Kemet Beyond the Pyramids · Episode 3

The Captain's Diary

The oldest written papyri ever found are not a hymn or a king's boast. They are a work log.

Ashraf Osman · اقرأ بالعربية

In March 2013, a French and Egyptian team was digging at Wadi al-Jarf, a forgotten harbour on the Red Sea coast. Inland from the shore, a row of storage galleries had been cut into the limestone hills. Long ago, someone had sealed them with heavy blocks.

Wedged between those blocks were rolls and fragments of papyrus. When archaeologist Pierre Tallet and his colleagues read them, they found the name of a man called Merer, and a place called Akhet-Khufu: "Horizon of Khufu." That was the Great Pyramid's original name.^[1]

For the first time, we could read the words of someone who helped build it.

Who was Merer?

Merer was not a king, a priest or an architect. His title was inspector, a middle-ranking officer in charge of a crew of boatmen. He kept a day-by-day record of their work, set out in columns like a table: one block of entries for each day of the month.^[2]

The best-preserved pages cover a few months in the 27th year of Khufu's reign, around 2560 BCE. The pyramid was nearly finished. What remained was the casing: the fine white limestone that once covered it in a smooth, shining skin.^[3]

A week on the river

The white limestone came from the quarries at Tura, on the east bank of the Nile, south-east of Giza. Merer's job was to bring it over. The log repeats the same rhythm, trip after trip.

1. LoadBlocks are loaded at the Tura quarries
2. SailOvernight stop at She-Khufu, "the Lake of Khufu"
3. DeliverBlocks reach the harbour at Akhet-Khufu
4. ReturnEmpty boats sail back south to Tura

The route as recorded in Papyrus Jarf A and B; after Tallet.^[1]

A few lines, in translation:

A crew could make two or three such trips in ten days, about thirty blocks each time, each block weighing two to three tonnes.^[2]

Water all the way to the building site

Merer worked from July to November, the season when the Nile flooded the valley. The flood was not an obstacle. It was the road.

The log describes artificial basins and channels at Giza that let the boats sail almost to the foot of the plateau. Their names survive in Merer's handwriting: the "Lake of Khufu," and the harbour at its mouth, "Ro-She Khufu."^[3]

The Great Pyramid was not only built on land. It was supplied by water, one boatload at a time.

The man in charge

The log also names Merer's superior: "the noble Ankh-haf, director of Ro-She Khufu."^[3] Ankhhaf was Khufu's half-brother, and his finely painted limestone bust, found in his tomb at Giza, is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.^[4] In Merer's pages we meet him not as a statue, but as the man whose harbour the boats were sailing into.

Paid, fed and counted

Other papyri from the same find are accounts. They record the rations given to the crews: grain, bread, beer and other food, measured according to each man's rank.^[3] These are the records of an organised, paid workforce. They fit what archaeologists have found in the workers' town at Giza, and they leave no room for the old picture of slaves driven by whips.

Why on the Red Sea?

If Merer worked at Giza, why were his papers found nearly 120 kilometres south of Suez?^[5] Crews like his moved wherever the king needed them. Wadi al-Jarf was a royal harbour, the starting point for expeditions across the Red Sea to the copper mines of Sinai. Boats were stored in its galleries between voyages. When the harbour was abandoned at the end of Khufu's reign, the papyri were left behind with the sealed galleries.^[1]

From the harbour to the museum

• ~2560 BCEMerer's crew carries casing stone to Giza.
• 1832Traveller J. G. Wilkinson records ruins at Wadi al-Jarf.
• 2011A joint Egyptian–French mission begins systematic excavation.
• March 2013The papyri are found between the blocks sealing the galleries.
• July 2016Pages of the log are shown for the first time, at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.^[6]

Merer never mentions ramps, levers or how the blocks were raised. He was not writing for us. He was writing so that someone could check his work: where his boats were, what they carried, and when.

That is exactly why his diary matters. The great inscriptions tell us what kings wanted remembered. Merer's columns tell us what actually happened on an ordinary working day on the Nile.

Ashraf Osman writes about ancient Egypt for everyone who loves it, starting with children and young adults. His books for young readers tell Egyptian history from a human point of view, so readers live the experience instead of memorising dates. This is episode 3 of Kemet Beyond the Pyramids.