Studying the geology of an archaeological site is standard practice today, but it had barely been done for Giza, Lehner says, because "Egyptology grew up in the study of inscriptions." When Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics in 1822, "suddenly huge temple façades and tombs everywhere started ‘talking’ to explorers." Then came the overwhelming abundance of "fabulous art objects—fabulous in their own right," he says, "but less useful out of context than they would have been if properly documented. Egyptology grew up largely as a philological and art historical discipline. Archaeology as a standard practice was late to come to Egypt."
Figures from the Fifth Dynasty tomb (found at Saqqara) of an official named Ty illustrate scenes in a bakery. First the dough is mixed in vats. Then the lids are stacked over an open hearth. The dough is placed in the pots, covered with the lids, and baked in hot coals. After cooling, the bread is removed. Lehner and his team used the scenes to create a working, modern reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian bakery complex. Drawings Courtesy of the Koch-Ludwig Expedition and the Harvard Semitic Museum
Over several seasons, Lehner surveyed the plateau to an accuracy of within a millimeter, and began to see with greater certainty how the pyramid builders had arranged themselves across the landscape. An ancient wadi—a desert streambed that flows with water only during the occasional downpour—would have made a perfect harbor, he surmised. The locations of the stone quarries, down the slope from the pyramids themselves, were known, and he thought he knew where a city of pyramid builders might fit into this pattern. What began to interest Lehner more than the question of how the Egyptians built the pyramids was, he says, “how the pyramids built Egypt.” Construction of the immense Giza monuments, thought to have been built for three successive pharaohs in a kind of experimental gigantism, must have required a lot of “free-wheeling” on the existing social apparatus. Influenced by Cambridge University’s Barry Kemp, who wrote
Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Lehner came to believe that the colossal marshaling of resources required to build the three pyramids at Giza—which dwarf all other pyramids before or since—must have shaped the civilization itself.
By now, Lehner was in his early thirties and realized that continuing his career hinged on getting a Ph.D. From 1986 to 1990, he suspended fieldwork to study at Yale under William Kelly Simpson. In his final year, with an offer of funding for what, he says, "had been jelling in my mind" for some time, he designed his "dream project": to find and excavate the settlement of workers who had built the pyramids. His studies had given him an idea of what he should be looking for—a city of about 20,000 people, on a scale with the earliest major urban centers of Mesopotamia, such as Ur and Uruk. In other words, he was looking for one of the most important cities of the third millennium B.C.
Lehner let the geology of the plateau guide his search. Guessing at the location of the harbor, he surmised where the delivery route to the pyramids must have run. Logically, the settlement for workers should be to the south-southeast, he thought, and in fact, at precisely that location, at the mouth of the wadi that divides the plateau, a towering stone wall, called in Arabic “the wall of the crow,” loomed above the sand. In Lehner’s home state of North Dakota, he says, the ancient masonry would have drawn attention and eventually been designated a national monument. But in Egypt, with its hieroglyphics, “gold bowls, and mummies,” the wall was virtually ignored.
But not completely. Harvard professor of Egyptology George Reisner, an early promoter of stratigraphic digging in Egypt, had noted the massive stone blocks in this wall almost in passing in the early twentieth century; he even stated that there was probably a "pyramid city" beyond it. But Lehner thinks that even the methodical Reisner, who unearthed much of the extraordinary Egyptian collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, was burdened by the magnitude of material coming out of the excavations he had undertaken. The manner of the discovery of the tomb of Queen Hetepheres is a perfect illustration. Reisner was actually in the United States when his photographer, setting up the legs of his tripod, inadvertently punched through the desert sand into a buried shaft leading to a hidden chamber filled with grave goods. The contents of the chamber had been disassembled in antiquity, and Reisner painstakingly reconstructed them: a golden chair, a golden bed with a headrest—furniture from the boudoir of the queen.
Lehner found himself facing a different kind of obstacle altogether. Now that he had his Ph.D., his nascent career as a scholar began to limit his time for fieldwork. He had accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, just when a massive modern sewage project for Greater Cairo had begun to expose the very area where Lehner planned to search for his ancient city.
A workman pulls an intact breadpot, or
bedja, from an ancient compartment built into a wall.
Bedja came in three standard sizes; this is an example of the largest. Below: A
bedja from the tomb of Queen Hetepheres is part of Harvard’s Peabody Museum collections and is now on display at Harvard’s Semitic Museum.
Photographs by Mark Lehner
For several seasons, Lehner worked as most professor/archaeologists do, digging for two or three months and teaching the rest of the year. The rapid pace of encroaching development kept him and his crew "working like firemen," he says, but led to some important discoveries, including the oldest bakery ever found in Egypt—right in the area where the workers’ city should be. A backhoe narrowly missed one of two large mixing vats along the bakery’s back wall. Inside, Lehner and his team found a cache of bread pots, easily recognizable from tomb scenes that document the bread-making process. Analysis of the plant remains at the site by paleobotanist Wilma Wetterstrom, an associate in botany in the Harvard University Herbaria, showed that Egyptian bakers used barley and emmer wheat for their bread. (Emmer has very little of the gluten that makes modern bread "spongy and gives it a nice crust," says Lehner, so it is grown today only in experimental agricultural stations.)
Archaeologist Fiona Baker provides a sense of scale at a royal storehouse—filled with circular grain bins—still in the process of being excavated. Photograph by Mark Lehner
For the most part, the bakeries duplicate, many times over, the same process by which bread was made in any Egyptian household of the time. Egyptologists might be mistaken, says Lehner, to think of pyramid building as analogous to a 1930s WPA project. "You don’t just cross this threshold around 3000 B.C." and have state projects with economies of scale, he argues. That would take another 1,500 years to develop. Instead, he says, the bakeries—and by extension, probably these "first skyscrapers"—"were built by replicating a household mode of production." But some evidence found at the bakery site did suggest that a cultural evolution might have begun: the pots, or
bedja, would have made a conical loaf more than a foot long. Lehner says the Egyptians appear to have been reaching, even at this early phase in the process of state formation, for some economies of scale.
An adjacent chamber turned out to be a hypostyle, or pillared hall, the oldest ever discovered in Egypt, filled with low benches. Speculation about how it was used suggested a dining hall, but its likely purpose remained a mystery for several years.
Lehner, in the meantime, gave up his professorship at Chicago to dedicate himself to the excavation of the pyramid city. In October 1999, with funding from philanthropists Ann Lurie, Peter Norton, David Koch, and others, he launched a “millennium project” to uncover the pyramid city through a consolidated effort of excavating eight months a year for each of the subsequent three years. Lehner believes the city was intentionally razed and erosion then swept away the rubble before the sand blew in. Today, all across the site, the ruins stand only ankle to waist high.
Lehner brought in trucks and front-end loaders to remove the overburden of sand that had preserved the site. "We now have an exposure of about five hectares, and have mapped the city over the whole area," he says. His international team of 30 archaeologists has excavated 10 percent—or 5,000 square meters—intensively, a huge undertaking when using modern stratigraphic standards. With more than 100 workers in total, they have amassed the largest collection of material culture from any dig anywhere in Egypt.
They have found not one town, but two, side by side. The first is laid out in an organic fashion, as though it grew slowly over time. Lehner speculates that this was the settlement for permanent workers. The other town, laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets, on a formal, grid-like system, is bounded to the northwest by the great wall that both Lehner, and Reisner before him, had noted. This "wall of the crow" turned out to be massive indeed, 30 feet high, with a gateway soaring to 21 feet, one of the largest in the ancient world. The main street leading through the complex is hard-packed limestone, paved with mud, with a gravel-lined drain running down the center—engineered, says Lehner, "almost like a modern street." His team has partially excavated a royal building filled with hundreds of seals dating from the time of Khufu’s son, Khafre, and his grandson, Menkaure. And they have found a royal storehouse with circular grain bins just like those depicted in De Mille’s
The Ten Commandments.
But there was something missing. There were not enough houses for all the people. Generations of scholars have painstakingly calculated how many laborers would have been needed to quarry, transport, and position the stones of the great pyramids. Estimates have ranged widely—from the 100,000 cited by Herodotus to just the few thousand posited by recent assessments that allow for decades of construction time. Yet Lehner and his team were not finding enough houses to accommodate even the low-end estimates. "Where are all the people?" he wondered. His graduate studies had taught him how other scholars of Middle Eastern settlement patterns had analyzed sites in order to come up with estimates of population size. Lehner was approaching the problem from the opposite perspective. He had a sense of how many people were needed to build a pyramid, and so could infer the size of the city he would find. But there were too few dwellings. The city seemed a ghost town.
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