The Djedi Project was back in the headlines at the end of December when New Scientist magazine named the discovery one of the Top 10 Science Stories of 2011.  For the next few articles, Em Hotep will bring you up to date on the history of the exploration of the mysterious shafts in the Great Pyramid.  This current article will cover the ground from Waynman Dixon up to the Pyramid Rover Project, with the next article focusing exclusively on Project Djedi.  This will be followed by a couple of very special interviews you will not want to miss..

The Pyramid Shafts

The Great Pyramid of Giza (Photo by Keith Payne)

The Great Pyramid was built over 4,500 years ago as the final resting place of Pharaoh Khufu, the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty.  Designed and executed by Khufu’s vizier and Master of Works, Hemienu, Khufu wanted a pyramid that would rival that of his father, Snefru—the Red Pyramid located at Dashur.  He succeeded.  The Great Pyramid is the tallest, and at 146.5 m would remain the tallest man-made structure in the world for another 3,800 years.

Hemienu and his fellow architects took the secrets of its construction to their graves and we are only just now beginning to fathom how the work could have been done with the tools and methodologies that we know existed at the time (for more on this, start with Hemienu to Houdin: Building A Great Pyramid – Introduction).  But even ignoring for the moment how the pyramid was built, many of the elements in the structure itself have raised questions.  From the unusually tall sloping passage known as the Grand Gallery to the equally puzzling tiered compartments above the King’s Chamber, Egyptologists and everyday people have wondered whether these labor and resource intensive structures served  ritual or structural purposes, or both.  The pyramid shafts would fall into this category as well.

There are four shafts that we know of, two exiting the north and south walls of the King’s Chamber (KCN and KCS, respectively) and two exiting the north and south walls of the Queen’s Chamber (QCN and QCS).  Their purpose has always been cause for speculation.  They have often been referred to as ventilation shafts, but they seem to be too long and narrow to efficiently provide airflow, so this is almost certainly not their purpose (But see Comments section at the end of the article).  Zahi Hawass, former secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, has proposed that they are related to king’s spirit and the solar boats that were discovered buried on the southern side of the pyramid.

The boats are oriented on an east-west axis, corresponding to the daily journeys that the sun god Ra would make through the sky. He believes that the southern shaft [KCS] symbolically served as a portal through which the king’s ka could travel in the night and day barques in the afterlife.  He also speculates that the northern shaft (KCN) would allow the king to symbolically journey on his boats toward the east as Horus surveying his kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt. (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 215)

This theory sits well with what we know about Old Kingdom royal funerary practices, but it doesn’t tell us much about the shafts in the Queen’s Chamber.  Unlike those of the King’s Chamber, QCN and QCS do not exit the pyramid—they seem to terminate somewhere within its massive bulk (it is worth noting that even the King’s Chamber shafts may have been covered by the now-missing casing stones that once covered the pyramid’s surface).  This would also seem to rule out astrological functions, as the sky would not be visible from the shafts, and would eliminate the ventilation theory for obvious reasons.  Besides, until their discovery in 1872 by a British engineer named Waynman Dixon, the shafts were sealed from the inside as well.

The Djedi Project is the latest in a series of explorations to better understand the pyramid shafts, particularly the Queen’s Chamber shafts, and what purpose they may have served.  Were they of religious significance, or did they serve a functional purpose in the building of the Great Pyramid?  Even if their purpose was spiritual in nature, which aspects of their structure are symbolic and which are functional?  Were the markings found in QCS by the Djedi Project team religious in nature, or were they notations left by the ancient builders?

The answers to these questions could provide clues about how the pyramid was built, the religious and funerary practices of the time, and could even lead to an as-of-yet undiscovered section of the pyramid.  Before we can approach the Djedi Project and how it might help us have a better understanding of the Great Pyramid, we should first review the history of the exploration of these mysterious shafts.  This article will cover this history from their discovery by Waynman Dixon up to the Pyramid Rover Project.

Charles Piazzi Smyth and Waynman Dixon

Charles Piazzi Smyth

The story of the Queen’s Chamber shafts begins with the surveys commissioned by Charles Piazzi Smyth, director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, from 1846 to 1888.  Smyth became interested in the Great Pyramid when he read John Taylor’s 1859 book The Great Pyramid:  Why Was It Built?  Who Built it?  Influenced by Taylor’s notion that the pyramid had been designed and constructed by Noah, of Great Flood fame, Smyth believed that the pyramid was built on the principles of sacred geometry, and that an understanding of this system could be deduced if accurate measurements of the pyramid were undertaken.

Smyth set out to measure every aspect of the pyramid he could think of, inside and out.  His first survey was conducted in 1865, an expedition Smyth funded himself when the Royal Society refused him a grant due to what they considered to be the pseudo-scientific underpinnings of his work.  Nonetheless, his extremely thorough survey was published in the Edinburgh Observations Vol. xiii and led to his partial vindication when he was awarded the Keith Prize by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1867.

Sacred Geometry aside, Smyth’s survey of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was the beginning of our scientific understanding of this awe-inspiring edifice (Above: Plate VII from Charles Piazzi Smyth’s “Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid”)

Charles Piazzi Smyth wanted to undertake additional measurements in 1872 but was prevented from returning to the Giza Plateau by illness.  Instead, he asked a friend and colleague, Waynman Dixon, a British engineer who along with his brother John were involved in construction work at Cairo, to take some measurements on his behalf.  The brothers Dixon set aside some time to help their friend, a fortunate development for the rest of us.  The Dixons shared Smyth’s inquisitive nature, and the addition of their expertise as builders and engineers led to one of the great discoveries in Egyptology.

The Dixons quickly fell under the Great Pyramid’s spell and were soon looking for secrets of their own.  Waynman was particularly curious about the shafts leading from the King’s Chamber and suspected that there might be similar shafts in the Queen’s Chamber.  He was drawn to a crack in the masonry of the southern wall, and after inserting a rigid wire between the blocks discovered that there was a hollow space behind them.  After chiseling through the facing stone he discovered that he was right—there was a shaft that seemed to correspond to those in the King’s Chamber.

The Smyth-Dixon survey of the Queen’s Chamber with “Dixon’s Channels” marked on the northern and southern walls. QCN still shows Dixon’s chisel marks, while QCS has been patched up a bit.

The Dixon Artifacts, minus the wooden slat (photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Using the same methodology Dixon discovered a matching shaft in the northern wall of the Queen’s Chamber, and was rewarded with an additional discovery.  In one of the shafts—he does not specify which but from the context it would seem to be QCN—Dixon found three artifacts:  a small copper hook measuring around 5cm, a small diorite ball, and a broken piece of wood about 13cm long.  Known as the Dixon Artifacts, these objects appear to be tools left behind by the ancient builders.

Diorite pounding tools were used to shape softer stone (photo by Scitim)

The Dixon Artifacts have themselves been the cause of speculation.  The wooden plank is missing, although it is thought to be somewhere in the Marischal Museum at Aberdeen (The Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid, by Zahi Hawass).  The diorite ball is similar to other spheres used by the ancient Egyptians to pound softer stone into shape.  The chisels used by the pyramid builders were made of copper, a soft metal that was only good for a dozen or so strokes against the local limestone, and which was totally useless against the red Aswan granite that was used in some of the structural elements of the pyramid (but see Comments below).  Diorite is harder than the red granite and was one of the tools of choice in the Old Kingdom period.

Rudolf Gantenbrink’s robot crawler, Upuaut-2, took this shot of an object in QCN that might correspond to the riveted hook recovered by Dixon. The track-like object is an iron rod abandoned by previous explorers (Photo by Rudolf Gantenbrink)

The copper hook (bronze by other accounts, cf. The Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid by Zahi Hawass) is of less obvious utility.  The hook has two rivets and might be related to another small rectangular object photographed by Rudolph Gantenbrink in QCN.  This latter object, which has yet to be recovered, appears to have two holes in it that might correspond to the rivets in the hook (The Upuaut Project—The Lower Northern Shaft).  It is not certain whether these objects were purposely left there by the ancient builders, or were dropped into the shaft at a point in construction when it was impossible to retrieve them.

But Dixon didn’t just recover some artifacts from QCN—he seems to have left a couple of his own.  Someone, presumably Dixon, used long iron rods to probe into the Queen’s Chamber northern shaft and several of these rods became stuck and were abandoned.  These more recent artifacts would be a vexation to the future missions into QCN, but more on that later.

Whatever we make of the iron rods, we can be certain that the Dixon Artifacts themselves are of ancient origin.  The shafts had been sealed on their lower end by the pyramid builders, and as we shall see, nobody dropped them in from above any time recently.  Dixon’s discovery of the Queen’s Chamber shafts and the artifacts therein was a major accomplishment, but it would be 120 years before another scientific mission would expand on his findings.

The Upuaut Project

The next phase of exploration originally began, somewhat inadvertently, as an effort to reduce the humidity levels in the Great Pyramid.  Humidity causes damage by allowing moisture to seep into the stone, causing it to expand.  Over time this can lead to major structural damage, so the Supreme Council of Antiquities had the idea that whether the shafts in the King’s Chamber were intended to for ventilation or not, they could potentially be used for that purpose.

Rudolf Gantenbrink

In 1989, a German engineer by the name of Rudolph Gantenbrink began working on a computer database to analyze the pyramids in an attempt to understand their construction.  It baffled Gantenbrink that, with all of the technological advances in recent years, and their potential for exploration, nobody seemed to be applying them to the mysteries of the Great Pyramid.

My engineer’s curiosity was aroused because there seemed to be so many questions and so few answers.  I just couldn’t get over the fact that we can fly to the moon and explore the depths of the oceans, but we can’t answer so many basic technical questions about the most exhaustively studied historical monument of all times.  (Rudolf Gantenbrink, The Upuaut Project—The Upuaut Story)

Rainer Stadelmann

Gantenbrink was particularly curious about the shafts.  As an engineer he appreciated the technical and mathematical genius behind creating these precise channels through a layered structure on such a grand scale and suspected they must have been an important part of Hemienu’s plan.  In 1990 he presented his analysis to the director of the German Archaeological Institute (GAI), Dr. Rainer Stadelmann.  Stadelmann was impressed with Gantenbrink’s work and met with him again in 1991, where Gantenbrink proposed revisiting the pyramid shafts with the best technology available.

A partnership was forged—Gantenbrink would make all of the technical arrangements, including the design of a robot crawler to explore the shafts, and Stadelmann would arrange all the permits through the GAI.  It was during this planning phase that the mission to explore the shafts became entangled with the ventilation project.  One of Gantenbrink’s early considerations was the possibility that the robot crawler might run into debris, and so planning for a cleaning operation would be a necessary part of the overall project.

Debris clogging KCN—before a robot survey mission or ventilation system could be installed, Gantenbrink would have to play the part of chimney sweep.

The SCA had also considered the need for cleaning out the shafts in the King’s Chamber as a part of installing the ventilation system, and Gantenbrink’s project sounded like a great opportunity to outsource this dusty undertaking.  In the process of negotiating the permits, somehow the installation of the ventilation system became a “rider” on the project to explore the shafts.  But for Rudolf Gantenbrink, all that mattered was that his project had received the go-ahead.  He arranged for a third party to design the ventilation system based on his database while he set about the task of designing the robot.

Rudolf Gantenbrink with “Father of Upuaut”

As it turned out, Gantenbrink would have to design a series of robots for his mission, The Upuaut Project.  The first robot, which was originally unnamed but came to be called Father of Upuaut, was made mostly of poly-carbonate plastic, had dual independently controllable tracks, and was mounted with a stationary forward-facing color video camera.  In March 1992, Gantenbrink prepared to deploy the robot into the Queen’s Chamber shafts, but soon discovered that the pressure from the chamber’s roof beams had caused the shafts to settle just enough that the robot was too tall—by half a centimeter.

One of the iron rods left in QCN, photographed by Father of Upuaut during its brief trip into the shaft.

Father of Upuaut was unable to make it much more than twelve meters into the Queen’s Chamber shafts, but had proven that they were not faux structures.  The predominant theory among Egyptologists at the time was that the shafts probably did not extend more than 3-4 meters before ending, an interesting position given that Waynman Dixon had managed to get his iron probing rods at least 12 meters (actually much farther) into QCN before getting stuck!  In addition to one of these rods, Father of Upuaut was able to transmit back photographic proof that there was much more to be explored in the Queen’s Chamber shafts.  Frustrated but wiser for the effort, Gantenbrink returned to Germany to begin work on a new robot.

Upuaut-1

The next robot Gantenbrink designed took only about four weeks to construct.  Dubbed Upuaut-1, this robot was actually a sled-mounted camera equipped with a special laser pointer/receiver capable of taking exact measurements of the shafts and the block joints.  Upuaut-1 was designed specifically for surveying the King’s Chamber shafts.  It had no treads or other independent propulsion and relied on a towing system that took advantage of the fact that the King’s Chamber shafts were open-ended, meaning the sled-bot could be towed from a pulley mounted on the surface of the pyramid.

Looking down Upuaut-1’s laser-mounted snout as it climbs KCS, the towing line is visible in the upper right corner of the shaft, the red laser surveying dot can be seen on the lower left wall.

Upuaut-1 was deployed into the King’s Chamber shafts in May of 1992, and other than a few minor snags unrelated to the sled-bot (a sand storm and a lost slip of paper with survey notes and measurements that had to be repeated), it performed brilliantly.  The shafts were cleared of debris, the survey completed, and the ventilation system was installed.  It was a success by all measures, literally.  Now Gantenbrink could return his attention to the Queen’s Chamber shafts, which would require a more sophisticated type of robot than Upuaut-1.

The sled-bot had worked for the King’s Chamber shafts, but without an opening to the surface there was no way to tow a similar robot through the Queen’s Chamber shafts.  The next generation of Upuaut would have to be independently propelled.  For his next robot Gantenbrink returned to a tread system, an over-and-under design that would allow the robot to extend tracks to both the floor and ceiling, giving it excellent power and leverage.  The new robot also had a new laser guidance system and a superior camera with pan and tilt.  It was also, incidentally, shorter than Father of Upuaut.

Irregularities such as this jutting wall section in QCS press on Upuaut-2 from all sides, but also yield discoveries such as the red mason’s mark visible along the edge of the block.

Upuaut-2 was deployed in March of 1993, and returned some of the most tantalizing discoveries since Dixon’s initial discovery of the shafts.  The little robot met no small amount of obstacles.  At one point Upuaut-2 proved to be too short for QCS, somewhat ironic given Father of Upuaut’s height difficulties, but this was fixed by using long slats to push the robot forward manually.  In QCN Upuaut-2 was turned back by a combination of a difficult 45-degree angle turn and one of the rods Dixon had left in the shaft, which itself had probably become snagged in the same turn.  Gantenbrink did not want to risk getting Upuaut-2 hopelessly entangled, so he decided to focus on QCS.

Mohammed Sheeha, Rudolf Gantenbrink, and Ulrich Kapp watch the monitor as Upuaut-2 makes history.

On March 22, 1993, Project Upuaut made its greatest discovery.  After climbing one last step at the 53 meter mark, Upuaut-2 came to a section where the masonry was clearly of higher quality than the team had observed anywhere else in the pyramid shafts.  But most exciting of all was the last obstacle of QCS—a block that promised to be more than just the end of the shaft, if it was the end indeed.

As we approach the slab, we can see two dark streaks on it, which upon closer inspection turn out to be copper fittings. And there is something else. The face of the inspector sitting next to me at the monitor has become chalk white. He draws my attention to two round, white marks on the copper fittings.  “These are seals, these are seals!” he exclaims, visibly shaken.  (The Upuaut Project—The 1993 Campaign)

The blocking slab, which would popularly come to be known as Gantenbrink’s Door, was a truly unique structure in the Great Pyramid (although, as we shall see later, there is a similar feature in QCN).  To begin with, the slab and part of the surrounding shaft are made of a different type of stone.  Most of the shaft is made of the same rough local limestone as most of the rest of the pyramid.  The shafts are formed by U-shaped blocks that resemble upside-down gutters that rest on flat base blocks.  The U-blocks, laid end-to-end on top of the base blocks, form the walls and ceilings of the shaft.

The final U-block and the blocking slab (Gantenbrink’s Door) that plugs it are both made from the lighter and finer Tura limestone that was used for the now mostly missing smooth facing stones that once covered the outer surface of the pyramid.  Gantenbrink noted that both the blocking slab and the final U-block were smoother and of higher craftsmanship than any of the other features of the pyramid shafts so far.

The upper-left corner of the “end” of QCS shows the higher quality of both the craftsmanship and the limestone, as well as the left-hand copper pin.

Regarding the roundish white “seals” that appeared to mark the slab behind the copper pins there was room for maybe-maybe-not.  Stadelmann, who seemed for whatever reason to have been distancing himself from the project by this point, insisted that Old Kingdom seals were created by rolling a pressing cylinder over a lump of clay, which would have looked nothing like what they were observing on the slab that sealed the shaft.  But Gantenbrink’s own research revealed that some Old Kingdom seals were made in gypsum, which might have looked similar to the white marks on the slab (The Upuaut Project—The 1993 Campaign).

The Upuaut Project had advanced the exploration of the shafts literally by leaps (over bumps and ledges) and bounds (up inclines and through breakdowns).  The SCA had gotten its ventilation system, and Gantenbrink had been able to explore the shafts as far as his robots and the legal permits would allow.  But the greatest obstacle would seem to have been a conflict of personalities.

For now, the mystery would remain.

Despite his original enthusiasm, Rainer Stadelmann had gradually cooled to Project Upuaut to the point where he rarely showed up on-site and seemed perpetually dissatisfied with Gantenbrink’s analyses and reports.  On March 28, 1993, just five days after the discovery of the blocking slab, Rudolph Gantenbrink withdrew from the joint venture and returned home.

For their part, the German Archaeological Institute seemed to lose interest in the pyramid shafts and the permits to continue the work seemed in danger of lapsing.  Was the work about to end just as things were getting really interesting?

The Pyramid Rover Project

The Upuaut Project provided some answers, and a lot more questions.  Gantenbrink’s Door presented us again with the Timeless Question—is this a functional part of the structure, or does it serve a symbolic purpose?  The copper “handles” certainly seemed to suggest that the block was movable, but how and by whom?  It was too small and too far within the pyramid to be accessible by people, and besides, both Queen’s Chamber shafts had been sealed up during the pyramid’s construction.  This later point seemed to exclude astrological purposes, and certainly ruled out the ventilation hypothesis.

Looking up QCS toward the blocking stone and the higher quality final (?) section of U-block.

The fact that the blocking slab was made of Tura limestone was interesting, but perhaps equally interesting was that the final U-block was of the same higher quality stone and workmanship.  The U-blocks were simply the walls and ceilings of the shafts and up to that point the local limestone had been suitable for the purpose.  Why was this final section of walls and ceiling given “the works”?  Was the blocking slab the end of the line for QCS, or was it really a door?

Zahi Hawass, who had initially been more skeptical than Stadelmann but had come to take an increasing interest in the shafts, knew that the only way to find out what was behind the slab would be to drill a hole in it and take a look—easier said than done, even for the chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.  All of the work permits had been arranged by Stadelmann and assigned to the GAI, who were no longer pursuing the project.  Egyptian law required that the permits be assigned to a university or similar research institution, so Gantenbrink could not pursue the work on his own.

Zahi Hawass

Hawass decided that the best work-around would be to have the SCA resume the project with himself assuming directorship.  He had a good relationship with National Geographic, and in 2001 contacted Tim Kelly, president of National Geographic’s television and film division, to assist with the next chapter in the drama of the pyramid shafts.  They agreed that the operation would be broadcast live on TV “in order to refute speculation about the withholding of information that has provided great interest to many people” (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 204).

The Boston, MA, firm iRobot was commissioned to design and build the next robot crawler, aptly dubbed Pyramid Rover.  The Pyramid Rover shared some aspects with Upuaut-2’s mobility design, including a vertically expandable chassis with over-and-under treads that allowed it to grip the floor and ceiling.  The iRobot team tested the traction system by recreating the shaft conditions in their lab.  Wooden planks were mounted at the proper angle with limestone surfaces and every conceivable obstacle, from speed bumps to sand traps.

Pyramid Rover’s primary camera was top-mounted with some tilt capabilities and a wide-angle lighting array.  The robot also had a specially mounted drill that would, if feasible, bore a small hole through the blocking slab just large enough for its secondary camera, a fiber optic camera with its own LED light source, to slip inside and take a peek.

But before any drilling could take place, Pyramid Rover would first have to determine the thickness of the slab and find an optimal spot for the hole.  This was achieved with a specially modified concrete thickness gauge (CTG) designed by Olsen Engineering, Inc., a company specializing in nondestructive structural analysis.   CTG uses impact-echo analysis, a type of sonar that works by lightly tapping a surface and then measuring the impact response.  Pyramid Rover’s CTG sensor had its own wheels so it could be moved around the face of the slab while remaining flush to its surface.

The Pyramid Rover Project was divided into two phases.  Phase I would involve a number of reconnaissance missions spread out over eight days.  Pyramid Rover was first sent up QCS for preliminary analyses of the blocking slab and the copper pins.  Phase I revealed that the base (floor) and U-blocks of QCS suffered from deterioration, most of which was natural, but some of which was attributed to scuffing from Upuaut-2’s treads.  The team also discovered two crystals that were likewise attributed to modern contamination, most likely of the New Age variety.

Of more ancient origin, Pyramid Rover transmitted back images of red marks that were interpreted as cutting lines made by the ancient stoneworkers.  Phase I also provided a more complete picture of the copper pins, which were observed to be bent downward at a 90 degree angle, flattening them against the surface of the slab.  The whitish material that Gantenbrink suggested might have been a royal seal, on closer examination, appeared to be mortar used to secure the pins in the slab.  The Rover confirmed Gantenbrink’s description of the slab as smooth highly-worked limestone of higher quality than the local limestone.

(Left) Rover sent back images of cutting lines, including this block familiar from Upuaut-2’s trip up QCS. (Right) The Rover mission also confirmed Gantenbrink’s description of the blocking stone as smooth and highly worked, but the white circular marks were looking less like royal seals and more like mortar patches.

Two of Dixon’s metal rods

Pyramid Rover was next sent up the northern shaft with a goal of exploring beyond the turn that had prevented Upuaut-2 from progressing more than 19 meters.  Rover passed this test with flying colors and navigated two more bends at 22 and 25 meters, apparently designed to keep QCN from running into the Grand Gallery.  At 27 meters Pyramid Rover encountered another modern obstacle—two more metal rods of the type Waynman Dixon had used to probe into the shaft more than a century before.  Rover could go no further into QCN at this time, having become snagged on Dixon’s now-infamous iron rods, but transmitted video showing that the shaft continued after yet another turn.

Phase II had similar objectives to Phase I:

The goals of this phase were very similar to that of the first; determine the thickness of the blocking stone in QCS, determine what was behind the blocking stone, study the metal pins on the opposite side of the block, discern the purpose of the blocking stone, and investigate the terminus of QCN.  (Hawass et. al, 2010, p. 205).

On September 16 (Cairo time), 2002, Pyramid Rover climbed QCS and deployed its echo-impact probe, which tapped ever so lightly on the door and listened…  After taking multiple readings it was determined that the slab was just 5-9cm thick, well within the capabilities of the drill and probe-mounted camera.  Whatever was on the other side, Rover would be able to fetch.  The decision was made to drill the hole, 2 cm in diameter, and proceed with the mission.  The following day, with National Geographic broadcasting live, the fiber optic camera was inserted into the hole and 4,500 years into the past.

After drilling the peep-hole (left) Pyramid Rover returned with the probe camera deployed (right).

At about 18 cm from the first slab was another block.  Unlike Gantenbrink’s Door, this block was more rough cut, appeared to be of the local yellow limestone, and had no features like the copper handles, just what appeared to be cracks.  There were two possible takes on this discovery.  It might mean that Pyramid Rover had come to the end of the line—that after an ornate faux block the shaft ended with the core stone that makes up the bulk of the pyramid’s solid structure.  The other, more optimistic take was that this was a second sealing block with something else beyond.  Understandably, Dr. Hawass opted for the later.

“What’s this…? We can see another sealed door. It has cracks… It’s another sealed door! It’s another space, another sealed door, but it looks to me we have a discovery.” (Zahi Hawass, National Geographic Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed)

But Hawass’ optimism was not unfounded.  Yes, the opposite “wall” did appear to be a rough-cut block of local yellow limestone rather than the Tura limestone of the first blocking slab and the surrounding U-block, but so was the rest of the shaft preceding the door.   There was no reason to assume the shaft could not continue on the other side as it had leading up to the small chamber.  And it did appear to be a chamber.  If the door had been a facing stone, why the 18 cm gap?  The space inside seemed to be intentional.

Hawass also pointed to the large chip in the bottom of the rough block, just right of the center.  It appears that the floor of the shaft continues under the block, which would not be the case if the shaft came to an end against the core masonry.  Although it was not certain by any stretch, a reasonable argument could be made for the block on the opposite side of the chamber being something that was inserted into the shaft, like a cork in a bottle, rather than something pressed against the shaft’s end, like a lid on a jar.

Unfortunately, the Rover’s probe-mounted camera had no tilt or pan capabilities, and the LEDs did not provide enough ambient light to tell much about the inside of the chamber.  The fixed mounting also meant that the camera could not look back at the backside of the door, so there was no way of knowing if the metal pins continued on the other side.  In some ways, it was like a high-tech version of the rigid wires Waynman Dixon had inserted into the masonry of the Queen’s Chamber to discover the shafts—they knew there was something back there, they just couldn’t say for sure what without being able to take a better look.

A new frontier? A third blocking stone in QCN

But the Pyramid Rover Project wasn’t quite finished yet.  Three more trips were made up the northern shaft, and this time Pyramid Rover made it past the metal rods that had stalled it at 27 meters.  Pushing up the slope, at 63 meters they discovered another blocking slab nearly identical to the one found in QCS, metal pins included.  Another interesting discovery was made between 18 and 21 meters within QCN—a plain piece of paper and a ticket for the Sphinx and pyramids!  Although modern contamination was expected, this was a fairly good distance into the shaft for these light objects to be discovered, considering that airflow is limited by the blocking slabs.

Charles Piazzi Smyth’s quest for the sacred geometry of Noah and Waynman Dixon’s chisels and iron rods may seem anachronistic by the standards of today, but they undoubtedly paved the way for Upuaut-2 and Pyramid Rover.  Far be it from us to judge the shoulders upon which we stand.  The next step into the pyramid shafts would build not only on the adventures we have covered here, it would pull together some of the most brilliant minds in fields as far reaching as scientific 3D simulation and virtual reality development, search and rescue technology, even space exploration.  Prepare to meet Djedi, and with apologies to George Lucas, the Force will be strong with this one.

Works Cited

• Zahi Hawass, Shaun Whitehead, TC Ng, Robert Richardson, Andrew Pickering, Stephen Rhodes, Ron Grieve, Adrian Hildred, Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner.  “First report: video survey of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid.”  Annales du Service des AntiquitÉs de l’Égypte.  Tome 84, 2010.  Pp. 203-16.
• Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed.  Dir. Cynthia Page.  National Geographic Television & Film, 2003. DVD.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2012.  All rights reserved.

Photograph Modern Egyptian shows the use of Diorite balls as carving tools for granite, at Aswan by Scitim is used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License.  All images watermarked “Copyright Rudolf Gantenbrink” are from the official Upuaut Project website, and are the property of Rudolf Gantenbrink, all rights reserved.  All images watermarked “National Geographic” are copyrighted by National Geographic, all rights reserved.  Copyright law allows limited use of copyrighted material under the fair use doctrine, to whit, “[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism.”  The copyrighted material reproduced in this article is used for the sole purpose of discussing and documenting the history of these various projects and does not seek to compete with the originals, prejudice their sale, or diminish their profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.  The positions of the originals are, as much as possible, represented fairly and accurately with no speculation attributed, implicitly or explicitly, to the creators of the originals, nor is it suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that the creators of the originals have endorsed this article or its contents.  Having said such, if you are the owner of the copyright to any of the material reproduced within this article it is not the intent of Em Hotep or any of its agents to violate your rights as the owner, and if you feel your rights have been violated and request that said material be modified or removed, it is the policy of Em Hotep, where it is reasonable to do so, to comply with said requests.  All other images are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright law.

Audio/Video

Hidden Hieroglyphs in the Great Pyramid: 3D Video Report Dassault Systèmes—an excellent video produced by the wizards of 3D animation at Dassault Systèmes (posted to YouTube May 30, 2011)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Websites and Journal Articles

• Zahi Hawass Official Website: The Djedi Team Robot—Zahi Hawass (no date listed)

I selected the Djedi team during a competition that I coordinated to pick the best possible robot to explore the shafts in the Great Pyramid. I decided on a team sponsored by Leeds University and supported by Dassault Systèmes in France.

• Scoutek, ltd

The official website of Scoutek, the company founded by Shaun Whitehead, and which is providing management and systems engineering for the Djedi Project. “Scoutek is solidly based on over 40 years of experience in exploration and inspection technology, in the arenas of terrestrial, archaeological, space and subsea.”

• 3D Perspectives: Exclusive 3D reconstruction of the Djedi robot findings in the Great Pyramid—by Mehdi Tayoubi (May 31, 2011)

But 3D is not only a tool for engineers and we believe that the best way to experience this adventure for yourself is through 3D experiences we are able to deliver. We spent this weekend capturing images in real-time, in a virtual 3D world, to help the public -all publics- understand what the robot has seen.

• Leeds University Faculty of Engineering News: Djedi robot expedition reports findings—no author listed (May 26, 2011)

Pictures from inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu, gathered by a robot explorer designed by University of Leeds engineers, together with Scoutek, UK and Dassult Systèmes, France, have been published…The team has committed to completing the work by the end of 2011. Full results of the work will be published in due course. The next report is expected to be issued in early 2012 after completion of the work.

• Daily Grail: Pyramid graffiti in the Gantenbrink Shaft?—by Greg (no last name listed) (May 26, 2011)

For his part, Zahi Hawass has continued to mention the possibility of a hidden chamber in the pyramid, based on the myth of Djedi…

• NewScientist: First images from Great Pyramid’s chamber of secrets—by Rowan Hooper (May 25, 2011)

They might be ancient graffiti tags left by a worker or symbols of religious significance. A robot has sent back the first images of markings on the wall of a tiny chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt that have not been seen for 4500 years. It has also helped settle the controversy about the only metal known to exist in the pyramid, and shows a “door” that could lead to another hidden chamber.

• Luxor News: Zahi Hawass seeks secret chambers in the Pyramid of Cheops—by Jane Akshar (May 17, 2011)

Top secret mission on the Giza Plateau: Under the strictest of secrecy and on instruction of the controversial Egyptian minister for antiquities, Zahi Hawass, a new mini robot crept through the passageways of the Pyramid of Cheops on the 29th May 2010. Its aim: To search for previously undiscovered secret chambers of the Pharaoh.

• Antiquity Lives: New robot set to explore mysterious shafts in Egypt’s Great Pyramid—by Aaron (no last name listed) (October 20, 2010)

A robotics team from the University of Leeds, working in conjunction with the Supreme Council and Dassault Systèmes in France, have already made two examinations and are currently waiting on the green light for a third.

• Projects Magazine: Djedi robot to enter the Great Pyramid of Khufu—by Adelle Kehoe (August 08, 2010)

A research team from the University of Leeds is set to discover secrets from Ancient Egypt using a specially designed robot. The tunnels the robot are set to explore have not been entered for over 4,500 years.

• Alan Alford’s Blog: Robot to probe Great Pyramid in 2009—by Alan Alford (December 25, 2008)

Fifteen years have gone by since Rudolf Gantenbrink’s robot unexpectedly revealed a copper-handled “door” in the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber during a routine survey of the Great Pyramid’s shafts in 1993.

News Articles

• Dentistry IQ (via South China Morning Post): Dentist has to wait to get his teeth into history; Hong Kong practitioner’s search for pyramid’s last secret is put on hold by the uprising in Egypt—by Adrian Wan (May 29, 2011)

Because of the protests, Hawass has told the team to put off their exploration for safety reasons. But the Causeway Bay dentist for 30 years said he could not wait to get inside and resume work on the project of his dreams. “I’m not afraid of protesters .We’ll be working inside the very secure pyramid anyway,” he said. “We’ve been on the project for nine years and I really can’t wait to find out and show the world what’s behind it.”

• Discovery News: Pyramid-exploring robot reveals hidden hieroglyphs: Written in red paint, the symbols may help Egyptologists figure out why the mysterious shafts were built into the pyramids—by Rosella Lorenzi (May 26, 2011)

“We believe that if these hieroglyphs could be deciphered they could help Egyptologists work out why these mysterious shafts were built,” Rob Richardson, the engineer who designed the robot at the University of Leeds, said. The study was sponsored by Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner of project partners Dassault Systèmes in France.

• HK News Watch: Dentist digs deep to discover Giza secret—by Adrian Wan (December 28, 2010)

Team founder Dr Ng Tze-chuen – whose more than 30-year dental practice in Causeway Bay supports a passion for science that includes the designing of precision instruments for missions to Mars – is overjoyed at having the opportunity to help unlock the secrets of a section of the pyramid that, even at the time it was built, only very few could access.

• University of Leicester eBulletin: Space inspiration in quest to reveal enigma of pyramid: Former University of Leicester space researcher turns to exploring Egyptian mysteries—no author listed (August 18, 2010)

In the imaginations of millions of people across the world, the mysteries of space are only rivaled by the mysteries surrounding the Egyptian pyramids. Both tantalize with glimpses of little-understood worlds that never quite seem to be within reach, at least until now. In a surprising link between the two, a researcher has taken the principles he learned in the University of Leicester’s world renowned Space Research Centre and applied them to cross the divide, not of the Universe, but of more than 4,000 years of history.

• Egypt News: Robot could open door to Great Pyramid secrets—no author listed (August 11, 2010)

Nobody knows where two unexplored air shafts leading from that ancient room lead. The hope is that the remote-controlled robotic tunnel explorer–which can fit through holes less than one inch in diameter–can drill through the secret door blocking the shafts and gather evidence that determines their purpose.

• Robot Living: Return of the Djedi—by Chief Robot (August 09, 2010)

An attempt to explore a shaft in the Pyramid of Khufu, one of the ancient seven wonders of the world, has stymied archeologists and once again they turn to robots for help.

• The Independent: Robot to explore mysterious tunnels in Great Pyramid: For 4,500 years, no one has known what lies beyond two stone doors deep inside the monument—by Andrew Johnson (August 08, 2010)

For 4,500 years, the Great Pyramid at Giza has enthralled, fascinated and ultimately frustrated everyone who has attempted to penetrate its secrets.

• Al-Ahram: The three secret doors and the magician Djedi—by Zahi Hawass (December 5-11, 2002)

Some believe these doors have a symbolic meaning because it is written on the Pyramid Text that the Pharaoh must travel through a series of doors to reach the Netherworld. But, I feel from the shape of the second door that it has another function.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Featuring Mark Lehner, Zahi Hawass, Rick Brown, Gunter Dreyer, Richard Redding, Rainer Stadelman, and Fathi Mohamed.

Riddles of the Sphinx primarily features Dr. Mark Lehner, but we also have significant face time with ancient tools specialist Rick Brown and informative snippets with Gunter Dryer, Richard Redding, Rainer Stadelman, and the obligatory sequences with Zahi Hawass.  It was written and produced by Gary Glassman of Providence Pictures for the PBS series NOVA (Original air date—January 19, 2010).

As the title suggests, the program addresses several timeless riddles of the Great Sphinx, namely, who built it, why, and how?

Who Built the Great Sphinx?

The question of who built the Great Sphinx is tackled by Rainer Stadelman, who makes the case for Pharaoh Khufu, and Mark Lehner, who makes a pretty convincing argument for Khufu’s son, Khafre.  Lehner points to the Sphinx’s location on the Giza Plateau.  Granted, it is located between the pyramids of both Khufu and Khafre, but Lehner explains that at the equinox the sun is aligned with the Sphinx, the Sphinx Temple, and Khafre’s Pyramid, which seems to associate these three monuments together.

Rainer Stadelman makes a much simpler, but nonetheless potent, argument:  the face of the Sphinx looks a lot more like Khufu than Khafre.  Incidentally, Em Hotep looks at this question in the article “The Great Sphinx: What We Know, What We Think We Know, What We Will Never Know”.  I have to admit, I didn’t get any further than Drs. Lehner and Stadelman in settling the question of who built the Sphinx, which isn’t too surprising!  But the face does seem to look an awful lot like Khufu.

One possibility the video does not address is that Khafre built the Sphinx, but may have attached his father’s face to it.  Some see this as a bit of a stretch, and Lehner’s geographic argument is pretty tight.  But there are geographic reasons for associating the Great Sphinx with Khufu as well, which are detailed in the Em Hotep article.

Why Was the Great Sphinx Built?

To explore why the Great Sphinx was built, the video first looks at what it represents.  We start with a trip to Abydos with Dr. Gunter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute.  Excavations of the tomb of Aha, the second pharaoh of the First Dynasty, revealed that along with human servants, lions were sacrificed and buried with the king.  This shows that even in the earliest days of Egyptian history, lions were associated with the monarch.

The video states that these leonean sacrifices are the first clue to the meaning of the Sphinx’s form.  The lion was a symbol of pharaonic power, but the Great Sphinx was also a god.  The Egyptians often depicted their gods as human/animal hybrids, but typically with human bodies and animal heads.  But the sphinx has the body of a lion, to represent power and ferocity, and the head of a man, to represent intelligence and good judgment.

Riddles of the Sphinx goes on to explain that by the Eighteenth Dynasty, after a thousand years of obscurity and neglect, the Sphinx was back in style.  After being rescued and restored by Pharaoh Thutmose IV the Sphinx becomes associated with the god Horemakhet (the video says Horus Akhet—same god), who is the personification of “Horus on the Horizon.”  The horizon is the gateway to the afterlife, and thus, the Sphinx is the guardian—and gatekeeper—of the afterlife.

Building on Lehner’s theory of who constructed the Sphinx, the video concludes that the reason for its construction was to assure Khafre’s passage into the afterlife.  Just as the sun aligns on the horizon with the Sphinx, its temple, and Khafre’s Pyramid during the equinox, the time of both rebirth and harvest, so the Sphinx as Horus on the Horizon guides the deceased Pharaoh into the hereafter.

But this is where I think the video glosses over some other possibilities.  A thousand years is a long time.  Egypt experienced a lot of development, along with a couple of Dark Ages, in the gulf between the Fourth Dynasty, when the Sphinx was presumably built, and the Eighteenth Dynasty, when it was clearly associated with Horemakhet. I don’t think the video makes a convincing case for the Eighteenth Dynasty interpretation of the Sphinx being a revival of the original beliefs and practices surrounding the Great Sphinx.

The Fourth Dynasty is silent with regard to the Great Sphinx.  There are no textual or graphic representations of what it meant or how it was revered within the Sphinx Temple, the pyramids, or on the Sphinx itself.  What we know comes from the time of Amenhotep IV, and may be more of a contemporary interpretation than an ancient revival. After all, everything Amenhotep IV knew of the Sphinx he learned in a mystical vision.

As with who built the Sphinx, the video does not really settle the question of why it was built either.

How Was the Great Sphinx Built?

The question of how the Great Sphinx was built takes up a generous portion of the video and is some of the most enjoyable viewing.  Operating on the philosophy that experience is the best teacher, the subjects of the video divide into two teams who attempt to reproduce various aspects of the building process. 

On one team we have Egyptologist Dr. Richard Redding of the University of Michigan working with local sculptor and stonemason, Fathi Mohamed.  Team One sets about sculpting a miniature sphinx from the same limestone that was used to construct the head of the original, which happens to also be the hardest layer of the strata from which the Sphinx was carved.  Redding and Mohamed use modern steel hand tools in their project.

On the other team, Mark Lehner joins Rick Brown, a specialist in ancient tools, who reproduces the pounders and copper chisels that would have been used by the original stonecutters.  For their project, Lehner decides to attempt to reproduce a scaled-down model of the Great Sphinx’s missing nose using only the tools employed by the Fourth Dynasty builders.  This idea turned out to be better on the strategic level than on the tactical level.  Implementation had… mixed results.

Right off the bat Mohamed and Redding discover that the hard limestone is bending their steel tools.  As for Lehner and Brown, their copper chisels are faring much more badly.  They find they can only get a few dozen strikes out of each chisel before it is fouled beyond use.  They discover very quickly that the process of reheating and reshaping the chisels back at the forge is at least as labor intensive as the actual stonecutting itself.

One of the unexpected joys of watching Riddles of the Sphinx was how surprisingly musical the hammering and pounding were.  Not the chisels so much, but the sound of the harder stone pounders striking the limestone was actually very resonate and pleasing to the ear.  Striking varying densities of stone would produce different tones, so one can only imagine what a symphony the workers must have produced.  It is something you have to hear to understand, and is one of the several reasons I recommend you check out this video for yourself.

The effects of the limestone on the tools themselves, however, was decidedly less pleasant, and by the end of the video Lehner and Brown are forced to resort to a pneumatic chisel and a circular saw designed to cut stone.  But even using modern power tools they find that the methods for cutting the stone are the same.  Parallel cuts are made in the stone, and then a chisel is used to remove the material between the cuts.

This method of carving away the limestone by making cuts and then chiseling away the material between is actually very similar to how the layers of surrounding strata were cleared from the Sphinx enclosure.  The video explains that the ancient workers started out by cutting a horseshoe-shaped trench around what would become the Sphinx enclosure.  Then parallel lines were cut into the plateau and blocks were cut away from the material between.

In working this way the stonecutters carved through the strata, downward and inward, until a large central block was isolated, from which the Great Sphinx itself was then carved.  The blocks that were removed in the process were carted off for other projects such as temple and pyramid building.  In fact, by matching layers of strata, Lehner seems to have demonstrated that the blocks which make up the Sphinx Temple were quarried from around the Sphinx itself.

Although we may not know who made the Sphinx or why, we have a pretty good idea of how.  And even though Lehner and Brown had to abandon their ancient-style tools, they were able to complete enough work with them to calculate how long the project would have taken.

They counted an average of about 200 strikes with the stone pounders per five minutes, and given a constant supply of replacement chisels, a worker could remove one cubic foot of stone in about 40 hours.  Lehner projects that it thus took about 1 million man-hours to carve the Great Sphinx, or three years for 100 men.  But that is only counting the stonecutters.  There were also the smiths who reworked the spent chisels, the people who gathered fire wood for the forges, the runners carrying tools, etc.  As we shall see in the in-progress Pyramid City series, entire towns emerged around these construction projects.

Redding and Mohamed were also successful in completing their miniature sphinx, but given that Lehner and Brown also ended up resorting to modern tools, I am not really sure of what Redding and Mohamed contributed to the program. 

Riddles Upon Riddles

There are other riddles addressed in the video as well.  For example, Dr. Zahi Hawass addresses another question people often ask about the Sphinx—If it was carved from one massive block, straight out of the living stone of the Giza Plateau, then why are there so many smaller blocks visible?  The answer is simple:  thousands of years of repair work by various cultures.  In addition to the original project by Thutmose IV, the Sphinx has undergone renovations right up to modern days.

Part of the problem in modern times is the pollution and vibrations caused by tourists, traffic, and near-by construction.  But the main destructive force, and one which has been in progress since the Sphinx was first built, is the process of rising ground water forcing residual salt up into the limestone.  The salt then dries and crystallizes, which is literally pushing the grains of limestone apart from within.

The effect is devastating.  In one particularly wince-worthy scene, Mark Lehner pulls a flake of limestone the size of his hand from the surface of the Sphinx and literally crumbles it to dust.  The effect of viewing this is akin to hearing fingernails on a chalkboard, but Lehner gets his point across—the Great Sphinx is in great peril.

(Author’s Rant:  If Albert Zink and Carsten Pusch can drill holes into royal mummies, and Mark Lehner can tear chunks from the Great Sphinx and crush them in his bare hands, then why is Jean-Pierre Houdin not allowed to, in effect, take high tech photographs of the Great Pyramid?  Is someone afraid that Houdin’s work might drill holes in, or crumble to dust, something more personal?  Hmmmm?)  

Riddles of the Sphinx, which I had the privilege of viewing in high definition, is beautifully filmed and edited.  In addition to the above-mentioned musical stones, there are many scenes which make its viewing well worth your time.  In one scene, for instance, we see Zahi Hawass walking down the back of the Sphinx toward its head.  This is an angle of the Sphinx we normally do not see, and it drives home how long and narrow the structure is.  The odd shape of the Sphinx—its long body and disproportionately small head—has spawned its own series of queries and riddles.

I highly encourage you, Gentle Reader, to check out Riddles of the Sphinx for yourself.  I am not convinced with all of the answers it proposes, but sometimes the fun is in not yet knowing.  I tend to enjoy journeys more than arrivals, myself.

Transcripts of the video are available here.

See Also

• The Great Sphinx: What We Know, What We Think We Know, What We Will Never Know

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Drawing “Stone-cutters finishing the dressing of limestone blocks” Drawn by Faucher-Gudin (Maspero, Gaston. History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Vol. II, Part A. London: Grolier Society) courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This article is the first of several in which we will attempt to put the research into layperson’s terms.  First we will take a look at the what, who, where, why and how of the study itself.

The study was conducted as part of the Family of Tutankhamun Project, a mission aimed at identifying the mother and wife of Tutankhamun, along with matching names to other anonymous Eighteenth Dynasty mummies. This particular phase of the project began in September, 2007, and was concluded in October, 2009. 

The results of the two-year study were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) as “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family” (Zahi Hawass, Yehia Z. Gad, Somaia Ismail, et al, JAMA. 2010;303(7):638-647), and was made available in electronic form beginning February 16, 2010, from www.jama.com.

The research was sponsored by the Discovery Channel, which in turn was allowed to premier the findings in a two-part series called King Tut Unwrapped, which aired on Sunday, February 21, and Monday, February 22, 2010.  Discovery Channel has posted clips from the program here.

Who and Where?

The project brought together seventeen researchers from Egypt, Germany, and Italy, and included some of the top names in Egyptology, anthropology, human genetics, radiology, and mummy forensics.  The tests were carried out at two labs in Cairo, primarily by Egyptian scientists at the insistence of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and director of the project.

Zahi Hawass (Photo courtesy of Archeologo)

“I am not against foreigners,” Hawass explained, “I simply wanted more equality” (Source:  AFP:  “Zahi Hawass, media-savvy guardian of Egypt’s past”).  Hawass has made the promotion of native Egyptologists a part of his mission.  However, even his “all Egyptian” teams are often more international than they are presented.

The genetic analysis team was headed up by anthropologist Albert Zink, of the European Academy of Bozen/ Bolzano (EURAC), and Carsten Pusch, a human geneticist from Tübingen University. 

Dr. Zink is also the head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, a EURAC program founded in 2007 to serve as a clearing house for all scientific data on Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991.  Dr. Pusch is the head of the Institute of Anthropology and Human Genetics at Tübingen University and is a world-renown expert in neurobiology and hereditary human diseases.

Ötzi the Iceman (Courtesy of Mesa Community College)

Dr. Paul Gostner, head of the Department of Radiology at Bolzano General Hospital at Bolzano, Italy, helped with the diagnosis of Tut’s illnesses.  Dr. Gostner has also helped with the analysis of Ötzi, and is co-author of “The Iceman: Discovery and Imaging” (Radiology, March 2003, pp. 614-629).

On the Egyptian side, Dr. Yehia Zakaria Gad, of the Department of Medical Molecular Genetics at Cairo’s National Research Center, supervised the DNA lab at the Egyptian Museum where the work was conducted.  Dr. Gad was a key member of the team credited with identifying the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut and is Egypt’s Top Doc on human genetics, both ancient and modern.

To summarize the places and people involved in the research:

• Supreme Council of Antiquities, Cairo, Egypt (Zahi Hawass, PhD, and Hisham Elleithy, MA)
• Institute of Human Genetics, Division of Molecular Genetics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany (Rabab Khairat, MSc, Markus Ball, MSc, and Carsten M. Pusch, PhD)
• Department of Radiodiagnostics, Central Hospital Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy (Paul Gostner, MD)
• Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, EURAC, Bolzano, Italy (Albert Zink, PhD)
• National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt (Yehia Zakaria Gad, MD,  Somaia Ishmail, PhD, Hany Amer, PhD, Naglaa Hasan, MSc,  and Amal Ahmed, BPharm)
• Ancient DNA Laboratory, Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt (Yehia Zakaria Gad, MD,  Somaia Ishmail, PhD, Dina Fathalla, MSc, Rabab Khairat, MSc, Naglaa Hasan, MSc,  and Amal Ahmed, BPharm)
• Learning Resource Center, Kasr Al Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt (Fawzi Gaballah, PhD, Mohamed Fateen, MD, and Sally Wasef, MSc)

Objectives

The study is distinguished by the fact that, rather than making inferences about the subjects based on diagnosing artifacts, the research directed its focus on the people themselves.  For instance, rather than making assumptions about the physical attributes of Akhenaten, the study began with identifying his mummy through genetic fingerprinting then proceeded to conduct a detailed physiological study.

According to the article in JAMA, the specific objectives of the study were:

To introduce a new approach to molecular and medical Egyptology, to determine familial relationships among 11 royal mummies of the New Kingdom, and to search for pathological features attributable to possible murder, consanguinity, inherited disorders, and infectious diseases. (p 638)

Introducing a New Approach

The new approach refers to both the tools employed and the subjects made available.  Many of the tools and methods employed by Egyptologists were perfected centuries ago and still serve their purpose.  But the Computer Age has resulted in a new generation of tools and processes to help Egyptologists and archaeologists know where to look, what to look for, and how to interpret what they find.

Mummy forensics, like criminal forensics, is a science which has been developing since the Victorian Age.  Like its hardboiled cousin, mummy forensics has benefitted from the technological boom, especially in the realm of genetics.  Analysis of ancient DNA is a young discipline, but this study could mark its entry into puberty. 

The Cairo Museum (Photo by Keith Payne)

Ground Zero for the study was a laboratory set up in the basement of the Cairo Museum.  The lab, which was also funded by the Discovery Channel and equipped by Applied Biosystems, was specifically designed to analyze ancient DNA.  Staffed with scientists and doctors from the Department of Medical Molecular Genetics at Cairo’s National Research Center, the lab is the frontline of forensic Egyptian mummy studies.  Work was also carried out in a lab at Cairo University.

The new approach also refers to the subjects of the study.  According to Dr. Hawass, this is the first time royal Egyptian mummies have been sampled for DNA analyses (Source:  “Press Release – The Discovery of the Family Secrets of King Tutankhamun”). 

The scientists who conducted the study have high hopes for the application of genetic fingerprinting in identifying mummies and fleshing out the family trees of Egypt’s ancient dynasties.  “This will open to us a new era,” Hawass told National Geographic Daily News (Source:  “King Tut Mysteries Solved: Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred”).

Familial Relationships—The Study Group

Ten mummies were selected for the study based on their known or suspected relation to Tutankhamun, for a total of eleven in the study group.  Besides Tut, the identities of only three other mummies in the study group were known—Tut’s grandparents or great-grandparents, Yuya and Thuya, and Amenhotep III, father of Akhenaten. 

Among the suspected relatives were two miscarried fetuses that were discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb, thought to have been his children.  Producing a genetic profile for either or both of these young princesses was a priority because if they did prove to be Tutankhamun’s offspring then Dr. Hawass hoped to use their genetic fingerprints to identify the mummy of Ankhesenamun, Tut’s sister-wife.  

Also in the study group were two unnamed noblewomen discovered in tomb KV21, known only as KV21A and KV21B, one of whom could possibly be Ankhesenamun.  Two other anonymous noblewomen included in the study, recovered from tomb KV35, are known as KV35YL, the Younger Lady, and KV35EL, the Elder Lady.  One of the goals of the study was to determine if either of the latter noblewomen could be the famous bride of Akhenaten, Nefertiti.

The final mummy in the control group came from tomb KV55 and was suspected to be the mummy of either Akhenaten or Smenkhkare.  The mummy from KV55 was an important link because, if he did prove to be Akhenaten, then he could link the two generations before him to the two generations that followed.  Five generations of Tut’s family were plotted by the study.

In all there were sixteen mummies in the study—eleven in the study group and five in the control group.  The details of all sixteen mummies will be outlined in the up-coming article, The Mummies Gallery.

Maladies Inherited and Acquired

The study also sought to determine what genetic conditions, infectious diseases, and violent traumas may have bedeviled the Eighteenth Dynasty royals.  Of the many pathologies detailed in the study, the media seem to have had a morbid fascination with the role of incest.  Although intermarriage and interbreeding were evident in the test group, the significance of this rather lurid detail may have been overstated for shock value.

For example, Times Online grabbed attention with the headline “Incest was true curse of Tutankhamun.”  According to their story, “The boy king was the product of an incestuous relationship that may have led to a weakened constitution and his early death, the first DNA study of the pharaoh’s remains has concluded.”  But did the study actually reach this conclusion?

In the appendix to the JAMA article, under the heading Pathology in the Royal Mummies, the writers state that bone diseases such as flat and club feet, cleft palate, scoliosis, hunched back, bone and joint degeneration and tumors were all observed.  The appendix further indicates that these conditions seemed to accumulate pretty rapidly in the five generations of the study group.  But what were the actual conclusions regarding the relations between the ailments and consanguinity?

Further research will show if this is suggestive of a disadvantageous genetic background resulting from interfamilial marriage in the royals. As can be seen in the genetically distant mummy control group (ie, TT320-CCG61065, TT320-CCG61066, KV60A, KV60B), there is also an obvious high frequency of disorders of the spine and feet. This makes it highly unlikely that the discussed conditions are indeed inherited.  (JAMA appendix)

In other words, the frequency of bone disorders was suspiciously high in the family of Tutankhamun, high enough to warrant further study.  But many of the same disorders were also frequent in the control group.  The control group is a control group specifically because it is not related to the family of Tutankhamun.  Observing the same conditions in both groups suggests intermarriage may not have been a significant contributor to the conditions observed in the study group.

Another misstatement of the Times Online article has to do with an affliction of King Tut’s royal tootsies, Freiberg-Kohler’s disease.  Talking about the results of the genetic fingerprinting, the article states that Tutankhamun:

…suffered from several disorders as a result of his family history.  These included a painful, degenerative bone condition known as Koehler’s disease and a club foot which meant that the pharaoh was “a young but frail king who needed canes to walk” (Source).

While his club footedness may or may not have had a genetic cause, Freiberg-Koehler’s disease almost certainly did not.  While we do not know exactly what causes Freiberg-Koehler’s disease, a degenerative bone disease of the foot, there is nothing in the literature to suggest a genetic connection, incestuous or otherwise.

There is, however, one bit of trivia I am surprised the media did not pick up on:  Freiberg-Koehler’s disease is generally an affliction of teenage girls.  This leads us to another concern of the study, whether or not the men of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Akhenaten in particular, suffered from some condition which resulted in a feminine body type. 

Do these curvy and maternal depictions of Akhenaten reflect reality or something more symbolic? (Photo by Gerbil)

Akhenaten, and to a lesser degree, Tutankhamun, are sometimes depicted with features such as female breasts and voluptuous hips.  It has also been suggested that there is something abnormally unmanly about Akhenaten’s displays of intimacy with his family.  While this latter may have more to do with the psychology of those doing the asking, the underlying question is a fair one:  Are these accurate depictions or artistic convention?

Another surprising find was that several members of both groups had suffered exposure—sometimes multiple exposures—to malaria tropica.  The most severe form of malaria, tropica is now one of the two main contenders for the cause of Tutankhamun’s death, with the other being a severe leg injury which probably led to an overwhelming infection.

In order to do these elements of the research justice, the pathology of both groups of mummies will be covered in detail in separate articles.

Reception and Criticism

The DNA

The scientists who conducted the study were amazed by how intact the ancient DNA seemed to be, which they chalked up to the mummification process itself.    A news brief from the University of Tubingen states:

The scientists were surprised by how well, comparatively speaking, the ancient DNA had been preserved, and the special embalming techniques reserved for kings may well have caused this phenomenon.  (Source:  Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen:  “Tutankhamun’s parents identified”)

Dr. Pusch suggests this notion is supported by the superior condition of the DNA from the royal mummies as opposed to samples taken from non-royal mummies.  As he stated to National Geographic:  “The ingredients used to embalm the royals was completely different in both quantity and quality compared to the normal population in ancient times,” (Source).

This conclusion, however, was met with some qualified skepticism.  Dr. Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist from the University of York who holds a Ph.D in archaeological chemistry specializing in Eighteenth Dynasty mummification practices, does not seem convinced.  Speaking with Discovery News, Buckley muses:

It is surprising that DNA should survive in these mummies given the very harsh conditions the bodies have been subjected to over the last 3000 years. I’m referring, for example, to the methods of embalming, the relatively high temperatures and oxidising environments. Hopefully, closer independent scrutiny by ancient DNA experts might help explain these very surprising results.  (Source:  “Controversy Arises Over King Tut Findings”).

Pathologies

Another perennial controversy was the cause of Tutankhamun’s death.  Certainly the study was not rash in making any specific conclusions regarding the deaths of any of the subjects.  “Caution must be taken when interpreting cause of death in these mummies,” (JAMA, p. 646).  But fatal conditions in some of the mummies were decidedly less ambiguous.

The head injuries sustained by KV35YL, assuming they were not postmortem, would surely have resulted in her death.  One of the mummies from the control group, previously thought to be Thutmose I but for now known only as mummy CCG61065, took an arrow to the chest, hardly a mere flesh wound.  Another more famous member of the control group, Queen Hatshepsut, may have died as a result of a malignant tumor, blood poisoning from an abscessed tooth, or a combination of both.  (See JAMA article appendix)

Tutankhamun’s death continues to generate the most attention, if for no other reason than name recognition.  But generalizing from the critical analyses of his pathologies can provide an informative backdrop to the entire study. 

One of the conditions King Tut seems to have suffered from is osteonecrosis—bone death.  Osteonecrosis can result from genetic and environmental causes and may have played a role in his death.  “Necrosis is always bad, because it means you have dying organic matter inside your body,” Dr. Pusch said regarding Tutankhamun’s Freiberg-Koehler’s disease (Source).  Tut’s foot condition was not itself life threatening, but more generalized osteonecrosis could point to something more serious at work. 

However, Dr. Gino Fornaciari, director of palaeopathology at the University of Pisa, questions whether or not the published images of Tut really warrant a diagnosis of osteonecrosis.  Even if Tut did suffer from osteonecrosis, Dr. Fornaciari suggests that it may have been a result of a malarial infection rather than bad genes (Source).

Indeed, King Tut was one of the mummies who showed the genetic markers for malaria tropica.  However, Dr. Robert Connolly, a physical anthropologist from the University of Liverpool who has himself worked with Tut, points out that the presences of the parasite in Tut’s blood does not necessarily mean he ever developed full-blown malaria (Source:  Pattaya Daily News:  “New Speculations Over King Tut’s Death”).

Dr. Frank Ruhli, head of Applied Anatomy at the University of Zurich and front man of the Swiss Mummy Project, questions whether we will ever be able to answer the question of what killed King Tut.  The condition of his mummy and the lack of internal organs will always leave room for uncertainty.  Dr. Ruhli observes:

This is a major work in Egyptian mummy studies.  It proves the value of modern methods such as CT and molecular testing. Yet, one needs to be cautious in stating any definite medical diagnosis.   (Source)

Overall, reception has been positive.  At the risk of committing an appeal to authority fallacy, the study’s acceptance into the Journal of the American Medical Association is itself a ringing endorsement.  But as stated near the beginning of this article, genetic and radiographic analysis of ancient mummies is a young science.  Continuing critical analysis, along with independent verification and replication, are vital for its growth.

The Future of the Project

The Family of Tutankhamun Project is an ongoing endeavor which will undoubtedly grow in both depth and scope as the field continues to mature.  Some specific short-term goals have already been enumerated.  Writing in Asharq Alawsat, Dr. Hawass points to the continuing work with the two fetuses and the search for Ankhesenamun, as well as the search for Nefertiti (Source:  “Tutankhamen’s Dynasty in the Valley of Kings”).

Drs. Zink and Pusch are also enthusiastic knights in the Egyptological Grail Quest.  “And we shall continue our research: Nefertiti will be our next project. We have moved our research onto a new and so far unexplored level!”

In terms of a timeframe, Dr. Hawass suggested in an article with News Trends Today that additional results could be released within six months (Source:  “Tutankhamun: one part of the mystery cleared up, but many riddles”).   Such projections have historically been dubious, but most of us are willing to exchange timeliness for accuracy and transparency.  So long as King Tut continues to enchant the popular imagination, the work—and show—must go on.

See Also

• The Mummies Gallery
• King Tut’s Feet Fatale: Did Frail Feet Fell the Famous Pharaoh?
• Your Mummy and Your Health: The Swiss Mummy Project Unravels Ancient Illnesses
• The Swiss Mummy Project Wraps Up Current Experiment 

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photo “Zahi_Hawass” by Archeologo is used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License.   Photo “Akhenaten and child” is adapted from this photo by Gerbil from de.wikipedia.org and is used in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License.  Graphic “family tree scroll” adapted from “Tutankhamun’sAncestry-MostProbableGeneticLineage.svg” by Captmondo is used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license, and is altered in accordance with the same.  Photo  “OetzitheIceman” courtesy of Mesa Community College is used in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine.  Mr. Mackey appears courtesy of South Park Studios, m’kay?

Egypt’s Vice Minister of Culture Zahi Hawass seems to think so.  As the critics, both pro and con, chime in with their own analysis of the recent JAMA article, Dr. Hawass seems to cross the line between making a response and taking offense.

“I call on Set, the [ancient Egyptian] god of evil to remain silent this time!”

Criticism of the results of the two-year study of royal Egyptian mummies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) was immediate, one of the benefits of living in the cyber age.  EEF News, an Egyptology forum mailing list moderated by A. K. Eyma, lit up with professional and lay responses to the JAMA article within hours of its publication.  The excitement was viral, but not without its share of “Yeah, ok, but what about…?”

More formal responses are undoubtedly being hammered out on the keyboards of Egyptology writers in the cluttered offices of media experts and the pristine halls of academia.  This is not a personal insult to Zahi Hawass or the many excellent minds who contributed to the work, it is simply how science is done.

In “As if Tutankhamun is Alive!” (Source: Asharq Alawsat), Dr. Hawass points to the fact that the JAMA article was “the peak of our work and efforts over at least the past two years, and the scientific research we provided was accepted by the Journal of the American Medical Association, after it was revised by a number of world-renowned scientists.”  The study has indeed received wide acclaim for its thoroughness and sound methodology.

But publishing a scientific paper, even one as thoroughly vetted as the JAMA article, is not the final word in the field.  Science is not like a court of law, where the evidence is presented, the jury renders a verdict, and the judge proclaims the case closed.  Scientific theories, no matter how apparently “true,” are always and forever open cases. 

Picking Words, Picking Fights, or just Picking?

Part of the problem with the Asharq Alawsat article is that Dr. Hawass is not very specific about who and what he is responding to.  Take the following quotation:

Apart from the gains of this significant publicity, some sad and other laughable things occurred. Dr. Abdel Halim Nureddin told me that someone keeps saying that he was the first to carry out DNA tests on mummies. All I could do was laugh because the project that I’m honoured to be presiding over is the first ever to use DNA testing on these mummies so we have exclusively set up the first two DNA laboratories to study mummies in Egypt. (Source)

Dr. Hawass does not name the person making this claim, so it is difficult to analyze.  But it is worth mentioning that there seems to be a separation between what is claimed and what is responded to.  Someone claims to have been “the first to carry out DNA tests on mummies,” to which Dr. Hawass counterclaims that he is “presiding over the first [study] ever to use DNA testing on these mummies” (emphasis mine).

One of the co-authors of the royal mummy study, Dr. Albert Zink, is also head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, a foundation established to study the famous Ötzi iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991.  According to the website for the Ötzi Museum, the first genetic analysis of Ötzi was published in 2006 (American Journal of Physical Anthropology: “The Iceman belongs to the European genetic haplogroup K and was probably infertile.”  Rollo, F.U., L. Ermini, S. Luciani, I. Marota, C. Olivieri, D. Luiselli.  Vol. 130, pp. 557-564:2006). 

It could therefore be argued that one of Dr. Hawass’ own team members conducted DNA tests on mummies prior to the royal mummy project, just not those same mummies. The murkiness of the claim and counterclaim, both as presented by Dr. Hawass, do not serve his complaint of harassment very well.

Dr. Hawass goes on to characterize as “false claims” the criticism that the DNA is only 40% confirmed, as opposed to 100% as Dr. Hawass claims.  The truth is, any expert working in a modern DNA lab with contemporary samples taken from living subjects can tell you that the best we can do is narrow a sample down to a likely population.  It is not at all unusual to hear a statement in a courtroom to the effect of “Only one person in 100 billion will exhibit these genetic markers.” 

Given the fact that there are not enough people on Earth for there to be a second person exhibiting those same characteristics, this sort of match is a fairly reliable conclusion!  But this is still not 100% certain, and I am guessing it is fair to say that ancient DNA can be trickier to work with than that taken from a living person.  It may seem like splitting hairs but Zahi’s statement that the tests are 100% accurate is as false a claim as 40%.  A more reliable assessment is likely somewhere in the middle.

This is the problem with taking peer criticism personally and responding with words such as “laughable,” “false claim,” and “I expected those enemies of success and people who are obsessed with fame to come forward to try and stick their noses in the results of our research.” 

Kate Phizackerley and the DNA Problems

There are many intelligent and thoughtful people who are taking a fair but critical look at the conclusions published in the JAMA article.  Kate Phizackerley, proprietor of News from the Valley of the Kings, has had a bead drawn on this story from the beginning.

Starting with “The Consanguinity Problem” and “An example of my consanguinity concerns”, Kate began to question the reliability of drawing specific conclusions from a population where interbreeding was so rampant.  She followed this up with a first rate scholarly article, “DNA Shows that KV55 Mummy Probably Not Akhenaten,” and made clarifications in “Genetic Sudoko.”  These articles are a good starting point for anyone who is curious about alternative views on the JAMA study and why any scientific work, no matter how well presented, is always an open case.

Kate’s most recent offering, “Questions Roundup and a Combative Zahi,” specifically responds to the Asharq Alawsat article.  “I don’t know what the academic community feels,” she states, “but I personally resent the accusation that I am “obsessed with fame” because I have critiqued the DNA data.”

We are all Layers in the Strata.  Take a Minute and Chill

Zahi Hawass is not alone in bemoaning those ever-present ignorant scoundrels who disagree with our hard work.  Nobody likes going through the process of developing, presenting, and successfully defending a thesis, only to have their parade rained on by the relentless drive of science.  But as any scientist will tell you, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and its giants all the way down.  Eventually, someone will climb onto your shoulders as well.  That’s how the game is played.

I am far too insignificant to offer Dr. Hawass advice, but far too indiscrete to pass up the opportunity.  The next time you want to bash your critics, invite some of your most trusted colleagues to the famous Old Cataract Hotel veranda, and while knocking back a cold Stella and watching the Nile lazily passing by, let it all out.  Just don’t invite the press.

See Also

• Squelching Scholarship? The Case of Ahmed Saleh
• Zahi Hawass and Beyonce: Pay No Attention to the Story Behind the Curtain 

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Dr. Hawass’ statement that “These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves” (source) was widely repeated in the press under headlines announcing that the belief that slaves had built the pyramids could now be retired.  But Egyptologists have long known that the Slave Hypothesis was pure Hollywood. 

Along with Hawass, Egyptologist Mark Lehner began uncovering the truth of the pyramid builders more than 20 years ago.  Lehner was consumed with the question of where such a large workforce could have lived.  After conducting the first detailed “to scale” survey of the Giza Plateau, he narrowed his focus to the area around the enigmatic Wall of the Crow, a colossal wall with no apparent related structures.

Lehner hit pay dirt, and his dogged pursuit of these ancient builders led to the excavation of the very city where they lived and worked—a large complex of barracks and permanent housing, distribution centers, industrial sites, and scribal workshops.  The recently discovered tombs tell us something of the status of the workers, but the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders gives us the everyday details of their lives.

Most of Em Hotep’s readers will be familiar with Dr. Lehner and his work.  But if you are not, then his total absence from the recent news stories may have left you with an incomplete picture of just how strong the case against the Slavery Hypothesis really is.  In this three-part series we will take a look at what Lehner discovered about the pyramid builders.  We will examine the evidence that the workforce had a surprisingly modern division of labor, followed by a tour of the city itself.

The headlines said it all

“Egyptian Tomb Find Suggests Pyramid Builders Weren’t Slaves” (Bloomberg).  “Egypt tombs suggest free men built pyramids, not slaves” (BBC).  The Times Live snarkily distinguished that “Great pyramid builders were wage slaves.” And speaking with sonorous authority, Al-Ahram Weekly declared “Building on facts:  A new discovery at Giza plateau has finally debunked Herodotus’ assertion that the Pyramids were built by slaves.”

Some sources at least acknowledged that this news wasn’t so new after all.  Discover Magazine announced “Egypt Finds Tombs of Pyramid Builders, And More Evidence They Were Free Men.”  The Canadian Press stated “Egypt says newly discovered tombs provide more evidence slaves did not build pyramids” [article no longer online].  JWeekly.com summarized “Egypt unveils more proof that Jews did not build pyramids.”

The headlines said it all, but the articles, unfortunately, did not.    

Egyptologist Dr. Mark Lehner (Courtesy of PBS, from the documentary “This Old Pyramid”)

Thanks to an oversight, Mark Lehner’s name was excluded from the original press release and official blog report by Zahi Hawass regarding the recent discovery.  To be clear, Dr. Lehner was not directly involved in the discovery of the new tombs.  But to leave him out of any discussion of the debunking of the Slave Hypothesis is like a history of the Theory of Evolution that fails to mention Charles Darwin.

Tombs of the workers overlooking Pyramid City (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Fortunately Dr. Hawass has amended his blog entry to mention Dr. Lehner by name, but the presses have rolled on to new headlines.  Again to be clear, the importance of the tombs of the overseers cannot be overstated.  They provide corroborative evidence of how the labor was organized, and their proximity to the king’s final resting place removes any question of their status—they were not slaves.

But this discovery is hardly the straw that broke the Slave Hypothesis’ back, as suggested by the media coverage.  It could be argued that while the overseers themselves were not slaves, the laborers were.  After all, not all of the workers who toiled on the pyramids were buried in cemeteries surrounding the pharaohs.  A feasible alternative hypothesis is that this privilege was reserved for freemen, while the rest of the laborers were slaves.

To really know about the pyramid builders we have to look beyond where they were buried to where they lived.  Does the archaeological record point to the presence of a large slave population on the Giza Plateau? 

First let’s set the parameters of the discussion:  what constitutes slave labor and what does not?

The Slave Hypothesis

The Slave Hypothesis is actually pretty simple:  the pyramids and other structures were built by slaves, usually depicted as being Semitic.  This latter part is easily dismissed.  Semitic people do not begin to appear in Egypt in great numbers until the Middle Kingdom Period, particularly during the Twelfth Dynasty. Of this much we can be certain—whether the pyramids were built by slaves or freemen, they were not built by Israelites, or proto-Israelites, or anyone else connected with the Moses of the Bible.  It just didn’t happen.

We owe this myth in part to a loose reading of the Book of Exodus, which gives the account of Moses leading the Children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage.  Although there have been Semitic slaves and kings alike in Egypt (see the Hyksos Dynasty), there is no actual archaeological or historical evidence for the Exodus accounts, even when stripped of its more supernatural elements.

Charlton Heston as Moses

But the Exodus account doesn’t even name the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and makes no mention of the pyramids.  For this we can blame Hollywood.  Movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” burned the image of Hebrew slaves into the pop culture psyche.  In large part, the Slave Hypothesis is based on a Hollywood fiction.

So what about the first part of the Slave Hypothesis?  Could the pyramids have been built by slaves if we toss out the Moses part?

Slaves in Egypt

There were many forms of servitude in ancient Egypt, and to a certain extent everyone was owned by the Pharaoh.  As we shall see below, there was also a type of feudalism which bound all Egyptians to a debt of labor to their superiors.  But what about an army of whip-driven state-owned slaves, as often depicted dragging blocks up the pyramid ramps?

To be sure, there were slaves in ancient Egypt.  Most slaves were a product of warfare, with victorious Egyptian armies returning from foreign campaigns with hundreds, or even thousands, of slaves in tow.  Such human booty became the property of the pharaoh to use and distribute as he saw fit.

Some of the slaves would serve directly as a part of the king’s estate, while others would be distributed to temples and work camps.  The king might also grant slaves to individuals as rewards for service or loyalty.  Slave labor was considered to be a resource which, like any other, was sent where it was needed.

Nubian Slaves at Abu Simbel

Most of the slaves would have been civilians who were captured, but many would also have been soldiers who had surrendered.  Some of these individuals would have been highly skilled and their talents were put to use.  Slaves could be found performing service ranging from grunt labor to any vocation not restricted to freemen.

Not all slaves were foreigners.  An Egyptian who was caught in criminal activity could find himself, and his entire family, enslaved as punishment.  Egyptians could also sell themselves into slavery to settle a debt.  Others sold themselves simply to improve their lot in life, finding the life of a slave more stable and secure than trying to get by on their own.  

At least some slaves were clearly treated as property in ancient Egypt.  The pharaoh might grant slaves, land, and cattle to a temple or an individual.  Wealthy Egyptians also included slaves in transactions among themselves. These contracts seem to have been conducted between individuals or with the state, but there were no slave markets as we see in other times and places.

So the question is, how common were such slaves in the Old Kingdom Period?  Could the pharaoh have mobilized an army of slaves to build the monumental structures of the Giza Plateau?  Obviously there were huge workforces of some sort involved, and this undoubtedly involved servitude, but what was the nature of that service?  In his article Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Egypt, writer Jimmy Dunn observes:

For ancient Egypt, a better, or at least more precise definition of a slave might be a “person owned by a master, as was any other chattel, used as the master pleased, to the extent of being disposed of by inheritance, gift sale and so forth”. In reality, such slavery seems to have been fairly rare in Egypt prior to the Greek Period, progressing over time.

Dunn goes on to point out that huge slave populations do not really begin to appear in Egypt’s history until the great conquests of the New Kingdom Period.  As noted above, even when the pharaoh acquired slaves they tended to be distributed throughout the kingdom.  Egypt simply did not have the means to control a huge population of thousands of slaves in one location.

There were slave work camps, but these were smaller localized projects.  Slaves were used in the construction of some temples and other structures, but a project the scale of the Giza Pyramids required thousands of workers.  The archaeological evidence from the Giza Plateau simply does not support the notion of a slave camp of that size. 

But there were thousands of somebodies working on the plateau. 

The Bak Hypothesis

One way or another, pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure were able to mobilize huge workforces numbering in the thousands to build the pyramids.  At least 2,000 and as many as 4,000 workers were fed, housed, managed and motivated within an easy walk of these great monuments (the 10,000 figure postulated by Hawass in his blog post is generally considered to be way too high).  Regardless of how you cut it, these were clearly very expensive undertakings.  How could such a project be funded if not performed by slave labor?

One type of organizational structure that could generate a large free-but-obligated workforce would be feudalism.  In a feudal system everybody owes some sort of service to the social rank immediately above them.  Kings appoint nobles, nobles appoint vassals, vassals organize knights, knights build armies, and armies conscript soldiers.  By requiring goods and service in exchange for land, status, and other privileges, the king could mobilize his entire kingdom through delegation.

Lehner proposes that the pyramids, as well as other national construction projects, were organized the same way.  The Egyptian system of vassalage was called bak, and everybody owed bak to somebody above them (not to be confused with baksheesh, which is what tourists and travelers seem to owe to every Egyptian!). 

Priests owed bak.  Scribes owed bak.  Potters owed bak.  Farmers owed bak.  Through this system of obligatory servitude every citizen of the Old Kingdom could be called upon to do his or her shift of work on the pyramid projects.  Simply put, the Bak Hypothesis says that the pyramids were built by a rotating workforce of laborers who were serving their allotted shift to their lords.  (See Harvard Magazine:  “Who Built the Pyramids,” by Jonathan Shaw)

The bak system solves several problems involved in pyramid building.  First, it keeps the overhead low because the labor is essentially free.  Unskilled labor requires little training and the workers are interchangeable.  Similarly, skilled labor is easily rotated because the workers are assigned to duties that take best advantage of their skill set.  By obliging every citizen to invest their skills for a certain amount of time, a huge workforce of skilled and unskilled labor could be employed for very little cost.

Second, the bak system absorbs the cost of supplying the workforce.  Raw materials such as grain and livestock are supplied through taxes and bak, and the workforce required to turn them into hot meals is at least partly composed of citizens serving their bak debt.  We shall see in Part 2 that the Pyramid City included a permanent workforce who made their living off of the building projects.  But even their wages would have come from the bak supplied by others.

Third, the bak system of conscription was actually good for morale.  As we have seen in the wars of the last century, a drafted soldier may not like the idea of going to war, but the esprit de corps he forms with his fellow draftees compel him to give 100% to the effort.  Dr. Lehner and others have found archaeological evidence of this sort of camaraderie around the building projects of the Giza Plateau, which we will look at in Part 2.

So the Bak Hypothesis gives an alternate model of how the pyramids may have been built.  Unlike the Slavery Hypothesis, for which we have no archaeological evidence, Lehner has been able to paint a very detailed picture of the lives of the permanent and rotating citizens of the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.

In Part 2:  Pyramid City, Inc., we will look at the evidence for how the workforce was organized, and how the evidence supports Lehner’s hypothesis while contradicting the Slave Hypothesis.  We will close the series with Part 3:  A Guided Tour of the Pyramid City, a trip through the Great Western Gate of the Wall of the Crow for a street-level look at how the denizens of the Pyramid City worked and lived.

The Great Western Gate of the Wall of the Crow (Photo by Jon Bodsworth)

Note:  Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), the organization founded by Dr. Lehner to excavate and analyze the Pyramid City, refers to the site in its official literature as the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.  For the sake of brevity, these articles will simply refer to the site as the Pyramid City, but we are talking about the same place.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2010.  All rights reserved.

Photograph “mark.png” from “This Old Pyramid,” courtesy of PBS.org, all rights reserved.  Photographs “plateau_14.png” and “plateau_16” by Jon Bodsworth, are copyright free.  Photograph “Nubian Slaves” is in the public domain and is copyright free.  Still from the movie “The Ten Commandments” courtesy of Paramount Pictures, all rights reserved.

According to the AFP newswire, one of the tombs is the largest yet discovered at Saqqara.  As Zahi Hawass put it, “It took me two hours to look around it” (Source: AFP: “Huge tomb found at Egypt’s Saqqara pyramid” [article no longer online]).  Although there is no mention of a pyramid in the story, the story’s title probably refers to the pyramid complex of Djoser, which is often considered synonymous with Saqqara, although there are a number of other pyramids at the site.  It is unclear at this point if the tombs are in any way related to Djoser’s step pyramid.

The larger tomb has a primary chamber described as “vast” with alcoves branching off.  One of the alcoves contained pottery and human skeletons, but no human mummies were discovered in the tomb.  There were mummified falcons, however, in another alcove.  Yet another alcove contained a 23-foot-deep well.

All that we know about the second tomb is that it contained pottery.  The looting of both tombs, according to one source (Earth Times:  “2,500-year-old tomb unearthed in Egypt”), occurred sometime in the Fifth Century AD. 

Details are few at this point, there being no posting as of this date at Zahi Hawass’ Official Website, and the discovery was apparently made by Egyptian archaeologists, so the full story will be released on the Supreme Council of Antiquities’ schedule.

Saqqara has been the location of a number of wonderful discoveries in recent years, including a pyramid believed to belong to Queen Sesheshet, mother of Pharaoh Teti, the first king if the Sixth Dynasty, and the Old Kingdom  tombs of the courtiers lya-Maat and Thinh. 

Update

For some pictures check out Discovery News:  “Largest Saqqara Tomb Discovered“.  Also, it would seem that the word “well” above, as in 23-foot-deep well, was a mistranslation.  It is at this point simply a hole, which of course isn’t simple at all, since it doesn’t seem to be a tomb shaft, so what is it?

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

The photos “Camels at Saqqara” and “Guards are forbidden” by Keith Payne, copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

German officials claim that the artifact’s constitution has already been evaluated and she is too fragile for travel, and that the Nefertiti Summit was never about the merits of Egypt’s case to begin with.

Meanwhile, Zahi Hawass intends to assemble a repatriation alliance based on his own model.  “Our strategy became a good case for everyone…. China announced they will do same as we do” (Source: M&C: “Egypt to aid return of Asian, African stolen artifacts”).

It seems rather convenient timing for Berlin to announce after the Nefertiti Summit had ended in stalemate that the analysis of the artifact’s travel worthiness had already been conducted, and with results favorable to Germany.  One would think that Berlin would have been more transparent about the evaluation from the beginning, and that such news might have been deemed relevant to the December 20, 2009, meeting between Dr. Zahi Hawass and Dr. Friederike Seyfried of the Berlin Egyptian Museum.

An independent evaluation of the artifact’s ability to withstand transport has been something those of us on the sidelines have been asking for all along.  For us, watching this debacle has been like watching a favorite niece being jerked around by self-centered parents in a nasty divorce.  But Germany’s thirteenth-hour claim that such a study has been conducted, sans details, invites healthy skepticism. 

Regarding the documentary evidence, neither Egypt nor Germany has changed their stand one inch.  According to Dr. Seyfried, “The position of the German side is clear and unambiguous – the acquisition of the bust by the Prussian state [of Germany] was legal,” (Source:  BBC:  “Germany refuses to return Nefertiti bust to Egypt”).

But Germany and Egypt seem to have had different expectations regarding December 20 meeting from the very beginning.  Seyfried, contrary to both the Egyptians and the world media, denies that the meeting was ever about Nefertiti, but was instead an opportunity to discuss future joint exhibitions (Source:  AFP:  “Germany dismisses Egyptian claims to Nefertiti bust”). 

This is contrary to Dr. Hawass’ press release which states specifically that the talks were for the purpose of discussing the bust, and that Dr. Seyfried was to “act as liaison between Dr. Hawass and the relevant German officials” (Source: Zahi Hawass’ Blog:  Press Release -Meeting with Berlin Museum Director).

This leads one to wonder if the media savvy Hawass essentially hijacked the occasion to focus attention on his own agenda.  Certainly Hawass has always made the repatriation of artifacts a priority, but is the current steroidal emphasis on the subject intended to solidify his new role as Vice Minister of Culture?

Zahi Hawass has always enjoyed a cosmopolitan appeal, but his new position as a Vice Minister adds a more official element to his international dealings.  As champion of Egyptian culture, it would be easy for Dr. Hawass to justify (in his own mind, at least) redefining the purpose of the meeting with Dr. Seyfried from a general administrative function to a summit discussing the repatriation of the bust of Nefertiti. 

And the media, current company included, has been complicit.  Germany has insisted, quite openly, that the meeting was not about the fate of Nefertiti.  In my own defense I might add that Berlin’s protestations could have been a little less vague regarding the purpose of the meeting, and the fact that Dr. Seyfried did use the occasion to present Germany’s evidence that the bust was acquired legally shows that the issue was at least on the menu.

But Dr. Hawass is an old hand at playing to the media, and his repatriation efforts seem to be expanding in both momentum and scope.  According to a speech he gave last week, he intends to build a coalition of nations who feel they have been cheated out of their heritages.

“At the end of March,” Hawass proclaimed, “we will hold a conference to meet with others who suffered like us from stolen artifacts and to discuss how to help all of us in efforts to return the stolen artifacts” (Source: M&C: “Egypt to aid return of Asian, African stolen artifacts”).

Whether Nefertiti is ever returned to Egypt or not, she is clearly serving a diplomatic role for Egypt as a royal hostage to the West.  Given the probable fragility of the artifact, proving Borchardt’s deceptiveness in acquiring it for Germany was always more of a moral than practical goal.  If nothing else, it would place Germany awkwardly in debt to Egypt.

Meanwhile, the camera lights shine, the presses roll, and cyberspace remains honed-in on Zahi Hawass and his growing crusade to free not only Egyptian artifacts from the evil doers, but to lead all the downtrodden nations in a charge to reclaim what is theirs.  Of course, western universities are welcome to continue to expend resources on, western corporations are welcome to continue to invest in, writers to write about, and Hollywood to exaggerate, Egypt’s culture.  Just be sure to pay a visit to the Vice Minister of Culture’s Office.

Update

An article from M&C News (“German museum confirms travel ban for Queen Nefertiti“) has provided some additional details about the examination of the bust of Nefertiti with regard to determining her mobility. 

‘An examination in 2007 of the state of preservation of the bust ruled it unsuitable for transport or loans,’ said the Prussian Heritage Foundation, the parent corporation of the museum. ‘Further tests which have not yet been completed only confirm this’ (Source).

And if that isn’t plain enough:

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s top culture aide, Bernd Neumann, said Tuesday through a spokesman that a loan was now “absolutely out of the question on conservation grounds alone” (Source).

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

Photograph “Berlin 053” by RinzeWind is used in accordance with this Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. 

The short version:  Egypt offered no new evidence, but Germany was kind enough to offer some old evidence that seems to favor Egypt, who now feels justified in officially demanding the return of the bust of Nefertiti.

For the long version…

On Sunday, December 20, 2009, Dr. Zahi Hawass met with Dr. Friederike Seyfried, Director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, to discuss the evidence related to the removal of the bust of Nefertiti from Egypt in the early days of the Twentieth Century.  Egypt maintains that Ludwig Borchardt, the German archaeologist who discovered the bust, used “unethical tactics” to secure her for Germany.  The position of the Germans has always been that the artifact was acquired legally and through proper channels.

The debate hinges on whether or not the bust could be considered a unique artifact, and if so, did Borchardt know and try to conceal this fact to acquire the bust for Germany.  According to the rules under which Borchardt was operating, objects sans pareil (without equal, or unique) became part of the Egyptian national collection and Germany was entitled to half of what remained.   In hindsight, the bust of Nefertiti is clearly a unique artifact, but did Borchardt know this at the time, and did he purposely misrepresent the value of the bust in order to keep it?

Back in August, 2009, Dr. Hawass stated that he was compiling evidence that Borchardt had indeed acted unethically and that he would reveal this evidence when he made a formal request to Berlin to return the bust.  But it would seem that the only evidence offered at the December meeting between Hawass and Seyfried was presented by the Germans. 

In particular, Dr. Seyfried presented the original protocol agreed to by Gustave Lefevre of the Egyptian Antiquities Services, which was under French directorship at the time.  The protocol details how the artifacts discovered by Borchardt were to be divided between Egypt and Germany.  Dr. Seyfried also presented Borchardt’s diary, which seems to be the smoking gun. 

The protocol describes the bust of Nefertiti as simply a “painted plaster bust of a princess.”  But according to a press release issued from Dr. Hawass’ website, Borchardt’s diary indicates that he knew the artifact was actually made of limestone covered with plaster, and the he knew it depicted the famous queen herself.  Says Dr. Hawass:

It seems that there was an agreement between Borchardt and Lefevre that all the plaster pieces (which included an important group of plaster masks of the royal family at Amarna) would go to Berlin, and this appears to have been one way that Borchardt misled Lefevre to ensure that the bust would also go to Berlin.  (Source:  Press Release -Meeting with Berlin Museum Director)

There has been no official response from the Germans as of yet, but judging from previous statements it would seem that they feel the evidence presented can be interpreted in more than one way.  In a statement made on December 18, 2009, wherein German officials denied that the Nefertiti Summit was intended to negotiate the terms of their surrender of the bust, it was pointed out that the artifact was photographed and presented in a way that was anything but deceptive.  “The cases stood open for appraisal,” the statement concludes.   ”There can be no talk of deception” (Source:  Haaretz:  “Egypt to demand Germany return bust of Queen Nefertiti”).

But where does the bust’s safety factor into the equation?  Germany has contended for years that regardless of how the bust came to Berlin, it is too fragile now to risk transportation.  Without having the artifact appraised for just that purpose it is impossible to know if this is a genuine consideration or an attempt to keep her in Berlin. 

And who will do the appraisal?  Egypt has a standing demand for the return of artifacts from the British (the Rosetta Stone) and the U.S. (the bust of Ankhaf and the mask of Ka Nefer Nefer), just to name a few.  If experts from any country currently in possession of a disputed artifact decide against the bust of Nefertiti being moved, will that invite a cry of bias from Egypt?

It does seem from Borchardt’s own journal that he knew he was spiriting something away from Egypt that Germany probably had no right to.  But if the bust of Nefertiti is unfit for transport then a shift from talks of repatriation to talks of reparation may be the only solution to this century-old custody battle.

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved.

In a previous article that appeared on France 24, Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, stated that the director of the Egyptian antiquities department would be coming to Cairo on December 8, 2009, to present his evidence that the famous bust of Nefertiti had been removed from Egypt via “proper channels” (Source).

The iconic statue was brought to Germany in the early days of the Twentieth Century by archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt.  But since 1930 Egypt has insisted the acquisition violated the rules in place at the time, which required that singularly unique artifacts were to remain in Egypt.  Hawass insists that Egypt is in possession of evidence that Borchardt knowingly and illegally removed the bust by deception. 

According to The Peninsula, the director of the Egyptian Papyrus Collection will represent Berlin’s Neues Museum at the December 20 summit.  Dr. Hawass will speak for Egypt.  “The only thing we are going to discuss is whether the director has any legal papers to show that the bust of Nefertiti left Egypt legally,” Hawass said. “All evidence that I collected till now shows the bust of Nefertiti left Egypt illegally” [story no longer online].

The Bust of Nefertiti—still stirring hearts after all these years (Photo by RinzeWind)

The bust of Nefertiti was moved from the Altes Museum to the newly-restored Neues Museum on September 4, 2009, and has been on public display since October 17.  Dietrich Wildung, director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, had originally dug in his heels regarding the issue of repatriation, but Hawass’ recent success with forcing the Louvre to return five sections of a wall removed from the tomb of Tetaki (TT15) seems to have everyone in the mood to discuss their options again.

Ultimately the entire argument may prove to be moot.  Wildung claims that the artifact is too delicate to risk moving to Cairo, and regardless of who may have legal claims to it, the statue’s safety must be the primary concern.  It would seem that the logical first step would be to have a neutral third party of experts evaluate the condition of Nefertiti and determine whether or not she is safe to travel.  But having a decision before Hawass is allowed to present his evidence might rob Egypt of an opportunity to strike a moral victory, if not actually bring the queen home.

See also:

• The Nefertiti Summit: Will the Evidence Finally be Revealed?
• Nefertiti, the Life and Death of King Tut, and KV64: The October Checklist
• The Year of Nefertiti: Will Zahi Hawass’ Final Year at the SCA be a Last Dance with a Queen?

Copyright by Keith Payne, 2009.  All rights reserved. 

Photographs “la belle est venue” by Audinou and “Berlin 053” by RinzeWind are used in accordance with this Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.