Who Built the Pyramids?

Not slaves. Archaeologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers.

by ONATHAN SHAW

The pyramids and the great sphinxrise inexplicably from the desert at Giza,relics of a vanished culture. They dwarfthe approaching sprawl of modern Cairo,a city of 16 million. The largest pyramid,built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530

b.c. and intended to last an eternity, was until early inthe twentieth century the biggest building on theplanet. To raise it, laborers moved into position six anda half million tons of stonesome in blocks as large asnine tonswith nothing but wood and rope. Duringthe last 4,500 years, the pyramids have drawn everykind of admiration and interest, ranging in ancienttimes from religious worship to grave robbery, and, inthe modern era, from New-Age claims for healing pyra-mid power to pseudoscientic searches by fantasticarchaeologists seeking hidden chambers or signs ofalien visitations to Earth. As feats of engineering or tes-taments to the decades-long labor of tens of thousands,they have awed even the most sober observers.

The question of who labored to build them, andwhy, has long been part of their fascination. Rootedrmly in the popular imagination is the idea that thepyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless

pharaoh. This notion of a vast

slave class in Egypt originated in Judeo-Christian tradi-tion and has been popularized by Hollywood produc-tions like Cecil B. De Milles The Ten Commandments, inwhich a captive people labor in the scorching sun beneath the whips of pharaohs overseers. But gratifrom inside the Giza monuments themselves have longsuggested something very different.

Until recently, however, the fabulous art and gold trea-sures of pharaohs like Tutankhamen have overshadowedthe eorts of scientic archaeologists to understand howhuman forcesperhaps all levels of Egyptian societywere mobilized to enable the construction of

the pyramids. Now, drawing on diversestrands of evidence, from geological

history to analysis of living arrangements,bread-making tech-

nology, and animal remains, Egyptologist

Mark Lehner, an associateof Harvards Semitic Mu-seum, is beginning to fash-ion an answer. He has

found the city of the pyramidbuilders. They were not slaves.

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I first went to egypt as a year-abroad student in 1973, hesays, ...and ended up staying for 13 years. His way was paid by afoundation that believed a hall of records would be found be-neath the paws of the Sphinx. Young Lehner, a ministers sonfrom North Dakota, hoped to discover if that was true. But themore time he spent actually studying the Sphinx, the more hebecame convinced that the quest was misguided, and he ex-changed its fantasies for a life grounded in archaeological studyof the Giza plateau and its monuments.

Actually, he became, in the words of one employer, an archaeo-logical bum who soon found work all over Egypt with German,French, Egyptian, British, and American expeditions. At the endof these digs, there were lots of maps and drawings left to bedone, he addssteady work once the short dig season was over.Lehner discovered he had a knack for drafting, and got his rstlessons in mapping and technical drawing from a German expert. I fell in love with it, he confesses.

His rst big break came in 1977, whenthe Stanford Research Institute con-ducted a remote sensing project atthe Sphinx and the pyramidsa search for cavities using non-invasive technologies. TheSphinx is carved directlyfrom the sedimentary rockat Giza, and sits belowthe surface of the sur-rounding plateau. Lehnerwas put in charge of agroup of men cleaning outthe U-shaped, cut-rock ditchthat surrounds the monument,so that the sensing equipmentcould be brought in. In orderto plot the locations of anyanomalies, the largest ex-isting surface maps of theSphinxabout the lengthof an index ngerwereenlarged and found to beextremely inaccurate.

By then a seasonedmapper, Lehner askedthe director of theAmerican ResearchCenter in Egypt(ARCE, a consor-tium of institutionsincluding museumsand universities suchas Harvard) if theywould sponsor hiseort to map theSphinx. But Lehner,despite his experi-ence in the eld,didnt have a Ph.D.Running his own

dig appeared to be out of the question until ARCE assistant di-rector James Allen, an Egyptologist from the University ofChicago, essentially adopted Lehner professionally, took himunder the wing of his own Ph.D., and designed a mapping project.The German Archaeological Institute loaned photogrammetricequipment, the sort used by highway departments for takinghighly accurate stereoscopic photographs from the air, and Lehnersoon produced the rst scale drawings of the Sphinx, which arenow on display at the Semitic Museum.

During the mapping, Lehners close scrutiny of the Sphinxsworn and patched surface led him to wonder what archaeologi-cal secrets it might divulge. There are layers of restoration ma-sonry going back all the way to pharaonic times, he says, indi-cating that even then, the Sphinx was severelyweathered. What Lehner saw, in essence, was

an archaeological site, in plain view, thathad never been described.

To better understand the dierential weather-ing in the natural layers of rock from which the

Sphinx is cut, Lehner initially consulted a ge-ologist with expertise in stone conserva-

tion. Then his interest in the geologicalforces that created the Giza plateau

brought him into contact with ayoung geologist, Thomas Aigner, of

the University of Tbingen, whowas studying the local cycles ofsedimentation. The layers in the

lower slope of the plateau, wherethe Sphinx lies, tend to alternate

between soft and hard rock. Thesofter layers of rock were depositedduring geological eras when the areawas a backwater lagoon protected by

a coastal reef; they are highly vul-nerable to erosion. Aignerpointed out to Lehner that the

hard-soft sequence of layersin this part of the plateau

would have made it easy forancient stonecutters to extractblocks of stone for building.

His analysis revealed that thestones used to build the

temples in front of theSphinx had been quar-ried from the ditch thatsurrounds it on threesides. Many of these

huge blocks, some ofthem weighing in

at hundreds oftons, are so big

that they havetwo or three

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through them, and theyare loaded with form-inifera. Detailed logs ofthe fossilsgastropods,bivalves, sponges, andcoralsin each block andlayer allowed Lehner andAigner to actually tracethe stones back to thequarry. We began to un-build these temples in ourminds, Lehner explains,and realized that thesame could be done forthe pyramids themselvesand for the whole Gizaplateau.

Lehner had often imag-ined what Khufus archi-tect must have envisionedwhen he looked down from the Maadi formation knoll highabove the southeast slope of the plateau and planned the veryrst pyramid: quarries, a port for bringing in exotic materials likegranite and gypsum mortar, a place for the workers to live, provi-sions for their food, a delivery route from the port to the con-struction sites. The ancient Egyptians, having already quarriedmaterials for other pyramids for generations, probably weregood geologists in their own right, says Lehner. They knew howto line up all three of the massive examples at Giza precisely onthe strike of the plateaus slope (if you can walk around a hillwithout going either up or down the slope, you are on the strike).In consequence, all the pyramidswhich align on their southeastcornersbegin at nearly the same elevation. Most modern schol-ars think they were built with ramps: the crumbling stone chipsfrom the Mokattam formation quarries were close by and maywell have provided the secondary material for the ramps. Thiswas one of the many insights given us by the geologists, Lehnersays. Yet almost nothing of the infrastructure needed to build apyramid, with the exception of the quarries, had ever been lo-cated. Lehner went back to the ARCE. Why not map the wholeplateau, he asked, to see what the land itself could tell about how

ancient Egyptian society organized itself around thetask of large-scale pyramid building?

Studying the geology of an archaeological siteis standard practice today, but it had barely beendone for Giza, Lehner says, because Egyptology

grew up in the study of inscriptions. When Jean-FranoisChampollion deciphered hieroglyphics in 1822, suddenly hugetemple faades and tombs everywhere started talking to ex-plorers. Then came the overwhelming abundance of fabulousart objectsfabulous in their own right, he says, but less use-ful out of context than they would have been if properly docu-mented. Egyptology grew up largely as a philological and art his-torical discipline. Archaeology as a standard practice was late tocome to Egypt.

Over several seasons, Lehner surveyed the plateau to an accu-racy of within a millimeter, and began to see with greater cer-tainty how the pyramid builders had arranged themselves acrossthe landscape. An ancient wadia desert streambed that owswith water only during the occasional downpourwould havemade a perfect harbor, he surmised. The locations of the stonequarries, down the slope from the pyramids themselves, wereknown, and he thought he knew where a city of pyramidbuilders might t into this pattern.

What began to interest Lehner more than the question of howthe Egyptians built the pyramids was, he says, how the pyra-mids built Egypt. Construction of the immense Giza monu-

The ancient Egyptians, having already quarried the mate-rials for other pyramids for generations, probablywere good geologists in their own right, says Lehner.

Left: Lehners front photogrammetric elevation of the Great Sphinx. Above: Asseen in a north elevation, weathered lime-stone and bedrock form the Sphinxs headand upper body. On the lower portions,restoration masonry predominates. Right:Lehner maps a site. Below: Lehner worksfast to document features briefly exposedby modern construction projects.

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ments, thought to have been built for three successive pharaohsin a kind of experimental gigantism, must have required a lot offree-wheeling on the existing social apparatus. Inuenced byCambridge Universitys Barry Kemp, who wrote Ancient Egypt:Anatomy of a Civilization, Lehner came to believe that the colossalmarshaling of resources required to build the three pyramids atGizawhich dwarf all other pyramids before or sincemusthave shaped the civilization itself.

By now, Lehner was in his early thirties and realized that con-tinuing his career hinged on getting a Ph.D. From 1986 to 1990, hesuspended eldwork to study at Yale under William Kelly Simp-son. In his nal year, with anoer of funding for what, hesays, had been jelling in mymind for some time, he de-signed his dream project: tond and excavate the settle-ment of workers who hadbuilt the pyramids. His stud-ies had given him an idea ofwhat he should be lookingfora city of about 20,000people, on a scale with theearliest major urban centers ofMesopotamia, such as Ur andUruk. In other words, he waslooking for one of the most

important cities of the third millennium b.c.Lehner let the geology of the plateau

guide his search. Guessing at the loca-tion of the harbor, he surmised wherethe delivery route to the pyramids must

have run. Logically, the settlement forworkers should be to the south-south-east, he thought, and in fact, at pre-cisely that location, at the mouth of the

wadi that divides the plateau, a tow-ering stone wall, called in Arabic the

wall of the crow, loomed above the sand. InLehners home state of North Dakota, he

says, the ancient masonry would havedrawn attention and eventually been

designated a national monument. Butin Egypt, with its hieroglyphics, goldbowls, and mummies, the wall wasvirtually ignored.

But not completely. Harvard profes-sor of Egyptology George Reisner, anearly promoter of stratigraphic dig-

ging in Egypt, had noted the massive stoneblocks in this wall almost in passing in

the early twentieth century; he evenstated that there was probably apyramid city beyond it. But Lehner

thinks that even the methodical Reis-ner, who unearthed much of the extra-ordinary Egyptian collection atBostons Museum of Fine Arts, wasburdened by the magnitude of mater-ial coming out of the excavations hehad undertaken. The manner of the

discovery of the tomb of Queen Hetepheres is aperfect illustration. Reisner was actually in

the United States when his photogra-pher, setting up the legs of his tripod,

inadvertently punched through thedesert sand into a buried shaft lead-ing to a hidden chamber lled withgrave goods. The contents of thechamber had been disassembled in

antiquity, and Reisner painstakinglyreconstructed them: a golden chair, a

golden bed with a headrestfurniturefrom the boudoir of the queen.Lehner found himself facing a dierent

kind of obstacle altogether. Now that he hadhis Ph.D., his nascent career as a scholar

began to limit his time for eldwork. He hadaccepted a tenure-track position at the Univer-

sity of Chicagos Oriental Institute, just when amassive modern sewage project for Greater Cairo

had begun to expose the very area where Lehnerplanned to search for his ancient city.

For several seasons, Lehner worked as most profes-sor/archaeologists do, digging for two or three months and teach-ing the rest of the year. The rapid pace of encroaching develop-

Clockwise from top: A workman pulls an intactbreadpot, or bedja, from an ancient compartmentbuilt into a wall. Bedja came in three standard sizes;this is an example of the largest. Figures from the FifthDynasty tomb (found at Saqqara) of an official named Tyillustrate scenes in a bakery. First the dough is mixed invats. Then the lids are stacked over an open hearth. Thedough is placed in the pots, covered with the lids, and baked inhot coals. After cooling, the bread is removed. Lehner and histeam used the scenes to create a working, modern reconstructionof an ancient Egyptian bakery complex. A bedja from the tomb ofQueen Hetepheres is part of Harvards Peabody Museum collectionsand is now on display at Harvards Semitic Museum. Archaeologist FionaBaker provides a sense of scale at a royal storehousefilled with circulargrain binsstill in the process of being excavated.

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ment kept him and his crew work-ing like remen, he says, but led tosome important discoveries, includ-ing the oldest bakery ever found inEgyptright in the area where theworkers city should be. A backhoenarrowly missed one of two largemixing vats along the bakerys backwall. Inside, Lehner and his teamfound a cache of bread pots, easily

recognizable from tomb scenes that document the bread-makingprocess. Analysis of the plant remains at the site by paleobotanistWilma Wetterstrom, an associate in botany in the Harvard Univer-sity Herbaria, showed that Egyptian bakers used barley and emmerwheat for their bread. (Emmer has very little of the gluten thatmakes modern bread spongy and gives it a nice crust, says Lehner,so it is grown today only in experimental agricultural stations.)

For the most part, the bakeries duplicate, many times over, thesame process by which bread was made in any Egyptian house-

hold of the time. Egyptologists might be mistaken, says Lehner,to think of pyramid building as analogous to a 1930s WPA pro-ject. You dont just cross this threshold around 3000 b.c. andhave state projects with economies of scale, he argues. Thatwould take another 1,500 years to develop. Instead, he says, thebakeriesand by extension, probably these rst skyscrap-erswere built by replicating a household mode of produc-tion. But some evidence found at the bakery site did suggest thata cultural evolution might have begun: the pots, or bedja, wouldhave made a conical loaf more than a foot long. Lehner says theEgyptians appear to have been reaching, even at this early phasein the process of state formation, for some economies of scale.

An adjacent chamber turned out to be a hypostyle, or pillaredhall, the oldest ever discovered in Egypt, lled with low benches.Speculation about how it was used suggested a dining hall, butits likely purpose remained a mystery for several years.

Lehner, in the meantime, gave up his professorship atChicago to dedicate himself to the excavation of the pyramid

Lehner began to be interested less in the question of how the Egyptians built the pyramids than in how the pyramids built Egypt.

Lehners conjectural 1985drawing of the Giza plateauas it might have appearednear the end of Khufusreign (the two later pyra-mids and the Sphinx, at cen-ter, are ghosted). Thoughlater digs changed his viewsabout certain specifics, thisvision of Egyptian organiza-tion across the landscape re-mains remarkably accurate.

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city. In October 1999, with funding from philanthropists AnnLurie, Peter Norton, David Koch, and others, he launched amillennium project to uncover the pyramid city through aconsolidated eort of excavating eight months a year for eachof the subsequent three years. Lehner believes the city was in-tentionally razed and erosion then swept away the rubble be-fore the sand blew in. Today, all across the site, the ruins standonly ankle to waist high.

Lehner brought in trucks and front-end loaders to remove theoverburden of sand that had preserved the site. We now have anexposure of about ve hectares, and have mapped the city overthe whole area, he says. His internationalteam of 30 archaeologists has excavated 10percentor 5,000 square metersinten-sively, a huge undertaking when using mod-ern stratigraphic standards. With morethan 100 workers in total, they have amassedthe largest collection of material culturefrom any dig anywhere in Egypt.

They have found not one town, but two,side by side. The rst is laid out in an organicfashion, as though it grew slowly over time.Lehner speculates that this was the settle-ment for permanent workers. The othertown, laid out in blocks of long galleries sep-arated by streets, on a formal, grid-like sys-tem, is bounded to the northwest by thegreat wall that both Lehner, and Reisner be-fore him, had noted. This wall of the crowturned out to be massive indeed, 30 feethigh, with a gateway soaring to 21 feet, oneof the largest in the ancient world. The mainstreet leading through the complex is hard-packed limestone, paved with mud, with agravel-lined drain running down the cen-terengineered, says Lehner, almost like amodern street. His team has partially excavated a royal buildinglled with hundreds of seals dating from the time of Khufus son,Khafre, and his grandson, Menkaure. And they have found aroyal storehouse with circular grain bins just like those depictedin De Milles The Ten Commandments.

But there was something missing. There were not enoughhouses for all the people. Generations of scholars have painstak-ingly calculated how many laborers would have been needed toquarry, transport, and position the stones of the great pyramids.Estimates have ranged widelyfrom the 100,000 cited by Hero-dotus to just the few thousand posited by recent assessmentsthat allow for decades of construction time. Yet Lehner and histeam were not nding enough houses to accommodate even thelow-end estimates. Where are all the people? he wondered. Hisgraduate studies had taught him how other scholars of Middle

Eastern settlement patterns had analyzed sites in order to comeup with estimates of population size. Lehner was approachingthe problem from the opposite perspective. He had a sense ofhow many people were needed to build a pyramid, and so couldinfer the size of the city he would nd. But there were too fewdwellings. The city seemed a ghost town.

Everywhere, Lehner and his team turned up institutional-looking buildings. One was used for working copperthe hard-est metal known to the ancient Egyptians, and critical for quar-rying and dressing stones. On the oor of another, theexcavators found what at rst looked like ears of wheat, sug-

gesting another bakery. But these turned out to be sh gills. Thesite was littered with them, and with sh ns and cranial parts;it turned out to be a place for processing or consuming sh. For acity with few residents, someone seemed to be eating a lot ofloaves and shes.

Because there were just 40 galleries in four large blocks in theentire area, Lehner was suciently disturbed that he called inhis friend Barry Kemp, the worlds foremost authority on ancientEgyptian urbanism, to have a look. Looks alien, teased Kemp,when Lehner asked him what he made of the large, sprawling gal-leries. In fact, Kemp believed and Lehner agreed that each galleryincluded the elements of a typical Egyptian housea pillared,more public area, a domicile, and a rear cooking areastretchedout and replicated on a massive scale.

The surprises were just beginning. Faunal analyst RichardRedding, of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural His-tory, identied tremendous quantities of cattle, sheep, and goatbone, enough to feed several thousand people, even if they atemeat every day, Lehner adds. Redding, who has worked at ar-chaeological sites all over the Middle East, was astounded bythe amount of cattle bone he was nding, says Lehner. He couldidentify much of it as young, under two years of age, and ittended to be male. Here was evi-

Where are all the people? Lehner wondered.

Left: Looking northwest across the site of Lehners Millennium Pro-ject, outlines of the eastern towns walls are visible in the foreground.This settlement appears to have grown organically over time, andLehner speculates that it housed permanent workers. Beyond the tentslie the galleries believed to have housed a rotating labor force of sev-eral thousand. In the distance are the wall of the crow, still partlyburied by sand (left), and beyond, the causeways leading to the pyra-mids of Khufu (right) and Khafre. Above: In the workers cemetery,Lehner and Dr. Zahi Hawass (far right) discuss a tomb excavation. (please turn to page 99)

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dence of many peoplepresumably not slaves or common labor-ers, but skilled workersfeasting on prime beef, the best meatavailable.

Redding and Wilma Wetterstrom had worked at another sitein Egypt where cattle appeared to have been raised on a kind ofestate. Wetterstrom had found tremendous quantities of cloverplant remains that had been eaten by cattle, yet Redding hadfound very little cattle bone, Lehner notes. We know from his-torical sources that the Egyptians were trying to colonize theirhinterland during this very period, and Redding had hypothe-sized that cattle were raised at the estate and shipped to some-where near the capital or nearthe pyramids at Giza. At Giza,the amount of cattle bone thatRedding found suggested thatthe city site uncovered byLehner and his team was down-town Egypt, and that farms andranches along the frontier couldhave been feeding the pyramidbuilders at the societys core.

Reddings faunal evidencedealt a serious blow to the Hol-lywood version of pyramidbuilding, with Charlton Hestonas Moses intoning, Pharaoh, letmy people go! There were slavesin Egypt, says Lehner, but thediscovery that pyramid workerswere fed like royalty buttressesother evidence that they werenot slaves at all, at least in themodern sense of the word. Har-vards George Reisner foundworkers grati early in thetwentieth century that revealedthat the pyramid builders wereorganized into labor units with names like Friendsof Khufu or Drunkards of Menkaure. Within theseunits were ve divisions (their roles still unknown)the samegroupings, according to papyrus scrolls of a later period, thatserved in the pyramid temples. We do know, Lehner says, thatservice in these temples was rendered by a special class of peopleon a rotating basis determined by those ve divisions. ManyEgyptologists therefore subscribe to the hypothesis that thepyramids were also built by a rotating labor force in a modular,team-based kind of organization.

If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehners friendZahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiq-uities, who has been excavating a workers cemetery just aboveLehners city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remainsof those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous busi-ness. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? Theanswer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in thepremodern world. People were not atomized, separate, individu-als with the political and economic freedom that we take for

granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say,the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of commu-nity obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feast-ing event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that,you may not have a choice. Plug that into the pyramid context,says Lehner, and you have to say, This is a hell of a barn!

Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organizedsomewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owedservice to a lord. The Egyptians called this bak. Everybodyowed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierar-chy. But it doesnt really work as a word for slavery, he says.Even the highest ocials owed bak.

Slaves or not, as the last season of his dig began, Lehner stilldid not know where all the workers slept.With his household model in mind, hehad been looking for large manor houseswhere lords could board their laborers forthe pharoah. Instead, he had found wholeblocks, 170 meters long, of precocious,sleek, modern-looking nondomestic gal-leries, albeit with elements of a typical

Egyptian home. Gradually, his team has developed a hypothe-sis for how these facilities were used. We now see the enig-matic rows of long galleries..., wrote Lehner at the end of the2002 season, as barracks housing for a rotating labor force, per-haps as large as 1,600 to 2,000 workers. This is why there arescores of bakeries anking the galleries, as well as an abun-dance of bone.

If the next few years of documentation, publication, and peerreview bear him out, Lehners ndings will suggest that the an-cient Egyptians were even more advanced in their social organi-zation at this period than previously supposed. Perhaps the OldKingdoms pharaohs did indeed preside over something morelike a nation than a efdom. What was arguably humanitys rstgreat civilization may have been even greater, at an earlier date,than we have ever supposed.

Jonathan Shaw 89 is managing editor of this magazine.

Above: Lehner andDr. Zahi Hawass(left) have workedtogether since 1974.Right: Ashraf Abdal-Aziz, sittingwhere an overseermight have lived,excavated thisgallery, whereworkers and teammembers demon-strate that morethan 50 peoplecould have slept onthis once-pillaredporch.

WHO BUILT THE PYRAMIDS? (continued from page 49)

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