The Lost City of The Pyramids

This tour is an amazing experience to an active archaeological site. It is generally unavailable to regular tourists. When you see the size and scope of the pyramids, the question about ‘how’ and why’ have fascinated Egyptologists and the public. This experience will help answer some of the central questions about the building of the pyramids and the infrastructure which supported it.

A construction project on the scale of Great Pyramid of Giza had never been undertaken before. The Lost City of the Pyramids revealed amazing facts about the project. But first, the city had to be found.

Mark Lehner Asks the Pivotal Question

As the answers to the many questions about the pyramids started to be teased from history, it was Mark Lehner (one of the great modern-day Egyptologists) who asked a simple question. He said: “There were tens of thousands of people here building the pyramids, but where’s their settlement?”  If up to 20,000 workers had been involved in building the Great Pyramid over 20 to 30 years, then the settlement that housed the workers, and which would have been a focal point of the building project, had to have been a substantial community. But where was it?

The Great Pyramid Building Needs Some Context

It’s worth remembering a few key facts and the implications of a city that accommodated the workers, and the infrastructure associated with it. The city must have been the place for the coordination of what the ancient Egyptians called Akhet- Khufu or the Horizon of Khufu but referred to recent times as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Today we refer to the infrastructure as the supply chain. That is, the people, building materials and other infrastructure required for the Great Pyramid project.

The Dimensions of the Great Pyramid Project

• Each side of the Great Pyramid was 756 long. The great pyramid is 44 storeys high.
• The total weight of the Great Pyramid was 6 million tons.
• 2.4 million blocks of stone were used – in other words over 330 blocks were laid each day with the average weight of each stone block being 2.5 tons.
• 3 different stone types were used and sourced from different locations in Egypt that had to be transported to the Giza site including:
  • White Fine-Grained Limestone – casing stone – obtained from the quarries of Turah about 10 miles from Giza
  • Course Limestone – the inner casing from a quarry a few hundred metres away from the Giza Plateau
  • Granite – shipped from Aswan 500 miles to Giza for the sacred inner burial chambers and tunnels
  • Approx 5.5 million tonnes of limestone and 8,000 tons of granite and 500,000 tonnes of mortar were used in the construction
  • Copper to make tools was shipped from the Sinai hundreds of miles away.

And all this in a period when the wheel had not been invented!  What we know so far about the pyramids came from:

• Numerous studies conducted on the pyramids since the 19th century to the present day
• What Mark Lehner referred to as the ‘excel spread sheets of the materials’ transported to the site. Papyrus texts that were found in 2013 (which are the oldest papyrus texts ever found) at the site of the oldest seaport, Wadi El Jarf, on the edge of the Red Sea’ detailed the sourcing, quantity and delivery to Giza of the materials used in construction.
• And from the excavations by Mark Lehner and his AERA team that uncovered the lost city of the pyramids.

So Where Was the City of the Workers?

In 1988, Mark Lehner and AERA discovered a site 400 meters south of the Sphinx that proved to be the vast settlement that once served as the base of operations for constructing the great pyramid. The 4th Dynasty city had sprawled over 17 acres. It had been completely covered by metres of sand.  Mark and his team are still working at the site, painstakingly recording all the shards of information that is being revealed about the workers who built the pyramid.

This city served as the base of operations for the pyramids of the pharaohs Menkaure, Khafre, and probably Khufu. Its size and layout and the building foundations indicated large populations of labourers, craftsmen, managers, and administrators all directly and/or indirectly involved in building their pharaohs eternal home.

The city housed the workers of the pyramid complexes, but also those who sustained the town and its workforce. The town’s streets and alleyways, as uncovered by Mark Lehner’s multidisciplinary team, were lined with craft workshops, industrial yards, bakeries, commissaries, kitchens, warehouses, small houses, and stately homes/offices for site administrators as well as cemeteries. And the raw materials from across Egypt flowed into the site for building, furnishing, and decorating the pyramid complexes and for producing the workforce’s food, clothes, shelter, tools, and equipment. And it is this amazing excavation and site which you will visit on this excursion.

AERA has been excavating targeted areas to determine the layout and functions of the settlement and it continues to this day.

And What About the Workers – Who Were They?

Dispelling the myth about who built the pyramids, the workers were ordinary, everyday farmers who were housed, paid and fed for their labour. They were not slaves. Consider this:

• 3-4 months a year, rural activity stopped with the flooding of the Nile. The annual flood made agriculture impossible. So, working at the pyramids was a source of income for the farmers and a source of labour for the project.
• Between 10,000 to 20,000 people had worked over 20 – 30 years of the construction period – this was a monumental, national building project.
• Thousands more people were involved in preparing food for the workers including:
  • 1500 people involved in supplying sheep
  • 500 people with the cattle and
  • 2000 and others with wheat and barley (to make bread and beer).
• All of this had a dramatic effect on the 1 million Egyptians who lived in the Nile Valley, and which led to Egypt’s growth and prosperity.
• There was also a health care system for the workers injured during construction and medical facilities were available – the first of its kind in history.