King Khufu and the great Pyramid

Khufu's Inside Story

King Khufu, who is also known by the greek name "Cheops," was the father of pyramid building at Giza. He ruled from 2589 - 2566 B.C. and was the son of King Sneferu and Queen Hetpeheres.

Dates Built: c. 2589-2566 B.C.

Total Blocks of Stone: over 2,300,000

Base: 13 square acres, 568,500 square feet, or 7 city blocks. The length of each side of the base was originally 754 feet (230 m), but is now 745 feet (227 m) due to the loss of the outer casing stones.

Total Weight: 6.5 million tons

Average Weight of Individual Blocks of Stone: 2.5 tons, the large blocks used for the ceiling of the King's Chamber weigh as much as 9 tons.

Height: Originally 481 feet (146.5 m) tall, but now only 449 feet (137 m).

Angle of Incline: 51 degrees 50' 35"

Construction Material: limestone, granite

WARNING upon entering Khufu: The 1908 edition of Baedeker's Egypt warns "Travelers who are in the slightest degree predisposed to apoplectic or fainting fits, and ladies travelling alone, should not attempt to penetrate into these stifling recesses."

First, choose your mode of exploration. We encourage you to download the QuickTime plugin so you can take part in this incredible journey. It'll be worth the effort!

Here, you can crawl through Khufu's narrow passageways and navigate your way, as the pharaohs did, to the King's burial chamber. Take the High-Resolution route (avg. 400k) for the best QuickTime VR experience, ease the download and see the same sights via the Low-Resolution route (avg. 150k), or take the Photographic route to see the 360-degree views as still images.

A "hand" cursor in a QTVR movie indicates a clickable link to the appropriate next page and QTVR file. Otherwise, navigate via the text links below the QTVR windows.

For the bold of browser, capture the whole experience in a single 2.7MB file, and click from passage to room and back, without waiting for the next movie to download. An "arrow" cursor indicates a clickable link to the next room.

Photography for QuickTimeVR: Aaron Strong
Photo: Aaron Strong

Colossus of Memnon

This truly colossal statue and its companion are all that remains of a huge mortuary temple built by the pharaoh Amenophis III (Amenhotep) in the 14th century B.C. The temple, which the pair of Colossi fronted, collapsed in an earthquake in the first century B.C., and later builders have long since appropriated its pieces, leaving nothing but an empty field.

An enormous temple once rose behind the Colossi of Memnon.

The quake caused cracks to develop in the Colossi, which ever after began "singing" when the sun rose. This led the Greeks to deem them the Oracle of Memnon (an Ethiopian king in Greek mythology), to which they and later the Romans made pilgrimages. When the Roman emperor Septimius Severus restored the statues in hopes of gaining favor with Memnon, they ceased speaking their oracles.

Egyptians prepare the ladder the NOVA team used to shoot some of the QuickTime VRs.

As you move around the Colossus, which is the northern one of the two, watch for its southern companion in the background and the range of hills to the west, wherein lie the Valley of the Kings and other necropoli. Keep an eye out, too, for a pair of Egyptians standing by the Colossus, who give a sense of just how immense these 60-foot-tall, 1,300-ton statues really are.

Hieroglyphs what say?

Hieroglyphs what say?

When you want to get a friend on the other side of the classroom to meet you for lunch (without disrupting class and getting in trouble) what do you do? Write her a note that says something like "meet me for lunch," right?

Easy enough. But what if you and your friend don't speak the same language? How would you get your message across?

What about pictures? Before there was a written language, people used pictures to communicate. That's how ancient Egyptians recorded ideas. Their pictures were called hieroglyphs. The problem with pictures, though, is that not everybody agrees on what they mean. Take these hieroglyphs, for example:

Hmmm. Some birds, a half moon, a feather, and a oval. Or maybe that half moon is a stone sticking out of the ground. And maybe the oval is really a hole in the ground. Maybe what it means is that two birds standing by a rock have a hole to jump in if trouble happens by. That might make sense, but it's not quite right. The pictures simply mean "water."

Say what? How could that possibly mean water, you ask? Good question

Here are some very simple versions of hieroglyphs like those Egyptians used to communicate with others about everyday life. Many of the hieroglyphs found in pyramids are much more complex and would be scrunched closer together.

There's a trick to making sense of these hieroglyphs. It might be a good idea to learn more about hieroglyphs before you try to decipher these

Hieroglyphs are part of a system of picture writing called hieroglyphics. When picture writing first began, the pictures represented the actual object they depicted. These were called pictograms. For example, a picture of a sun within a family scene signified that the sun was part of that scene. Later, pictures came to represent ideas, so that if you saw a sun in a scene, it might symbolize not only the sun, but also daytime, warmth, or light. These were known as ideograms.

Finally, the pictures began to represent not only the appearance of an object and related ideas, but also the sound of a spoken word used to it describe it. Sun, then, might also mean son, or be part of the word Sunday. So each picture took on a unique sound that could be used to form thoughts and ideas. If you used everyday objects to do the same thing, you would write the word "hi there" as follows:

The simplified code below shows you what each sign sounds like using our alphabet. Actual Egyptian hieroglyphics has no vowels (pictures for them have been added here to help you with your translation). Also, unlike these simple hieroglyphs, each hieroglyph found in pyramids and tombs often symbolized more than one consonant. Not only that, but actual Egyptian hieroglyphs were a combination of sound-signs, pictograms, and ideograms. No wonder it was so hard to decode them!

Now look again at the hieroglyphs you are trying to decipher:

How Old Are The Pyramids (part 2)

MARK LEHNER, Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum

NOVA: How do we know how old the pyramids are?

LEHNER: It's not a direct approach. There are people coming from a New Age perspective who want the pyramids to be very old, much older than Egyptologists are willing to agree. There are people who want them to be built by extraterrestrials, or inspired by extraterrestrials, or built by a lost civilization whose records are otherwise unknown to us. And similar ideas are said about the Sphinx. And in response to the evidence that we have for the time in which the pyramids are built, the criticism is often leveled at scholars that they're only dealing with circumstantial information. It's all just circumstantial. And sometimes we smile at that, because virtually all information in archaeology is circumstantial.

Rarely do we have people from thousands of years ago who are writing, who are signing confessions. So there's no one easy way that we know what the date of the pyramids happens to be. It's mostly by context. The pyramids are surrounded by cemeteries of other tombs. In these tombs we find bodies. Sometimes we find organic materials, like fragments of reed, and wood, wooden coffins. We find the bones of the people who lived and were buried in these tombs. All that can be radiocarbon dated, for example. But primarily we date the pyramids by their position in the development of Egyptian architecture and material culture over the broad sweep of 3,000 years. So we're not dealing with any one foothold of factual knowledge at Giza itself. We're dealing with basically the entirety of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology.

NOVA: Can you give us an example of a single aspect of material culture, from ancient Egypt that you might use as a starting point for dating the pyramids?

LEHNER: The pottery, for example. All the pottery you find at Giza looks like the pottery of the time of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, the kings who built these pyramids in what we call the Fourth Dynasty, the Old Kingdom. We study the pottery and how it changes over the broad sweep, some 3,000 years. There are people who are experts in all these different periods of pottery or Egyptian ceramics.

So to bring it down to a level that almost anybody can understand, if, for example, you were digging around the base of the Empire State Building, assuming that it was a ruin and the streets around it in Manhattan were filled with dirt, and you started finding ceramics that were characteristic of the Elizabethan era or say the Colonial period here in the United States, that would be one thing. But if you started finding the Styrofoam cups and the plastic utensils of the nearby delicatessen, then you would know by virtue of their position in the overall material culture of the 20th century that that's probably a good date for the Empire State Building. Of course then you'd look at the Empire State Building's style and you'd compare it to the Chrysler Building, and you'd compare it to the Citicorp Building, which is considerably different. And you'd work out the different styles in the evolution of Manhattan itself. But by and large, you would, in the broad scope, be able to put the Empire State Building and Manhattan in an overall context of development here in the United States and in the modern 19th and 20th centuries. And you would know that it didn't date, for example, to the colonial period of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, because nothing you'd find in the Empire State Building ruins, around it, in the dirt surrounding it—maybe it's a stump sticking up above the sloping ruins of Manhattan—nothing really looks like the flowing blue china, or the other kinds of utensils and material culture that they used in the time of the American Revolution. So it's hard to give a succinct answer to that question, because we date things in archaeology on the basis of its context and a broad mass of information and material culture—things that were used by people, styles, and so on.

NOVA: When it comes to carbon dating, do you need organic material?

LEHNER: Right. There has been radiocarbon dating, or carbon-14 dating done in Egypt obviously before we did our studies, and it's been done on some material from Giza. For example, the great boat that was found just south of the Great Pyramid, which we think belongs to Khufu, that was radiocarbon dated—coming out about 2,600 B.C.

NOVA: But how do you carbon date the pyramids themselves when they're made out of stone, an inorganic material?

LEHNER: We had the idea some years back to radiocarbon date the pyramids directly. And as you say, you need organic material in order to do carbon-14 dating, because all living creatures, every living thing takes in carbon-14 during its lifetime, and stops taking in carbon-14 when it dies. And then the carbon-14 starts breaking down at a regular rate. So in effect, you're counting the carbon-14 in an organic specimen. And by virtue of the rate of disintegration of carbon-14 atoms and the amount of carbon-14 in a sample, you can know how old it is. So how do you date the pyramids, because they're made out of stone and mortar? Well, in the 1980s when I was crawling around on the pyramids, as I used to like to do and still do, I noticed that contrary to what many guides tell people, even the stones of the Great Pyramid of Khufu are put together with great quantities of mortar. We're looking, you see, at the core.

A pyramid is basically, most basically, two separate constructions: it's an outer shell of very fine polished limestone with great accuracy in its joints, but most of that's missing; and the other construction is the inner core, which filled in this shell. Since most of the outer casing is missing what you see now is the step-like structure of the core. The core was made with a substantial slop factor, as my friend who is a mechanic likes to say about certain automobiles. That is, they didn't join the stones very accurately. You have great spaces between the stones. And you can actually see where the men were up there and they didn't, you know, they may have like four or five, even six inches between two stones. And so they'd jam down pebbles and cobbles and some broken stones, and slop big quantities of gypsum mortar in there. I noticed that in the interstices between the stones and in this mortar was embedded organic material, like charcoal, probably from the fire that they used to heat the gypsum in order to make the mortar. You have to heat raw gypsum in order to dehydrate it, and then you rehydrate it in order to make the mortar, like with modern cement.

So it occurred to me that if we could take these small samples, we could radiocarbon date them, not with conventional radiocarbon dating so much, but recently there's been a development in carbon-14 dating where they use atomic accelerators to count the disintegration rate of the carbon-14 atoms, atom by atom. So you can date extraordinarily small samples. So we set up a program to do that. And it involved us climbing all over the Old Kingdom pyramids, including the ones at Giza, taking as much in the way of organic samples as we could. We weren't damaging the pyramids, because these are tiny little flecks and it's a very strange experience to be crawling over a monument as big as Khufu's, looking for a bit of charcoal that might be as big as the fingernail on your small finger. We noted, not only the samples of charcoal, sometimes there was reed. Now and then in some of the pyramids we found little bits of wood. But we saw in many places, even on the giant pyramids of Giza, the first pyramid and the second pyramid and the third one, fragments of tools, bits of pottery that are clearly characteristic of the Old Kingdom. And it occurred to us, you know, these are not just objects, these, the pyramids themselves were archaeological sites during the time they were being built. If it took 20 years to build them—and now we begin to think that Khufu may have reigned double the length of time that we traditionally assign him—if people were building the Great Pyramid over three decades, it was an occupied site as long as some camp sites that hunters and gatherers occupied that archaeologists dig out in the desert.

So you see the pyramids are very human monuments. And the evidence of the people who built them, their material culture is embedded right into the very fabric of the pyramids. And I think I could take just about any interested person and show them this kind of material embedded in the pyramids as well as tool marks in the stones and say, hey, folks, these weren't lasers. These were chisels and hammers and you know, people who were really out there.

NOVA: What does the radiocarbon dating tell us about the date of the pyramids?

LEHNER: Well, we did a first run in 1984, actually, funded by the Edgar Cayce Foundation because they had definite ideas that the pyramids were much older than Egyptologists believed. That they date as early as 10,500 B.C. Well, obviously for them it was a good test case because radio carbon dating does not give you pinpoint accuracy. If you have a plus or minus factor, but I say it's kind of like shooting at a fly on a barn with a shotgun. Well, you're not going to hit the fly exactly, you're going to know which side of the barn, which end of the barn, you know, the buckshot is scattering. And it wasn't scattering at 10,500 B.C. on that first run of some 70 samples from a whole selection of pyramids of the Old Kingdom. But it was significantly older than Egyptologists believed. We were getting dates from the 1984 study that were on the average 374 years too old for the Cambridge Ancient History, (the Cambridge Ancient History is a reference) dates for the kings who built these monuments. So just recently we took some 300 samples, and in collaboration with our Egyptian colleagues, we are now in the process of dating these samples. The outcome we are going to announce jointly in tandem with our Egyptian colleagues, and maybe we can pick up the subject of the results when we're over there in Egypt together with Dr. Zahi Hawass (during the February excavation of the bakeries at Giza).

NOVA: Is there any evidence at all that an ancient civilization predating the civilization of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure was there?

LEHNER: It's a good question. If they were there, you see—civilizations don't disappear without a trace. If archaeologists can go out and dig up a campsite of hunters and gatherers that was occupied 15,000 years ago, there's no way there could have been a complex civilization at a place like Giza or anywhere in the Nile Valley and they didn't leave a trace, because people eat, people poop, people leave their garbage around, and they leave their traces, they leave the traces of humanity.

Now at Giza, I should tell people how this has come down to me personally. Because I actually went over there with my own notions of lost civilizations, older civilizations from Edgar Cayce. When I worked at the Sphinx over a five-year period we were mapping every nook and cranny, every block and stone, and actually every fissure and crack as well. And I, on a couple of different occasions was able to excavate natural solution cavities in the limestone from which the Sphinx is made. Natural solution cavities are like holes in Swiss cheese. When the limestone formed from sea sediments 50 million years ago there were bubbles and holes and so on, and fissures later developed from tectonic forces cracking the limestone. So for example, right at the hind paw of the Great Sphinx on the north side, this main fissure that cuts through the whole body of the Sphinx and then through the floor opens up to about 30 centimeters wide and about a meter or more in length. And in tandem with Zahi Hawass in 1979-'80, we were clearing out this fissure, which now is totally filled with debris again. But we actually reached down to our armpits, lying on our sides on the floor, scooping out this clay. And in the clay was embedded, not only charcoal, but bits of pottery that were very characteristic of the pottery that was used during the time of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the 4th Dynasty.

We did that again on the floor of the Sphinx temple which is built on a lower terrace directly below the paws of the Sphinx. Directly in front of the Sphinx, we found a solution cavity in 1978, during what's called the SRI Project, which has been written about. We actually cleared out this cavity. We found dolomite pounders, these round balls of hard dolomite that are characteristic hammerstones of the age of the pyramids that they used for roughing out work in stone. Beyond that, Zahi and I excavated deposits on the floor of the Sphinx, even more substantial, deposits that were sealed by an 18th Dynasty temple, built by Tutankamen's great grandfather when the Sphinx was already 1,200 years old. But it was built by a pharaoh named Amenhotep II and his son, Thelmos IV. They put the foundation of this temple right over deposits of the Old Kingdom, and sealed it, so that they were left there and were not cleared away by earlier excavators in our era in the 1930s.

Zahi and I sort of did a stratographic dissection of these ancient deposits. That is we did very careful trenches, recorded the layers and the different kinds of material. The bottom material sealed by a temple built by Tutankamen's great or great great grandfather, was Old Kingdom construction debris. They stopped work cutting the outlines of the Sphinx ditch—the Sphinx sits down in this ditch or sanctuary. We were able to show exactly where they stopped work. They didn't quite finish that. We found tools, we found pottery, characteristic of the Old Kingdom time of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

Now the point is this. That it's not just this crevice or that nook and cranny or that deposit underneath this temple, but all over Giza, you find this kind of material. And as I say in looking for our carbon-14 samples, climbing in the pyramids you find the same material embedded in the very fabric of the pyramids, in the mortar bonding the stones together. So back to the question, is there an earlier civilization? Well, as I say to New Age critics, show me one pot shard of that earlier civilization. Because the only way they could have existed is if they actually got out with whisk brooms, scoop shovels and little spoons and cleared out every single trace of their daily lives, their utensils, their pottery, their wood, their tools and so on, and that's just totally improbable. Well, it's not impossible, but it has a very, very low level of probability, that there was an older civilization there.

Photos: (1,4,5) Aaron Strong; (2) From "This Old Pyramid"; (3) Carl Andrews

How Old Are The Pyramids? (part 1)

How Old Are The Pyramids?

The precise age of the pyramids of Giza has long been debated because, until now, there has been little evidence to prove when the pyramids were built. The history books generally point to 3200 B.C. as the approximate date when the pyramid of Khufu was under construction. But how exactly do Egyptologists date the pyramids? Like past excavations, the current dig at Giza attempts to bring us closer to pinpointing the time period during which the pyramids were built. NOVA Online's interviews with two experts reveal the results of recent carbon dating on the pyramids, and shed further light on the process Egyptologists must go through to decipher the age of these great monuments. NOVA Online invites those who have questions or comments about the age of the pyramids and the Sphinx to e-mail the excavation.

ZAHI HAWASS, Director General of Giza

NOVA: There have been claims that a great civilization predates ancient dynastic Egypt—one that existed some 10,500 years B.C.—and that this civilization was responsible for building the pyramids and sculpting the Sphinx. Is this possible?

HAWASS: Of course it is not possible for one reason. Until now there is no evidence at all that has been found in any place, not only at Giza, but also in Egypt. People have been excavating in Egypt for the last 200 years. No single artifact, no single inscription, or pottery, or anything has been found until now, in any place to predate the Egyptian civilization more than 5,000 years ago.

NOVA: What evidence do you have that the pyramids and tombs at Giza were from, as you say, no more than 5,000 years ago.

HAWASS: First of all you have inscriptions that are written inside the tombs, the tombs that are located on the west side of the Great Pyramid for the officials, and the tombs that are located on the east side of the Great Pyramid for the nobles, the family of the King Khufu. And you have this lady, the daughter of Khufu. And this man was the vizier of the king. This one was the inspector of the pyramids, the chief inspector of the pyramids, the wife of the pyramid, the priest of the pyramid. You have the inscriptions and you have pottery dated to Dynasty 4. You have inscriptions that they found of someone who was the overseer of the side of the Pyramid of Khufu. And another one who was the overseer of the west side of the pyramid. You have tombs of the workmen who built the pyramids that we found, with at least 30 titles that have been found on them to connect the Great Pyramid of Khufu to Dynasty 4. You have the bakery that Mark Lehner found. And all the evidence that we excavate here.

Who Built the Pyramids

Who Built the Pyramids

The question of who built the pyramids, and how, has long been debated by Egyptologists and historians. Standing at the base of the pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these enormous monuments could have been built in one pharaoh's lifetime. Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote in the 5th century B.C., 500 years before Christ, is the earliest known chronicler and historian of the Egyptian Pyramid Age. By his accounts, the labor force that built Khufu totalled more than 100,000 people. But Herodotus visited the pyramids 2,700 years after they were built and his impressive figure was an educated guess, based on hearsay. Modern Egyptologists believe the real number is closer to 20,000.

Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the 20,000 - 30,000 laborers who built the pyramids lived. Once they find the workers' living area, they can learn more about the workforce, their daily lives, and perhaps where they came from. Mark has been excavating the bakeries that presumably fed this army of workers, and Zahi has been excavating the cemetery for this grand labor force. It is believed that Giza housed a skeleton crew of workers who labored on the pyramids year round. But during the late summer and early autumn months, during the annual flooding of the fields with water from the annual innundation of the Nile flooded the fields, a large labor force would appear at Giza to put in time on the pyramids. These farmers and local villagers gathered at Giza to work for their god kings, to build their monuments to the hereafter. This would ensure their own afterlife and would also benefit the future and prosperity of Egypt as a whole. They may well have been willing workers, a labor force working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, and country.

The following interviews with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass address the controversial question of who actually built the pyramids at Giza:

MARK LEHNER, Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum

NOVA: In your extensive work and research at Giza have you ever once questioned whether humans built the pyramids?

LEHNER: No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or super intelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in 1972 and ended up living there 13 years. I was imbued with ideas of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive. And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who built these things, they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, bakeries that we actually find.

Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying, there's no way they could have done this. I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find.

NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that 100,000 workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20,000 workers. Can you explain that for us?

LEHNER: Yeah, well, first of all Herodotus just claims he was told that. He said, 100,000 men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of 100,000 men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the 100,000 men. But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid." You know, the popular film that was done by NOVA [where we attempted to build a small pyramid at Giza]. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology 100 percent because there's no way we could replicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the 60-ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques and operations, without testing the entire building project.

One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet—they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night out there—if they can quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out somewhere between—I've got this all written down—but it comes out in the hundreds of men. Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500 men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so that 12 men become 32. And now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at Giza. You see most of the stone is local stone.

So then because of our mapping and because of our approach where we looked at, what is the shape of the ground here, where's the quarry, where is the pyramid, let's see, where would the ramp have run, we could come up with a figure of how many men it would take to schlep the stones up to the pyramid. Now it's often said that the stones were delivered at a rate of one every two minutes or so. And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the Egyptians of Khufu's day. But the stones didn't go in one after another, you see. And you can actually work out the coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a 1.5 ton block over a slick surface with great ease. And then you could come up with very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an average size block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to the pyramid. And you could even factor in different configurations of the ramp which would give you a different length.

Well, working in such ways, and I challenge anybody to join in the challenge, it comes out that you can actually get the delivery that you need. You need 340 stones delivered you see, every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten hour day, right. Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something like 2,000, somewhere in that area. We can go over the exact figures. So now we've got 1200 men in the quarry which is a very generous estimate, 2,000 men delivering. And so that's 3,200. OK, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints, so there's a difference there. But let's gloss over that for a moment.

One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could, is just what is it like to have a 2 or 3-ton block—how many men can get their hands on it? Well, you can't have 50 men working on one block, you see. And you can only get about four or five, six guys at most working on a block, say two on levers, you know, cutters and so on. And you know, you put pivots under it and as few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it. There are all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get too many men on a block. But you figure out how many stones have to be set to keep up with this rate, to get in with 20 years. And it actually comes up 5,000 or less men, including the stone setters. Now the stone setting gets a bit complicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from each corner, and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing and then the core. And I'm going to gloss over that.

But the challenge is out there: 5,000 men to actually do the building and the quarrying and the schlepping from the local quarry. This doesn't count the men cutting the granite and shipping it from Aswan or the men over in Tura. OK, so that increases the numbers somewhat....And that's what things like the ancient technologies series done by NOVA really bring home, I think. No, we're not recreating ancient society, and ancient pyramid building 100 percent. And probably not even 60 percent. But we are showing some nuts and bolts that are very useful and insightful, far more than all the armchair theorizing.

Now just recently I was contacted by the construction firm DMJM—the initials stand for Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall—it's one of the largest construction firms, they're working right now on the Pentagon. And one of the senior vice presidents decided to take on for a formal address for fellow engineers, a program management study of the Great Pyramid. So these are not guys lifting boilers in Manhattan, these are senior civil engineers with one of the largest construction corporations in the United States. And I'm sure they'd be happy to go on record with their study which looked at what they call critical path analysis. What do you need to get the job done? What tools did they have? And they contacted me and other Egyptologists and we gave them some references. Here's what we know about their tools, the inclined plane, the lever and so on. And without any secret sophistication or hidden technology, just basically what archaeologists say, this is what these folks had. DIM JIM came up with 5,000, 4 to 5,000 men could build the Great Pyramid within a 20 to 40 year period. And they have very specific calculations on every single aspect, from the gravel, for the ramps, to baking the bread. So I throw that out there, not because that's gospel truth, but because reasoned construction engineers, who plan great projects like bridges and buildings today and earthworks and so on, look at the Great Pyramid and don't opt out for lost civilizations, extraterrestrials, or hidden technologies. No, they say it's a very impressive job, extraordinary for the people who lived then and there, but it could be done. They are human monuments.

NOVA: You've made reference to inscriptions at Giza that indicate who built the pyramids. What do the inscriptions say?

LEHNER: One of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have is graffiti on ancient stone monuments in places that they didn't mean to be shown. Like on foundations when we dig down below the floor level, up in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber, and in many monuments of the Old Kingdom, temples, the Sun temples, other pyramids. Well, the graffiti gives us a picture of organization where crews, where a gang of workmen was organized into two crews. And the crews were subdivided into five phyles. The word phyles is spelled p-h-y-l-e-s. It's the Greek word for tribe. The Egyptian word is za. They were divided into five za's. In later times when the Greeks came and in bilingual inscriptions, when somebody was translating za into Greek they used the word phyles, the word for tribe, which is extremely interesting actually.

Were these militaristic kinds of conscripts? Certainly they weren't slaves. Could they actually have been natural communities of the Nile Valley kind of contributing like the way the Inca build their bridges and so on? .....So the phyles then are subdivided into divisions. And the divisions are identified by single hieroglyphs with names that mean things like endurance, perfection, strong. OK, so how do we know this—you come to a block of stone in the relieving chambers above the Great Pyramid. And first of all you see this cartouche of a King and then some scrawls all in red paint after it. That's the gang name. And in the Old Kingdom in the time of the Pyramids of Giza, the gangs were named after kings. So for example, we have a name, compounded with the name of Menkaure, and it seems to translate 'the drunks or the drunkards of Menkaure.' There's one that's well attested, actually in the relieving chambers above the Great Pyramid, the Friends of Khufu gang, the Drunks of Menkaura gang, and then you have the green phyles and then the powerful ones. None of this sounds like slavery, does it?

And in fact it gets more intriguing. Because in certain monuments you find the name of one gang on one side of the monument and another gang, we assume competing on the other side of the monument. You find that to some extent in the temple, the Pyramid temple of Menkaure. It's as though these gangs are competing. So from this evidence we deduce that there was a labor force that was assigned to respective crew gang phyles and divisions.

NOVA: Where did the gangs come from? Were they local people or did they travel from afar?

LEHNER: There's some evidence to suggest that people were rotated in and out of the raw labor force. So that you could be a young man in a village say in middle Egypt, and you had never seen more than a few hundred people in your village, maybe at market day or something. And the King's men come and it may not have been entirely coercion, but it seems that everybody owed a labor tax. We don't know if it was entirely coercive, or if in fact, part of it was a natural community donation as in the Incan Empire for example, to building projects where they had a great party and so on. But anyway they started keeping track of people and their time on the royal labor project. And if you were brought from a distance you were brought by boat. So can you imagine floating down the Nile and say you're working on Khafre's Pyramid, and you float past the great pyramid of Meidum and the Pyramids of Dashur, and my God, you've never seen anything like this. These are the hugest things. We're talking about a society where they didn't have cameras, you didn't see yourself age. You didn't see great images. And so here are these stupendous, gigantic things thrusted up to the sky, polished white limestone, blazing in the sunshine. And then they go on down to Giza and they come around this corner, actually the corner of the Wall of the Crow right into the harbor, and there's Khufu, the biggest thing on the planet actually in the way of a building until the turn of the century—our century. And you see, for the first time in your life, not a few hundred, but thousands, probably, of workers and people and industries of all kinds. And you're rotated into this experience and you serve in your respective crew, gang, phyles and division, and then you're rotated out and you go back because you have your own large household to whom you are assigned on a kind of an estate organized society. You have your own village, maybe you even have your own land that you're responsible for. So you're rotated back but you're not the same. You have seen the central principle of the first nation state in our planet's history, the pyramids, the centralization, this organization. And so they must have been powerful socializing forces.

Anyway, we think that that was the experience of the raw recruits. But there must have been a cadre of very seasoned laborers who really knew how to cut stone so fine that you could join them without getting a razor blade in between. And perhaps they were the stone cutters and setters, and the experienced quarry men at the quarry wall. And the people who rotated in and out were those doing all the different raw labor, not only the schlepping of the stone but preparing gypsum and we don't know to what extent the other industries were also organized in the phyles system. But it's quite an amazing picture. And one of the things that really is motivating me now is the question of what vision of society is suggested by a pyramid like Khufu's? Was it in fact coercive? Was it a militaristic kind of state WPA project? Or is it possible that we could find evidence that would bring Egypt into line with what we know of other traditional ancient societies. Like when the Inca build a bridge, and every household winds its twine together, and the twine of all the households in the village are wound into the villages' contribution to the rope. And the rope on the great day of bridge building is wound into a great cable. And all the villages' cables are wound into this virtual bridge. Or in Mesopotamia we know that they built city walls, great mud brick city walls, by the clans turning out and giving their contribution, a kind of organic, natural community involvement in the building project. I wonder if that wasn't the case with the Great Pyramid of Khufu. You know, it's almost like an Amish barnraising. But you know, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is one hell of a barn.

NOVA: Some of the theories of who built the pyramids suggest that the builders may not have been from Egypt. Can you respond to that?

LEHNER: One thing that strikes me when I read about these ideas—that it couldn't have been the Egyptians who built the pyramids, it couldn't have been the Egyptians who built the Sphinx, of the 4th Dynasty, it had to have been an older civilization. And I think about those claims and then I look at the marvelous statue of Khafre with the Horus falcon at the back of his head. I look at the sublime ship of Khufu that was found buried south of the pyramid. And we know that these objects date from the time of Khafre and Khufu, and I think, my God, this was a great civilization. This was as great as it comes in terms of art and sculpture and building ships from any place in the planet, in the whole repertoire of ancient cultures. Why is there such a need to look for yet another culture, to say 'No, it wasn't these people, it was some civilization that's lost, even older.' And to some extent I think we feel the need to look for a lost civilization on time's other horizon because we feel lost in our civilization and somehow we don't want to face the little man behind the curtain as you had in "The Wizard of Oz." We want the great and powerful wizard with all the sound and fury. You know, go get me the broomstick of the wicked witch of the west. We want that sound and fury. We always want more out of the past than it really is.

ZAHI HAWASS, Director General of Giza

NOVA: Let's address the question of who built the pyramids.

HAWASS: We are lucky because we found this whole evidence of the workmen who built the pyramids and we found the artisans and Mark found the bakery and we found this settlement of the camp, and all the evidence, the hieroglyphical inscriptions of the overseer of the site of the Pyramid, the overseer of the west side of the Pyramid, the craftsman we found, the man who makes the statue of the overseer of the craftsman, the inspector of building tombs, director of building tombs—I'm telling you all the titles. We found 25 unique new titles connected with these people. Then who built the pyramids? It was the Egyptians who built the pyramids. The Great Pyramid is dated with all the evidence, I'm telling you now to 4,600 years, the reign of Khufu. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is one of 104 pyramids in Egypt with superstructure. And there are 54 pyramids with substructure. There is support (that) the builders of the pyramids were Egyptians. They are not the Jews as has been said, they are not people from a lost civilization. They are not out of space. They are Egyptian and their skeletons are here, and were examined by scholars, doctors and the race of all the people we found are completely supporting that they are Egyptians.

NOVA: The Greek historian Herodotus claimed in 500 B.C. that 100,000 people built the pyramids, and yet modern Egyptologists believe the figure to be more like 20,000 to 30,000.

HAWASS: Herodotus, when he came here, met guides who tell stories and things like that. But I really personally believe that based on the size of the settlement and the whole work of an area that we found, I believe that permanent and temporary workmen who worked at building the pyramid were 36,000.

NOVA: And how do you come to that number?

HAWASS: I came to that number based on the size of the pyramid project, a government project, the size of the tombs, the cemetery. We know we can excavate the cemetery for hundreds of years—generations after generation can work in the cemetery—and the second is the settlement area. I really believe there were permanent workmen who were working for the king. They were paid by the king and these are the technicians who cut the stones, and there are workmen who move the stones and they come and work in rotation. You have this group and another group. In the same time there are the people who live around the pyramids that don't need to live in the pyramids. They come by early in the morning and they work fourteen hours from sunrise to sunset.

NOVA: From your excavations of the workers' cemetery you say you found skeletons. Did you analyze the bones, and if so, what did you learn about the workmen?

HAWASS: We found 600 skeletons. And we found that those people, number one, they were Egyptians, the same like you see in every cemetery in Egypt. Number two, we found evidence that those people had emergency treatment. They had accidents during building the pyramids. And we found 12 skeletons who had accidents with their hands. And they supported the two sides of the hand with wood. And we have another one, a stone fell down on his leg, and they made a kind of operation, and they cut his leg and he lived 14 years after that.

NOVA: How do you know that?

HAWASS: Because we have a team here from the National Research Center who are doctors and they use the x-ray and they can find all the evidence about age. They found that the age of death for those workmen were from 30 to 35. Those are the people who really built the pyramids, the poor Egyptians. It's very important to prove how the pyramid was built. The pyramid you know, has magic, it has mystery. It's a structure that was built, you know, 4,600 years ago. There is no accurate book until now that really explained all of that. All the theorists, in other books they say that the stones were taken from Tura, about five miles to the east of the pyramid. This is not true. All the stones have been taken from the plateau, except the casing stones that came from Tura, and the granite in the burial chamber that came from Aswan. But the magic of the pyramid makes people think about it. An amateur comes by and looks at this structure and doesn't know the mechanics. The cult of the Egyptians, the religion, the pyramid, is a part of a whole civilization.

NOVA: There is an inscription above Khufu's burial chamber that identifies the pyramid as that of Khufu. Some people claim that is a fake inscription. Can you comment on that?

HAWASS: They say that the inscriptions inside the five relieving chambers are fake. Fine. I went last week and we lighted all of them. It has been never lighted before. We did beautiful lighting. Then we can read each single inscription.

NOVA: And what do they say?

HAWASS: The workmen who were involved in building the Great Pyramid were divided into gangs, groups, four groups, and each group had a name, and each group had an overseer. They wrote the names of the gangs. And you have the names of the gangs of Khufu as 'Friends of Khufu.' Because they were the friends of Khufu proves that building the pyramid was not really something that the Egyptians would push. You know, it's like today. If you go to any village you will understand the system of ancient Egyptians. When you build, I mean a dam, or you build a big house, people would come to help you. They would work free for you, the households will send food to feed the workmen. And when they build the houses you will do the same for them. And that's why the pyramid was the national project of Egypt because everyone had to participate in building this pyramid. By food, by workmen, this way the building of the pyramid was something that everyone felt to participate, and really it was love. They are not really pushed to do it. When the king takes the throne, the people have to be ready in participating in building the pyramid. And then when they finish it, they celebrate. That's why even now in modern Egypt we still really do celebrations when we finish any project because that's exactly what happened in ancient Egypt.

NOVA: But what about the incriptions in the relieving chambers in Khufu and the claim that they were not written in the time of Khufu?

HAWASS: They say that these inscriptions have been written by people who entered inside. And if you go and see them they are typical graffiti that can be seen around every pyramid in Egypt, because the workmen around the pyramid left this. I would like those people who talked about this to come with me. And I will take them personally to the rooms. First of all they say that only inscribed is the second room—it's not true. All the five relieving chambers are inscribed. Number two, there are some inscriptions there that cannot be written by anyone except the workmen who put them there. You cannot go and reach there. It has to be the man who put the block above the other one to do that. I think that maybe the only few Egyptologists, the only two Egyptologists in the world that will really have an open mind, it's me and Mark Lehner, because we believe the public has the right for us to tell them the truth. We are really working excavating around the pyramids to tell the world the truth

Abydos in Egypt by Marie Parsons >> Abydos Abydos, or Abjdu, lies in the eight nome of Upper Egypt, about 300 miles south of Cairo, on the western side of the Nile and about 9.5 miles from the river. It spreads over 5 square miles and contains archaeological remains from all periods of ancient Egyptian history. It was significant in historical times as the main cult center of Osiris, the lord of the netherworld. At the mouth of the canyon at Abydos, which the Egyptians believed to be the entrance to the underworld, one of the tombs of the 1st dynasty kings was mistaken for the tomb of Osiris, a thousand years later, and pilgrims would leave offerings to the god for another thousand years. The area is thus now called Umm el Qa’ab, "Mother of Pots." Abydos was the burial place for the first kings of a unified Egypt. But it contains remains from earlier, in the Predynastic period. In 1900 the Predynastic cemetery of el-Amra was excavated with hundreds of graves from all Predynastic phases. Other important cemeteries were found at Naga ed-Deir, el-Mahasna, Mesheikh, Beit Allam and the various cemeteries at Abydos itself. In addition, settlements have been found, most representing small farming villages. El-Mahasna had beer-brewing facilities. The Predynasty/Early Dynastic cemetery is located in the low desert. It consists of three parts: predynastic Cemetery U in the north, Cemetery B in the middle with royal tombs from Dynasty 0 and the early 1st Dynasty, and in the south the tomb complexes of six kings and one queen from the 1st dynasty and two kings from the 2nd dynasty. Most of the 1st dynasty tombs show traces of immense fires. Many had also been plundered many times. In 1977 a tiny ivory label was discovered bearing the "nar" name of Narmer, and the king is seen smiting an enemy in the Delta. Cemetery U contains several hundred graves and offering pits. Ceramics are from the Naqada culture. Of particular importance is the tomb named U-j, uncovered in 1988. It is dated to 150 years before Aha and the beginning of the 1st dynasty. The tomb is elaborate, brick-lined, with doors and windows. It has twelve chambers and measures about 27 feet x 24 feet. It still contained much funerary equipment. There were large amounts of different kinds of Egyptian pottery, and more than 200 wine jars imported probably from Palestine. There were also about 150 labels of ivory or bone, many of which were apparently attached to linen bolts. Many of the inscriptions on the labels are readable with clear glyphs and signs. The most frequent sign was a scorpion, sometimes together with a plant. It is speculated that either King Scorpion was buried here or that he was a known figure. Hundreds of wine jars imported from Canaan were also unearthed in one of the tomb’s store-rooms. There were traces of a wooden shrine on the floor in the burial chamber, and in the northeastern corner a complete crook-shaped scepter of ivory. Many of the earliest tombs are in the location known as Umm el Ga'ab. Ten royal enclosures in total must have been built; but only eight have been located. Some of the royal owners have been identified: Djer, Djet (Tomb), Queen-mother Merneith (Tomb), of the 1st Dynasty, Den (tomb) and Peribsen (Tomb) and Khasekhemwy (Tomb)of the 2nd Dynasty. At least some of these burials were surrounded by subsidiary graves for attendants killed and buried along with the royal funeral. Cemetery B contains three double-chamber tombs, currently attributed to King Aha (Tomb), and his Dynasty 0 predecessors of Narmer (tomb), Ka (tomb) and possibly another King named Iry-Hor (tomb). Pottery shards have been found here which are inscribed with the name-signs of these kings. Royal graves at Abydos became more elaborate, until the last and largest royal tomb built there for Khasekhemwy, last king of the 2nd Dynasty. His tomb, called Shunet es-Zebib, the Storehouse of the Flies, measures about 230 feet long and varying between 56 and 33 feet in width. Near Khentyamentiu’s temple, a mile north of the Umm el Ga’ab (Qa'ab) cemetery and nested among the enclosures were fourteen (found to-date) large boat graves The remains of the ancient ships, dating to the 1st Dynasty, were uncovered in the desert. Each averages 75 feet in length and had been encased in a structure two-feet thick with whitewashed mud-brick walls. Whether they were meant to represent solar barques, anticipating the ship built by Khufu and found within his Pyramid at Giza, is not yet known. North Abydos contains an ancient settlement and also the remains of a large stone temple from the 30th Dynasty, along with a portal structure of Ramesses II, and a fairly recently discovered temple built by Tuthmosis III. Most of the early town lies beneath modern groundwater and the remains of later settlements. Another temple, that of Khentyamentiu which was later identified with Osiris as his temple, dates from the later third millennium BCE. Royal cult buildings or ka chapels were built here by kings from the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom. Buildings to the west and southwest of the cult buildings proved to be houses spanning the period from late Predynastic to the 2nd Dynasty. A residential and industrial section have also been found to the southeast of those excavations, dating to the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. A number of mudbrick houses, consisting of between 7 and 10 small rooms, courtyards and a narrow street have been found. A workshop, the earliest and most complete faience workshop in Egypt, was also uncovered, complete with kilns. The Northern cemetery was the principal burial ground for non-royal individuals at Abydos during the Middle Kingdom, and continued to be so used through the Graeco-Roman period. The tombs of the first kings of unified Egypt were deep brick-lined structures topped with mounds of sand, later called mastabas, the Arabic word for bench, since their square or rectangular shapes resembled benches. Later in the 1st Dynasty, one structure was placed underground, supported by a retaining wall, and the second mastaba was placed above ground directly over the first, to protect the lower one. The most striking standing buildings are the enclosure of King Khasekhemwy from the 2nd Dynasty, the well-preserved New Kingdom temples of Seti I (temple) and Ramesses II (temple) from the 19th Dynasty, and the walled enclosure now called the Kom es-Sultan, the location of the early town and main temple dedicated to Osiris. The 19th Dynasty Seti temple contains seven sanctuaries set in a row, each dedicated to a different deity, Ptah, Ra-Harakhty, Amun-Ra, Osiris, Isis and Horus. Seti I himself was included with his funerary shrine. The unusual L-shaped plan of the temple is caused by a southeast wing appended to the main rectangular-shaped temple. This wing contains rooms dedicated to Sokar and Nefertum and other funerary deities. There is also a King list to the south of the sanctuaries. Since the temple was unfinished when Seti died, his son and successor Ramesses II finished the work. Immediately behind the chambers dedicated to the Osiris cult is another structure, subterranean, called the Osireion. It contains offering scenes and other scenes from the Book of Gates and the Book of the Dead. South Abydos was developed as a zone for royal cult complexes, two well-preserved ones so far identified as belonging to Senusret II of the 12th Dynasty and Ahmose of the 18th Dynasty, who built a small pyramid here. . Relief fragments at the complex of King Ahmose, the founder of the New Kingdom and conqueror of the Hyksos invaders, have been found near his pyramid and funerary complex at Abydos. One fragment represents a group of three arcers, teams of bridled chariot horses, ships with oars, and fallen warriors recognizable as Asiatics. Other fragments bear the names of Apophis, the leader of the Hyksos, and that of Avaris, the capital city of the Hyksos. As work proceeds at ancient Abydos, a home of the dead for so many millennia, more and more of the history and religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians is returning to life. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt Archaeology Magazine, by David O’Connor, Diana Craig Patch, and Stephen P. Harvey The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt Egypt Uncovered by Vivian Davies and Renee Friedman