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Egyptologist Professor Laurel Bestock rejoins WIRED to break down five discoveries that tell us exactly how the Egyptian pyramids were built; from the Giza quarry to The Diary of Merer, Laurel paints a vivid picture of just how the ancient pyramids were built from the ground up.
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00:00As an Egyptologist, my phone rings off the hook whenever the news story breaks.
00:04New satellite imagery, new scans, new theories, a new discovery has solved the mystery of the pyramid.
00:10But it's usually a big nothing burger.
00:12We actually have a pretty good understanding of how Khufu's pyramid was built.
00:15And that understanding comes from multiple discoveries, five of which we're going to dive into right now.
00:21Discovery number one, the Giza Pori.
00:24There is a lot of stone in the Great Pyramid and the Giza Plateau.
00:28Where on earth do these stones come from?
00:31Most of the stone that was used to build the Great Pyramid at Giza was the bedrock of Giza itself.
00:36We have, in fact, an area that was a quarry.
00:39Very large horseshoe-shaped quarry south of the pyramid that was used to pull up the blocks that were then
00:45used in the pyramid.
00:46Let me show you how you could get a block of stone out of a quarry like this.
00:49It sounds really inexact, but it can actually be done fairly well.
00:53So looking from the top first, you're going to take a hard stone, a stone like granite or diorite.
00:58And you're going to drop it onto the ground in a track, so in a line.
01:02It takes a lot of dropping to chip this away, but you're doing it.
01:05You're going to do this in a bunch of lines.
01:07Then you get a lattice of trenches, narrow trenches, made by dropping a hard stone onto the soft stone of
01:13the limestone repeatedly.
01:14And you go down for a couple of meters like this.
01:17Now, looking from the side, you have these narrow trenches.
01:20How are you going to knock this block off that you want to have knocked off?
01:24You've only defined this on the sides from the top.
01:27Well, here you go again with your stone tools.
01:30And it's harder to do this because you don't have gravity.
01:32But you chip away the sides.
01:36And then you put a log in each of these.
01:40When you wet the log, the wood is going to expand.
01:43And as the wood expands, it cracks right here.
01:49Now you have a beautifully shaped block that you can pick up and take to your ramp.
01:54Discovery 2, the ramps.
01:57This is the big question.
01:58How on earth did you raise so much heavy stone into this shape, this height, before modern technology?
02:05We've known that there must be ramps involved.
02:07We do not have ramp remains at Giza itself.
02:11This is one reason why this is fertile ground for theories and imagining of what the ramps might have looked
02:16like.
02:16But in fact, we know a great deal about what ramps looked like in ancient Egypt.
02:20Probably the best remaining example of an actual ramp that we have from Egypt comes from the site of Karnak
02:26at Thebes.
02:26Karnak is a huge temple.
02:28It's considerably later than the pyramids at Giza.
02:31But it does show us a lot about Egyptian construction techniques.
02:35And particularly, it shows us the building of a mud brick ramp that was used to construct a massive stone
02:41building.
02:41One reason the ramp at Karnak is so cool is because they left the site as a construction site.
02:46It was never finished.
02:47Very often, we don't have evidence of construction process because they cleaned up.
02:52At Karnak, that wasn't the case.
02:54At Giza, the construction process was finished.
02:56And as such, they removed the remains of the ramp, probably as part of smoothing down the pyramids as they
03:02finished them.
03:03So the two basic ideas are either that a ramp would have been straight and gone up the side of
03:08the pyramid,
03:09or that a ramp used the pyramid itself as the basis that supported it and spiraled up around the pyramid,
03:16growing as the pyramid grew.
03:18A straight ramp for a building as large as the pyramid is improbable.
03:22The ramp would have had to be extremely long to maintain a shallow angle of incline for dragging the blocks
03:29up once you got to the top.
03:30You look at the entire plan of Giza and think how much territory would have to be covered by a
03:35ramp.
03:36That means your starting place for dragging the blocks up is very far away.
03:40It's an enormous amount of material.
03:41And it's less likely that there would be nothing left for us to find.
03:45So both practically and in terms of the evidence that we have from the site,
03:50a spiraling ramp up the pyramid is substantially more probable, particularly for the higher levels of the pyramid.
03:56So it's one thing to build a ramp.
03:58It's another thing to get the blocks up the ramp.
04:00How do you actually do that?
04:02To get a block of this size up the ramp, you put it on a wooden sledge.
04:06These are runners of wood.
04:07They're flat.
04:08These are not rollers.
04:09We're not using wheels or rolling of any sort.
04:11And you pull the sledge up.
04:13The sledge is attached to ropes and you have a human labor force.
04:16It doesn't seem that they're using animals in this case, just people.
04:19You can ease that process somewhat by lubricating the ground underneath the sledge by pouring water in front of the
04:26sledge as it's going up.
04:28And it would have taken many men to pull a single block of stone.
04:31It's backbreaking labor.
04:33This would have been extremely dangerous and difficult.
04:36But ramps didn't build the pyramids alone.
04:38What is very clear is that an enormous number of people were needed to haul the stones up those ramps.
04:44And that takes us to our next discovery.
04:46The workman's village at Giza, sometimes called the Lost City.
04:52Archaeologists since the 1980s have been working at the Giza Plateau trying to understand not only the vast monuments that
04:59are symbols of kingship,
05:00but also what the site might teach us about the process of building the pyramids and, in particular, about the
05:06people who were part of that.
05:08The site of the workers' village at Giza is not immediately adjacent to the pyramids.
05:13It is rather closer to the cultivation, down a bit from the main plateau.
05:17While our estimates of the number of people who it would have taken to build the Great Pyramid are wildly
05:23variable,
05:24usually somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 people,
05:27it is clear that the workman's village could have supported a really large percentage of this population.
05:33The town that has been uncovered since the 1980s is enormous, and it contains many different types of evidence.
05:39We have, for instance, the bakeries, the place where they were baking the bread
05:43that is the main food source for the construction crews who are working on the pyramids.
05:49We have long galleries that have been interpreted as sleeping places, as barracks for seasonal workers.
05:55We have houses for people who lived year-round at the pyramid construction site.
06:00We have animal pens where the other main food source for the population here lived.
06:06Now, meat was not a regular part of the diet of most Egyptians,
06:09but the level of animal keeping that we're seeing here argues that the people who were building the pyramids
06:15absolutely needed a high-protein diet.
06:17That may very well relate to the fact that people here are doing an incredible amount of labor.
06:22Another element we have at the workers' villages, we have these enormous silos for storing grain.
06:27Bread is one thing you make with grain, but another thing you make is beer.
06:31Beer was a staple food in ancient Egypt, and it is even given as part of payment to people.
06:37Understanding how a workforce is paid in Egypt is a little bit complicated because money hadn't been invented yet.
06:42So people are being paid for their time, but they're being paid in food, in bread and beer, the staple
06:47foods,
06:48often being paid more than they themselves would have consumed.
06:52That's what allows you to keep a family, or if you're paid way more, to be a patron yourself and
06:57hire others.
06:58And people were paid for their work at the pyramids.
07:01We do have questions about the labor status, whether or not those who built the pyramids were slaves.
07:06It's a really normal question to ask, and we don't really have good evidence as to whether or not they
07:12made the choice
07:13to work on the pyramids or whether they were owned.
07:16There's a lot of room in between.
07:18Discovery number four, the Diary of Merer.
07:21In 2013, archaeologists working at the site of Wadi el-Jarf on the coast of the Gulf of Suez
07:27discovered a cache of papyri that dated back to the Fourth Dynasty.
07:32The papyri at Wadi el-Jarf included the diary of an official named Merer and a day-by-day account
07:38of activities
07:39directly relating to the construction of the pyramids.
07:42This is the earliest known inscribed papyrus that we have from ancient Egypt.
07:48Papyrus is a material that is made by splitting the stalks of papyrus plants that is kept in a long
07:53scroll.
07:54The papyri that have been translated so far are of particular importance for telling us about the activities of the
08:01official Merer.
08:02Merer was in charge of a workforce that was worrying stone for the outer parts of the pyramid.
08:08In Merer's diary, he doesn't talk specifically about the activities of quarrying, but he does talk about the transport of
08:16the blocks.
08:16And he gives us particularly the itineraries of where his crew were at any given time.
08:22So at the top of every column here, we get a number that's a date.
08:25He is recording exactly what's happening on any given date, keeping track, close track of these large groups of men
08:31who are responsible for transporting the blocks.
08:34We know that it took two days to go from the site called Tura, which is on the east bank
08:39of the Nile, to the pyramid site at Giza on the west bank.
08:43It's not that far, but transporting these really large blocks of stone took two days round trip and the crew
08:49turned right back around to go back to the quarry as soon as they had dropped off the blocks.
08:54So if we look at this papyrus, one thing we can see is how frequently the name of Khufu is
08:59present.
09:00That is the king for whom the pyramid was being built.
09:02It's usually because Merer is referring to places where he is taking the stone, and the places themselves are named
09:11in a way that incorporates the name of Khufu.
09:14So it's calling Giza Khufuville, for instance.
09:17Discovery 5, the early pyramids.
09:20Sometimes we approach Giza as though it were a marvel that came into being with no precedent, as though it
09:27were the only site where pyramids are.
09:29But in fact, Giza was built at the end, not the beginning, of a process of discovering how to build
09:35large buildings.
09:37The first pyramid in Egypt, which was built at the site of Saqqara, was built well over a hundred years
09:43before Khufu built his pyramid.
09:45The step pyramid at Saqqara is built in a very different way.
09:49The blocks of stone, which were quarried at Saqqara, are smaller than the blocks of the Great Pyramid.
09:55The pyramid itself is not square at its base, it's rectangular.
09:59It shows today as though it's a big layer cake with the layers of diminishing size because it's stepped.
10:05But also significantly, each layer of stones, rather than being laid flat, is laid so that it is at an
10:12incline. It's tilted.
10:13We can see here that they're figuring out how to build in stone.
10:16Nobody else had ever built a building in stone in Egypt here.
10:20They built and figured out how to build by doing it.
10:23And they changed their minds and their techniques as they were constructing.
10:27The other reign that is really important is the reign of King Sneferu, the father of Khufu.
10:33Sneferu actually built three different pyramids.
10:35The first pyramid was built much like the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, with leaning courses and a stepped structure.
10:44The second pyramid of Sneferu appears to have run into engineering difficulties,
10:47and they changed the angle part way through, probably because of structural weaknesses that were encountered because of the weight
10:54of stones.
10:56It's now called the Bent Pyramid because it's bent.
10:58The sides are at a noticeably different angle in the bottom half of the pyramid and the top half of
11:04the pyramid.
11:05Sneferu, when he builds the Bent Pyramid, he's going for a true pyramid structure, but it fails.
11:11It's the wrong size and shape for what the ground can accommodate.
11:15The last pyramid that Sneferu built, which we call the Red Pyramid, is of a much shallower angle.
11:21Perhaps again because they had learned, through the process of messing up with the Bent Pyramid,
11:26that a steeper angle meant too much weight on top.
11:30By the time Khufu comes to build his pyramid on a much more stable plateau with stronger limestone,
11:36he has all of the lessons that he was able to learn from the successes and failures of his predecessors.
11:42So if you ask me how the Great Pyramid of Giza was truly built,
11:45I would say it was built after an enormous amount of trial and error.
11:49And that trial and error over previous generations was trial and error on a bunch of different fronts.
11:55It was trial and error figuring out how to recruit and organize and feed an enormous workforce.
12:01Development of writing and record keeping enabling that kind of organization.
12:06It is the exploitation of sites far afield from where the pyramids are built.
12:11It is trial and error on a construction and engineering front.
12:15What kind of ramps will work?
12:16It took generations to figure that out and trial and error on keeping and feeding an entire workforce
12:22at the site so that they're ready to perform their labor.
12:25The Great Pyramid is an awe-inspiring, amazing monument.
12:28To stand in its shadow is to be overwhelmed.
12:31But as generations of scholarship have taught us, it is also a deeply human monument,
12:36something that was built by people.
12:38People who figured out how to organize themselves, how to do the engineering,
12:43how to construct this amazing thing.
12:45We continue to learn more through new discoveries about this monument
12:49and to refine our understanding of the people who built it.
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