It is also the least visible evidence of the Great Pyramid that can be identified. High above the King Chamber, in narrow rooms which could only be approached by climbing and crawling, the red-ochre markings are put. They are read more like administration than like devotion: the sort of writing that is proper to a worksite.
The marks are documented in these upper relieving chambers, and they consist of rotating crew identities and useful titles. “Titles like the Friends of Khufu” are intermingled with more specifically defined titles, like “the overseer of the side of the pyramid” and the “craftsman” and, instead of a symbol of ancient power, a document of organized work. In the Matt Beall Limitless podcast, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass made the implication a one-line sentence: “These inscriptions confirm that the builders were not slaves. If they had been, they would never have been buried in the shadow of the pyramids. Slaves would not have prepared their tombs for eternity, like kings and queens did.”
The slave narrative remained as it is intuitively clear: a huge undertaking must have been achieved by huge force. Classical authors nourished the image and this continued in the storytelling of modern days until it became solid as traditional knowledge. But the Giza Plateau has continued to yield another kind of evidence, the plans of settlements, food debris, and logistics, facts which do not flatter myth, but which clarify how stone was able to ascend on time.
To the south of the pyramids, archaeology of the workers settlement of Heit el-Ghurab commonly known as the Lost City indicates a throughput purpose-built town. Long, residential-style buildings indicate what is to come in housing, not a temporary camp, and the character of industrialization implied by bakeries and storage facilities point to extensive provisioning on a large scale. Deposits of bones and jars paint a picture of a diet based on bread and beer, but fortified with meat on an impressive institutional scale. Hawass wrote about the discoveries in relatively simple terms: There were thousands of animal bones at the location, with 11 cows and 33 goats among them. It was a sufficient diet to feed approximately 10,000 workers each day. Having so many people to feed at once suggests herds, slaughter, distribution, and rationing,–engineering of supply, as engineering of stone.
The archaeology is preserved in paperwork. The Wadi el-Jarf papyri contain records in the form of logbooks, which conform to crews tracked and deliveries scheduled, and are indicative of the image hinted at by the crews of crews painted on the inside walls of the pyramid of Khufu.
The construction narrative, as well, is becoming more and more the practical problem-solving than mystery. Rubble-and-mud ramp evidence on the southwestern side of the pyramid and a connection with the quarry of approximately 300 meters, a restricting logistical loop that is highly adaptable to frequent haulage, are examples of evidence that Hawass cites. Tasks, however, seem to have been segregated by special brigades, which cut, shaped, and transported limestone on wooden sleds dragged about over a level surface.
A more recent suggestion brings inward that practical reasoning, inside the monument. Dr. Simon Andreas Scheuring suggests an internal lifting concept based on counterweights and pulleylike mechanisms, and the Grand Gallery and Ascending Passage is viewed as an effective ramp and the grooves of the readings are taken as evidences of the constant movement of the mechanism.
On the plateau, the most interesting testimony is human. The graves below the complex tools, pottery and drawings of people who were likely to move stones- demonstrate that the graves were used to honor individuals rather than to discard them. Combined with red-ochre names of the crew poised in spots no visitor looks at, the Great Pyramid reads less of a legend constructed by shadows and more like an archaeological mega project: staffed, supplied, scheduled and remembered.
