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LABOR IN THE
ANCIENT WORLD
EDITED BY
PIOTR STEINKE LLER AND MICHAE L HUDSON
2
INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS CONFERENCE
ON ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ECONOMIES
VOLUME 5
STEINKELLER
HUD SON
LABOR IN TH E ANCIE NT WORLD
Other books in this series:
PRIVATIZATION IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
AND CLASSICAL WORLD
Edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine. Archaeologists, economists, and
Assyriologists describe the increasingly private control of land, handicraft work shops, and
credit from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity. (1996)
URBANIZATION AND LAND OWNERSHIP
IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine. This volume examines the im pact
of debt, pivate land ownersip, and urbanization on ancient societies as evidenced by
archaeological data, surviving financial records, and other documents. (1999)
DEBT AND ECONOMIC RENEWAL
IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Edited by Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop. This volume places the origins
of interest-bearing debt in historical context by tracing its dynamics from Sumer down
through the Neo-Babylonian epoch. (2002)
CREATING ECONOMIC ORDER
RECORD-KEEPING, STANDARDIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
ACCOUNTING IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Edited by Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch. This voume addresses the extent
to which accounting practices actively shaped economic life from early Uruk (c. 3300BC)
down through the Neo-Babylonian period, as well as Egypt, Crete, and Mycenaean
Greece. (2004)
LABOR IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
The fifth volume in this series sponsored by the International Scholars Conference on
Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE) and the Institute for the Study of Long-
Term Economic Trends (ISLET) offers case studies about the way how labor was pro-
cured, managed, and exploited in the early Meso potamian and Mediterranean World
and points to shared characteristics: the general insignificance of slave labor; the promi-
nence of corvée as the primary way of obtaining labor; the role of large building projects
as a tool of political integration; the use of hired workers as a way of dealing with the
systemic shortage of labor and the practice of compensating the employees of “great
organ iza tions” with the salaries in kind and/or field allotments.
LABOR IN THE
ANCIENT WORLD
VOLUME V
in a series sponsored by the
Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends
and the International Scholars Conference on
Ancient Near Eastern Economies
A Colloquium held at Hirschbach (Saxony), April 2005
EDITED BY
Piotr Steinkeller
Michael Hudson
2
Dresden
COVER ART: A stone relief of the Pre-Sargonic ruler of Lagash named
Ur-Nanshe (ca. 2400 BC = ED IIIa). AO 2344.
The upper register of the relief shows the construction of a temple, with Ur-
Nanshe carrying a corvée basket (tupšikku). In the lower register, a feast culmi-
nating the construction is depicted.
Photo by Philipp Bernard. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum.
Copyright © 2015 by ISLET-Verlag
All rights reserved.
Labor in the ancient world / edited by Piotr Steinkeller and Michael
Hudson. The International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near
Eastern Economics, vol. 5
664 p. 23 x15 cm
ISBN 978-3-9814842-3-6
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Labor in the Early States: An Early Mesopotamian
Perspective
Piotr Steinkeller 1
1. Labor, Social Formation, and the Neolithic Revolution
C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky 37
2. Home and Work in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia:
“Ration Lists” and “Private Houses” at Tell Beydar/Nadaba
Walther Sallaberger and Alexander Pruß 69
3. The Employment of Labor on National Building Projects
in the Ur III Period
Piotr Steinkeller 137
4. Building Larsa: Labor Value, Scale and Scope-of-Economy
in Ancient Mesopotamia
Seth Richardson 237
5. Hired Labor in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
Karen Radner 329
6. Labor in Babylonia in the First Millennium BC
Michael Jursa 345
7. Labor and the Pyramids. The Heit el-Ghurab “Workers
Town” at Giza
Mark Lehner 397
8. Problems of Authority, Compulsion, and Compensation
in Ancient Egyptian Labor Practices
Ogden Goelet 523
9. Labor and Individuals in Late Bronze Age Pylos
Dimitri Nakassis 583
10. The Mycenaean Mobilization of Labor in Agriculture and
Building Projects: Institutions, Individuals, Compensation,
and Status in the Linear B Tablets
Tom Palaima 617
11. How the Organization of Labor Shaped Civilization’s
Takeoff
Michael Hudson 649
7.
Labor and the Pyramids
The Heit el-Ghurab “Workers Town” at Giza
Mark Lehner
University of Chicago and Ancient Egypt Research Associates
1. Introduction
In his appraisal in this volume of authority and compulsory or com pen -
sated labor, Ogden Goelet calls our attention to three decades that have
passed since the publication of Labor in the Ancient Near East,1which
included Eyre’s2surveys of labor in the Old and New Kingdoms. Eyre
began his treatment of Old Kingdom labor by listing all the limita tions
to what we could then know about the topic. Sources were limited to “the
necropolis, the pyramids of the kings and the tombs of their offi cials….”
On the point of dwellings and workshops, Eyre stated: “There are, indeed,
no excavated remains of a permanent workmen’s village from the Old
Kingdom ….”3Citing the Lexikon der Ägyptologie entry for Arbeiter -
siedlungen, he had in mind the New Kingdom segregated, walled
settlements of Deir el-Medineh at Luxor, the Workers’ Village at Amarna,
and the Middle Kingdom settlement at el-Lahun.4Over the three decades
1Powell 1987.
2Eyre 1987a; 1987b.
3Eyre 1987a: 7, 28.
4Helck 1975b: 374–375, who authored the entry, stated that workers towns
developed into the Pyramid Towns attached to pyramid complexes for officials
and priests since the 4th Dynasty as attested by the titles of their leaders in
tombs, a view he expressed earlier (Helck 1957). Eyre also cited the Lexikon
entry for Pyramidenstadt, authored by Stadelmann (1984: 10–14) who did
not believe that workers towns developed into Pyramid Towns, a view he
expressed earlier (Stadelmann 1981a). He places el-Lahun into the latter
following Eyre’s seminal contributions, Ancient Egypt Research Associates
(AERA) salvaged between five and seven hectares of 4th Dynasty settle -
ment at the southeastern base of the Giza Plateau, about 400 meters south
of the Sphinx, a layout that has been called, loosely, “the Workers’ Town”
on the basis of our interpretation of a series of long galleries arranged in
four large blocks as barracks for workers employed on the Giza pyramid
projects.5
The 4th Dynasty pyramids on the high plateau to the northwest stand
as the raison d’être for this settlement. The half dozen truly gigantic pyra -
mids of the early Old Kingdom also stand as challenges to any notion of
the society that built them, in terms of how that society mobilized labor.
As Bernadette Menu expressed it:
La pyramide transparaître donc en filigrane derrière cette étude…
Toutes les lignes de la pyramide convergent vers le sommet, et c’est
par l’haut qui j’ai choisi d’aborder le problème du travail dans l’Ancien
Empire égyptien.6
I begin, in a sense, at the bottom, at the very lowest southeastern rim of
the Pyramid Plateau where the outcrop of the Middle Eocene Moqqatam
slopes into a broad wadi and low desert. Here we have recovered part of
a footprint left by the Old Kingdom state, where it stepped down for two,
possibly three generations, and then walked on. We call the site HeG, for
Heit el-Ghurab, Arabic for “Wall of the Crow,” after the most distin -
guish ing feature, a 200-meter long stone wall, 10 m wide and 10 m tall,
which forms the northwest boundary of a mudbrick and fieldstone
settlement contemporary with the building of the pyramids of Khafre and
Menkaure (fig. 1). An earlier phase possibly dates back to Khufu. So far,
except for clay sealings, the site is textually mute, yet the patterns of walls,
ways, and structures must have something to tell us about how authorities
organized and mobilized labor and material resources. We must infer
messages from architecture, material culture and spatial analysis against
what we know about labor from texts. Many of the textual sources, which
Goelet reprises in this volume, do indeed derive from the necropolis.
398 M. LEHNER
category. If Helck’s view that pyramid towns developed out of a workers
settlement is correct, we could place the town(s) attached to the Khentkawes
monument at Giza and the adjacent settlement in the Menkaure Valley
Temple as an exception to Eyre’s statement. Stadelmann takes both these
agglomerations together as the Pyramid Town of Menkaure. See Bußmann
2004; Lehner forthcoming.
5Lehner 2002: 69–70, and so following suit, Kemp 2006: 188–191, “work camp.”
6Menu 1998: 209.
Michael Hudson cited the difficulty of focusing on labor organization
per se, when “one can hardly define the mode of labor and its ‘hiring’ or
‘employment’ without describing the economy’s overall fiscal and political
structure”7–– that is, the nature of a society as a whole. The Great Pyramid
of Giza challenges any vision of Old Kingdom society, and how
authorities at the top mobilized labor to build it. In relation to the laborers
of the lowest status, “connections between the top and the bottom [have]
remained obscure.”8
However, over recent years a narrative has emerged, especially from
secondary reports in the popular press9, that our findings at the HeG site
support a positive view of pyramid projects: workers who came in home-
based fellowships were well treated, well-fed, perhaps in the contexts of
feasts. The pyramid projects provided, intentionally or not,10 an inte -
grating force for the greater nation, creating a sense of unity and national
identity. All worked with an enthusiasm and esprit de corps during a ritual
suspension of taxes and a leveling of social status, not unlike Victor Turner’s
concept of communitas in his classic study, The Ritual Process, Structure
and Anti-Structure.11 This vision stands in contrast to a tra di tional,
“negative view of the pyramid projects,”12 where tyrannical au thority
coerced and compelled people to work against their will for royal or state
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 399
7Hudson 2005: 1.
8Toth 1999: 4.
9For example, Morell 2001: 82–83 quoting Zahi Hawass; Shaw 2003: 99; Stille
2005: 64.
10 Baines 2009: 136.
11 Turner (1969) quoted Martin Buber (1961: 51): “Community is the being no
longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one an -
other of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves toward
one goal, yet everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flow -
ing of I to Thou.” Specifically, this vision would be in accord with Turner’s
“normative communitas, where under the influence of time, the need to
mobilize and organize resources, and the necessity for social control among
the members of the group in pursuance of these goals, the existential com -
munitas is organized into a perduring social system …” (Turner 1969: 132).
Years of ritual studies have followed since Turner’s book, as seen by perusing
the journal, Ritual Studies. Cf. Moreno-García 1998b: 72, n. 7, invoking of
Middle Kingdom texts where leaders claim to have judged both the pat (pa -
tricians, the elite) and the rxjjt (plebeians) and to have brought together the
rxjjt to build monuments of the king, though here the leaders maintain a
superior, supervisory role.
12 Steinkeller, this volume, n. 59.
projects –– unfree labor, bondage (with partial communal auton omy), and
at worst slavery, without the right to move at will.13
This article surveys the so-called “Workers Town” at the Heit el-
Ghurab in relation to information from Old Kingdom texts, art, and
archaeology with the goal of learning more about the status of its
inhabitants in the organization of labor for the building of the
anomalously gigantic pyramids of the 4th Dynasty. In the first part I ask:
Do indicators of an abundance of meat, the presence of hunted game,
and Levantine “luxury” imports suggest good treatment of common
workers, or does this material hint that the occupants enjoyed a higher
status than common workers and that the HeG hosted functions other
than a barracks for workers? In the second part I pivot to a related
question: If, for building the Giza pyramids, central authorities required
extremely large numbers of people of a lesser status than the HeG
occupants, did they use foreign captives or native corvée?
Section 2 introduces the HeG settlement layout with its central fea -
ture, the Gallery Complex and the hypothesis that the galleries served as
barracks. I review salient categories of material culture: animal bone and
bakeries (bread and meat), hunted fauna, Levantine imports, and high-
ranking scribal titles. Section 3 relates evidence from Old Kingdom art,
texts, and archaeology to the findings from the HeG. The Gallery
Complex begs us to guess at its message about the labor organization that
built the colossal pyramids on the high plateau. Its long modular units
suggest a match to units of labor organization known from builders’
graffiti and other texts: crews or gangs (aprw), phyles (zAw) and divisions.
Evidence for an abundance of meat and Levantine imports indicate either
the generosity of central authorities in provisioning common workers, or
that the inhabitants of the Gallery Complex enjoyed a higher status than
we might expect for such workers. Possibilities for the occupants of the
Gallery Complex include elite paramilitary, royal guard troops or
“retainers” (šmsw), an early (4th Dynasty) formation of what became in
the 5th Dynasty a special class of people attached to pyramids and pyramid
towns, the 2ntjw-S. In section 4 I suggest that Levan tine imports and
large quantities of granite from Aswan reinforce contextual evidence that
the HeG served as part of a major Nile port, complicating the possibilities
for the function of this site –– as an entrepôt it could have served for storage
–– and for the status of its occupants, who could have included
shipwrights, carpenters, and stevedores. In Part 2, section 5, I review the
13 Kolchin 1987.
400 M. LEHNER
conclusion that we have no evidence for a regular, out-of-district, national
corvée and the alternative of captive foreigners as a labor source for
pyramid building. In section 6 I relate the question of corvée to the idea
that the 4th Dynasty was an exceptional time that saw pervasive
intervention by central authorities, who may have sustained internal levies
for longer periods than the normally episodic conscriptions for
expeditions. Section 7, which concludes the survey, outlines a range of
possibilities for the occupants and functions of the HeG and the Gallery
Complex, defeating a simple dichotomy of elite and non-elite, or high
and low status.
PART I
2. The Heit el-Ghurab Site (fig. 1)
Located at the low southeastern base of the Giza Plateau, 400 m south of
the Great Sphinx, the Heit el-Ghurab site was one district of a larger series
of settlement patches strung out north-south at the interface with the
floodplain along the eastern base of the plateau. We know this from drill
cores and trenches carried out in the late 1980s as part of the Greater
Cairo Waste Water Project.14 These settlement concentrations probably
flanked the western side of a Nile channel that ran about 200 to 300 m
east of the site at Giza.15 And, like the sites of Tell El-Daba, Memphis,
and Amarna more than a millennium later, the HeG must have served as
part of a major inland port at the center of the Egyptian state.16
2.1. HeG Site Layout
Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) began to excavate the HeG in
1988. Between 1999 and 2004 AERA carried out major operations to
clear the site of an overburden of modern dumps and ancient sand. AERA
teams mapped walls and other features that show in the underlying,
undulating, very compact surface of the settlement ruins. This exposure
amounts to a horizontal section through the settlement after people had
abandoned and partially dismantled it at the end of the 4th Dynasty, and
after remaining structures collapsed.17 We were thus able to map the walls
14 El-Sanusi and Jones 1997.
15 Lutely and Bunbury 2008; Jeffreys 2008; Bunbury, Lutley, and Graham 2009;
Lehner 2009.
16 Lehner 2013.
17 Lehner 2002: 30; 2007: 18–21.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 401
402 M. LEHNER
Fig. 1: Heit el-Ghurab
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 403
Fig. 2: Heit el-Ghurab, Detail: from the Wall of the Crow to RAB Street
and spatial structure over most of seven hectares. We could choose where
to excavate through the “mud mass” down to 4th Dynasty living floors
and other cultural deposits.
It is important to keep in mind that we have excavated and sampled
only a small percentage of our exposure of the HeG settlement, perhaps
10% of the total area covered by the walls as mapped so far. For 25 years
(1988–2012), as AERA team members carried out these targeted, strati -
graphic excavations in the HeG, they systematically retrieved all classes
of material culture –– including animal bone, carbonized plant remains,
chipped stone (lithics) and clay sealings.18
In the central feature, the Gallery Complex, state planners assembled
large modular units, “galleries,” with a width to length ratio of 7:1, into
four great blocks separated by three, broad (5.20 m = 10 royal cubits) east-
west cross streets (fig. 1). At the southern side of the western entrances of
these throughways, gatehouses must have sheltered people who monitored
and controlled access to the streets.19 A long open colonnade at the front
of each gallery could have accommodated 40 or 50 people for sleeping.
As noted, we have hypothesized the galleries served as barracks for
members of teams who slept in the long, empty colonnades. Leaders or
over seers of these teams could have stayed in small house-like room
complexes in the southern ends of Gallery Sets II and III. Abundant ash
and scorched walls in the rear chambers of these domiciles furnish evi -
dence of cooking, roasting or baking.20
Structures for food production and storage surround the Gallery
Complex on the east, west and south. These include the replication of
modular, open-air bakeries with a production capacity far beyond the
needs of an individual household.21 At the southeastern corner of the
settlement a large enclosure, which we called for convenience, the “Royal
Administration Building” (RAB), features a sunken court of large, round
silos, 2.5 m diameter, probably for grain storage.22 The RAB extends far -
18 Lehner 2002: 73, n. 64; Lehner and Tavares 2010: 207–213. See for summary
reports for every field season from 1988–89 until 2012 the Oriental Institute
Annual Report, available online. AERA has published brief, more popular
summaries in the AERA newsletter, AERAGRAM, and preliminary reports from
seasons 2004–2009 in the Giza Occasional Papers 1–5, also available online.
GOP 6 on seasons 2011 and 2012 is forthcoming. Lehner (2002), Lehner and
Tavares (2010), and Tavares (2011) provide overviews of the site.
19 Lehner 2002; Abd al-Aziz 2007a; 2007b; Kemp 2006:188–190; Tavares 2011.
20 Lehner 2002: 68–72.
21 Lehner 1992: 3–9; 1993: 60–67; Redding and Malleson forthcoming.
22 Lehner and Sadarangani 2007.
404 M. LEHNER
ther south under the modern Abu Hol Sports Club and soccer field. We
have found most of the bakeries in the industrial yard immediately north
of RAB, the area we call EOG (East of the Galleries). We hypo the size that
the RAB and EOG functioned together as storage and production unit.
On the far eastern limit of our exposure, we have recovered part of
what we call the Eastern Town, a series of small chambers and courts that
reflect more the self-organization or “organic” order that emerges from
many individual choices characteristic of villages.23 Here we find grinding
stones that people used to produce flour for the bakeries that surround
the Gallery Complex. The grain must have come from the central storage
in the RAB. In spite of the proximity of these state storage facilities and
bakeries, we find in the Eastern Town individual hearths and small
household storage silos. This part of the settlement continues farther east
under the modern road and urban sprawl of Kafr Gebel, beyond the limits
of our salvage work.
In their assessments of the settlement as a work camp, Kemp and
Bußmann24 are missing the Western Town, a maze of walls between the
RAB and the escarpment in which we can recognize thicker walls defining
large “elite” houses.25 Excavation of only half of “Pottery Mound,” a large
dump between two of the large houses, yielded thousands of sealings,
some of which bore some of the highest-ranking scribal titles of the time
of Khafre and Menkaure.26 The dump fills and spills over a rectangular
space between House Unit 1, at 400 m2the largest residence so far identi -
fied on the HeG site, and another large compound, House Unit 2, to the
south. We infer that these houses, in particular House Unit 1 to the
north,27 probably served as administrative centers and scribal workshops.
The sealings were mixed with quantities of beer jars, an abundance of
cattle bone, and some leopard teeth, indicative of hunting, and perhaps
of priestly leopard skin garments.28 This material culture, in combination,
furnishes as strong an indicator of elite status as we can expect in
archaeology.
The Western Town and the Gallery Complex display orthogonal
planning, a signature of top-down design. In spite of the evident elite
status of the Western Town houses, they lie only 50 m north of a likely
23 Tavares 2011.
24 Kemp 2006: 189, fig. 66; Bußmann 2004: 29–30, fig. 6.
25 Lehner 2007:45–46.
26 Nolan and Pavlick 2008; Nolan 2010.
27 Kawae 2009; Sadarangani and Kawae 2011.
28 Redding 2007; 2011a.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 405
corral and possible abattoir on the prominence of Standing Wall Island (area
SWI), so-called because some of the fieldstone walls remained standing a
meter or more in height. Here in 2004 we found two enclosures opening
south into a larger enclosure that we cleared in 2011 in the depression we
call Lagoon 2.29 Redding interpreted the larger enclosure as a holding pen
or corral.30 Another deep depression, “Lagoon 1,” filled with sand to
depths below the water table, separates area SWI from the Western Town.
We hypothesize the Lagoon 1 depression remains from an ancient feature
of the topography, a possible put-in bay or southern service harbor for
delivering protein (cattle) up into the SWI corral on the south, and
carbohydrates (grain) up into the RAB compound on the north.
2.2. HeG Material Culture: Signs of Function and Status
Evidence of labor organization on the HeG site comes not in its
architecture alone. We must take into account the material culture. When
we excavate through the seal of decayed mud brick and other compact
post-occupation deposits to the living floors, we systemically and inten -
sively retrieve ancient objects, plant remains, animal bone, ceramics,
sealings, lithics (chipped and ground stone), and charcoal. We count and
weigh stone exotic to Giza, such as granite and alabaster. We take samples
of archaeological deposits for the flotation process to recover charred plant
remains. We dry sieve the sediments on site and wet sieve the finer
material in the store to recover the smallest animal bone, chipped stone,
pottery, and seal impressions. This material culture provides a great deal
of additional evidence about life in the distinct parts of the HeG settle -
ment.
Some caveats are in order. As with all distribution plots of material
culture classes from AERA/GPMP excavations of the HeG, our plots of
different classes of material across the site derive from a good but far from
random sample of our exposure of this Old Kingdom settlement.
According to my rough calculation, we have excavated less than 10% of
this exposure. Most of the HeG map derives from our mapping of walls
showing in the top of the ruin surface after removing an overburden of
sand and modern material. Forces of erosion in effect cut an undulating
horizontal section through the settlement ruins before the substantial
accumulation of wind blown sand covered the ruins by the New Kingdom
if not already by the late Old Kingdom. Also, ours is not a stratified
29 GOP 1: 39–44.
30 Redding 2011b; AERA 2011: 16–19.
406 M. LEHNER
random sample, that is, a random sample within different zones, like the
Galley Complex. We have sampled the different zones on criteria other
than obtaining a random sample. We must also take into account the
depth, intensity and areal coverage of the excavation. For example, in the
Eastern Town we have excavated and sampled only the “Eastern Town
House”31 whereas in the so-called Royal Administration Building we have
spent several seasons of sustained excavation and retrieved floor deposits
of an earlier phase.32
Nonetheless, after twenty-five years of excavation, certain patterns
have persisted in our analysis of an increasing abundance of material
culture.33 At the same time we gained a finer focus of the distribution of
different classes of material culture across distinct parts of the site. This
sharper image prompts us to a reinterpret the site as more than, and more
nuanced than, simply a workers settlement.
2.2.1. Abundance of Meat, Loaves, and Fishes
By 2002, after eleven seasons of excavation, we were impressed by the
abundance of all classes of material culture, most notably bread molds,
around the meta-household, industrial bakeries flanking the Galley
Complex.34 We have also been impressed by the quantities of animal
bone, especially cattle, sheep and goat. And yet by 2002 we had identified
less than twenty house-like room complexes inside and flanking the
Gallery Complex, not counting the maze-like rooms of the Eastern Town,
which we had only found that season. We had begun to wonder: “Where
were all the consumers?” This question led us to excavate one complete
unit, Gallery III.4.35 To that point we had already seen repeating gallery
features showing at the top of the settlement ruins, or in our 5×5 m
excavation squares located variously throughout the Gallery Complex. In
the extended front colonnade of Gallery III.4 we found low sloping
platforms that resemble bed or sleeping platforms in other houses of the
Old Kingdom and later periods. These structures solidified our barracks
hypothesis. Although the G III.4 colonnade featured only five low plat -
31 Lehner and Tavares 2010: 210; Aeragram 7.2: 6–7; Aeragram 8.1: 8–9;
32 Sadarangani 2009; Lehner and Sadarangani 2007.
33 For example, patterns noted already in Lehner 2003 and reiterated by Lehner
and Tavares 2010: 208–214.
34 Lehner 1992: 9; 1993: 56–67; 2002: 57–58; 2007: 24–28; Aeragram 1.1: 6–
7. For more bakeries excavated after 2002, GOP 3: 44–49.
35 Abd El-Aziz 2007.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 407
forms, we hypothesized that this elongated space could comfortably sleep
forty people, twenty stretched out to either side.36 We estimated that the
four blocks of galleries could accommodate around 1,600 people, more if
the entire complex, standing some 7 m off the ground and stretching
150 m north to south, featured a loft-like second floor and a flat roof.37
It was at this point that the notion of well fed workers emerged, in
large part from the fact that we were finding large quantities of cattle,
sheep and goat bone, indicative of meat consumption on a large scale. We
coupled this finding with the barracks hypothesis, leading us to envision
well-fed workers rotating through the Gallery Complex during stints of
obligatory service in the royal work projects to raise the pyramids on the
high Giza Plateau to the northwest of the HeG.
All the fauna, flora and lithics suggested that authorities provisioned
the people occupying the site. Flint implements (lithics) and grain, for
example, appeared to have passed the most initial processing stages before
coming into the site. Faunal analyst Richard Redding was finding enough
cattle, sheep, and goat bone to feed large numbers of people. With some
assumptions from our limited excavations, around 30 sheep and goat and
11 cattle per day could have provided meat for thousands of people.38 I
sug gested we should look at this meat consumption and labor mobi -
lization at Giza in terms of feasting and the concept of a work feast.39
Also, we had the rather neat inversion of a pattern established at the
western Delta site of Kom el-Hisn a center for rearing pen-fed cattle
attested by texts and evidenced by archaeobotanical and faunal evidence,
possibly the locale known as the “Estate of the Cattle” as early as the First
Dynasty.40 In spite of this evidence, the excavators found low numbers
of cattle bone and high numbers of pig bone, the inference being that
people of Kom El-Hisn, raised cattle for export, while consuming pig for
their own protein. Pig is more of a village animal that can be fed waste
36 Lehner 2002: 69, fig. 20.
37 Nolan and Heindl 2011 for reconstruction of loft-like second floors and
contiguous vaulted roofs for the galleries. If builders filled the spring of the
vaults, they could have made the roof into a continuous flat terrace.
38 Lehner 2002: 68, n. 47, 72–73, based on Redding e-mail of March 11, 2003;
assuming 50 kg of meat per sheep, 100 kg of meat per dressed bovine, a meat
ration of 300 gm per day, and taking into account protein and calories from
fish and other foods.
39 Lehner 2002, 72, n. 61, citing Dietler and Hayden 2001, in which see Dietler
and Herbich 2001.
40 Moens and Wetterstrom 1988.
408 M. LEHNER
organics, produces numerous offspring, and yields high-calorie meat. Yet,
with short legs, pigs cannot migrate long distances.41 In 1992 Redding
predicted that at “capital zone” centers like Giza he would find a “mirror,”
opposite ratio,42 that is, high ratios of cattle to pig. Redding found such
a ratio at the HeG site, a pattern sustained after 25 years of exca va tion.43
As of 2010, the ratio of cattle to pig for the entire site stands at 6:1, and
for certain areas 16:1. The pattern stands as a material culture correlate
to the provisioning of the core by the provinces, such as we infer from
texts and scenes of offering bearers bringing produce from villages and
estates.44
In 2004 we cleared and mapped more of Eastern Town, the more
normal settlement flanking the Gallery Complex and RAB enclosure on
the east. That year we found the extensive Western Town of large house
units surrounded by a maze of small chambers, flanking the RAB en -
closure on the west. Unfortunately, a modern soccer field, covers most of
the RAB. We salvaged and mapped what we could of the Western Town
between the soccer field and the high desert escarpment. Aided by our
Geographic Information System (GIS) and material culture data bases,
with some classes numbering in the hundreds of thousands of iterations,
we were beginning to see patterns of distribution.
Striking patterns for the overall site persist in faunal samples excavated
up to 2005: cattle (Bos taurus) are the second most abundant mammal
after sheep and goat. At the same time, bovines provide eight to ten times
the amount of meat of sheep and goats. The cattle, sheep, and goat con -
sumed on the site were predominately young (under two years old) and
male,45 suggesting that authorities were harvesting young male animals
from herds in order to provision the site with high-quality meat.46
But areas began to differentiate in terms of the fauna.47 In the Gallery
Complex, mostly represented by Gallery III.4, we found fewer cattle bones
than in the overall site, while numbers of sheep and goat bone were
greater. Further, the ratio of goat to sheep was higher here than anywhere
41 Redding 1991; Zeder 1991: 30–32. Being of local village life may be why
attestations of pig are rare in Near Eastern economic texts.
42 Redding 1992.
43 Redding forthcoming; Lehner 2010: 91.
44 Lehner 2010: 91.
45 Male to female ratios are cattle 6:1, and sheep and goat 11:1.
46 Redding 2007a: 266–269; 2010c: 68–69; 2011c: 106; forthcoming.
47 Lehner and Tavares 2010: 208–214; Redding 2010c for summaries of material
culture distribution patterns.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 409
else on the site, and the ratio of meat bearing to non-meat bearing bone
suggested the occupants slaughtered and butchered the animals nearby,48
perhaps in the broad cross streets such as “Main Street,” which featured a
channel running down the middle.49 Goat is lower in body fat and calories
than sheep, and therefore less desirable. Fish served as an important sup -
plement. In the Gallery complex catfish bones, a “cheaper” catch because
people could trap catfish in catchment basins as the flood water receded,
were more numerous than Nile perch, a more “expensive” fish as it was
mostly caught one at a time by line and hook in the deep Nile channel.50
Redding writes of a “cattle perch” complex where high numbers of cattle
and perch are found together,51 such as in North Street Gate House, one
of the residential units at the entrance of the street between Gallery Sets
Iand II. These gatehouses served as interfaces between the gallery occu -
pants and the evidently more elite occupants of the Western Town.52 The
Eastern Town, a more “normal” village-like component of the site,53
yielded pig bone at numbers higher than site average. Pig bone was also
more frequent in later deposits from the RAB enclosure, where people
from the Eastern Town may have worked to grind flour from grain stored
in the RAB silo granaries. The ratio for sheep-goat to pig in the Eastern
Town is almost identical to that at Kom el-Hisn, the Old Kingdom village
and “Estate of Cattle” in the western Delta, while contrasting markedly
with the Gallery Complex where the ratio of sheep and goat to pig is 41.6
to 1.54 At the other extreme of the HeG faunal spectrum, “Pottery
Mound,” a dump between two of the large House Units (1 and 2) in the
Western Town, yielded extraordinary large amounts of cattle bone. For
the most part, the cattle bone derived from animals under 8–10 months
at the time of slaughter, with ratios of cattle to sheep-goat 13.6 to 1.55
Zeder stated “animal economy has left witnesses in two major components
of the archaeological record in the Near East –– texts and bones…”56 Texts
and bones came together in Pottery Mound. The texts, from some 1,190
sealings, bore witness not to meat provisions, but to some of the highest
48 Redding 2007b for Gallery III.4.
49 Abd el-Aziz 2007a; Redding 2007a states that the fauna from the street, while
more fragmented, was similar to that from the galleries.
50 Redding 2007b; Aeragram 6.2: 1, 4–5.
51 Redding 2010c: 73.
52 Lehner and Tavares 2010: 194–202.
53 Tavares 2011: 271.
54 Redding, forthcoming.
55 Redding 2007c; Redding 2010c: 73.
56 Zeder 1991: 24.
410 M. LEHNER
ranking scribal titles of the time (Menkaure to Khafre), such as Scribe of
the Royal Documents and Scribe of the Royal Works.57 Much of this trash
emanated from House Unit 1 to the north, which must have housed
administrators of high status, as well as a scribal workshop.58 Redding
concluded: “The residents (of the Western Town) had preferential access
to cattle at levels not found on any other area of the site … they also had
preferential access to wild fauna.”59
2.2.2. HeG and the Hunt: Wild Taxa
As team specialists in different materials continued to explore the HeG
site through painstaking, often microscopic, analysis in the AERA field
lab, we began to see materials that did not quite fit a barracks of common
pyramid workers. We were forced to consider whether the material sug -
gests very good treatment of common people, a communitas leveling of
status for pyramid building, or simply a higher status for the occupants
of these barracks-like structures.
Wild fauna is relatively rare on the HeG site. However the distribu -
tion and kinds of animals represented are noteworthy. Redding identified
only 6 iterations of wild fauna from the Gallery Complex and the adjacent
eastern industrial zone, and 44 from the Eastern Town, RAB compound,
and Western Town combined. More than half (24) of the total of wild
fauna came from the Western Town,60 where we have found the largest
houses on the HeG site along with high numbers of cattle bone, and
sealings bearing high ranking scribal titles. The largest sample of wild
fauna came from the Pottery Mound dump between two of the large
compounds, from which Redding identified 7 Dorcas gazelle bones.61 He
noted:
This was a hunted resource and its occurrence in the Pottery Mound,
another SFW [Soccer Field West = the Western Town] sample, rein -
forces the pattern noted to date of a concentration of hunted resources
in the [RAB] and SFW areas. People in these areas had preferential
access to hunted resources; either only they had the time to hunt or
they received the hunted resources from specialized hunters.62
57 Nolan 2010; Nolan and Pavlick 2008.
58 Redding 2007b; 2011a.
59 Redding 2010: 74; 2007a; 2011b; Kawae 2009; Sadarangani and Kawae 2011.
60 Redding 2010c, 70, fig. 5.2.
61 Redding 2010a: 233; 2010b: 239.
62 Redding 2010a: 233, emphasis mine.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 411
We might consider certain birds in the category of hunted or captured
wild fauna, or semi-wild fauna brought into captivity in aviaries and
poultry yards. Redding finds for the Western Town relatively high num -
bers of pintai (Anas acuta), Teal (Anas crecca), and Wigeon (Anas Pene -
lope), calling the latter two, “semi-domesticates.”63
Inferences about status and diet based on the distribution of animal
bone do face serious challenges.64 Redding infers that wild taxa were
hunted, either by or for elites. At the HeG he is able to relate this inference
to the other indicators of high status in the Western Town.65 Redding
reported two leopard teeth from all Pottery Mound strata.66 From
continued excavations in House Unit 1 in the Western Town, Redding
and Rasha Nasr Abd el-Mageed found two more leopard teeth during the
2011 field season. Overall the faunal remains from House Unit 1 are very
similar to Pottery Mound, lending support to the inference that this
dumped material derived from the high status occupants of House 1.67
Leopard teeth could serve as another signal of high status, perhaps deriving
from a leopard tooth garment worn by Sem-Priests. A further reference
to ritual may come in a significant preponderance of hind to forelimb
elements from the cattle bone, which Redding relates to the common
scenes of slaughter in elite tombs where the cattle are trussed with the
hind limbs tied as butchers take off the forelimb for a traditional offering.
The discovery in 2012 of a complete hippopotamus hip in the back
of Gallery III.3, the second gallery that we excavated completely, along
with the pit of a tree fruit, possibly olive, drew our attention to the
potential significance of wild fauna and Levantine imports for
understanding the role and status of gallery occupants, even if these two
particular pieces are singular or rare finds.68
AERA archaeologists retrieved the hippo hip along with limestone
fragments, mudbricks, and silt filling a niche in the eastern wall of the
eastern of two back chambers of Gallery III.3. Included in this fill was a
complete, upturned example of one of the large bell-shaped bread-baking
63 Redding 2010c 68, Table 5.1, “It is unclear when these birds were domes -
ticated in Egypt, but it is at least likely that the pintail may have been
domesticated as early as the Old Kingdom as pintails are readily domesticated”
(citing Houlihan and Goodman 1986).
64 deFrance 2010.
65 Redding 2007c; 2010c: 69.
66 Redding 2007b: 7.
67 AERA 2011: 26; Redding 2011a.
68 AERA 2012: 22–23.
412 M. LEHNER
pots so ubiquitous across the HeG site, accounting for 70% of industrial
zones east of the Gallery Complex, where we have identified multiple
bakeries. The niche probably served as one of the hearths we have found
in the back chambers of the galleries, which appear to have been reserved
for cooking.
This hip is not the only hippopotamus bone we have excavated from
Pyramid Age settlements at Giza. Redding reported: “Hippo (Hippopot -
amus amphibius) is represented by 21 fragments at our sites. These are
mostly tusk fragments, the ivory of which would have been used for
decoration. Two tusk fragments that are clearly worked from the small
Eastern Town House may be the ‘waste’ from ivory craftwork,”69 sug -
gesting that this little urban estate70 in the village-like component of the
site may have housed some skilled crafts people. “Other hippo parts range
from a metapodial (foot bone) from the South Street Gate House (square
4.ZZ6–7, excavated in 1998), and a patella (kneecap) from the Khent -
kawes Valley Complex (KKTE+), in addition to the pelvis in G III.3.”71
The importance of wild, hunted taxa for understanding the HeG site
emerges when we look at those who hunted wild game for ancient
Egyptian estates, expeditions, and those who accompanied the royal hunt
(see section 3.6).
2.2.3. Levantine Imports at HeG
Evidence of olive, foreign pottery and charcoal of coniferous woods testify
that HeG occupants handled and distributed Levantine products obtained
in the well-documented Old Kingdom trade with the eastern Mediterra -
nean. Abundant and ubiquitous granite fragments scattered across the
HeG site, in addition to the bulk granite used in the Giza pyramid com -
plexes, show the HeG occupants trafficked in trade with Aswan, which
was itself an entrepôt for trade with lands farther south.
The first signals of Levantine traffic came when botanist Rainer
Gersich identified scattered bits of olive wood in his analysis of thousands
of charcoal fragments that we retrieved from excavations of the HeG
settlement up to 2008.72 This is the oldest attestation of olive in Egypt.73
Olive trees might have been raised in Egypt by the time of the 18th Dy -
69 Redding, personal communication, e-mail July 9, 2012.
70 Aeragram 7.2: 6–8.
71 Redding, personal communication, e-mail July 9, 2012.
72 Gerisch 2008.
73 Gerisch, Wetterstrom, and Murray 2008.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 413
nasty, but more likely not until the Roman period. In eastern shore lands
of the Mediterranean people grew and harvested olive trees for oil since
the Chalcolithic.74 It has been a matter of debate just when the Egyptians
began to import olive or its products from the Levant.75 The olive charcoal
from HeG derived from small pieces or twigs. Just how the wood of the
olive tree, as opposed to its fruit or oil, came into the site is a matter to
question. Perhaps after production and decanting of olive oil into export
jars, and during loading for transport, some of the olive branches and
twigs might have been introduced as packing between jars full of oil.
During season 2012, Claire Malleson possibly added to this evidence
when she identified an olive pit, which would be Egypt’s oldest, from an
ashy deposit on the floor of a cooking chamber in the back end of Gallery
III.3 next to the chamber where we found the hippopotamus hip bone.76
If imported olive products, chiefly oil, remained a luxury and perk of high
status for most ancient Egyptians during the Pyramid Age (see section
3.7), why would we find olive on the site of a town or camp for common
workers?
We must ask the same of 18 fragments (sherds) of Early Bronze III
metallic combed ware pottery vessels, so-named because the makers etched
or dimpled the surface, as though by a comb, before they fired the clay so
hard as to make a metallic sound when struck against a hard surface.
During the Old Kingdom (EB III in the Levant), potters made combed
ware throughout the Levant, but not in Egypt. Levantine vessels of other
forms and surface treatments had been finding their way into Egyptian
tombs since the Early Dynastic Period.77 During the Old Kingdom
74 Ancient olive pits and wood have been taken as confirmation of olive
cultivation “far outside the natural range of olives” in the Chalocolithic Period
at Teleilat Ghassul, north of the Dead Sea (Serpico and White 2000: 399,
citing Zohary and Hopf 1993: 141), and olive wood was taken as evidence of
olive cultivation in the Upper Jordan Valley (Serpico and White 2000: 399,
citing Neef 1990: 300–301), though perhaps in both cases the evidence was
more abundant than the single olive pit and 15 pieces of olive wood charcoal
recovered from the HeG.
75 Stager 1985; Amnon Ben-Tor 1991; Ward 1991. The dispute has focused on
whether the Egyptian word bAo stood for olive or moringa oil.
76 Aeragram 13.2: 24. During Season 2013, Malleson 2013: 24 considered the
possibility that the pit derives from the walnut-sized fruit of the Egyptian
plum. The pit, charred and split in half, could be either. Whether this pit is
olive or plum, Gerisch’s olive wood charcoal stands as evidence for the presence
of olive during the 4th Dynasty HeG occupation.
77 Kantor 1992.
414 M. LEHNER
Levantine potters made such vessels in combed ware. We find only sherds,
but they stand as some of the oldest known combed ware from a
settlement site. Anna Wodzin´ska and Mary Ownby plotted the find spots
of the combed ware sherds across the HeG site.78 Pieces of these ceramic
imports turned up in the Gallery Complex, in the bakeries of the
industrial zones to the northwest and southeast (Area EOG), and in the
so-called Royal Administrative Building (RAB), where the inhabitants
stored grain in round silos and probably ground it into flour.
Returning to Gerisch’s charcoal analysis, although 93.3% of the wood
charcoal from the HeG proved to be local Nile Acacia,79 Gerisch found
other wood that can only have come from outside Egypt: Cyprus, Pine,
Oak, and the Cedars of Lebanon.80 To reiterate, we have excavated down
to “living floors” and into ancient trash deposits inless than 10% of the
total area represented by our map of the HeG. When we plot the
occurrence of charcoal from wood that grew in the Levant but not in
Egypt, the distribution is nearly the same as where we have excavated
down to 4th Dynasty living floors or into contemporary dumps. Cedar is
relatively abundant in the galleries, occurring in the entire length and
every part of Gallery III.4. As we have excavated only a small percentage
of the living floors and occupation deposits elsewhere, we might take the
relative frequency and distribution of Levantine wood charcoal to reflect
an overall abundance of imported wood at the site. The historical context
of the HeG makes this inference reasonable.
3. Old Kingdom-HeG Correspondences: Text, Art, and Archaeology
In trying to understand what the HeG site means for labor organization
we look for correspondences between its architectural, spatial, and material
culture aspects with what is known from ancient Egyptian and specifically
Old Kingdom texts, art, and archaeology.
Even before we turned a trowel of dirt on our site at Giza, we won -
dered what any architectural footprint would tell us about how the ancient
Egyptians organized their society and mobilized their labor for building
the Sphinx and Pyramids. How would the ground plan relate to what we
know from ancient texts and the stone monuments themselves? One set
of clues comes from graffiti that workers left on stone walls never meant
to be seen.
78 Wodzin´ska and Ownby (2011: 291, fig. 8).
79 Gerisch, Wetterstrom, and Murray 2008.
80 Gerisch 2008.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 415
3.1. Gangs, Graffiti and Phyles
In looking for correspondences between the spatial structure of the HeG
and labor organization as known from texts, I begin with builders’ graffiti
on the masonry of five chambers, each only about three feet high, stacked
one over the other, the whole series above the granite-lined King’s
Chamber of the Khufu Pyramid. These rectilinear spaces, about the same
floor dimensions as the King’s Chamber, were never meant to be seen,
although builders left a crawl space, a small tunnel, from the top eastern
side of the Grand Gallery to the lowest chamber, which a man named
Davison entered in 1760. In 1832 Howard Vyse, armed with gunpowder
and a rather liberal permission to explore the Giza Pyramids, confirmed
his suspicions of more chambers higher up when he blasted a vertical
passage that breached four more chambers. The chambers were separated
one from another by huge granite beams, weighing up to 40 or 50 tons,
with smooth under sides that formed the ceiling of the chamber below,
but left undressed in the floor of the chamber above. Gabled limestone
beams roof the top chamber, so that the weight of the pyramid above is
displaced down the beams to either side, rather than directly onto a flat
ceiling. Thought to have been the 4th Dynasty builders’ attempt to relieve
the stress on the King’s Chamber, these dead spaces are called the Re liev -
ing Chambers.
Now these chambers are covered with the back-soot graffiti of visitors
who managed to enter them since the early 19th century. But when How -
ard Vyse went into the upper four he saw the bright red-painted marks
of the ancient builders: leveling lines, axis markers, cubit notations, and
the names of work gangs compounded with the name of the king. Workers
or scribes applied those graffiti that name work gangs on the stone blocks
before fitting them into the monument. So unlike setting lines and
measurements, these texts concern the block itself –– mostly probably its
transport –– rather than the overall structure.
Looking at the record that Howard Vyse81 and his collaborator, J. S.
Perring82 made of the masons’ graffiti, Ann Roth noted that ten blocks
on the northern side of the combined construction bore graffiti of gang
(apr) names compounded with the nswt-bjtj name of the king, Khnum-
Khuf (“The God Khnum Protects”), while seven blocks on the southern
walls bear gang names compounded with the king’s Horus name, 1r-
81 Howard Vyse 1840: 279–285.
82 Perring 1839: pls. 5–7.
416 M. LEHNER
MDdw (something like, “The Striker Horus”).83 Roth notes that the end
walls are divided in half, with the gang name on each half matching that
on the nearest sidewall. The division suggests that two gangs competed,
and cooperated, in this unusual construction, probably mostly during the
transport of the stones.84 Vassil Dobrev translates the northern name,
“The Followers of the Powerful White Crown of Khufu,” and the
southern as “The (Two Lands) Purifiers of Horus-Medjedu.”85 A third
gang name occurs twice, showing clearly on one of the southern ceiling
beams, cmrw 2wfw, “The Friends, or Companions, of Khufu.”86
Between 1906 and 1907 George Reisner found similar builders’
graffiti on the large limestone core blocks of the Menkaure Pyramid
Temple.87 The information conveyed is so important for our
understanding of the HeG site because these builders’ graffiti are exactly
contemporary with the main phase of occupation that we have found at
the HeG, and because they attest to a gang, phyle, and division structure
of labor, which we should think about it terms of our barracks hypothesis
for function of the Gallery Complex.
Menkaure’s workers set the large, locally-quarried limestone blocks,
weighing up to 200 tons, to form the cores of the temple walls (hence the
term, core blocks). Like the Khufu relieving chambers, the annotated faces
of these blocks were never meant to be seen. The builders had begun a
casing of hard granite to cover the core blocks, but they stopped work,
apparently when Menkaure died. Under his successor, Shepseskaf, masons
finished the wall casings quickly in plastered mud brick. When Reisner
peeled off this mudbrick casing he saw the brightly painted leveling lines,
cubit notations, and graffiti, 30 cm high, giving the names of work gangs
(aprw) including one called “The Friends (cmrw) of Men kaure.” Roth
83 Roth 1991: 125–127, fig. 7.2.
84 But see Verner 2003: 450 where three different gang names were found in a
restricted part of the unfinished Raneferef pyramid at Aubusir.
85 Dobrev 2003: 30–31.
86 Reisner 1931: 275, saw in the Khufu relieving chamber graffiti four gang
names. However, aprw 1r-mDdw-wab-tAwy (“Horus Medjeduw is the Purifier
of the Two Lands”), which Reisner translated “Horus Mededuw is Pure,” is
probably the same name as that without the tAwy. He translated the gang
name, aprw 2wfw-cmrw as “Cheops [=Khufu] Excites Love,” and the third
gang name, aprw Hdt-2nm-xwfw-sHm(t) “The gang, The White Crown of
Khufu is Powerful.” Dobrev 2003: 31 reads “The Two Lands, Purifiers of
Horus Medjedu” and “Purifiers of Horus Medjedu.” Verner 1991: 76 sees in
this graffiti three gang names.
87 Reisner 1931, pls. XI–XII.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 417
noticed from Reisner’s records88 that he found the two graffiti naming
this gang on the southern side of the temple, while thirteen names of
another gang, txw Mn-kAw-Re, “The Drunkards of Menkaure,” were
found on the northern side of the temple.89
The name of a unit called zA (plural zAw) followed the gang names in
the Menkaure Pyramid Temple builders’ graffiti. The zA hieroglyph
depicts a rope tied in a series of loops, that is, a cattle hobble such as bound
the legs of animals so that they moved together, and could therefore be
controlled. ZA can mean “protection,” but the term also designates groups
of people rotating through periods of labor on building projects and in
temple service.90 In the bilingual (Greek and Egyptian) Canopus Decree
honoring Pharaoh Ptolemy III Euergetes and his queen Berenice, dated
238 BC, Egyptian priests translated zA with the Greek word, φυλή, phyle,
“clan” or “tribe.”91 Hence Egyptologists translate zA as “phyle.”
We know of five phyle names in the Old Kingdom. One of these
names could follow aprw gang names in builders’ graffiti. The names bear
some kind of relationship to the parts of a boat.92 From the Abusir
archives of royal mortuary service, as well as inscribed phyle names in so-
called “private” tombs, we know that when listed together these names
follow a particular “canonical” order,93 presented below with rough trans -
lations and nautical equivalents that have been suggested:
“Great” (wr): D, or (imj-wrt): [DAP - starboard
“Port” (tA-wr) or “Asiatic” (sT): &P - port, larboard
“Green” or “Fresh” (wADt): kA
- bow
“Little” (nDs, or imj nDs): AP
- stern
“Last” (imj-nfrt): [mAP
- no certain equivalent
The graffiti from the Menkaure Pyramid Temple show only two phyle
names, wADt and nDs, occurring on both the north and south sides of the
western temple, that is, both phyles are found with either of the two apr-
gangs, illustrating that the same phyle names are used across different
88 Reisner 1931: 274–277.
89 Roth 1991: 127–130, fig. 7.3; Dobrev 2003: 30–31 would read the word txw
as “Laborers of Menkaure” rather than “drunkards.”
90 Goelet 1982: 444; Hannig 2003: 1052–1054.
91 Budge 1904; Sethe 1904: 134–36; Roth 1991: 2–3.
92 For references and discussion of an old idea that the phyle names derive from
ships watches (Reisner 1931: 276) and the relationship between phyles names
and nautical terms, imi-wrt (“starboard,” or “western half”) and tA-wr (lar -
board) see Roth 1991: 41–59.
93 Posener-Kriéger 1976: 565–574; Roth 1991: 9–40.
418 M. LEHNER
gangs. The builders put these marks on the blocks prior to setting them
in place, witnessed by the fact that when a block bearing such a graffito was
set on end, as indicated by the geological strata running through it, the graf -
fito is also on end.94 The texts therefore document the labor of transport-
ing the heavy stones to the temple wall from the nearby quarry, probably
the quarry southeast of the pyramid. It appears that two phyles worked
together, here transporting different blocks, but in mastabas of the Giza
Cemetery GIS, two phyles worked together on the same large block.95
The phyles were composed of smaller groups or divisions designated
with single hieroglyphs that could convey positive ideas, such as “strong,
first, noble, rising,” which can be taken as qualities and praise of the
workers and their work.96 There appear to have been at least four divisions
in each zA of the Menkaure Temple builders.97 Many representations of
the cattle hobble have ten loops. It is possible that divisions numbered 10
individuals, as reflected in the Old Kingdom title, “Overseer of Ten.” Or,
it is possible that this title meant “Overseer of One-Tenth” of a gang,
with 2 divisions per zA times five zA.98 In the Menkaure Pyramid Temple,
one division, marked by the hieroglyph of an ibis, occurs on three different
blocks, in each case with the nDs-phyle, reflecting that the division names
are specific to a given phyle and gang.
3.2. Division Signs, the Delta and Middle Egypt: The Question of
Local Recruitment
We have no generic term (an equivalent to zA) for “division.”99 Some of
the signs for divisions are the same as certain district or nome emblems,
which could indicate home regions whence workers were levied.100 The
main reference for this inference from Old Kingdom builders’ graffiti is
this corpus of builders’ graffiti from the Menkaure temple. As examples,
Verner cites graffiti signs for Nomes 10 and 17. Carrying on this infer -
94 Reisner 1931: 273; Roth 1991: 128.
95 Roth 1991: 130–131.
96 Verner 1991: 74.
97 Roth 1991: 142.
98 Roth 1991, 120–121; Jones 2000: 145–146, nos. 566–567 for overseers of
tens of various crews.
99 Roth 1991: 120. Andrássy 2009a: 2–3 n. 10, cited a late 6th Dynasty letter that
indicates Tst as a subdivision of apr (Gardiner 1927: 75–78). But see section
3.3 for Tst as superordinate to two or more gcw, “sides” of craftsmen or
specialized stone workers.
100Verner 1991: 74; Andrássy 2009a: 3–4.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 419
ence, Andrássy excerpts from Reisner’s record the graffito of the jackal-
with feather standard of Upper Egyptian Nome 17, Jnpwt,101 which
marked a division of the wADt phyle and the gang, “Drunkards of Men -
kaure,” on a large limestone core block from the northwest corner of the
temple.102 Conceivably, the antelope marking another division of the
same gang and phyle103 could stand for the Gazelle Nome (mA-HD), Upper
Egyptian Nome 16.104
Andrássy also finds in the Menkaure temple corpus the district em -
blems of Lower Egyptian Nomes 3 and 15. Reisner found these graffiti
on the granite casing blocks in corridor 13. Andrássy took a bird that
Reisner saw as an ibis (graffito Sa1) as the ibis emblem of Lower Egyptian
Nome 15. If so, perhaps the ibis signs on three other blocks, these of
limestone, in the temple northwest corner also signify this nome, making
the division from this nome very busy in this area. Andrássy takes a very
sketchy hieratic sign of a standard, which Reisner read jmn (graffiti Sa3
and Sb1), as the falcon on a plumed standard emblem of Lower Egyptian
Nome 3, named jmntt,“The West.”105
101Helck 1977: 391.
102Andrássy 2009a: 4, fig. 2; Reisner 1931: 274, no. 6viii, pl. XI.
103Andrássy 2009a: 4 n. 16; Reisner 1931: 274, no. 1i-ii, pl. XI.
104Helck 1977: 392.
105Andrássy 2009a: 4, n. 16, citing Reisner 1931: pl. XII, nos. Sa1, Sa3, Sb1. See,
for the nomes, Helck 1977: 394–395. The Sa3 and Sb1 graffiti occur on the
granite blocks in Corridor 13. These graffiti are thought to reflect the
organization of specialized craftsmen or stoneworkers into “sides” (gcw) and
“troops” (Tswt); see section 3.3. Haeny (1969: 31), looking at the term gcw in
graffiti from the Userkaf Sun Temple, and Menkaure and Sahure pyramids,
believed that the organization of the craftsmen corresponded to the cardinal
directions (not unlike Roth’s observation about the apr-gang names on either
side of a structure), so that gc imntj would be “the west workers section,” gc
rcj “the south workers section.” Perhaps we should yet ask if the term jmn in
these graffiti did not refer to the placement of the granite blocks on one side
of the corridor. The graffiti include the term gc, literally, “side” but also
“administrative sector,” as in gc-pr, “administration” (Hannig 2003: 1377), or
“gang,” for specialized craftsmen (Andrássy 2009a: 4). The graffiti on all four
blocks on the northern side of Corridor 13 begin gc imj-wrt, literally
“starboard side.” However imj-wrt can also mean “west” or “western” (Hannig
2003: 78–79), specifically the western part of a building or temple (Roth 1991:
12) or nome (Fischer 1959b: 136), or “right hand side” (Jones 2000: 50, no.
250). It is therefore ironic that Helck (1975b: 371–374, n. 24) suggested the
workers used imj-wrt here in place of “east,” because “east” conveyed bad
mythological associations. Only the graffiti on blocks on the southern side of
the corridor bear the term jmn (Reisner 1931: 277), which also means “west”
420 M. LEHNER
The attestation of Nome 3, if this is the correct reading in the Men -
kaure temple graffiiti, adds to the significance of the Old Kingdom settle -
ment at Kom el-Hisn for the HeG. Kom el-Hisn as the “Estate of the
Cattle” (1wt-jHjt)106 might have been a center whence cattle were dis -
patched to the HeG.107
If those in control of work used division signs as district emblems in
graffiti on blocks, this would suggest that workers for transporting blocks
and other tasks of building pyramids came some distance from the pro -
vinces of Middle Egypt and the Delta. Given the hints of this provincial
conscription as early as the late 4th Dynasty in the Menkaure builders’
graffiti, it is worth looking at builders’ graffiti from the later Old King -
dom, and also at the more elaborate “control notes,” as Felix Arnold
termed builders’ graffiti from Middle Kingdom pyramid complexes.
In the 5th Dynasty builders’ began to apply graffiti on stone blocks
that convey the names of work crews formed with the names of prominent
persons and officials who dispatched labor to build both royal tombs and
the tombs of high officials. This practice was common by the time of
Pepi I.108 Graffiti with names and titles did not totally replace the apr gang
names formed with the name of a king and qualified by a phyle name.
Gang and phyle names have also been found in builders’ graffiti from the
6th Dynasty PepiI Pyramid.109 In fact we begin to see here in building, as
in temple service, two facets of the same system: “a whole range of dig -
nitaries of different social levels” contribute labor of their people to phyle
or “right side” (Hannig 2003: 142–143). Given the Egyptians’ orientation
upriver to the south, west equaled right hand (jmn). However three of the
southern graffiti (Sa7, Sb2, Sb3) also bear the sign tr or rnpt (“time,” “year”
or “occasion”) and rsj,“south.” The corridor runs east-west. If one turned to
the west, “right” becomes north. If these terms are directional, why would the
graffiti writers use another term for “right” and/or “west” on the southern
blocks? These texts are not linear like the gang, phyle, and division graffiti. It
is possible that jmn on the southern blocks qualified another term in these
graffiti, the “western” Hmwt smjt, desert workshop, or Hmwt xAst, “foreign
crafts men,” see section 3.3.
106Helck 1977: 395; also possibly the latter place-name ImAw.
107Old Kingdom settlement so far excavated at Kom el-Hisn dates to the 5th and
6th Dynasties, with some settlement extending into the Middle Kingdom
(Wenke et al. 1988:13), but it is very likely, given the possible link with the
“Estate of the Cattle,” that the settlement was occupied through the early Old
Kingdom and since the Early Dynastic.
108Dobrev 1996; 1998; Andrassy 2009a.
109Vymazalova 2013: 182, n. 21 citing personal communication with V.Dobrev.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 421
formations subordinated to their authority as holders of certain rank and
office.110 Now, from the 5th Dynasty, builders’ graffiti designate groups
of workers by the name of the prominent householder or estate owner
who donates their labor.
So, for example, on blocks of the large and elaborate mastaba tomb
of Ptahshepses at Abusir, graffiti include his name as well as other officials.
Names and titles of King’s wives and daughters appear on blocks in the
mastabas of their relatives, husbands and fathers, for example the “King’s
Wife Khentkawes” appears on a stone from the pyramid of her husband,
Neferirkare. Names of officials or large householders can be found in
graffiti on the blocks of their own mastabas, or in the monuments of other
officials. Andrássy has shown that the graffiti with such names mark not
the donations of the stone as such, rather the labor of their transport, and
possibly of cutting and trimming, before setting in place. For example the
label “Khnumhotep” on a block within the mastaba of Ptahshepses would
indicate that Khnumhotep donated the labor for moving this block to the
project of building Ptahshepses’s tomb memorial.111
Donations of labor to royal monuments from districts and commu -
nities becomes more explicit in Middle Kingdom builders’ graffiti, which
Felix Arnold aptly called control notes.112 We find two kinds of notes.
For the literate supervisors, scribes painted notes on stones that document
the date of transport, the workmen in charge of the stone, and stages
reached from quarry to pyramid (although quarrymen are never referred
to in the control notes). “Brought from” or “removal from” the quarry
are the most common control notes. Transport ships are mentioned, and
we read of stone delivered at the mereyt, “harbor” or “embankment;” for
example, “removed from the quarry to the pyramid <by> Hewet-ankh
<and> the ships of Heliopolis in the fourth month of the inundation, day
25.” Stones are noted as “brought from the embankment” and delivered
to “storage enclosures.” Stones are also noted as “brought” or “dragged”
to the pyramid or “delivered to the ramp”: for example, “[Year] 12, first
month of Winter, day 17. Brought [from] the storage [enclosure];”
“delivered to the ramp <by> the overseer of the work, Mek.” Cowherds,
who may have driven oxen for pulling stones, are mentioned: “First
month of Summer, day 12. Dragged <by> the cowherds [of the southern
district]. Delivered at the workshop of …”
110Andrassy 2009a; Verner 2003: 450.
111Andrássy 2009a: 7.
112Arnold 1990.
422 M. LEHNER
The second kind of note takes form as oversized signs that sometimes
overlap the smaller, more meticulous text. These are team marks that must
have been written and “read” by the illiterate workmen. Some are known
hieroglyphs while others are invented geometric signs, pitchforks, crossed
sticks, and the like. Arnold believes the team marks may have identified
the hometowns and villages of corvée workers, while the made-up
hieroglyphs represented smaller villages,113 a suggestion that Andrássy
confirmed.114 The team marks either present a stage between illiterate
(and therefore anonymous) pre-formal symbols,115 or abbreviations of
places, in contrast to the formal hieratic script applied by literate con -
trollers.116 It is still possible that the team marks represent, as well as
home-based groups, the subdivision of work gangs, like 20-member phyle
divisions or the 10-member subdivisions of Old Kingdom work gangs
(see below). In the Middle Kingdom the divisions were termed Tst,
“troop.” A controller and scribal assistants kept the control notes for six
such divisions. So the large team marks may have represented both topo -
nyms and troop divisions at the same time.
The more literate texts specify places that range in geographic scale:
estates (rmnjt) and households of officials; towns, such as Hermopolis
(Wnwt) in Nome 15 of Middle Egypt, Sais (4Aw) in Nome 5 of Lower
Egypt, and the pyramid town 4xm-Jmn-m-Hct ʿnx Dt r-nHH “Amenemhet
is Powerful, May He Live Forever,” the name of the pyramid town of king
Amenemhet II;117 the Ptah Temple in the central quarter of Memphis;
and administrative districts of large towns, such as “the second district of
Heliopolis” and “the provisioning quarter of the divine offering of
Heliopolis.” Andrássy concludes:
113Arnold 1990: 22–23.
114Andrássy 2009a; 2009b.
115Andrássy, Budka and Kammerzell 2009.
116Andrássy (2009b: 120) notes that similar signs outside the repertoire of the
hieroglyphic script, or from that repertoire but inversed with respect to the
rest of the entry, occur in the Papyrus Reisner accounts of copper donated to
a dockside workshop. Literate scribes certainly compiled these accounts, in
which case the signs in question must be taken as abbreviations or copies of
marks engraved onto the copper tools being accounted.
117This is the pyramid town where, according to the Mit Rahina inscription (see
section 5.2) Amenemhet II settled his Asiatic captives (see section 5.2). The
control note mentioning this place comes from the pyramid of his successor,
Senwosret II (Arnold 1990: 25, 168).
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 423
The context makes it clear that, of course, not places, estates,
households, domains and so on transported the stones, but the people
coming from there, who were sent by the local authorities for corvée
at the pyramid building sites. A place name can therefore be con -
sidered as an abbreviation for “men of town, estate, household,
domain … X.”118
Arnold plotted on a map of Egypt the home districts of the workers
mentioned in the control notes of Middle Kingdom pyramid complexes.
The area around the old “capital” zone –– Memphis to Heliopolis –– plus
the Delta, and the area of Nomes 12–15 of Middle Egypt predominate.119
Often the Lower Egyptians are designated without specifying a particular
town, but using the term bjtyw, “Lower Egyptians.”120 Could this nisbe
have been a counterpart to niswtjw, a term for colonizers on royal land,
with both terms stemming from the designation of the royal prenomen,
nswt-bjti, literally, “he of the sedge and bee”, emblems of south and north
respectively?121
Arnold’s plot of the distribution of locales supplying labor from the
Delta and Middle Egypt bears resemblance to the distribution of Old
Kingdom estates, a product of the internal colonization of these same
broader floodplains.122 The Middle Kingdom control notes also show
that labor came from the Memphite area, and the “capital zone”
(Heliopolis, Memphis, the Ptah Temple, and the Amenemhet II pyramid
town). The distribution bears comparison to a pattern that Moreno García
points to repeatedly where the Delta and Middle Egypt, under relatively
direct administration from the center, served as hinterland extensions of
the Memphite capital zone.123
The possible references in the Menkaure builders’ graffiti to Upper
Egyptian Nomes 16–17 (in Middle Egypt, north of the Qena Bend124),
while tenuous, are intriguing considering many associations of the 4th
Dynasty kings and their outposts in these and other districts of Middle
Egypt. Recent excavations at Shaykh Said in Nome 15 by the Leuven
118Andrássy 2009a: 8–9.
119Arnold 1990: 24, fig. 1.
120Arnold 1990: 25.
121Gardiner 1969: 74; Allen 2000: 65.
122Jacquet-Gordon 1962: 104–121; Kemp 1983: 91, fig. 2.2.
123Moreno García 2013: 99, 112, 114–119, 123–125, 131.
124Lehner 2000: 298–300, figs. 5–6; Qena Bend refers to the large bend where
the Nile and its valley turn east, then bend to the west at Qena, before opening
out into the broad valley of Middle Egypt at Hiw, Nome 7.
424 M. LEHNER
University mission revealed the remains of a royal domain of the 4th
Dynasty, installed during the reign of Khufu for the purpose of quarrying
calcite alabaster from the Maghara (quarry) Abu Aziz to the east up the
Wadi Zabayda from the excavation site SS/WZ. Willems et al. suggest
that just as the royal domain at Elephantine produced granite, which the
builders used in large quantities at the Memphite Pyramid cemeteries,
especially Giza, Shaykh Said produced calcite alabaster (or travertine)125
and limestone.126
Not unlike HeG, the site SS/WZ flanks an embayment from the
flood plain into the low desert at the mouth of a wadi delivery tract. The
team has recorded in this embayment geophysical and stratigraphic evi -
dence of a harbor, recalling that HeG must have flanked a delivery zone
and harbor north of the Wall of the Crow, a difference being, that HeG
lies south while SS/WZ lies to the north of the hypothesized harbor.127
Willems et al. (2009) cite multiple correspondences between the ma -
terial culture at Shaykh Said and HeG at Giza.128 The “massive amounts
of flat and deep bread molds” suggests the kind of intensified production
and provisioning evidenced at HeG in the areas surrounding the Gallery
Complex.129 One similarity between Shaykh Said and the HeG, cited by
the SS/WZ investigators, is high numbers of cattle, sheep, and goat bone,
and deep-channel Nile Perch, suggesting protein provisioning. The
Shaykh Said mission members suggest the cattle probably came from
herds nearby.130 Also like HeG, the presence of formal, institutional seal -
ings suggest the presence of, or a connection to elite state adminis -
trators,131 although, apart from remains of an apparent bakery,132 the
125Here, I use the crude term “alabaster” and forgo the discussion of cal cite, cal -
cite alabaster, travertine, or gypsum; see Willems et al. 2009: 295, n. 9. Saleh
1974: 138 characterized the stone in the industrial settlement southeast of the
Menkaure Pyramid as “yellow-red calcite (or crystalline calcium) stones which
resemble alabaster.”
126Willems et al. 2009: 325.
127Willems et al. 2009: 321–322, Pl. I.
128The Leuven University team dates the stone working site, SS/WZ, to the time
of Khufu on the basis of ceramics, and one sealing fragment bearing the
bottom of a serkeh, with mDdw, which must be part of Khufu’s Horus name,
1r-mdDw.
129Lehner 2002: 71; Lehner 2007b: 279–283; Lehner and Tavares 2010: 207–
214.
130Willems et al. 2009: 323.
131Nolan 2010.
132Willems et al. 2009: 303–307, figs. 6–7.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 425
absence at SS/WZ of formal architecture, so far, suggests more of a camp.
The investigators suggest the settlement may lie elsewhere, but nearby.
The investigators count the site as one of a network of royal domains
(Hwwt).133 Willems et al. point to the similarities in layout between the
quarry Maghara Abu Aziz at Shaykh Said and the well-know calcite
alabaster quarries at Hatnub, southeast of Shaykh Said, where the earliest
royal inscriptions start with Khufu. They hypothesize a royal domain
founded near Hatnub.134 The pyramid builders certainly used much
calcite alabaster for statues and paving in the temples. At Giza they in -
stalled alabaster pavements in the Khafre pyramid temple and valley
temple. In the early 1970s Abd El-Aziz Saleh excavated a settlement
southeast of the Menkaure Pyramid that served as a kind of depot, perhaps
at the end of the Shaykh Said/Hatnub run, for large, raw alabaster pieces
and a working area for shaping them as well as other industries.135
In regional survey, the Deir el-Bersha Project has identified cemetery
evidence of other possible nodes of the 4th Dynasty network: the Old
Kingdom cemeteries of rock cut tombs at Nuwayrat in Nome 16 and
stone circle tombs with burials in pottery coffins and large ceramic vats at
both Nuwayrat and Deir el Bersha. They date these cemeteries from the
late 3rd to the early 4th Dynasty136 and suggest that the cemeteries imply
nearby communities of people who buried their leaders –– or minor elites
of a royal domain –– in the upper rock cut tombs, some with false doors
and decoration.
At Zawiyet el Meiyitin, north of Nuwayrat, a king built a small step
pyramid, one of a series of small provincial step pyramids that includes
one at Elephantine probably built by Huni at the beginning of the 4th
Dynasty. A few hundred meters southwest of the Zawiyet el Meiyitin
pyramid, an Old Kingdom cemetery and settlement near Zawiyet el-
Sultan may mark the ancient place named Hebenu.137 All these sites could
once have belonged to a network of royal outposts in Middle Egypt.
De Meyer et al. point out that the series of estates in the so-called
Valley Temple of Sneferu list five in Nome 16 of Middle Egypt.138 The
place names Menat Sneferu (“Nurse of Sneferu”) and Menat Khufu,
133Willems et al. 2009; de Meyer et al. 2011.
134Willems et al. 2009: 325.
135Saleh 1974.
136de Meyer et al. 2011.
137Moeller 2001.
138De Meyer et al. 2011: 692.
426 M. LEHNER
possibly referring to the same estate, may have been located in this nome
at a wadi mouth south of Beni Hassan.139 De Meyer et al. point to Old
Kingdom mastaba tombs modeled after the large mastabas at Giza near
Deir Abu Hinnis and between Tihna el-Gebel and Zawiyet el-Meiyitin.
The mastaba tomb at Zawiyet el-Meiyitin belonged to a man named Ny-
ka-ankh. The authors date his tomb to the early 5th Dynasty. His father
and grandfather can be linked to other large tombs at the site, which
would place these tombs, and the careers of these men, into the 4th
Dynasty. They continue to investigate the hypothesis that in this region
of Middle Egypt “more or less regularly spaced sites that were probably
(linked to) royal domains existed.”140
The formal sealings from HeG show links to this area of Middle
Egypt. John Nolan’s reconstruction of 12 seal patterns from the Pottery
Mound corpus includes one with the name of the god “Khnum-Foremost
of Hermopolis.”141 Hermopolis was located in Nome 15, on the bank
opposite Shyakh Said. Nolan relates this reference to the fully-written
name of Khufu, Khnum-khuf, “it is Khnum who Protects me,” and we
can add these associations to the names, Menat-Khufu (“Nurse of Khufu”)
and Menat-Sneferu, of places near Beni Hassan, just northeast of
Hermopolis. Seal 2, reconstructed from the Pottery Mound corpus, names
“Seshat, Foremost of the House of the Book Roll,” and the king as Horus,
“[brother] of Min and Amun.”142 Sehsat, the female goddess of writing
associated at Hermopolis with Thoth, the male god of records and writing,
was called “Lady of the Eight-town.” Amun was a member of the Ogdoad
worshipped at Hermopolis, and if Nolan’s identification of one of two
ithyphallic figures as Amun is correct, it would be the oldest representation
of this deity.
These Middle Egypt districts must have sent labor, as indicated by
division signs for Nomes 16–17, and possibly 15, and materiel –– calcite
alabaster, produce, and cattle –– to Giza and the HeG site.
139Kessler 1981:197–198.
140De Meyer et al., 2011: 693, n. 61.
141Nolan 2010: 81–85, Seal 1, of Khafre. The name of Hermopolis is literally
“Eight-town” 2mnw , a reference to the Ogdoad, eight deities worshipped at
Hermopolis in the Old Kingdom. This may be the oldest known reference to
2mnw.
142Nolan 2010: 86–124, Seal 2; the same two facing figures, ithyphallic and
crowned with the double plume, appear on Seal 6, and partially on Seal 8.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 427
3.3. Granite Graffiti, Links to Elephantine, and Hints of Foreign Labor
Reisner noted that the graffiti on the granite blocks in the Menkaure
Pyramid Temple differed from those on the limestone core blocks.143 This
difference has been taken as indicating a special department of the
workforce for skilled craftsmen permanently settled near the building
site.144 Verner and Andrássy convey the idea that the granite graffiti
manifests a difference between levies of Egyptians for the apr-gangs, as
indicated by graffiti on the limestone blocks that include division signs
for home districts, and foreigners who were specialized craftsmen, in this
case, the granite workers.145
The graffiti written in red on the granite blocks of the unfinished
granite casing of corridor 13 are less linear than those mentioning gangs,
phyles, and divisions on the limestone blocks. Reisner saw four elements
to the most complete graffiti on granite: (1) the word gc; “side”; (2) either
imj-wrt (northern blocks) or rmn plus tr or rnpt (“time, year” or
“occasion”) and rsj (only on the southern blocks); (3) a “variable element,”
which Reisner took as a “distinguishing mark” like the division signs on
the limestone core blocks; and (4) Hmwt smjt, “desert workshop,”146
according to Reisner’s translation. Stadelmann maintained that Hmwt smjt
referred to the industrial settlement and alabaster depot at the far,
southeastern rim of the quarry that furnished much of the core stone for
the Menkaure Pyramid.147 Abd el-Aziz Saleh excavated this settlement in
the early 1970s, and found much evidence for working calcite alabaster,
but not granite.148 Others understand the term Hmwwt smjt as “craftsmen
of the desert.”149
Looking at the attestations of the term gc in the graffiti of the pyramid
complexes of Menkaure and Sahure as well as the Userkaf Sun Temple,
schol ars believe that the term designates an organization of specialized
crafts men separate from that of the apr-gangs and phyles. The gc organiza -
143Reisner 1931: 267–277, pl. XII.
144Helck 1975b: 372–373; Verner 1991: 77–79.
145Andrássy 2009a: 4–5.
146Reisner 1931: 277. Reisner noted that the sign Dam occurs twice on the granite
blocks in corridor 13 and also in room 24, and we have noted that the ibis
division marker, conceivably the sign for Lower Egyptian Nome 15, is also
found on both these granite blocks and the limestone core blocks, so it could
be the same division worked on both, and this would go against the idea that
Hmwt smjt indicates a separate guild of specialist craftsmen.
147Stadelmann 1981: 67.
148Saleh 1974.
149See Andrássy 2009a: 5, n. 24 for references.
428 M. LEHNER
tion was divided into “sides” (gc), each side led by an overseer (imj-r gc).150
These craftsmen lived permanently near the worksite. As made explicit in
the title “Scribes of the Troops (comprised of) Four Sides of Craftsmen”
(sS Tst (nt) gc 4Hmwt), a larger unit, the Tst, (“troop”), could be divided
into four “sides.” Helck thought the craftsmen were so divided on the
basis of their living quarters.151 Verner suggested those so organized could
have served in the quarries for longer terms than the members of apr-
gangs, as they were specialized in the extraction and procurement of more
valuable stone.152 Could they have come from the locales where such
costly stone was quarried?
Recently Andrássy also argued that the granite graffiti attest “a special
kind of craftsmen.” Instead of Hmwt smjt, Andrássy reads Hmwwt xAst,
“for eign craftsmen”, citing a text from the Abusir mastaba of Ptah shep -
ses153 where the term is spelled out and includes determinatives of seated
Asiatics as part of a line of text following stp-zA, literally, “the Chosen
Phyle.”154 Andrássy noted that the term Hmwwt xAst has not been found
in builders’ graffiti later than Menkaure, but states “the role of foreign
craftsmen in the building of pyramids and temples must not be under -
estimated later on.”155
The marks on the granite blocks could relate, like the graffiti on lime -
stone core blocks, to the labor of their transport, or, as Verner suggested,
workers who specialized in such stone, from quarrying to transport,
shaping and setting.156 Unlike the colossal limestone core blocks, which
were dragged from the nearby quarries,157 the granite blocks came from
150Haeny 1969: 31; Helck 19759; Verner 1991: 77–79; Andrássy 2009a: 4–6.
151Helck 1975a; but see Verner 1991: 78: “die Beziehung zwischen Hmwt smjt
und Tst ist in den Baugraffiti nicht belegt.”
152Verner 1991: 78.
153Andrássy 2009a: 5 citing Vachala 2004: 171.
154Goelet 1986: 86. Look for the term as designating the group of 200 men
bringing fine limestone from the eastern quarries at Turah to the pyramid of
Khufu documented in the recently discovered journal of the Inspector (cHD)
Merer, part of the 4th Dynasty papyri records of building the Khufu Pyramid
recently found at Wadi el-Jarf; Tallet, personal communication; and see Tallet
and Marouard 2014; Tallet, forthcoming.
155Andrássy 2009a: 6.
156Reisner noted that graffito Sa3, on one of the southern blocks, crossed the
plaster of the joint with the adjacent block, in which case the graffito was
applied after the setting of the blocks.
157Lehner 1985a: 132, fig. 16; 154. The quarries immediately below and south -
east of the Menkaure Pyramid show channels and wedge-sockets that quarry -
men used to separate from the bedrock just such large core blocks like those
in the Menkaure temple.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 429
Aswan at the first cataract. If Andrássy’s reading and inference of foreign
labor are correct, we should not be surprised to find “foreign craftsmen”
or the like associated with granite blocks. A whole infrastructure must
have existed at Aswan and the fortified island settlement of Elephantine
for procuring, shaping, loading, and shipping granite. However, we must
consider Andrássy’s inference about skilled, higher status craftsmen who
specialized in stone like granite with other evidence that the 4th Dynasty
Egyptians might have taken captives from Nubia for labor (see section
5.2). The determinatives in the Ptahshepses scene of Hmwwt xAst are
Asiatic, not Nubian, but given the quantities of granite that had to have
been shipped the 600 km downstream from Aswan to Giza, could we
expect Asiatic (Syrian) crews as well as craftsmen? Perhaps not for
domestic Nile barges as opposed to sea-faring ships at such an early period,
though by later times in the Old Kingdom Syrian sailors, ship wrights and
carpenters had become routine for expeditions to the Levant (see section
3.7).158 In any case, we can be practically certain that Elephantine served
as another important node, like those in Middle Egypt, in an inter-
regional network with Giza as its center during three generations of 4th
Dynasty pyramid building, and therefore we should not be surprised at
the idea that foreigners might have been among the occupants of HeG.
Indeed, Reisner estimated it would have taken 1,200 to1,500 granite
blocks to clad the walls of the Menkaure Temple, had the workers finished
it.159 A similar order of magnitude of granite casing blocks was probably
already set in place in the lower 16 courses of the pyramid, albeit left
mostly untrimmed. All this granite must have been imported from Aswan,
nearly equal in distance on a straight line from Giza (685 km = 426 miles)
as Byblos (625 km = 388 miles), but located upstream on Egypt’s southern
border. The Old Kingdom Egyptians removed as much as 45,000 cubic
meters (1.5 million cubic feet) of granite from the Aswan quarries.160 They
brought most of this granite to the capital zone just above the apex of the
Nile Delta. Generally across the Giza Pyramids Plateau, and on the HeG
site, one finds granite fragments everywhere.
Much of the granite was off-loaded from barges on the margins of the
HeG site, evidenced by two concentrations of waste from working this
heavy, hard stone. Certainly the 4th Dynasty builders could move very
heavy loads overland, including up steep slopes to the pyramid itself;
witness the granite blocks and beams in the King’s Chamber of the Khufu
158Bietak 1988.
159Reisner 1931: 277.
160Röder 1965: 472; Arnold 1991: 36.
430 M. LEHNER
Pyramid. Nonetheless, the labor saved in getting heavy items as close as
possible to their destination before offloading is why the desert-edge
cultivation zone, that is to say, the flood season waterfront, is so impor -
tant. This is the setting of the HeG. Near the eastern end of the Wall of
the Crow we found a massive bank of “granite dust.”
Late in the 4th Dynasty sequence, the inhabitants used this waste from
intensive, large-scale granite works to fill and close a large cut, possibly
caused by desert wadi flooding, through the northern enclosure wall of
Gallery Set I.161 The Menkaure Pyramid and the Khentkawes Imonu -
ment162 were the last major granite works at Giza. The larger fragments
included red and black granite and diorite. From what survived of the
Menkaure temple casing, the builders were favoring black granite but also
used red.163
We found the second concentration of granite at the far southeastern
corner of the site where, again, late in the occupation sequence, builders
had used large fragments of granite in the fieldstone wall around the
sunken court of silos. The sharp breaks indicated these fragments came
from the initial stages of dressing, and some of the pieces featured rounded
faces like the “handling bosses” on the unfinished Menkaure pyramid
casing.164 The two concentrations of granite may reflect two offloading
and deliver zones, a landing or harbor north of the Wall of the Crow,165
and possibly a smaller “put-in bay” at the south, where we found a deep,
sand-filled depression (“Lagoon 1”) between the main HeG settlement
and an “island” of settlement further south where the 4th structures
(“Standing Wall Island” –– SWI) may comprise a corral and abattoir (fig.
1).166 If foreigners –– Nubians or Asiatics –– were involved in granite
procurement, delivery, and working, we must consider them as possibly
among the inhabitants of the HeG.
161Lehner 2002: 48–53;
162Khentkawes I’s builders used granite to make the doorjambs of her chapel,
her colossal false doors, and the lining of her burial passage.
163Reisner 1931: 70–72.
164Lehner 2002: 63–64.
165Lehner 2013. We recently discovered a basin east of the Khentkawes Town
and about 300 meters farther west of the east end of Wall of the Crow. While
this basin was cut down to the estimated level of the 4th Dynasty floodplain,
it is questionable that it served as a harbor for major deliveries of food, fuel,
and building materials during the main pyramid construction. The Khent -
kawes basin is more likely a harbor that served symbolic functions and
deliveries for the maintenance of the cults of Khentkawes I and Menkaure.
166GOP 4: 39–44; Redding 2011.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 431
The kind of connections we infer from builders’ graffiti and material
culture between the HeG and Elephantine/Aswan for granite, and
between HeG and the Middle Egyptian nomes for calcite alabaster or
travertine, were summed by Weni in regard to his procurements of these
very materials for the pyramid of Merenre, in the 6th Dynasty, some two
hundred years after Menkaure. The king sent Weni to granite quarries
around Elephantine to get granite for his pyramid capstone, sarcophagus,
symbolic false door, real doors, lintels and other elements, as well as to
the Middle Egypt alabaster quarries of Hatnub (Nome 15) for a “great
offering table of alabaster.” On one of his expeditions to Nubia, the rulers
of Irtjet, Wawat, Iam and Medja cut down local acacia trees to make
barges to carry the granite, and these local rulers may have levied their
people for the work Weni mentioned of cutting canals for the transfer
north of the heavy stone accouterments for Merenre’s pyramid at South
Saqqara.167 We must think of Weni’s expedition to Aswan multiplied
many times over during the three generations of 4th Dynasty pyramid
building at Giza.
In addition to a source for granite, Aswan served as an entrepôt and
gateway for mining and quarrying expeditions for other hard stones and
copper, and for trading expeditions for products from farther south,
including the southern land of Punt.
3.4. Gangs, Phyles and the HeG: Correspondence of Overall Structure?
In this section I look at a possible correspondence between the gang/crew
and phyle organization and the spatial structure of the HeG Gallery Com -
plex. For this review we need to look at the numbers of people per unit.
To summarize, the builders’ graffiti from Giza suggests a system in
which the royal house assigned a crew of two competing apr-gangs to some
area or part of the pyramid complex. Four or five phyles, always with the
same set of names, comprised an apr-gang. Only the first four phyles are
so far attested from the 4th Dynasty,168 so it is possible the imj-nfrt phyle
167Urk. I: 98–110; Strudwick 2005: 352–357, no. 256
168Roth 1991: 35–36, 142, 120, 202–203, 211, points out that the inscriptions
on shallow bowls or plates from the Djoser Step Pyramid register a 5th phyle,
with a hieratic sign, possibly a baboon, that might have been an Archaic
writing of imj-nfrt. And now look for the attestations of the five phyles in the
recently discovered Wadi el-Jarf papyri documents relating to the building of
the Khufu Pyramid, Tallet, personal communication. For the papyri see Tallet
and Marouard 2014, Tallet forcoming.
432 M. LEHNER
was not used until later.169 The phyles were composed of smaller groups
or divisions. In temple service texts later than Dynasty 4 each phyle
includes two divisions.170 There appear to have been at least four divisions
in each phyle of the Menkaure Temple.171 Many representations of the
cattle hobble, the zA-hieroglyph, feature ten loops, possibly signifying that
divisions numbered 10 individuals, as reflected in the Old Kingdom title,
“Overseer of Ten.” It is possible that this title meant “Overseer of One-
Tenth” of a gang, with 2 divisions per phyle times five phyle.172
The general picture is a numerical-size hierarchy of people in crews,
gangs, phyles, and divisions. For the 4th Dynasty, Ann Roth saw royal
work crews composed of two gangs of 4 or 5 phyles,each phyle with 4 or
more divisions. Obviously, large pyramids like those of Khufu and Khafre
might have required many crews.173
Vassil Dobrev recently suggested that rather than the phyles being a
subdivision of larger crews and apr-gangs, these gangs were, in effect,
temporary enlistments of the phyles.174 The idea is the apr-gangs were
temporary, whereas the four or five phyles could have been broader, more
permanent affiliations. In this case we might think of the phyles along the
lines of our college sororities and fra ternities to which we might belong
no matter what school, dormitory, or year we attended college. Phyles,
like the natural or artificial Greek “tribes”175 whence our translation of
the Egyptian zA derives, may have cut across family and lineage, or even
across regional boundaries. In traditional societies leaders have drawn
upon such non-kin associations and broad sodalities that crosscut
household, tribe and lineage to form special purpose groups that make
war, form expeditions, and carry out so-called “public works.”176 If the
phyles were the larger associations (along the lines of a fraternity), from
which work gangs were recruited, the apr-gangs are listed first, Dobrev
remarks, because they were com pounded with the name of a pharaoh,
169Verner 1991: 72.
170Posner-Kriéger, Verner, and Vymazalová 2006: 264–266 for the phyle
divisions in the Neferirkare and Raneferef temples.
171Roth 1991: 142.
172Roth 1991: 120–121.
173Roth 1991: 120, 210–211; Andrássy 2009a: 2–4; Verner 1991.
174Dobrev 2003: 30.
175Trail 1975.
176Harris and Johnson 2007:165–166. An issue to be explored further concerns
the unnamed phyles of the provinces, against the attestation of the five named
phyles (wr, sT, wADt, nDs, and imyt-nfr) only in the Memphite cemeteries, Roth
1991: 210–211.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 433
and so honorific transposition moves the gang name forward, whereas it
was actually the zA that has first place as the broader, more lasting
association.177 The nature of phyle membership is still not entirely
understood.178
For understanding the labor organization of building pyramids,
Dobrev pointed to the limitations of the Abusir Papyri, which account
for 200–250 people at most, organized into phyles for the memorial
service of a king.179 But we know that authorities did organize the
workforce for building the truly gigantic pyramids of the early Old
Kingdom by phyle and division. While the evidence shows a certain
development of the phyle system from the Early Dynastic through the
Old Kingdom,180 by the time of Menkaure and later phyles were widely
used in both royal and so-called “private” memorial foundations (pyramid
temples and tomb chapels).181
As for estimates of the numbers of people per labor unit, a full phyle
enlistment most probably numbered about forty persons.182 A key text
comes on a 4th Dynasty graffito on a limestone flake from “the debris of
mastaba G5110 in the Western Cemetery,” “therefore of uncertain
date.”183 Under the sign for “West” appear the signs for “sT-phyle.” Below
this a vertical line divides the words, wADt and sT, probably two division
names, followed underneath by the title, “Overseer of Ten” (imj-rA 10).
Under this title we find the names of two men, Per-neb and Iwfy, each
apparently an “Overseer of Ten.” Here a division, in what Verner took as
a 4th Dynasty context,184 would number 10.
177Dobrev 2003: 30.
178Roth 1991: 61–75 on the nature of phyle membership.
179Dobrev 2003: 31.
180Roth 1991: 197–216; Verner 1991: 72.
181Roth 1991: 119–143.
182See Verner 1991: 76 for the range of estimates of numbers in a phyle from
Reisner’s (1931: 276) 200 to 250 to Helck’s (1975: 129) 20 per phyle. All
estimators so far assume that a phyle is a separate discrete body of men specific
to a particular foundation or building project, as opposed to a wider sodality
or association whence authorities levied people for special purpose labor and
temple service. If the latter, any number of persons belonging to a given phyle
could be enlisted for a period of service. See now, Spalinger 2013: 65, 177–
178 who would like to see a phyle as numbering 30. I thank Miroslav Bárta
for this reference.
183Smith 1952: 126, fig. 8.
184Verner 1991: 75.
434 M. LEHNER
On the other hand, three of four limestone tablets from the Userkaf
Sun Temple at Abusir might give the numbers of persons in divisions as
22, 23, and 20 (tablet D gives 20 each for the two divisions nfr and rci).185
It is not clear if these numbers, which qualify a term, ʿ, written with the
sign of a human arm,186 give members of a division, which could include
overseers, but if these are division members the numbers are evidently not
constant in this early 5th Dynasty context. However, the numbers are close
to 20, and this abetted Posener-Kriéger’s conclusion that around, but not
exactly, 20 people made up the half-phyles in the late 5th Dynasty papyrus
archives of the Neferirkare temple.187 Yet another source, the Raneferef
pyramid temple archives, gives numbers of people serving per phyle that
are half or less those of the roughly contemporary Neferirkare archive.188
However, we cannot be certain that the total number of phyle members,
or the total number of members of a particular phyle assigned to one
institution, were on duty at any given time.
The number of labor units would not have stayed constant over the
course of a building project. Ann Roth pointed out that labor units could be
added, subtracted, and overlapped or not to increase or decrease the numbers:
If the size of a division remained constant, the number of workers
available at a given time could be reduced eight-fold by halving the
number of divisions, abandoning the overlapping rotation [of phyles],
and rotating the divisions as well as the phyles. If the organization of
two gangs was also abandoned, the reduction becomes sixteen fold.189
185Edel 1969; Verner 1991: 75–76.
186We might understand the term a, literally “arm, hand,” as persons, as in
English “hired hand,” but with mHti (“north”) or rsj (“south”) the term could
mean “area, section,” or “district.” Alone, the sign could also mean “piece” or
“length of fabric” (Hannig 2003: 247–251). Roth (1991: 133–143) disagrees
with reading this term as members of a phyle division, and took aas referring
to a unit of work. She also understood the imj-wrt on tablet B as a direction,
not a phyle, and rsj on tablet D as a direction, not a divison. Here again we
have less than complete clarity of whether we are dealing with worker or work
units, or directions. See note 105. Also, see Verner’s 1991: 449 comments on
Roth’s conclusion, drawn from these tablets, that phyles took over the function
of apr-gangs in assignments to parts of buildings. The sign of an arm, a,
followed by a number is used in the Abusir papyri for units of cloth distributed
to phyles (Posener-Kriéger, Verner and Vymazalová 2006: 225; pl.13A).
187Posener-Krieger 1976: 573; Posener-Kriéger, Verner, and Vymazalová 2006:
365.
188See Posener-Kriéger, Verner, and Vymazalová 2006: 367–368, for this differ -
ence and other irregularities for the model of a system of regular rotation in a
10-month cycle.
189Roth 1991: 143.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 435
The wrinkle presented by the low numbers per phyle, such as seven
in one instance in the Raneferef archive, is that we cannot conclude that
the numbers of a phyle or division remained constant.
Given these caveats, and for heuristics, if we accept for the large
pyramid-building projects of the 4th Dynasty that the “Overseer of Ten”
indicates the smallest division of ten people –– which is the most that can
efficiently work on an average-sized pyramid block, and if we assume at
least four divisions per phyle, we end up with a phyle of 40 persons, times
four or five phyles, results in 160 to 200 per gang and 320 to 400 per
crew. If we accept a very low estimate of around 2,000 total workers for
building the large 4th Dynasty pyramids,190 five or six such crews would
be needed (not counting quarrying and distant transport).
It is reasonable to ask if the great Gallery Complex we have mapped
across five hectares of our site reflects this 4th Dynasty labor organization
known from texts. The phylo-like modularity and combining form of the
gal leries, and the evidence that they functioned as barracks, now begs this
question.
The forty persons in the estimate of members of a phyle corresponds
to the number that could comfortably stretch out on either side of the
20-meter long front colonnade of Gallery III.4, as our team members
demonstrated during our 2002 season.191 Each side could accommodate
easily twenty people, the estimate for a half-phyle in the Neferirkare
temple. Together the two sides of Gallery III.4, separated formally by the
low stylobate-like wall in which were embedded the bases for the columns
of the colonnade, could easily accommodate 40 to 50 people. Perhaps
here in a gallery we see the architectural counterpart to a phyle, each side
a half phyle, or two divisions of 10.
We found eight galleries in each of Sets II and III to the west of the
Manor compound and Hypostyle Hall respectively (fig. 1). Each of
Gallery Sets II and III could have housed two apr-gangs at four phyles per
gang, or one complete crew. Just as a gallery served as the architectural
base of a phyle, we could see Gallery Sets II and III as the housing of a
complete crew. Perhaps this fits with the lack of evidence for the fifth,
imj-nfrt phyle in Dynasty 4.192 With modifications, we might hypothesize
each of the four blocks of galleries as the architecture of a crew.
190Lehner 1997: 224–225.
191Lehner 2002: 69–70, fig. 20
192Although we look to future publications of the Wadi el-Jarf Papyri for
attestations of all five phyles in the reign of Khufu; Tallet and Marouard 2014;
Tallet, personal communication.
436 M. LEHNER
As we excavate more of the Gallery Complex we can test our very
rough estimates of 1,600 to 2,000 occupants, based on 40 to 50 persons
per gallery. When we excavated Gallery III.3 in 2012, we found again the
low, linear molding, like a stylobate, divided the rather empty front
colonnade roughly down the middle. We found column bases embedded
within the stylobate. The colonnade was not as long as that of Gallery
III.4, excavated ten years earlier. But Gallery III.3 featured a square open
space or court between the colonnade and the rear, southern domicile,
where more people could have slept.193 We see enough signs of variability
in the galleries that we probably cannot assume a standard number of
persons per gallery, but we keep to this number for the sake of an estimate
at ground level. Below I revisit the estimate for the numbers of occupants.
Gallery Sets II and III show eight galleries west of a space given over
to the Manor compound and to the Hypostyle Hall complex (fig. 1). We
might think that nine of the galleries in Set IV possibly accommodated
people. The tenth and, certainly the eleventh gallery on the east of Set IV
were given over to baking and seem unsuitable for sleeping. Most of
Gallery Set I, which was 55 m long as opposed to 35 m like the southern
sets, was eroded away, leaving us the southwestern corner. We might
assume the eight western galleries of Set Ifunctioned in part as dormito -
ries, leaving the width of three galleries on the east given over to some
other pattern/function, and that the longer Set I galleries accommodated
55 persons. On these assumptions, we can revisit the estimate of people
under the barracks hypothesis:
Gallery Set I: 8×55 = 440
Gallery Set II: 8×40 = 320
Gallery Set III: 8×40 = 320
Gallery Set IV: 9×40 = 360
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Total 1,440
As Kemp observed194 this is still only a fraction of the labor required to
build the Giza pyramids (though it would suffice to build the later, smaller
pyramids). We have only part of the total HeG settlement, which con -
tinues farther east. Boreholes in the modern floodplain indicate other
settlement concentrations to the north and northeast. Also, if the galleries
featured a second loft-like level that would support people, or if an entire
gallery set featured one, continuous, terrace-like roof, the numbers who
193AERA 2012: 16–17.
194Kemp 2006: 189.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 437
could be accommodated increase.195 On the other hand, to the extent
that storage of materials took gallery space, the numbers of occupants
would have to decrease.
Yet, the impression is that the Gallery Complex, a substantial invest -
ment in mudbrick construction, was intended for something more than
common workers.196 And here we should note the idea that authorities
did not use the apr-gangs and phyles to organize the unqualified broad
masses of workers, if masses were required.197 Rather, special people
comprised these sodalities.
According to Verner, the members of the apr-gangs were not season -
ally employed, unlike an unqualified mass (“unqualifizierten Massen”)
who could be taken from the agricultural infrastructure during the flood
season. Recruitment of apr-gangs depended upon the scope and character
of the building project. Authority called upon the apr-gangs as needed,
especially for the procurement of building materials, which had to flow
without delay. Their use as specialized expeditionary crews is why phyle
names have been found on tools in far-flung places like Nubia and
Lebanon.198 The “Einsatz der Phylen” was also a call to service from the
broad zAw-associations for assignment to gangs working particular critical
parts of buildings, as shown in the stack-construction of relieving cham -
bers above Khufu’s burial chamber, the western Menkaure temple, or the
Userkaf Sun Temple.
These gang and crew assemblages carried the same or similar names
between different reigns, compounding epithets like “noblemen” (Spsw),
“friends” (cmrw), “acquaintances” (rxw), or “beloved ones” (mrw), with
the name of the reigning king.199 Andrássy concluded: “This kind of name
195Heindl forthcoming reconstructed a vaulted roof over each gallery. If the
builders filled in the springing of the vaults to create a continuous upper
terrace, as illustrated in Nolan and Heindl 2010, many could have slept on
roof.
196Heindl (forthcoming: 31) estimated it took 185,000 bricks to make Gallery
III.4; 1,182,080 for Gallery Set II; and 5,088,000 bricks for the whole Gallery
Complex.
197As just stated, 6 crews or 12 apr-gangs would, on the estimates cited, make up
a force of around 2,000, corresponding to a low estimate for the numbers need
to build the largest Giza Pyramids.
198Verner 1991: 76–77, citing Engelbach 1938: fig. 59; also Rowe 1936: fig. 36
and Rowe 1938: 393.
199Verner 2003: 450, n. 33. In this article Verner listed such crew or gang names
from the reign of Sahure through that of Niuserre.
438 M. LEHNER
rather points to elite troops of young recruits for whom a lasting service
has to be presumed than to ordinary workmen.”200
3.5. Meat and Elite: What Status the Consumers?
The idea that young recruits of the apr-gangs stayed in the galleries, rather
than “unqualified mass” of laborers, nuances the narrative of well-fed
workers. Egyptologists suggest these troops were chosen and therefore
somewhat “elite.”201 At the same time, if the apr-gangs dragged Men -
kaure’s multi-ton core blocks, we would certainly class them as workers.
Yet, as members of royal expeditionary forces, they may have enjoyed a
certain privileged status. We may see in the Gallery Complex the footprint
of an expeditionary force, one more formal and longer-term than those
expeditions that went abroad to procure valued raw materials. Or, here
in the HeG site, we see a home base of those expeditions. This sheds a
different light on the evidence for abundant meat provisions.
Meat allocations, whether “rations,” “pay,” or Arbeiterversorgung, are
known from ancient Egypt. From the Wadi Hammamat a stele of the
20th Dynasty reign of Ramses IV lists a daily allowance of 10 units of
bread, 3 jars of beer, 2 cakes and 2 units of meat (iwf ) for members of an
expedition.202 A stela of the the 19th Dynasty reign of Seti I at Gebel
Silsileh records as a daily allocation to stone workers 20 units wdnt bread,
3 bundles (xrS) of vegetables, and 1 unit of ASrt (grilled) meat, as well as
two sacks of grain per month.203 An inscription of Ramses II from
Manshiyet el-Sadr records that the king allocated to his stonemasons
bread, cakes, ointment and meat for all ten days of their monthly service,
as well as wheat, salt and beans.204 The residents of Deir el-Medina, the
builders of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, received fish, and
were assigned fishermen. From time to time they received meat with other
special allowances.205 And now we learn from the newly discovered Wadi
el-Jarf papyri that those who delivered fine limestone from the eastern
quarries to Khufu’s pyramid project were provisioned with roasted
200Andrássy 2009a: 3.
201A word used perhaps too facilely in archaeology and Egyptology: “An elite in
political and sociological theory is a small group of people whop control a
disproportionate amount of wealth or political power,” http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Elite, Dec. 2, 2013.
202Helck 1975c: 375; Goyon 1957: 103–106, no. 89.
203Helck 1975c: 375–376; Sander-Hansen 1933: 3.
204Helck 1975c: 375–376; Hamada 1938: 217ff.
205Helck 1975c: 376.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 439
meat,206 among other provisions from various areas, including the
Delta.207
Loprieno cites as an example of obligatory corvée labor what he called
“the first dated graffito at Wadi Hammamat,” by a man named Djati on
an expedition for an unknown king, perhaps near the end of the Old
Kingdom. The royal house provisioned this expedition with live animals,
apparently for meat.
Mission carried out by the eldest son of the king, the treasurer of the
god, the general of the expedition (mSʿ, “army”), Djati, known as
Kanofer, who had care of his men on the day of battle, who knew
how to foresee the coming of the day of obligatory recruitment.208 I
distinguished myself among the multitude, and I carried out this task
for Imhotep, with 1,000 men of the royal palace, 100 men of the
necropolis, 1,200 pioneers, and 50 engineers. His Majesty ordered all
these people to come from the Residence, and I organized this task in
exchange for provisions of barley of all kinds, while his Majesty placed
at my disposal 50 oxen and 200 goats for the daily victuals.209
While Loprieno quoted the passage as an example of corvée, Goelet, in
his study of the Old Kingdom palace, cites this inscription as evidence
that, “all the men came from the xnw (Residence) and were probably
considered to be attached to this place.”210 The numbers amount to an
ox and a dozen goats for every forty-seven people. However, the text does
specify the number of days. Expedition members must have herded 50
oxen plus 200 goats into the Wadi Hammamat, exemplifying that: “The
use of the living animal as a meat locker solves the storage problem for
206Tallet, personal communication.
207Tallet and Marouard 2014: 8.
208Loprieno reads as “obligatory recruitment” sTp od(w) Hwi m nDwt-rA (Urk. I
149.2–3); sTp, “recruitment” (Hannig 2003: 1269); od,“building,” “building
work” (Hannig 2003: 1342) or odw (“mason”); Hwi (literally “to beat”), and
m nDwt-rA, “counsel” (Hannig 2003: 685).
209Loprieno 1990: 192; Urk. I (= Sethe 1933), 148.16–149.10. John Nolan
pointed out to me that Goelet 1982: 26–27 translates: “I performed this work
of Imhotep with: 1,000 men of the pr-aA, 100 quarrymen, 1,200 workers (?)
50 bwt(?)-workers. His Majesty caused that these numerous troops should
come from the Xnw …” I thank John Nolan for this reference. The term bwt
(Loprieno’s “engineers”), possibly with a determinative of a casting mold (or
a ladel?) for molten metal, might refer to metal workers or blacksmiths, Jones
2000: 413, no. 1523.
210Goelet 1982: 27.
440 M. LEHNER
this otherwise highly perishable animal product (meat), making meat a
suitable commodity for regulated distribution.”211
Throughout his publications, Moreno García portrays an Old King -
dom landscape of state-supported and state-supporting special-purpose
settlements (grgt), household estates (pr), control towers (swnw),
production centers (pr Snaw), and, above all, plantations (Hwwt) and great
plantations (Hwwt aAt).212 A Hwt, also called an estate or domain,213 was
“a kind of royal farm, warehouse, processing and administrative center
and defensive building,”214 or a center similar to an ezba of more recent
times. Among other functions, one purpose was to furnish cattle to the
royal center, as we have already suggested for Kom el-Hisn in Lower
Egyptian Nome 3, possibly the Hwt jHjt, “Estate of the Cattle.”
Moreno García points to an emphasis of the stewards of Upper Egypt
and nomarchs in the late Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom on raising
and increasing cattle herds and filling stables with birthed calves for local
wealth and prestige and for meeting the fiscal needs of the royal house.215
He discusses evidence for a number of Hwwt, estates or “plantations,”
strategically located in the Edfu region to supply expeditions passing on
the river and through nearby wadis to the Red Sea.216 A man named Qar,
who became nomarch and the head of Upper Egypt in the 6th Dynasty,
boasted in his tomb biography that the bulls of this nome were more
numerous than the bulls in the stable of the head of all Upper Egypt.
Who were the meat-eaters on these expeditions? Titles from a number
of tombs from the early 5th Dynasty relate to the supervision and control
of troops of young men assembled into armies and expeditionary forces.
A man named Kaaper recorded in his tomb at Abusir217 a long list of
211Zeder 1991: 34.
212Moreno García 1996; 1997; 1998; 1999; 2010; 2013.
213Jacquet-Gordon 1962.
214Moreno García 2013: 88.
215Moreno García 1998; although see Eyre’s 2004: 183 n. 167 objection to
Moreno García’s claim that meeting fiscal needs of the state included corvée
to such an extent that it led to crisis in the late Old Kingdom.
216Moreno García 1998: 152.
217The information on this Kaaper comes to us from relief scenes and texts from
his tomb, which he had built in the 5th Dynasty in south Abusir. Fischer
(1959) wrote about this man’s career from relief fragments in museums; the
location of the tomb, thought to be Saqqara, was unknown. Members of the
Saqqara Inspectorate of the Ministry of Antiquities located the tomb at south
Abusir in 1989. The Czech team excavated and surveyed the tomb in 1991.
Miroslav Bárta (2001: 143–191) published it in Abusir V.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 441
titles, many of which relate to expeditions. He rose, apparently, from the
lowest and most basic title, nfr, “Recruit” or in this case, “Cadet,”218 to
the highest, “Overseer of All Works of the King.”219 In between, his
sequence of twenty-six titles includes others related to the organization of
labor, including imy-r mS a, “Overseer of the Army” or “Overseer of the
Expedition,”220 and sS mS a, “Scribe of the Army,” a title concerned with
foreign lands, expeditions, and works.
In regards to considerations of meat allocations for “elite” gangs of
workers and expedition members, Kaaper’s title sequence begins with
“Herdsman of the Dappled Cattle” and “Scribe of the Pasture Lands of
the Dappled Cattle.”221 With due consideration that the second of these
titles makes Kaaper already a scribe, we might ask: is it possible that in
his youth Kaaper worked as a herdsmen and that his titles reflect a practice
of allocating cattle to royal military/expeditionary forces? Kaaper’s father
may have been a man named ʿIy who was “Overseer of Royal Works,”
and whose father, in turn, may have been “Overseer of the Army,” Tjenti.
Kaaper’s titles may then reflect a tradition of provisioning cattle to labor
organized for military campaigns, expeditions and royal building
projects.222
Scenes in Sahure’s upper temple show a special class of young men,
labeled xntjw-S, bringing cattle and fowl, sources of meat.223 The xntjw-
S (literally “those Foremost of the Basin”) are also labeled, Smsw pr aA,
“Retainers-” or “Followers of the Great House,” that is, the palace. These
young troops (nfrw)formed an elite guard for the palace. We meet them
again in scenes of expeditions and the royal hunt.
218Fischer 1959: 259.
219Strudwick 1985: 145, no. 139.
220Literally “of a multitude;” or per Spalinger 2013: 466, of a “host.”
221Fischer 1959a: 257–258. Fischer’s sequence relies to some extent on his
reconstruction of the west wall of Kaaper’s chapel from loose blocks and
photographs. Bárta (2001: 173–177, fig. 4.24 followed Fischer’s recon -
struction, with some caveats.
222Fischer 1959a: 255; see Bárta’s (2001: 184; 1999: 17–20) reservations on
Kaaper’s filiations in light of features that may indicate Tjenti’s tomb (Saqqara
Tomb B1) dates to the late 5th Dynasty. Strudwick (1985: 145, no. 139) sees
the filiation between Kaaper and Iy as particularly problematic. He dates Iy
to the second half of the 5th Dynasty.
223Borchardt 1913, pl. 55. The last part of the term, xntjw-S, the Splus the
mountain determinative, show in one of six fragments that Borchardt (1913,
pl. 55) displays with other fragments of a scene of leading cattle and fowl.
442 M. LEHNER
As well as being provisioned with meat, expeditions and raids into
foreign countries served also to procure cattle, sheep and goats. So royal
inscriptions attest, if we can take these as historical, although the numbers
are most probably exaggerated. The Palermo Stone annals relate for one
year (PS r.VI.2) in the reign of Sneferu, the import of 7,000 captives and
200,000 sheep and goats. The same entry mentions building some kind
of great wall:
… building a 100-cubit “Adoring the Two Lands” boat and 60 “six -
teener” royal boats (of) cedar (mr(w)); smiting Nubia, bringing (in
tribute) 7,000 male and female live captives (sḳr(w) anx), 200,000
sheep and goats; building of the wall of the south and north-land
(called) “The Mansions of Sneferu”; bringing 40 ships laden? (with)
pine-wood (aS)…224
We do not know if the captive people and animals were connected to the
mentioned building operations, but the juxtaposition of the events
suggests so. Helck believed the royal house settled these captives on the
newly created estates and cattle ranches mentioned in the next year-register
(PS r. VI.3), the seventh year of counting:225
… creating 35 estates with people? (and) 122 cattle-farms; building a
100 cubit “Adoring of the Two Lands” boat (of) pine, and two 100-
cubits boats (of) cedar; seventh occasion of the census …226
Then there is the well-known scene in the Sahure upper pyramid temple
of the accounting goddess Seshat, “Foremost of the House of the Book
Roll,” “writing down the number of captives of all the foreign lands.”
Seshat faces subjugated Libyan tribesmen. Lower registers show, and
specify numbers for cattle (123,440), donkeys (223,400), goats (223,413),
and sheep (243,688).227 These numbers are most probably far too large
even if representing the entire holdings of the Libyan tribes. In the bottom
register, the wife and children of a Libyan ruler raise a hand to beg for
mercy. This composition was once part of a larger scene; to the left, the
king slayed the Libyan chief. As with all such scenes in the pyramid
temples, this was iconic.228
224Wilkinson 2000: 141.
225Helck 1974.
226Wilkinson 2000: 143.
227Borchardt 1913, 13, Bl. 1; Strudwick 2005: 84, no. 10; Roccati 1982: 58–60.
228That such scenes were repeated on pyramid temples as ritual, not (only)
historical signifiers, is shown by the fact that more than two hundred years
later, Pepi II’s artists repeated the scene of king slaying the Libyan chieftain as
his wife and son look on, labeled with the same names. Stadelmann (1985:
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 443
The juxtaposition in compressed year compartments of the Palermo
Stone Annals of events relating to Levantine wood and ships and the cap -
ture of cattle and people bears a certain resemblance to the association of
high numbers of cattle, evidence of Levantine imports and wood, and the
compressed modular spaces of the Gallery Complex on the HeG site. It
is also coincident with Sahure’s scene of Seshat and cattle accounting that
we find texts on seal impressions invoking Seshat, “Foremost of the House
of the Book Roll” –– the very title of Seshat title in the Sahure scene, in
the same deposit that yielded an abundance of cattle bone in Pottery Mound
in the Western Town of the HeG (fig. 1). People discarded this waste from
their occupation of House I, which served as scribal workshop. Here, meat
consumption 229 and scribal activity came together.230
3.6. Who Were the Hunters?
When we think about presence of bones of hunted fauna on the HeG
site, especially from the largest mammal in the Egyptian Nile Valley, the
hippopotamus, we should consider that hunters are listed among other
specialists in expeditions and estates (Hwwt).
An inscription recording an expedition of 18,660 persons into the
Wadi Hammamat during the 38th year of the 12th Dynasty king
Senwosret I lists 30 hunters as one of thirteen groups of skilled and un -
skilled workers, along with 60 sandal makers, 100 stone cutters, 100
quarrymen, 200 rowers, 1,000 guardsmen (300 Theban naval soldiers and
700 infantrymen), soldiers, millers, brewers and bakers, and but lers.231 A
whole bureaucracy marched along, comprised of officials also divided into
thirteen groups, including seal bearers and 20 mayors (hAtyw-a) of towns
“presumably because it was their responsibility to supply most of the
199) doubts that this takes away from the historicity of the Sahure relief, were
it the prototype. Because they are so stereotypical, Vachala (1991: 96, n. 22 for
refs.) rejects such scenes from royal temples for establishing historical events.
229Note that only 50 m to the south, in the area we designated “Standing Wall
Island” (SWI), we found a large enclosure that appears to have been a corral,
with chambers that might have served as abattoirs (Redding 2011). Between
SWI and the Western Town, the depression, Lagoon 1, might remain from a
put-in bay for the delivery of cattle on hoof or by boat (fig. 1). Carbohydrates
went to the north into the court of large silos in the Royal Administration
Building (RAB), protein (on hoof) went to the south into the SWI corral.
Scribes in the Western Town, at the head of the bay, may have accounted
both kinds of delivery.
230Nolan 2010: 86–89, Seal 2, 98–100, Seal 5; Redding 2010: 229–240.
231Goyon 1957: 17–20, 81–85, no. 61; Mueller 1975: 256.
444 M. LEHNER
drafted or conscripted labour.”232 A critical point for questions of status
and rations, compensation, or provisioning in the Middle Kingdom
expeditions is that quantities differed according to specialty and rank.
Stonecutters were given more than common laborers, who received 10
bread units and one-third of a unit of beer. Hunters ranked with stone -
cutters and quarrymen and received 15 bread loaves and one-half a unit
of beer, whereas a craftsman got 20 loaves and one-half a unit of beer.233
We might see this expedition as a Middle Kingdom version of the HeG
site on the move.
The Gebelein Papyri list hunters as a class of specialists among some
300 people from two villages (determined with the niwt “town” sign) that
comprised an estate near the site of Gebelein in Upper Egypt.234 These
documents date possibly to the reign of Menkaure,235 that is, the exact
period of our main exposure of the HeG site and of the apr-gang and phyle
graffiti in the unfinished Menkaure Pyramid Temple. The papyri list
personnel in categories, like a stationery version of the Senwosret I expe -
di tion, or perhaps authorities registered people from these two villages for
an expedition or labor mobilization away from home.236 The fact that in
one list (Roll IV) they are sorted by locality reminds us of the graffiti or
control notes from the Middle Kingdom pyramid complexes.
It is remarkable that a class of specialized hunters, comprising “un
nombre assez important,” feature among other specialists in this small
number of people from two provincial villages at this early period.
Posener-Kriéger notes that the accounted people must have been of
modest or low status. The titles show several of the same occupations we
see in painted scenes carved in relief on the chapel walls of tombs of large
estate holders: bakers, brewers, craftsmen, boat makers, sailors and rowers,
masons, metal workers, stockmen, grain measurers, a “sealer of the gran -
ary,” as well as the hunters and two “nomads” (Hrj-S).237 These are the
basic specialists we would find in any large farm, ranch, or plantation,
here, in an Old Kingdom estate. Some scribes are also included, as well
as employees of the archive and the spouses, children and parents who
generally go unnamed.238
232Kemp 2006: 181.
233Mueller 1975: 251 n. 9, 253, 256.
234What we could call an estate, or domain, is here termed a pr Dt (literally,
“house of eternity”). This term is used for a household estate as opposed to a Hwt.
235Posener-Kriéger 1975: 216–217.
236Posener-Kriéger 1975: 212.
237Hannig 2003: 874.
238Posener-Kriéger 1975: 219.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 445
Roll Iof the Gebelein Papryi lists a group of persons with the title
nfrw.239 This is the basic, early title, “Cadet” or “Recruit,” that Kaaper
held, probably long before he rose to become “Scribe of the King’s Army”
and “Overseer of All Works of the King” (see section 3.5). The same term,
nfrw, could be used for the “elite troops of young recruits” that Andrássy
sees as making up the apr-gangs and phyles in the Menkaure graffiti.240
On the other hand, Eyre stated that nfrw were “typically young men of
low status engaged on large projects.” They were “probably levies of a
certain age, called up for mass labour.”241 The nfrw, “recruits”, and titles
reflecting the direction of nfrw, figure prominently in the titles concerned
with the organization of both military and building forces over the long-
term of the Old Kingdom.242
Nfrw served on land expeditions to very distant mines and quarries,
on the royal hunt, and on ships and boats.243 The title, “Overseer of a
‘Detachment’ (or ‘Expedition’) of Recruits” is widely attested in the Old
Kingdom.244 An expedition to Hatnub was comprised of 1,600 nfrw in
three roughly equal groups from three different places.245 The nfrw could
form army troops, serving, in local militia,246 under command of local
notables, which we may take as attested by HoA (“ruler,” “chief”) signs
above the village lists in the Gebelein, or nfrw could be conscripted for
military, expeditionary, or building service for the royal house.
It is such young troops of estates who hunted the largest animal of
the ancient Egyptian Nile Valley. The inhabitants of HeG hunted, or
interacted with those who hunted hippopotami, which inhabited the river
and its banks along with fish, waterfowl, and crocodiles.247 Given the wide
spatial distribution of hippo parts from our excavations of the Giza
239Related to the word, nfr, generally, “good, beautiful, perfect,” but also possibly
nfryt “end, bottom,” and nfrw, “ground level, base” (Faulkner 131–132:
1962/1996; Hannig 2003: 624–628).
240Andrassy 2009a: 3, and see Fischer 1960: 5 and Jones 2000: 705–706, no.
2575 for the “Director of the apr-gangs of Young Recruits.”
241Eyre 1987a: 19.
242Faulkner 1953: 34–35.
243Fischer 1959a: 260–261, n. 65; Fischer 1960.
244Jones 2000: 142–143, no. 551, 552.
245Anthes 1928, Gr. 6; Eyre 1987: 19.
246Faulkner 1953: 35–36.
247Linseele and Van Neer 2009: 49. Hippos may have remained more abundant
for a longer time in the quiet waters of the marshy Delta, the preferred hippo
niche. The hippo was reportedly last seen in Upper Egypt in the 20th century
(Krzyszkowska 1990: 20, citing Sidney 1965: 99; Manlius 2000: 62, fig. 1).
446 M. LEHNER
settlements –– both the Heit el-Ghurab and Khentkawes Town sites, it is
highly unlikely that all these elements came from one individual. The
diversity of parts suggests that whole animals were brought to the site.
Scenes from the tombs of officials and estate owners depict coteries
of young men as the estate’s harpooners.248 Altenmüller suggested it was
the job of such harpooners to secure the work and passage through the
papyrus thickets of fishermen and cattle ranchers belonging to the es -
tate.249 He emphasized the occurrence of scenes of hippo harpooners in
association with cattle fording water. Troops of young men formed a kind
of vanguard clearing the way of hippos for estate workers, herders, and
for the estate owner in marginal wet zones and on the edges of papyrus
thickets.250
A scene in the entrance vestibule of the upper pyramid temple of Pepi
II showed the king larger than life harpooning a hippopotamus while
standing on a stylized reed boat, his right hand raised and gripping the
end of a long harpoon, his left hand grasping the end of double ropes
sunk in the yawning mouth of a wounded hippopotamus, who turns men -
ac ingly toward the king in a threatening roar.251 The scene is iconic,
repeated in its basic elements at least since the First Dynasty, and through -
out Pharaonic history.252 As a Pharaonic version of St. George spearing
the dragon, the hippo hunt is only one reflection of the theme, ever-
repeated in ancient Egyptian art, monarchical order over chaos.253 In the
Pepi II scene the king is the corporeal composite of his troops, or, hero-
248Harpur 1987: 355–67, feature 7, fig. 189.
249Altenmüller 1989: 15–16.
250Behrmann (1995:15–16) objected that Altenmüller’s idea of a vanguard
clearing the way of hippos for fording cattle and estate workers misunderstands
the behavior and disposition of hippopotami, which are not predators and
whose instinct would be to flee at the approach of noisy cattle and humans
on boats. This may be true to some extent, but Lydekker (1902: 1037–1038)
relates anecdotes of surprised hippos attacking boats and seizing cattle in their
gaping jaws.
251Jéquier 1940: 20–22, pl. 32, pls. 33–35.
252Behrmann 1989; 1995; 1996.
253Other kings may have included the hippopotamus harpooning scenes in their
pyramid temples. Fragments hint of such a scene in the pyramid temple of
Userkaf at Saqqara (Labrousse and Lauer 2000: 110–111, fig. 224; Harpur
1987: 184–185). Borchardt (1913: 29–30, 180, pls. 15–16) assigned a scene
of hippopotami to the left side of the portico entrance to the Valley Temple
of the Sahure pyramid complex, and saw in small fragments, evidence of a
harpooning scene.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 447
like, singly performs the feat of many. But here, too, the scenes probably
signify an apotropaic function, order against chaos.254
Rainer Stadelmann suggested that the Egyptians might have actually
enacted the archetype, that is, performed the age-old ritual of harpooning
the hippo with a real, live animal in a canal or basin at the base of the
pyramid complex.255 The Pepi II hippo-harpooning scene includes a
unique addition to the more standard aspects of the composition. Behind
the king, six men (in pairs, two abreast) pull what seems to be a live hippo
tied firmly to a sled. Jéquier refers to this as a second hippo,256 but we
can interpret this as an event prior to the thrust of the royal harpoon: the
king’s troops first arrive with the same hippo, captured and brought to
the site for the ritual enactment.
It may seem far-fetched that young men of the royal entourage would
capture a hippo, deliver it to the pyramid zone and hold it for a
performance (wherein, surely, they, not the king himself, delivered the
killing blows, his thrusting arm simply a manifestation of his troops). But
Egyptologists, archaeologists, art historians, and zoologists who have
looked at rock art, tomb scenes, images on artifacts and pottery, and
skeletal remains of animals in Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom contexts
see compelling evidence that in these times and in later periods Egyptians
did indeed capture and contain wild animals. In fact, most of the
commentators who have remarked on the evidence of bones, tomb and
temple images, and texts believe that the Egyptians hunted, captured,
transported, and kept wild animals of both the swamp and desert.
… the study of the so-called decorations in the Egyptian tombs and
temples of the Pyramid Ages…led to a highly surprising result…In
ancient Egypt there was a complex system of ‘gathering’, hunting,
transporting and keeping desert animals, establishing an economic
section of its own alongside other important ones, i.e. a swamp-
economy, cattle breeding and agriculture.257
Hunting and capturing wild animals, which first peaked in the Old
Kingdom, during the 5th and 6th dynasties,258 was a team effort.259 Scenes,
myths and ethnographic accounts show that hippopotamus hunting was
254Staehelin 1978.
255Stadelmann 1985: 198.
256Jéquier 1940: 21.
257Herb and Föster 2009: 17–18.
258Linseele and Van Neer 2009: 47–48; citing Boessneck 1953: 28; 1988: 35.
259Säve-Söderbergh 1953: 12.
448 M. LEHNER
a group activity, involving teams or troops (men of the estate, gods, royal
followers). In the Pepi II hippopotamus scene the six men who pull the
sled to which the recumbent hippo is firmly lashed must represent the
royal troops of the moment. Many more figures of the royal entourage
likely filled the empty spaces. Next to the king’s forward striding leg
appears the label m ctp zA, “in the S
´tp-zA.” To reiterate, the compound ctp
zA, means literally “to select-” or “to choose a protection” or to choose a
phyle, zA.260 In some uses we could see the body of men so formed as a
most elite or chosen phyle, selected to escort or accompany the king.
In the Old Kingdom ctp zA is related closely to the palace while not
yet written with the pr-sign, the building or house determinative. In times
later than the Old Kingdom, ctp zA became one of the five major terms
for the palace. As a verbal noun the term can mean “escort,” “body guard,”
making it a synonym with Smc, “to follow.”261 Verbs in clauses containing
m ctp zA have to do with decision-making processes where the subject is
often craftwork, building or construction. S
´tp-zA is then used as a context
in which such decisions are made in consultation.262
Goelet quotes from the famous biography of the 6th Dynasty official,
Weni: “I acted so that his majesty praised me, by performing ctp-zA (m irt
ctp-zA), in preparing (irt: lit. “making”) the way of the king, and
performing (irt) attendance (ahaw).”263 Goelet concludes that Weni’s
expressions reflect watching, attending and escorting for the king and
members of the king’s household. Altogether, attestations of S
´tp-zA as
verbal expressions in non-religious texts indicate “a type of protection
service offered to a human (indirect) object who was in transit … the
notion of escorting or acting as a body-guard.”264 In the Pepi II scene,
appears also the term, writ large, Per Weru, literally “house of the Great
Ones,” indicating something like an honor guard according to Posener-
Kriéger.265 Per Weru juxtaposed with the label m ctp-zA shows that the
Per Weru comprised part of the ctp-zA; “the people closest to the king
were treated as a collective body.”266
260Goelet 1982: 444, n. 4, 445–451.
261Goelet 1986: 85–86.
262Goelet 1986: 90. See above, section 3.4, the association of the hmwtt hAst,
“foreign craftsmen” with the ctp zA. Andrassy 2009a: 5, fig. 4.
263Goelet 1982:446–448; 1986: 87.
264Goelet 1982: 450; 1986: 88.
265Posener-Kriéger 1976: 498.
266Goelet 1982: 459.
LABOR AND THE PYRAMIDS: HEIT EL-GHURAB 449
In addition to high-status equerries, the Setep-Za appears to have
included people of lesser rank and file, as shown in the use of the term as
a label for men guarding and serving in team-based delivery of animals
and material for prominent, so-called “private” individuals, and for the
hunting and capture of wild animals. We find this expression of ctp-zA in
the tomb chapel of a Vizier named Ptah-hotep at Saqqara, much visited
by modern tourists. A procession delivers the contributions of huntsmen,
including a caged lion and leopard, gazelles, oryx, ibex, hedgehogs and
hares.267 Standing at the head of a register of men leading antelopes,
gazelles, and other livestock, a man named Ptah-nefer-khu is labeled
“Foremost of Those in the Setep-Za,” (HAty imyw ctp-zA), as well as
“Director of Those Who are in the Following” (xrp imyw Smaw), and
“Overseer of Those Who Are in the Crews” (imy-rA imyw isw). Goelet
concludes: “The term ctp-zA thus effectively stands in parallel with the
words Smcw ‘following’, and isw, ‘crews’,”268 and serves as a virtual
synonym for Smc, “to follow.” It is the crews of the ctp-zA, or a ctp-zA –– a
select enlistment, a set of recruits –– who hunt and deliver the exotic
animals of the desert economy for the estate of Ptah-hotep,269
This example from the tomb of Vizier Ptah-hotep associates the term
ctp-zA with troops, crews, and a suite of men who capture and deliver wild
animals, a practice so abundantly represented in tomb chapels of the
pyramid age that Herb and Förster conclude it amounted to a desert- and
swamp-economy, alongside cattle breeding and agriculture.270
In the left upper register of the Ptah-hotep scene, young men wrestle,
and on the right six naked males with the side locks of youth march
behind another youth with his hand tied behind his back,