“The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids” by Mark Lehner and Pierre Tallet

Nearly a decade ago, archaeologists at Wadi al-Jarf on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast found a cache of papyrus fragments dating from the reign of the 4th Dynasty King Khufu (Cheops), he of the Great Pyramid at Giza, dating from 2633-2605 BCE. These fragments appear to be the “oldest written documents” ever found (document meaning material approximating paper as opposed to some other material); more interesting perhaps is that they are from logbooks—tasks, travel, supplies, rations—of an official called Inspector Merer, who ran a work gang who also transported stone blocks destined for the Great Pyramid.

The main narrative in these papyri spell out in some detail, as one chapter goes, a year in the life of Merer and his men. They spend part of the year ferrying stone on the Nile, before moving to the port, where the papyri (which traveled with the group) were, for some reason, left behind. The papyri themselves are evidence of the state of Egyptian bureaucracy (standardized and omnipresent) as well as a direct contact to relatively humble members of Egyptian society. These are not inscriptions of kings or princes or religious invocations, but working documents written by real people in real time about real-life activities.

 

The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids , Mark Lehner, Pierre Tallet (Thames & Hudson , January 2011)
The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids, Mark Lehner, Pierre Tallet (Thames & Hudson , January 2011)

Before one can discuss the book’s virtues, one needs to point out a couple of drawbacks, from which, to a large extent, the book’s strengths in fact stem. The most glaring (although perhaps also the most irrelevant) is the book’s title. “The Red Sea Scrolls” is, of course, meant to evoke (and even rhymes with) the more famous and extensive “Dead Sea Scrolls” from Qumran. This is something of a bait-and-switch because only a relatively small part of the book deals directly with the scrolls and their contents. Nor is the subtitle “How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids” terribly accurate either: instead, these discoveries provide a catalyst and organizing principle for a deep dive into what is now known about the Pyramids and their construction.

The problem is the papyri do not, and perhaps could not, carry an entire book. They are themselves, in the broader sweep of early Egyptian history, relatively minor items. What they provide is (admittedly important) information about how work 4700 years ago was organized, interesting and even touching details about the people (some of whom are named) and their daily lives.

Ankh-Haf (Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
Ankh-Haf (Boston Museum of Fine Arts)

The papyri, for example, link Merer’s group to Ankh-Haf, Director of the Port of Khufu, a senior official known from other references and of whom there is a striking bust. The bulk of the book, however, provides context: the history, nature and construction of the pyramids, Egyptian trade, the archaeology of the Red Sea Coast, with chapters ranging from “The Quest for Copper” to “How the Pyramids Created a Unified State”.

 

redsea4The second drawback is that the book goes pretty deep into the weeds (or maybe rushes) of Egyptology. What it discusses, it does in considerable technical detail, more perhaps than the non-expert might wish to have. This is significantly mitigated by the great many marvelous photos and illustrations, all well-captioned, that one might expect from Thames & Hudson. And the prose, while for the most part quite academic in content, is clear and readable.

And some of these details are extremely interesting. Egypt’s first Dynasties were at the tail end of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age: they had metal, but just copper—they had not learned to make the alloy bronze. The Copper Age can be given short shrift in histories as being transitional between the Neolithic Age of stone tools and the advent of bronze. But authors Pierre Tallet and Mark Lerner discuss how copper—which is very soft—was used. Copper chisels could only be a finger-width wide—tracks from which are still seen—and would rapidly wear down. Copper “saws” were toothless blades where the cutting was actually done by quartz sand. It is estimated that on average the copper would wear down 1cm for every 3cm of cutting. The raw material came from the Sinai, which explains the presence of the work group on the opposite coast.

The picture Tallet and Lerner draw is of a sophisticated and organized society with bureaucratic procedures to ensure regularity and productivity, so much so that a single work group could work part of the year on the Nile and other part at the Red Sea, keeping it all in a single set of records. Of course, much of this effort went toward what seems to today as the rather pointless exercise of building massive pyramids, but the authors propose that it was no much Egypt that built the pyramids but the pyramids that built Egypt:

 

Aerial view of King Khufu’s Great (Pyramid Frontispiece)
Aerial view of King Khufu’s Great
Pyramid (Frontispiece)
Early Old Kingdom rulers who constructed pyramids in the process colonized their own country, primarily Middle Egypt and the Delta, to feed the royal project. They mobilized people to travel and come together at the work site, socialized conscripts from the provinces, set up institutions, educated young scribes and established a bureaucracy to keep track of tasks in the way Merer did.

 

The Red Sea Scrolls isn’t the easiest of reads, and it helps to know one’s way around Ancient Egypt a bit before diving in, but the effort is rewarding. It covers everything from shipping to corbelled vaults in the Pyramids, as well as providing a clear update as to what Egyptian archaeology consists of today.


Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.