complex was a tremendous display of wealth, so large and so expensive that it required the resources of all Egypt: copper from Sinai, limestone from Tura, basalt from the Faiyum, granite from Aswan and, according to Merer, grain from two regions in the Nile Delta. Yet the extent and unity of Egypt was far from self-evident in this period. One of the traditional titles of the Egyptian king was ‘the uniter of two lands’, an acknowledgment that from its earliest history Egypt was comprised of two distinct centres of power: Memphis, at the base of the Nile Delta, and Thebes, further south, near the Qena Bend of the Nile (modern Luxor). It was the pyramid builders – Djoser and most of all Khufu’s father, Sneferu – who were largely responsible for developing the sparsely populated area in between, now known as Middle Egypt. They exploited the Nile’s flood plain and created a string of new estates roughly equidistant from Memphis and Thebes. Land doesn’t farm itself, of course. Many people were relocated, often by force. But Sneferu’s agricultural development project and search for resources also led the Egyptian state to be more decentralised, as its regional administrators became increasingly powerful and wealthy.

Tallet’s career has been distinguished by his recognition of the value of conducting his research outside Egypt’s traditional centres of power. In 2012, he discovered a hieroglyphic inscription from the fourth millennium bce in the Sinai Peninsula, which pushed back the date of Memphis by fifty years. It is the oldest known example of a sentence written in hieroglyphs: ‘The Horus, he is Ity,’ a phrase spoken to confer full royal status on a prince. (‘Ity’ means ‘sovereign’.) ‘In the excitement of that moment,’ Tallet writes, ‘I remember thinking that I would never again make an archaeological discovery of such importance in my entire career as a researcher.’ Ten months later, at Wadi el-Jarf, he would prove himself wrong.

In 2607 bce it would have seemed likely that the Great Pyramid would outlast Merer’s diary. Later pyramids would be filled with texts – from Unas’ cosmological hymn to Teti’s vision of wandering the heavens – but Khufu’s is silent, except for the graffiti left behind by the builders. For millennia, this silence has been part of its appeal. In 23 bce Horace compared his work to the ultimate symbol of immortality: ‘I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze,/more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids.’ Merer’s reports, Dedi’s logs and the economic accounts of Wadi el-Jarf don’t always make thrilling reading, but they are no less valuable for that. For the first time in 4500 years, Khufu’s pyramid has its voices again: not of priests or pharaohs but of the men who made it possible, rowing their boats from quarry to quay, quay to quarry.