The question of who built the pyramids, and how, haslong been debated by Egyptologists and historians. Standing at the base of thepyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these enormous monumentscould have been built in one pharaoh's lifetime. Herodotus, the Greekhistorian who wrote in the 5th century B.C., 500 years before Christ, is theearliest known chronicler and historian of the Egyptian Pyramid Age. By hisaccounts, 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 hisimpressive figure was an educated guess, based on hearsay. ModernEgyptologists believe the real number is closer to 20,000.Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the20,000 - 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 perhapswhere they came from. Mark has been excavating the bakeries that presumablyfed this army of workers, and Zahi has been excavating the cemetery for thisgrand labor force. It is believed that Giza housed a skeleton crew of workerswho labored on the pyramids year round. But during the late summer and earlyautumn months, during the annual flooding of the fields with water from theannual 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 atGiza 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 andprosperity of Egypt as a whole. They may well have been willing workers, alabor force working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, andcountry.
The following interviews with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass address thecontroversial 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 questionedwhether humans built the pyramids?
LEHNER: No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or superintelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in 1972 and ended up livingthere 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 humanityare everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal wheresometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists aredenigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argumentthat we say they were primitive. And the New Agers sometimes want to say thesewere very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who built thesethings, they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here,because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations andsocieties that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the onesthat we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating thepeople whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, bakeries that weactually find.
Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is thissociety that built the Sphinx and the pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza myrespect 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 bydoing this they contributed something to the human career and its overalldevelopment actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out andsaying, there's no way they could have done this. I think that denigrates thepeople whose evidence we actually find.
NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that 100,000 workers built thepyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20,000workers. Can you explain that for us?
LEHNER: Yeah, well, first of all Herodotus just claims he was told that. Hesaid, 100,000 men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess ifyou read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of 100,000men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the 100,000 men. But my ownapproach 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'treplicate ancient technology 100 percent because there's no way we couldreplicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So ourstones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, wedidn't reconstruct the barges that brought the 60-ton granite blocks fromAswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in theaccompanying 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 quarryin about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days theyquarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an ironcable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and alltheir 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-toshelter, 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 wouldhave to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes outsomewhere between—I've got this all written down—but it comes out in thehundreds of men. Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulledthe stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, ofabout 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, all340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. Andthat'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 thepyramid, let's see, where would the ramp have run, we could come up with afigure 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 twominutes or so. And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility forthe 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 ona slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would taketo pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a 1.5ton block over a slick surface with great ease. And then you could come upwith very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pullan average size block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to thepyramid. And you could even factor in different configurations of the rampwhich 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 need340 stones delivered you see, every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in aten hour day, right. Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangsof 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 quarrywhich 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 differentbetween the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casingstones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracythat you can't get a knife blade in between the joints, so there's a differencethere. But let's gloss over that for a moment.
One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could, is justwhat is it like to have a 2 or 3-ton block—how many men can get their hands onit? Well, you can't have 50 men working on one block, you see. And you canonly get about four or five, six guys at most working on a block, say two onlevers, you know, cutters and so on. And you know, you put pivots under it andas few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble underit. There are all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get toomany men on a block. But you figure out how many stones have to be set to keepup with this rate, to get in with 20 years. And it actually comes up 5,000 orless men, including the stone setters. Now the stone setting gets a bitcomplicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from eachcorner, and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing andthen 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 thequarrying and the schlepping from the local quarry. This doesn't count the mencutting the granite and shipping it from Aswan or the men over in Tura. OK, sothat increases the numbers somewhat....And that's what things like the ancient technologies series done by NOVA really bringhome, I think. No, we're not recreating ancient society, and ancient pyramidbuilding 100 percent. And probably not even 60 percent. But we are showingsome nuts and bolts that are very useful and insightful, far more than all thearmchair theorizing.
Now just recently I was contacted by the construction firm DMJM—theinitials stand for Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall—it's one of the largest constructionfirms, they're working right now on the Pentagon. And one of the senior vicepresidents decided to take on for a formal address for fellow engineers, aprogram management study of the Great Pyramid. So these are not guys liftingboilers in Manhattan, these are senior civil engineers with one of the largestconstruction corporations in the United States. And I'm sure they'd be happyto go on record with their study which looked at what they call critical pathanalysis. 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 whatarchaeologists say, this is what these folks had. DIM JIM came up with 5,000, 4to 5,000 men could build the Great Pyramid within a 20 to 40 year period. Andthey 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 becausethat's gospel truth, but because reasoned construction engineers, who plangreat projects like bridges and buildings today and earthworks and so on, lookat 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 builtthe pyramids. What do the inscriptions say?
LEHNER: One of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have is graffiti onancient stone monuments in places that they didn't mean to be shown. Like onfoundations when we dig down below the floor level, up in the relievingchambers above the King's chamber, and in many monuments of the Old Kingdom,temples, the Sun temples, other pyramids. Well, the graffiti gives us apicture of organization where crews, where a gang of workmen was organized intotwo crews. And the crews were subdivided into five phyles. The word phyles isspelled 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 inbilingual inscriptions, when somebody was translating za into Greek they usedthe 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 ofcontributing like the way the Inca build their bridges and so on? .....So thephyles then are subdivided into divisions. And the divisions are identified bysingle 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 therelieving chambers above the Great Pyramid. And first of all you see thiscartouche of a King and then some scrawls all in red paint after it. That'sthe gang name. And in the Old Kingdom in the time of the Pyramids of Giza, thegangs were named after kings. So for example, we have a name, compounded withthe name of Menkaure, and it seems to translate 'the drunks or the drunkards ofMenkaure.' There's one that's well attested, actually in the relievingchambers above the Great Pyramid, the Friends of Khufu gang, the Drunks ofMenkaura 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 thename of one gang on one side of the monument and another gang, we assumecompeting on the other side of the monument. You find that to some extent inthe temple, the Pyramid temple of Menkaure. It's as though these gangs arecompeting. So from this evidence we deduce that there was a labor force thatwas assigned to respective crew gang phyles and divisions.
NOVA: Where did the gangs come from? Were they local people or did theytravel from afar?
LEHNER: There's some evidence to suggest that people were rotated in and outof the raw labor force. So that you could be a young man in a village say inmiddle Egypt, and you had never seen more than a few hundred people in yourvillage, maybe at market day or something. And the King's men come and it maynot 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 buildingprojects where they had a great party and so on. But anyway they startedkeeping track of people and their time on the royal labor project. And if youwere brought from a distance you were brought by boat. So can you imaginefloating down the Nile and say you're working on Khafre's Pyramid, and youfloat 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'retalking about a society where they didn't have cameras, you didn't see yourselfa*ge. You didn't see great images. And so here are these stupendous, giganticthings thrusted up to the sky, polished white limestone, blazing in thesunshine. 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'sKhufu, the biggest thing on the planet actually in the way of a building untilthe turn of the century—our century. And you see, for the first time inyour life, not a few hundred, but thousands, probably, of workers and peopleand industries of all kinds. And you're rotated into this experience and youserve in your respective crew, gang, phyles and division, and then you'rerotated out and you go back because you have your own large household to whomyou are assigned on a kind of an estate organized society. You have your ownvillage, maybe you even have your own land that you're responsible for. Soyou're rotated back but you're not the same. You have seen the centralprinciple of the first nation state in our planet's history, the pyramids, thecentralization, this organization. And so they must have been powerfulsocializing forces.
Anyway, we think that that was the experience of the raw recruits. But theremust have been a cadre of very seasoned laborers who really knew how to cutstone so fine that you could join them without getting a razor blade inbetween. And perhaps they were the stone cutters and setters, and theexperienced quarry men at the quarry wall. And the people who rotated in andout were those doing all the different raw labor, not only the schlepping ofthe stone but preparing gypsum and we don't know to what extent the otherindustries were also organized in the phyles system. But it's quite an amazingpicture. And one of the things that really is motivating me now is thequestion of what vision of society is suggested by a pyramid like Khufu's? Wasit in fact coercive? Was it a militaristic kind of state WPA project? Or isit possible that we could find evidence that would bring Egypt into line withwhat we know of other traditional ancient societies. Like when the Inca builda bridge, and every household winds its twine together, and the twine of allthe households in the village are wound into the villages' contribution to therope. And the rope on the great day of bridge building is wound into a greatcable. And all the villages' cables are wound into this virtual bridge. Or inMesopotamia we know that they built city walls, great mud brick city walls, bythe clans turning out and giving their contribution, a kind of organic, naturalcommunity involvement in the building project. I wonder if that wasn't thecase with the Great Pyramid of Khufu. You know, it's almost like an Amishbarnraising. 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 buildersmay not have been from Egypt. Can you respond to that?
LEHNER: One thing that strikes me when I read about these ideas—that itcouldn't have been the Egyptians who built the pyramids, it couldn't have beenthe Egyptians who built the Sphinx, of the 4th Dynasty, it had to have been anolder civilization. And I think about those claims and then I look at themarvelous statue of Khafre with the Horus falcon at the back of his head. Ilook 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 Ithink, my God, this was a great civilization. This was as great as it comes interms of art and sculpture and building ships from any place in the planet, inthe whole repertoire of ancient cultures. Why is there such a need to look foryet another culture, to say 'No, it wasn't these people, it was somecivilization that's lost, even older.' And to some extent I think we feel theneed to look for a lost civilization on time's other horizon because we feellost in our civilization and somehow we don't want to face the little manbehind the curtain as you had in "The Wizard of Oz." We want the great andpowerful wizard with all the sound and fury. You know, go get me thebroomstick of the wicked witch of the west. We want that sound and fury. Wealways 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 theworkmen who built the pyramids and we found the artisans and Mark found thebakery and we found this settlement of the camp, and all the evidence, thehieroglyphical inscriptions of the overseer of the site of the Pyramid, theoverseer of the west side of the Pyramid, the craftsman we found, the man whomakes the statue of the overseer of the craftsman, the inspector of buildingtombs, director of building tombs—I'm telling you all the titles. We found25 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 withall the evidence, I'm telling you now to 4,600 years, the reign of Khufu. TheGreat Pyramid of Khufu is one of 104 pyramids in Egypt with superstructure.And there are 54 pyramids with substructure. There is support (that) thebuilders of the pyramids were Egyptians. They are not the Jews as has beensaid, 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 thatthey are Egyptians.
NOVA: The Greek historian Herodotus claimed in 500 B.C. that 100,000 peoplebuilt the pyramids, and yet modern Egyptologists believe the figure to be morelike 20,000 to 30,000.
HAWASS: Herodotus, when he came here, met guides who tell stories and thingslike that. But I really personally believe that based on the size of thesettlement and the whole work of an area that we found, I believe thatpermanent and temporary workmen who worked at building the pyramid were36,000.
NOVA: And how do you come to that number?
HAWASS: I came to that number based on the size of the pyramid project, agovernment project, the size of the tombs, the cemetery. We know we canexcavate the cemetery for hundreds of years—generations after generation canwork in the cemetery—and the second is the settlement area. I really believethere were permanent workmen who were working for the king. They were paid bythe king and these are the technicians who cut the stones, and there areworkmen who move the stones and they come and work in rotation. You have thisgroup and another group. In the same time there are the people who live aroundthe pyramids that don't need to live in the pyramids. They come by early inthe morning and they work fourteen hours from sunrise to sunset.
NOVA: From your excavations of the workers' cemetery you say you foundskeletons. Did you analyze the bones, and if so, what did you learn about theworkmen?
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. Numbertwo, we found evidence that those people had emergency treatment. They hadaccidents during building the pyramids. And we found 12 skeletons who hadaccidents with their hands. And they supported the two sides of the hand withwood. And we have another one, a stone fell down on his leg, and they made akind 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 aredoctors 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. Thoseare the people who really built the pyramids, the poor Egyptians. It's veryimportant 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 thetheorists, in other books they say that the stones were taken from Tura, aboutfive miles to the east of the pyramid. This is not true. All the stones havebeen taken from the plateau, except the casing stones that came from Tura, andthe granite in the burial chamber that came from Aswan. But the magic of thepyramid makes people think about it. An amateur comes by and looks at thisstructure and doesn't know the mechanics. The cult of the Egyptians, thereligion, the pyramid, is a part of a whole civilization.
NOVA: There is an inscription above Khufu's burial chamber that identifies thepyramid as that of Khufu. Some people claim that is a fake inscription. Canyou comment on that?
HAWASS: They say that the inscriptions inside the five relieving chambers arefake. Fine. I went last week and we lighted all of them. It has been neverlighted before. We did beautiful lighting. Then we can read each singleinscription.
NOVA: And what do they say?
HAWASS: The workmen who were involved in building the Great Pyramid weredivided into gangs, groups, four groups, and each group had a name, and eachgroup had an overseer. They wrote the names of the gangs. And you have thenames of the gangs of Khufu as 'Friends of Khufu.' Because they were thefriends of Khufu proves that building the pyramid was not really something thatthe Egyptians would push. You know, it's like today. If you go to any villageyou will understand the system of ancient Egyptians. When you build, I mean adam, or you build a big house, people would come to help you. They would workfree for you, the households will send food to feed the workmen. And when theybuild the houses you will do the same for them. And that's why the pyramid wasthe national project of Egypt because everyone had to participate in buildingthis pyramid. By food, by workmen, this way the building of the pyramid wassomething that everyone felt to participate, and really it was love. They arenot really pushed to do it. When the king takes the throne, the people have tobe ready in participating in building the pyramid. And then when they finish*t, they celebrate. That's why even now in modern Egypt we still really docelebrations when we finish any project because that's exactly what happened inancient Egypt.
NOVA: But what about the incriptions in the relieving chambers in Khufu andthe claim that they were not written in the time of Khufu?
HAWASS: They say that these inscriptions have been written by people whoentered inside. And if you go and see them they are typical graffiti that canbe seen around every pyramid in Egypt, because the workmen around the pyramidleft 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 onlyinscribed is the second room—it's not true. All the five relieving chambersare inscribed. Number two, there are some inscriptions there that cannot bewritten by anyone except the workmen who put them there. You cannot go andreach there. It has to be the man who put the block above the other one to dothat. I think that maybe the only few Egyptologists, the only twoEgyptologists in the world that will really have an open mind, it's me and MarkLehner, because we believe the public has the right for us to tell them thetruth. We are really working excavating around the pyramids to tell the worldthe truth.
(6)Aaron Strong; (7) Mark Lehner
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