The
Pyramids Of Egypt
History of Giza
 Standing
at the base of the Great Pyramid, it is hard to imagine that
this monument—which remained the tallest building in the
world until early in this century—was built in just under 30
years. It presides over the plateau of Giza, on the
outskirts of Cairo, and is the last survivor of the Seven
Wonders of the World. Five thousand years ago Giza, situated
on the Nile's west bank, became the royal necropolis, or
burial place, for Memphis, the pharaoh's capital city.
Giza's three pyramids and the Sphinx were constructed in the
fourth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, arguably the first
great civilization on earth. Today, Giza is a suburb of
rapidly growing Cairo, the largest city in Africa and the
fifth largest in the world.
 About
2,550 B.C., King Khufu, the second pharaoh of the fourth
dynasty, commissioned the building of his tomb at Giza. Some
Egyptologists believe it took 10 years just to build the
ramp that leads from the Nile valley floor to the pyramid,
and 20 years to construct the pyramid itself. On average,
the over two million blocks of stone used to build
Khufu's pyramid weigh 2.5 tons, and the heaviest blocks,
used as the ceiling of Khufu's burial chamber, weigh in at
an estimated nine tons.
How did the ancient Egyptians move the massive stones used
to build the pyramids from quarries both nearby and as far
away as 500 miles? This question has long been debated, but
many Egyptologists agree the stones were hauled up ramps
using ropes of papyrus twine.
 The
popular belief is that the gradually sloping ramps, built
out of mud, stone, and wood were used as transportation
causeways for moving the large stones to their positions up
and around the four sides of the pyramids.
Khufu's son,
Khafre, who was next in the royal line, commissioned the
building of his own pyramid complex which includes the
Sphinx.
Menkaure, who is believed to be Khafre's son, built the third
and smallest of the three pyramids at Giza. Giza, however, is more
than just three pyramids and the Sphinx. Each pyramid has a mortuary
temple and a valley temple linked by long causeways that were roofed
and walled. Alongside Khufu and Khafre's pyramids were large
boat-shaped pits and buried boats that were presumably meant to aid
the pharaoh's journey to the afterlife. As yet, no vessels have been
found beside Menkaure's tomb. In addition, cemeteries of royal
attendants and relatives surround the three pyramids. The entire
plateau is dotted with these tombs, called mastabas, which were
built in rectangular bench-like shapes above deep burial shafts.
The
Nile was used to transport supplies and building materials to the
pyramids. During the annual flooding of the Nile, a natural harbor
was created by the high waters that came conveniently close to the
plateau. These harbors may have stayed water-filled year round. Some
of the limestone came from Tura, across the river, granite from
Aswan, copper from Sinai, and cedar for the boats from Lebanon. The
foundations of the pyramids were laid with limestone blocks mined by
masons using copper chisels. Contrary to popular belief, the
Egyptians built the Giza pyramids up from the bedrock of the
plateau, not over a flat sandy base. Khufu, in fact, was built
around a small rock knoll. Building stones were predominantly
limestone and granite, while mudbrick was used earlier for mastabas.
Mudbrick was also used to build later Middle Kingdom Pyramids. A
brilliant white limestone provided the final outer layer for the
Giza pyramids, creating what must have been an awesome if not
blinding sight to those who gazed upon these massive structures.
Limestone was used for all but the lowest course of outer casing on
Khafre and the lower 16 courses of Menkaure. These lower casings
were made of granite.
The outer casing stones have disappeared from all three pyramids
except the very top of Khafre. This is thought to be due to
 natural
erosion and human intervention; the precious white limestone was
torn away from the faces of the pyramids and used in the
construction of buildings in Cairo. There is good evidence that
Khafre's bottom course of granite casing was being stripped as early
as ancient Egypt's 19th Dynasty, and as early as the 12th century
A.D., limestone was quarried from the Giza Pyramids for the
construction of buildings in Cairo.
Giza's pyramids are oriented to face the four cardinal directions:
true north, south, east, and west. Their entrances are all on the
north side, and the temples of the pyramids are on the east side.
Today, through the work of archaeologist Mark Lehner and his
colleagues, a topographical and archaeological survey of the Giza
plateau is being produced by the
Giza
Plateau Mapping Project.
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 King
Khufu, who is also known by the greek name "Cheops," was the
father of pyramid building at Giza. He ruled from 2589 -
2566 B.C. and was the son of King Sneferu and Queen
Hetpeheres.
Dates Built: c. 2589-2566 B.C.
Total Blocks of Stone: over 2,300,000
Base: 13 square acres, 568,500 square feet, or 7 city
blocks. The length of each side of the base was originally
754 feet (230 m), but is now 745 feet (227 m) due to the
loss of the outer casing stones.
Total Weight: 6.5 million tons
Average Weight of Individual Blocks of Stone: 2.5
tons, the large blocks used for the ceiling of the King's
Chamber weigh as much as 9 tons.
Height: Originally 481 feet (146.5 m) tall, but now
only 449 feet (137 m).
Angle of Incline: 51 degrees 50' 35"
Construction Material: limestone, granite
WARNING upon entering Khufu: The 1908 edition of
Baedeker's Egypt warns "Travelers who are in
the slightest degree predisposed to apoplectic or fainting
fits, and ladies travelling alone, should not attempt to
penetrate into these stifling recesses."
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 Khafre,
who was the son of Khufu, was also known as Rakhaef or
Chephren. He ruled from 2520 - 2494 B.C. and is responsible
for the second largest pyramid complex at Giza, which
includes the Sphinx, a Mortuary Temple, and a Valley Temple.
The most distinctive feature of Khafre's Pyramid is the
topmost layer of smooth stones that are the only remaining
casing stones on a Giza Pyramid.
Dates Built: c. 2558-2532 B.C.
Total Blocks of Stone:
Base: 704 feet (214.5 m) on each side covering a
total area of 11 acres
Total Weight: undetermined
Average Weight of Individual Blocks of Stone: 2.5
tons, some of the outer casing blocks of stone weigh in at 7
tons
Height: Originally 471 feet (143.5 m) tall, now 446
feet (136 m) tall
Angle of Incline: 53 degrees 7' 48"
Construction Material: Limestone and red granite
Khafre may be best known for his statues, and most famous
among them is, of course, the Sphinx. Mark Lehner and Zahi
Hawass write of Khafre: "He was, after all, perhaps the
greatest maker of statues of the Pyramid Age. There are
emplacements in his pyramid temples for 58 statues,
including four colossal sphinxes, each more than 26 feet
long, two flanking each door of his Valley Temple; two
colossal statues, possibly of baboons, in tall niches inside
the entrances of the Valley Temple; 23 life-size statues of
the pharaoh in the Valley Temple (fragments of several have
been found with his name inscribed on them); at least seven
large statues of him in the inner chambers of his Mortuary
Temple; 12 colossal Khafre statues around the courtyard of
his Mortuary Temple; and ten more huge statues in the Sphinx
Temple."
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 Menkaure,
also known as Mycerinus, ruled from 2490 - 2472 B.C.. He was
king of the smallest of the three pyramids at Giza, and is
believed to be Khufu's grandson.
Dates Built: undetermined
Total Blocks of Stone: unknown
Base: 344 feet (105 m) on each side
Total Weight: unknown
Average Weight of Individual Blocks of Stone:
undetermined
Height: originally 215 feet (65.5 m), now 203 feet
(62 m)
Angle of Incline: 51 degrees 20' 25"
Construction Material: Limestone and red granite,
sarcophagus made of basalt
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 The
Sphinx, which embodies the body of a lion and the head of a
pharaoh, is believed to be the head of Khafre and his
guardian spirit for his entire burial complex. Carved from
the natural limestone of Giza, the sphinx has disintegrated
over the years, entire pieces dropping off to the desert
floor below. It is not known to have chambers inside, like
those found in the pyramids at Giza.
Dates Built: undetermined
Base: 187 feet (57 m) in length
Total Weight: undetermined
Width: Face is 20 feet (6 m) wide
Height: Total height is 66 feet (20 m), 30 feet (9.15
m) high from chin to head
Construction Material: Soft limestone
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|
 The
question of who built the pyramids, and how, has long been
debated by Egyptologists and historians. Standing at the
base of the pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any
of these enormous monuments could have been built in one
pharaoh's lifetime. Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote
in the 5th century B.C., 500 years before Christ, is the
earliest known chronicler and historian of the Egyptian
Pyramid Age. By his accounts, the labor force that built
Khufu totalled more than 100,000 people. But Herodotus
visited the pyramids 2,700 years after they were built and
his impressive figure was an educated guess, based on
hearsay. Modern Egyptologists believe the real number is
closer to 20,000.
Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the
puzzle of where the 20,000 - 30,000 laborers who built the
pyramids lived. Once they find the workers' living area,
they can learn more about the workforce, their daily lives,
and perhaps where they came from. Mark has been excavating
the bakeries that presumably fed this army of workers, and
Zahi has been excavating the cemetery for this grand labor
force. It is believed that Giza housed a skeleton crew of
workers who labored on the pyramids year round. But during
the late summer and early autumn months, during the annual
flooding of the fields with water from the annual
innundation of the Nile flooded the fields, a large labor
force would appear at Giza to put in time on the pyramids.
These farmers and local villagers gathered at Giza to work
for their god kings, to build their monuments to the
hereafter. This would ensure their own afterlife and would
also benefit the future and prosperity of Egypt as a whole.
They may well have been willing workers, a labor force
working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, and
country.
The following interviews with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass
address the controversial question of who actually built the
pyramids at Giza:
MARK LEHNER, Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum
NOVA: In your extensive work and research at Giza
have you ever once questioned whether humans built the
pyramids?
 LEHNER:
No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or
super intelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in 1972
and ended up living there 13 years. I was imbued with ideas
of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over,
starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told
me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and
the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see
there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age
theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are
denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a
scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive. And the
New Agers sometimes want to say these were very
sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who
built these things, they were not primitive. Well, actually
there's a certain irony here, because they say they were
very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies
that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't
the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that
are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies,
family relationships, tools, bakeries that we actually find.
Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that
indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the
pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases
for those people and that society, that they could do it.
You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did
this. And that by doing this they contributed something to
the human career and its overall development actually.
Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying,
there's no way they could have done this. I think that
denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find.
NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that
100,000 workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists
come up with a figure more like 20,000 workers. Can you
explain that for us?
LEHNER: Yeah, well, first of all Herodotus just
claims he was told that. He said, 100,000 men working in
three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read
it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of
100,000 men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the
100,000 men. But my own approach to this stems to some
extent from
"This Old Pyramid." You know, the popular film that was
done by NOVA [where we attempted to build a small pyramid at
Giza]. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology
100 percent because there's no way we could replicate the
entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So
our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to
barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that
brought the 60-ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically
what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the
accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test
particular tools, techniques and operations, without testing
the entire building project.
 One
of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact
that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the
eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we
needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they
quarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you
know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away
from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But
other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just
a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet -- they lived in a
lean-to shelter, day and night out there -- if they can
quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and
see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men
were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you
would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20
years. And it comes out somewhere between -- I've got this
all written down -- but it comes out in the hundreds of men.
Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500
men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron
winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I
said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so
that 12 men become 32. And now let's run the equation. Well,
it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron
tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by
something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at
Giza. You see most of the stone is local stone.
 So
then because of our mapping and because of our approach
where we looked at, what is the shape of the ground here,
where's the quarry, where is the pyramid, let's see, where
would the ramp have run, we could come up with a figure of
how many men it would take to schlep the stones up to the
pyramid. Now it's often said that the stones were delivered
at a rate of one every two minutes or so. And New Agers
sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the
Egyptians of Khufu's day. But the stones didn't go in one
after another, you see. And you can actually work out the
coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how
much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to
pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men
could pull a 1.5 ton block over a slick surface with great
ease. And then you could come up with very conservative
estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an
average size block the distance from the quarry, which we
know, to the pyramid. And you could even factor in different
configurations of the ramp which would give you a different
length.
Well, working in such ways, and I challenge anybody to join
in the challenge, it comes out that you can actually get the
delivery that you need. You need 340 stones delivered you
see, every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten
hour day, right. Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x
number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something
like 2,000, somewhere in that area. We can go over the exact
figures. So now we've got 1200 men in the quarry which is a
very generous estimate, 2,000 men delivering. And so that's
3,200. OK, how about men cutting the stones and setting
them? Well, it's different between the core stones which
were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which
were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much
accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the
joints, so there's a difference there. But let's gloss over
that for a moment.
One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book
could, is just what is it like to have a 2 or 3-ton block --
how many men can get their hands on it? Well, you can't have
50 men working on one block, you see. And you can only get
about four or five, six guys at most working on a block, say
two on levers, you know, cutters and so on. And you know,
you put pivots under it and as few as two or three guys can
pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it. There are
all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get
too many men on a block. But you figure out how many stones
have to be set to keep up with this rate, to get in with 20
years. And it actually comes up 5,000 or less men, including
the stone setters. Now the stone setting gets a bit
complicated because of the casing, and you have one team
working from each corner, and another team working in the
middle of each face for the casing and then the core. And
I'm going to gloss over that.
 But
the challenge is out there: 5,000 men to actually do the
building and the quarrying and the schlepping from the local
quarry. This doesn't count the men cutting the granite and
shipping it from Aswan or the men over in Tura. OK, so that
increases the numbers somewhat....And that's what things
like the
ancient technologies series done by NOVA really bring
home, I think. No, we're not recreating ancient society, and
ancient pyramid building 100 percent. And probably not even
60 percent. But we are showing some nuts and bolts that are
very useful and insightful, far more than all the armchair
theorizing.
Now just recently I was contacted by the construction firm
DMJM -- the initials stand for Daniel, Mann, Johnson &
Mendenhall -- it's one of the largest construction firms,
they're working right now on the Pentagon. And one of the
senior vice presidents decided to take on for a formal
address for fellow engineers, a program management study of
the Great Pyramid. So these are not guys lifting boilers in
Manhattan, these are senior civil engineers with one of the
largest construction corporations in the United States. And
I'm sure they'd be happy to go on record with their study
which looked at what they call critical path analysis. What
do you need to get the job done? What tools did they have?
And they contacted me and other Egyptologists and we gave
them some references. Here's what we know about their tools,
the inclined plane, the lever and so on. And without any
secret sophistication or hidden technology, just basically
what archaeologists say, this is what these folks had. DIM
JIM came up with 5,000, 4 to 5,000 men could build the Great
Pyramid within a 20 to 40 year period. And they have very
specific calculations on every single aspect, from the
gravel, for the ramps, to baking the bread. So I throw that
out there, not because that's gospel truth, but because
reasoned construction engineers, who plan great projects
like bridges and buildings today and earthworks and so on,
look at the Great Pyramid and don't opt out for lost
civilizations, extraterrestrials, or hidden technologies.
No, they say it's a very impressive job, extraordinary for
the people who lived then and there, but it could be done.
They are human monuments.
NOVA: You've made reference to inscriptions at Giza
that indicate who built the pyramids. What do the
inscriptions say?
LEHNER: One of the most compelling pieces of evidence
we have is graffiti on ancient stone monuments in places
that they didn't mean to be shown. Like on foundations when
we dig down below the floor level, up in the relieving
chambers above the King's chamber, and in many monuments of
the Old Kingdom, temples, the Sun temples, other pyramids.
Well, the graffiti gives us a picture of organization where
crews, where a gang of workmen was organized into two crews.
And the crews were subdivided into five phyles. The word
phyles is spelled p-h-y-l-e-s. It's the Greek word for
tribe. The Egyptian word is za. They were divided into five
za's. In later times when the Greeks came and in bilingual
inscriptions, when somebody was translating za into Greek
they used the word phyles, the word for tribe, which is
extremely interesting actually.
Were these militaristic kinds of conscripts? Certainly they
weren't slaves. Could they actually have been natural
communities of the Nile Valley kind of contributing like the
way the Inca build their bridges and so on? .....So the
phyles then are subdivided into divisions. And the divisions
are identified by single hieroglyphs with names that mean
things like endurance, perfection, strong. OK, so how do we
know this -- you come to a block of stone in the relieving
chambers above the Great Pyramid. And first of all you see
this cartouche of a King and then some scrawls all in red
paint after it. That's the gang name. And in the Old Kingdom
in the time of the Pyramids of Giza, the gangs were named
after kings. So for example, we have a name, compounded with
the name of Menkaure, and it seems to translate 'the drunks
or the drunkards of Menkaure.' There's one that's well
attested, actually in the relieving chambers above the Great
Pyramid, the Friends of Khufu gang, the Drunks of Menkaura
gang, and then you have the green phyles and then the
powerful ones. None of this sounds like slavery, does it?
And in fact it gets more intriguing. Because in certain
monuments you find the name of one gang on one side of the
monument and another gang, we assume competing on the other
side of the monument. You find that to some extent in the
temple, the Pyramid temple of Menkaure. It's as though these
gangs are competing. So from this evidence we deduce that
there was a labor force that was assigned to respective crew
gang phyles and divisions.
NOVA: Where did the gangs come from? Were they local
people or did they travel from afar?
LEHNER: There's some evidence to suggest that people
were rotated in and out of the raw labor force. So that you
could be a young man in a village say in middle Egypt, and
you had never seen more than a few hundred people in your
village, maybe at market day or something. And the King's
men come and it may not have been entirely coercion, but it
seems that everybody owed a labor tax. We don't know if it
was entirely coercive, or if in fact, part of it was a
 natural
community donation as in the Incan Empire for example, to
building projects where they had a great party and so on.
But anyway they started keeping track of people and their
time on the royal labor project. And if you were brought
from a distance you were brought by boat. So can you imagine
floating down the Nile and say you're working on Khafre's
Pyramid, and you float past the great pyramid of Meidum and
the Pyramids of Dashur, and my God, you've never seen
anything like this. These are the hugest things. We're
talking about a society where they didn't have cameras, you
didn't see yourself age. You didn't see great images. And so
here are these stupendous, gigantic things thrusted up to
the sky, polished white limestone, blazing in the sunshine.
And then they go on down to Giza and they come around this
corner, actually the corner of the Wall of the Crow right
into the harbor, and there's Khufu, the biggest thing on the
planet actually in the way of a building until the turn of
the century -- our century. And you see, for the first time
in your life, not a few hundred, but thousands, probably, of
workers and people and industries of all kinds. And you're
rotated into this experience and you serve in your
respective crew, gang, phyles and division, and then you're
rotated out and you go back because you have your own large
household to whom you are assigned on a kind of an estate
organized society. You have your own village, maybe you even
have your own land that you're responsible for. So you're
rotated back but you're not the same. You have seen the
central principle of the first nation state in our planet's
history, the pyramids, the centralization, this
organization. And so they must have been powerful
socializing forces.
Anyway, we think that that was the experience of the raw
recruits. But there must have been a cadre of very seasoned
laborers who really knew how to cut stone so fine that you
could join them without getting a razor blade in between.
And perhaps they were the stone cutters and setters, and the
experienced quarry men at the quarry wall. And the people
who rotated in and out were those doing all the different
raw labor, not only the schlepping of the stone but
preparing gypsum and we don't know to what extent the other
industries were also organized in the phyles system. But
it's quite an amazing picture. And one of the things that
really is motivating me now is the question of what vision
of society is suggested by a pyramid like Khufu's? Was it in
fact coercive? Was it a militaristic kind of state WPA
project? Or is it possible that we could find evidence that
would bring Egypt into line with what we know of other
traditional ancient societies. Like when the Inca build a
bridge, and every household winds its twine together, and
the twine of all the households in the village are wound
into the villages' contribution to the rope. And the rope on
the great day of bridge building is wound into a great
cable. And all the villages' cables are wound into this
virtual bridge. Or in Mesopotamia we know that they built
city walls, great mud brick city walls, by the clans turning
out and giving their contribution, a kind of organic,
natural community involvement in the building project. I
wonder if that wasn't the case with the Great Pyramid of
Khufu. You know, it's almost like an Amish barnraising. But
you know, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is one hell of a barn.
NOVA: Some of the theories of who built the pyramids
suggest that the builders may not have been from Egypt. Can
you respond to that?
LEHNER: One thing that strikes me when I read about
these ideas -- that it couldn't have been the Egyptians who
built the pyramids, it couldn't have been the Egyptians who
built the Sphinx, of the 4th Dynasty, it had to have been an
older civilization. And I think about those claims and then
I look at the marvelous statue of Khafre with the Horus
falcon at the back of his head. I look at the sublime ship
of Khufu that was found buried south of the pyramid. And we
know that these objects date from the time of Khafre and
Khufu, and I think, my God, this was a great civilization.
This was as great as it comes in terms of art and sculpture
and building ships from any place in the planet, in the
whole repertoire of ancient cultures. Why is there such a
need to look for yet another culture, to say 'No, it wasn't
these people, it was some civilization that's lost, even
older.' And to some extent I think we feel the need to look
for a lost civilization on time's other horizon because we
feel lost in our civilization and somehow we don't want to
face the little man behind the curtain as you had in "The
Wizard of Oz." We want the great and powerful wizard with
all the sound and fury. You know, go get me the broomstick
of the wicked witch of the west. We want that sound and
fury. We always want more out of the past than it really is.
ZAHI HAWASS, Director General of Giza
NOVA: Let's address the question of who built the
pyramids.
HAWASS: We are lucky because we found this whole
evidence of the workmen who built the pyramids and we found
the artisans and Mark found the bakery and we found this
settlement of the camp, and all the evidence, the
hieroglyphical inscriptions of the overseer of the site of
the Pyramid, the overseer of the west side of the Pyramid,
the craftsman we found, the man who makes the statue of the
overseer of the craftsman, the inspector of building tombs,
director of building tombs -- I'm telling you all the
titles. We found 25 unique new titles connected with these
people. Then who built the pyramids? It was the Egyptians
who built the pyramids. The Great Pyramid is dated with all
the evidence, I'm telling you now to 4,600 years, the reign
of Khufu. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is one of 104 pyramids
in Egypt with superstructure. And there are 54 pyramids with
substructure. There is support (that) the builders of the
pyramids were Egyptians. They are not the Jews as has been
said, they are not people from a lost civilization. They are
not out of space. They are Egyptian and their skeletons are
here, and were examined by scholars, doctors and the race of
all the people we found are completely supporting that they
are Egyptians.
NOVA: The Greek historian Herodotus claimed in 500
B.C. that 100,000 people built the pyramids, and yet modern
Egyptologists believe the figure to be more like 20,000 to
30,000.
HAWASS: Herodotus, when he came here, met guides who
tell stories and things like that. But I really personally
believe that based on the size of the settlement and the
whole work of an area that we found, I believe that
permanent and temporary workmen who worked at building the
pyramid were 36,000.
NOVA: And how do you come to that number?
HAWASS: I came to that number based on the size of
the pyramid project, a government project, the size of the
tombs, the cemetery. We know we can excavate the cemetery
for hundreds of years -- generations after generation can
work in the cemetery -- and the second is the settlement
area. I really believe there were permanent workmen who were
working for the king. They were paid by the king and these
are the technicians who cut the stones, and there are
workmen who move the stones and they come and work in
rotation. You have this group and another group. In the same
time there are the people who live around the pyramids that
don't need to live in the pyramids. They come by early in
the morning and they work fourteen hours from sunrise to
sunset.
NOVA: From your excavations of the workers' cemetery
you say you found skeletons. Did you analyze the bones, and
if so, what did you learn about the workmen?
 HAWASS:
We found 600 skeletons. And we found that those people,
number one, they were Egyptians, the same like you see in
every cemetery in Egypt. Number two, we found evidence that
those people had emergency treatment. They had accidents
during building the pyramids. And we found 12 skeletons who
had accidents with their hands. And they supported the two
sides of the hand with wood. And we have another one, a
stone fell down on his leg, and they made a kind of
operation, and they cut his leg and he lived 14 years after
that.
NOVA: How do you know that?
HAWASS: Because we have a team here from the National
Research Center who are doctors and they use the x-ray and
they can find all the evidence about age. They found that
the age of death for those workmen were from 30 to 35. Those
are the people who really built the pyramids, the poor
Egyptians. It's very important to prove how the pyramid was
built. The pyramid you know, has magic, it has mystery. It's
a structure that was built, you know, 4,600 years ago. There
is no accurate book until now that really explained all of
that. All the theorists, in other books they say that the
stones were taken from Tura, about five miles to the east of
the pyramid. This is not true. All the stones have been
taken from the plateau, except the casing stones that came
from Tura, and the granite in the burial chamber that came
from Aswan. But the magic of the pyramid makes people think
about it. An amateur comes by and looks at this structure
and doesn't know the mechanics. The cult of the Egyptians,
the religion, the pyramid, is a part of a whole
civilization.
NOVA: There is an inscription above Khufu's burial
chamber that identifies the pyramid as that of Khufu. Some
people claim that is a fake inscription. Can you comment on
that?
HAWASS: They say that the inscriptions inside the
five relieving chambers are fake. Fine. I went last week and
we lighted all of them. It has been never lighted before. We
did beautiful lighting. Then we can read each single
inscription.
NOVA: And what do they say?
HAWASS: The workmen who were involved in building the
Great Pyramid were divided into gangs, groups, four groups,
and each group had a name, and each group had an overseer.
They wrote the names of the gangs. And you have the names of
the gangs of Khufu as 'Friends of Khufu.' Because they were
the friends of Khufu proves that building the pyramid was
not really something that the Egyptians would push. You
know, it's like today. If you go to any village you will
understand the system of ancient Egyptians. When you build,
I mean a dam, or you build a big house, people would come to
help you. They would work free for you, the households will
send food to feed the workmen. And when they build the
houses you will do the same for them. And that's why the
pyramid was the national project of Egypt because everyone
had to participate in building this pyramid. By food, by
workmen, this way the building of the pyramid was something
that everyone felt to participate, and really it was love.
They are not really pushed to do it. When the king takes the
throne, the people have to be ready in participating in
building the pyramid. And then when they finish it, they
celebrate. That's why even now in modern Egypt we still
really do celebrations when we finish any project because
that's exactly what happened in ancient Egypt.
NOVA: But what about the incriptions in the relieving
chambers in Khufu and the claim that they were not written
in the time of Khufu?
HAWASS: They say that these inscriptions have been
written by people who entered inside. And if you go and see
them they are typical graffiti that can be seen around every
pyramid in Egypt, because the workmen around the pyramid
left this. I would like those people who talked about this
to come with me. And I will take them personally to the
rooms. First of all they say that only inscribed is the
second room -- it's not true. All the five relieving
chambers are inscribed. Number two, there are some
inscriptions there that cannot be written by anyone except
the workmen who put them there. You cannot go and reach
there. It has to be the man who put the block above the
other one to do that. I think that maybe the only few
Egyptologists, the only two Egyptologists in the world that
will really have an open mind, it's me and Mark Lehner,
because we believe the public has the right for us to tell
them the truth. We are really working excavating around the
pyramids to tell the world the truth.
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 The
precise age of the pyramids of Giza has long been debated
because, until now, there has been little evidence to prove
when the pyramids were built. The history books generally
point to 3200 B.C. as the approximate date when the pyramid
of Khufu was under construction. But how exactly do
Egyptologists date the pyramids? Like past excavations, the
current dig at Giza attempts to bring us closer to
pinpointing the time period during which the pyramids were
built. NOVA Online's interviews with two experts reveal the
results of recent carbon dating on the pyramids, and shed
further light on the process Egyptologists must go through
to decipher the age of these great monuments. NOVA Online
invites those who have questions or comments about the age
of the pyramids and the Sphinx to
e-mail
the excavation.
ZAHI HAWASS, Director General of Giza
NOVA: There have been claims that a great
civilization predates ancient dynastic Egypt -- one that
existed some 10,500 years B.C. -- and that this civilization
was responsible for building the pyramids and sculpting the
Sphinx. Is this possible?
HAWASS: Of course it is not possible for one reason.
Until now there is no evidence at all that has been found in
any place, not only at Giza, but also in Egypt. People have
been excavating in Egypt for the last 200 years. No single
artifact, no single inscription, or pottery, or anything has
been found until now, in any place to predate the Egyptian
civilization more than 5,000 years ago.
NOVA: What evidence do you have that the pyramids and
tombs at Giza were from, as you say, no more than 5,000
years ago.
 HAWASS:
First of all you have inscriptions that are written inside
the tombs, the tombs that are located on the west side of
the Great Pyramid for the officials, and the tombs that are
located on the east side of the Great Pyramid for the
nobles, the family of the King Khufu. And you have this
lady, the daughter of Khufu. And this man was the vizier of
the king. This one was the inspector of the pyramids, the
chief inspector of the pyramids, the wife of the pyramid,
the priest of the pyramid. You have the inscriptions and you
have pottery dated to Dynasty 4. You have inscriptions that
they found of someone who was the overseer of the side of
the Pyramid of Khufu. And another one who was the overseer
of the west side of the pyramid. You have tombs of the
workmen who built the pyramids that we found, with at least
30 titles that have been found on them to connect the Great
Pyramid of Khufu to Dynasty 4. You have the bakery that Mark
Lehner found. And all the evidence that we excavate here.
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