The work ink is not a royal scripture but the most telling writing that is found in the great pyramid. Very high above the King’s Chamber of Khufu, in narrow aisles never designed as ceremonial, red-ochre marks appear on concealed areas of stone in the unceremonious manner of completing a job: team identification, output monitoring, and the organisation of an enormous build.
These narrow rooms, more frequently referred to as such, as they “relieve chambers,” since they assist in setting the weight over the King’s Chamber, maintain what the completed monument carefully concealed. As a result of a close tour of the upper passages and chambers, the red markings or graffiti of the workman have been found on blocks in areas that would not have been visible at all when the stones were laid, as well as those that occur underneath one stone atop another. This physical fact makes the writing firmly attached to the process of construction and not to future telling of stories.
These marks have recently been documented by Egyptian archeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass as the markings of rotating work gangs-names, which look more of an internal designation, like “the Friends of Khufu,” in place of a job designation, such as “overseer of the side of the pyramid,” and “artisan.” In an interview on the Matt Beall Limitless podcast, Hawass presented what such evidence points to, namely that the builders were not slaves. Had they been, they could not have been interred in the shade of the pyramids. Slaves would never have got their graves ready forever, as kings and queens did. The inscriptions contain even the counting of days of toil in them, that sort of thing which is not at all part of legend but of administration.
The fact that that older legend was durable is in part due to its narrative cleanness: the largest pyramid appears to need a pile of forced bodies to support it. But the plateau has also provided another group of indications settlement planning, rationing trash, and fragments of a paper trail to turn the Great Pyramid into a national project of some sort, the elements brought together via systems that could be duplicated each day.
The most rooted location of that system is the workers settlement called Heit el-Ghurab commonly referred to as the Lost City. According to the official accounts about the site, archeologists discovered the site was surrounded by houses, magazines, main streets, and a royal administrative building as well as four big galleries that are likely to have been used as barracks. The immense quantity of animal bones, fish, bird, cattle, sheep, goat, and pig, which was left behind, as a by-product of the animal feeding on an industrial scale, is highlighted in the same source as needed to maintain laborers in a fit state of health to work extensively in heavy shifts at Giza. An adjacent cemetery ascends the hill-side: tombs of lower-ranking overseers below, larger stone mastabas of overseers of higher rank and skilful artisans above, a social scale better marked in architecture than any payroll system.
A single point bears an odd burden: most of the bodies excavated are seen to be injured in ways that are suggestive of hard work, but many of the fractures have been successfully healed, which suggests long-term attention. It is not a question of sentiment, it is a question of infrastructure. A healed workforce will be a workforce that will be coming back to work.
The same picture is stretched out to Giza by logbooks. The Wadi el-Jarf papyri retain the tunes of crews and shipments in the Old Kingdom, which is compatible with the nature of rotating teams suggested by the red-ochre gang names over the King Chamber. The impressions on stone and the observations on papyrus, in combination, characterize a project which required schedules, rations and accountability.
The most enigmatic areas of the monument are now tackled with construction inquiries as opposed to supernatural inquiries. Hawass has reported a recent new inspection initiative that had placed a snake-camera into the “Big Void” a 30-metre hole identified by muon imaging, searching in the area of construction evidence such as further markings or signs of ramps.
Finally, the red-ochre writing does not idealize the Great Pyramid it makes it work. The inscriptions are like the clerical backside of wonder, conserve, in several quick strokes, the existence of organized gangs pushing stone through a giant and well-funded machine.
