The Great Pyramid is not a book about enslaved labor, it is a file cabinet constructed out of rocks. Across the roof of the King Chamber upstairs, over and under, among crevices are these red-ochre marks, where tourists stand never, and where an amateur potter would never dare to tread. They are not glorifying a pharaoh in high-pitched poetry. They document the daily identity of individuals who appeared, labored in teams and dropped their names.
Those marks look like a labor force signature: rotating gangs of whom nicknames are the names, and titles that, instead of sounding like a devotional position, sound like the job description. One of the crew identities is “The Friends of Khufu”, which is complemented by such labels as the overseer of the side of the pyramid and “craftsman”. Egyptologist Zahi Hawass in the Matt Beall Limitless podcast described the meaning in those terms: these inscriptions affirm the fact that the builders were not slaves. Had they been, they would never have been mounded back into the shade of the pyramids. The slaves were not going to furnish their graves as the kings and queens did.
The slave narrative was maintained since it is narratively efficient: the monumental form of the coercion appears to state the need of another monumental coercion. Classical authors supported that picture and contemporary entertainment supported it. Archeology has fulfilled the tedious task of substituting an easy narrative with a complex one constructed not out of one dramatic discovery, but out of settlement patterns, food stuffs, stamped seals and the glundering and grindless mathematics of feeding thousands of people.
In Giza, the residential area of the workers at Heit el-Ghurab, commonly referred to as the Lost City, seems to be civilized and not temporary. Planned housing is indicated by long dormitory-like buildings, volume scale of production indicated by industrial bakeries and storage areas. The menu is filled in with bones and jars: meat combined with bread and beer, served in a manner that seems to be following order and duty. The provisioning was bluntly described by Hawass: There were thousands of animal bones at the site, including the bones of 11 cows and 33 goats, he says, and this diet was sufficient to feed some 10,000 workers daily. To have provided such a continuous feeding the system would have entailed scheduling, herd control, slaughter logistics and ration control engineering in the nature of administration.
Paperwork, in fact, survives. The entries in the Wadi el-Jarf papyri are in the form of log books that were consistent with crews tracked and materials delivered, furthering the impression that labor was rotated, counted, and provided. Even rest seems to be controlled, and Hawass writes of a time off regime, which came at very rare intervals discipline, and not anarchy.
How stone rose is another question, and that too an abnormally open one to a monument so notorious. A more recent model published in Nature suggests an internal lifting process that involves counterweights travelling along inclined passes and making the interior of the pyramid a working area and not a ceremonial walkway. The Grand Gallery and the Ascending Passage, in that understanding, are to serve as inclined slides upon which loaded to be rolled; the Antechamber, with its grooves and more perforated surface, are actually to be used as a lifting station instead of a robbery-hole. Wear patterns, scratches and polished surfaces also form the subject matter of the proposal, which are indicative of constant mechanical activity instead of infrequent ritual percussion.
The picture is still pegged by exterior evidence of more traditional logistics: there have been testimonies of a rubbleandmud ramp on the southwestern face of the pyramid and a quarry connection of a few hundred meters, a short circuit, which is biased towards throughput. The new accentuated misalignments of chambers, which are difficult to reconcile with a symmetrical and idealised plan, can be interpreted as a compromise to the building restrictions as it is read inside.
The most human signage lies at ground level. South of the pyramid complex and the tool, pottery, and representation of work indicate commemoration as opposed to disposability. Next to the red-ochre names of the crew concealed in cramped spaces above, the constructors of the pyramid are revealed as skilled workers of a controlled national project workers whose work was planned, fed, and commemorated.
