Robert Cioffi’s LRB review (8 May 2025; archived) of The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner describes the excavations at Wadi al-Jarf:
Wadi el-Jarf lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the port is hardly visible: deep galleries carved out of limestone bluffs, the low walls of a few comb-like structures, a sandy beach, the rocky remnants of an ancient jetty. But on 12 March 2013, a team of French and Egyptian archaeologists led by Pierre Tallet discovered six fragments of papyrus in a depression near the limestone cliffs five kilometres from the shore. Hundreds of thousands of texts written on papyrus have been discovered in Egypt – ritual and religious instructions for the afterlife, works of literature, bills, contracts, tax receipts, lawsuits and orders for grain – but none as old as these. Over the next month, Tallet’s team uncovered more than a thousand fragments of papyrus. They had found, almost by accident, a first-hand account of the men who built the Great Pyramid of Giza. […]
The most enduring mystery of the pyramids is the fact of their existence. There has been serious scholarly disagreement over the number of workers, their status and how they went about their monumental task. Herodotus, who stands roughly equidistant between Khufu’s time and ours, writes that Khufu ‘drove [the Egyptians] into complete misery’, with teams of a hundred thousand men compelled to haul stones for three months at a time. As Herodotus has it, workers first built a set of steps and then used levers to fill in the gaps and produce the pyramid’s smooth sides. Four hundred years later, Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who wrote in Greek, proposed that the stones were moved on earthen ramps, so that the pyramid seemed ‘not the slow labour of humanity, but a sudden creation of some god, set down in the surrounding sand’. The whole project, Diodorus and Herodotus agree, took twenty years. Archaeologists have found evidence – ranging from the remains of ramps to modern trials with levers and ropes – for techniques similar to those they describe, but both accounts, written two thousand years after the fact, leave much to be desired.
In The Red Sea Scrolls, Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner, an American archaeologist who has worked extensively on Giza, don’t pass judgment on Herodotus and Diodorus, at least directly. They can’t explain all the mysterious cavities of the Great Pyramid, nor can they provide a new account of the way its gargantuan blocks were moved into position. But what they can reveal is perhaps more consequential. The papyri of Wadi el-Jarf, written between 2607 and 2605 ʙᴄᴇ, specify who worked on the pyramid, how they were compensated and what they did each day. Tallet and Lehner also trace the story of the papyri’s journey from the Nile Valley and the Giza plateau to the Red Sea coast, and describe the painstaking process by which they were excavated, studied and pieced back together.
The Red Sea Scrolls comprise at least seven logbooks as well as additional economic accounts. The logs alone total more than five metres of continuous text. They record in extraordinary detail the movements and labours of 160 of Khufu’s workers, and provide information on everything from the delivery of food to the procurement of tools. Although it remains an open question why the papyri were deposited at an intermittently used port on the Red Sea, it is possible that they were intended to become part of – or form the basis for – an official archive.
The star of the Red Sea Scrolls is undoubtedly a man called Merer, a mid-level official or inspector who oversaw a team of forty men transporting limestone for Giza on a ship named The Uraeus of Khufu Is Its Prow (a uraeus was the figure of a sacred serpent, symbolising royal authority). For at least four months of the 26th year of Khufu’s reign, Merer dipped his reed pen in ink and described the activities of his team in a careful and precise hand. We first meet him in the vicinity of Giza:
[Day 25] [Inspector Merer spends the day with his team [h]au[ling] st[ones in Tura South]; spends the night at Tura South. [Day 26]: Inspector Merer casts off with his team from Tura [South], loaded with stone, for Akhet Khufu; spends the night at She Khufu; Day 27: Sets sail from She Khufu, sails towards Akhet Khufu, loaded with stone, spends the night at Akhet Khufu. Day 28: Casts off from Akhet Khufu in the morning; sails upriver [towards] Tura South. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day with his team hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night in Tura South.
Merer rarely deviates from this structure: sometimes he takes a delivery of bread; sometimes he gets instructions from a senior official; once he is delayed. He never preens or complains, and – maddeningly – he never describes what it was like to see a great pyramid, inhuman in its scale, rising from the Giza plateau. Tallet and Lehner speculate that he would have found it unnecessary to describe the construction for his contemporary audience. Merer’s text is more like a timesheet or a ship’s log than a memoir. He may have felt wonder, but was hardly compelled to write it down. […]
Besides Merer and Dedi, we meet many others in the Red Sea Scrolls: Ideru, ‘the director of six’, who sails to Heliopolis for food and returns with forty sacks of grain; Hesi, ‘the director of ten’; and, most intriguing of all, Ankh-haf, a close relative of Khufu, who held the title ‘director of Ro-She Khufu’. Ankh-haf has long been known to experts from the astonishing bust discovered in his grand, bench-shaped tomb in the early 20th century. He described himself as ‘overseer of all the king’s works’ and ‘vizier’, positions that he may have held under Khufu’s successor. He doesn’t mention his role in the pyramid’s construction but perhaps he didn’t need to. His burial place at the edge of the Eastern Cemetery at Giza overlooked his domain at the Ro-She Khufu. Pyramid building had its rewards in this life and the next. […]
When the Nile receded in December that year, Merer’s team was dispatched north to the Mediterranean to work on a structure called a ‘double djadja’, perhaps a double jetty. We hear nothing more of them until early April. It’s possible that they were given time off, but we may simply be missing the relevant section of the logs. We next encounter them on the Red Sea. The papyri contain references to sailing expeditions, mountainous areas, a place called Ineb Khufu (the ‘walls of Khufu’, perhaps the Tell Ras Budran fortress on the south-western coast of the Sinai Peninsula) and, finally, a place called Bat, the ‘Bushy Land’, which may be Wadi el-Jarf. It looks desolate now, but it was probably chosen for its topography, access to fresh water and connections to the Nile. One of the fragments discovered by Tallet’s team was a small, folded slip of papyrus, no larger than a business card, that belonged to ‘the great one of the carrying chair, the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality, the controller of the necklace makers and royal administrator Neferiru’. Neferiru presumably travelled to Wadi el-Jarf on one of many desert roads that are marked today only by a handful of scattered inscriptions, depositions of pottery and, occasionally, ancient tracks. The same roads almost certainly carried Merer and his men to the Red Sea. […]
After September, Merer and his men disappear from view and the Red Sea Scrolls come to an end. We don’t know why they left Wadi el-Jarf, after storing Merer’s diary, Dedi’s logs and other papyri in a pit in front of one of the rock-cut galleries. Were they under threat? Was Merer fired? Did Khufu’s death mean his meticulously compiled records were no longer relevant? Tallet and Lehner find the last option most likely, but we can’t know for sure. […]
Tallet’s career has been distinguished by his recognition of the value of conducting his research outside Egypt’s traditional centres of power. In 2012, he discovered a hieroglyphic inscription from the fourth millennium ʙᴄᴇ in the Sinai Peninsula, which pushed back the date of Memphis by fifty years. It is the oldest known example of a sentence written in hieroglyphs: ‘The Horus, he is Ity,’ a phrase spoken to confer full royal status on a prince. (‘Ity’ means ‘sovereign’.) ‘In the excitement of that moment,’ Tallet writes, ‘I remember thinking that I would never again make an archaeological discovery of such importance in my entire career as a researcher.’ Ten months later, at Wadi el-Jarf, he would prove himself wrong.
The OED (entry from 1926) says of uraeus:
A modern Latinization of οὐραῖος, given by Horapollo as the Egyptian name for the cobra (now transliterated as ἰ?r·t), perhaps influenced in form by the Greek adjective οὐραῖος, < οὐρά tail.
And I must say, “the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality” is an impressive title.
I am no Egyptologist, though shared a winter rental with Mark Lehner in Va. Beach in, was it, the 1970s, but I may comment on one detail of this report.
That is, the claim that “Merer dipped his reed pen in ink.”
No.
This was before split-nib reed pens and inkwells, but in a time of rush brushes and palettes.
See:
William John Tait, Rush and Brush: the Pens of Egyptian and Greek Scribes, Proceedings of the XVIII International Congress of Papyrology, 1988, vol. 2, 477-481, and
Willy Clarysse, Egyptian Scribes Writing Greek, Chronique d’Égypt, 68 (1993) 186-201.
A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 4th ed. 1963, 362-365.
Wikipedia:
I was wondering.
I must say that sharing a winter rental in Va. Beach with an Egyptologist sounds like an opening scene in some sort of film-noir script that is going to get dark and weird pretty quickly. I’m glad Stephen Goranson has survived all these decades to tell the tale!
Not all Egyptologists are cursed.
I met Mark Lehner in 1975 when I was dragomanning Ken Kesey around Egypt for Jann Wenner. (Dropping two or maybe three names in one sentence.) He has come a long way from his childhood among devotees of the Sleeping Guru Edgar Cayce.
¿dragomanning?
Has that anything to do with lobsters?
The verb dragoman means ‘serve as dragoman to’.
I thought “dragomanning” was such an excellent participle that it frankly distracted me from the one-time celebrity or quasi-celebrity status of the names dropped elsewhere in the sentence. The Egypt trip presumably did not get Kesey out of his notoriously long-running writer’s block, but that’s probably not the dragoman’s fault.
David M.
written Arabic “j” is pronounced “g” in spoken Egyptian Arabic.
The post doesn’t mention the salacious bit amongst Khufu’s efforts (accn. to Herodotus) to get the pyramid up: “sending his daughter into the stews”, as it was put in an 18th cent. translation.
Chez Khufu sounds like a fine place to spend one’s night.
That ? is a computer-typography fail. It should be an “Egyptological ain” (in Unicode since 2008, ꜥ U+A725 Latin Small Letter Egyptological Ain); the code for it appears in the web version of the OED2 entry as [egyasper]. When the online OED launched in 2000, its character set was painfully limited, and they had to resort to images for Greek letters and a variety of special characters (which was irritating enough that somebody made a script to substitute Unicode entities). At some point — I think this must have been part of the platform redesign of 2010 — they managed to get fonts with Greek and diacriticized Roman letters, but all the other special characters were lost and have never been repaired. You can see the scars e.g. in the etymologies of letters M, N, O, P, Q, R, where glyphs for Phoenician and early Greek forms are missing.
The OED was already playing the game of “Guess which transliteration system this is — we’ll never tell!” in the first edition, but Wikipedia gives it away: this is the Erman 1894 system. Erman and Grapow’s Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache has this word in vol. 1, p. 42 — the entire dictionary is *handwritten*, I think it wins the all-time prize for most beautiful handwriting by a linguist! That means no OCR and no searchability, but fortunately, this word is very early in the alphabet so it didn’t take long to find.
Anyway, Egyptology has moved on since 1926, and Wiktionary has some more recent thoughts on uraeus, using a slightly different transliteration:
Here is the passage in Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica (boldface added) from which Egyptologists took οὐραῖος/uraeus as a technical term:
To read it in the manuscript, go here and scroll down to the image file labelled ‘Carta 68r’. The word οὐραῖον occurs about two-thirds of the way through the third line from the top of the page (this line ends with the word βασιλίσκον).
Recent scholarship seems to prefer an etymology of the term from wrrt. Scroll down to ‘Attestation in the TLA text corpus’ and click on the bar to see the citations from texts. See also wrr.t here. And see the list reconstructed pronunciations, especially Late Egyptian /wəˈɾeʔjə/, in the Wiktionary entry for wrrt. I have some other things I have to do now—maybe other LH readers can follow up on this interesting topic.
Has anybody here seen the theory that the Jewish-Greek name Hyrcanus contains a theophoric reference to Horus? https://www.academia.edu/611696/A_Brief_History_of_the_Second_Temple_Period_NameHyrcanus
Yes, and that’s usually shown in transcriptions, so I was wondering why it wasn’t this time.
That *is* odd, now that you mention it.
Not to be confused with Hufu.
@R.RCK: That’s a very good and thorough paper. Thanks!
[Rescued comments by ktschwarz and Xerîb from purgatory.]
Peter Grubtal: written Arabic “j” is pronounced “g” in spoken Egyptian Arabic.
Or the other way around, depending on your outlook, I suppose.
I myself am currently living in a rental in Virginia Beach, although not a winter one, with my daughter and her nuclear family.
Beware of Egyptologists bearing mummy wrappers!
Re “the controller of the dwarves of the department of the clothes of linen of the first quality”: I wonder whether “dwarves” was a euphemism for “slaves”.
Why would a euphemism be needed, though? I would first speculate about a misreading or mistranslation and then maybe about a reason why average body size was disadvantageous – or was thought to be so – for working with linen of the first quality.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a technical term of some kind. After all, a printer’s devil was not (usually) an actual demon, and an âme damnée is generally not a damned soul (as yet, anyhow.)
Dwarfs were dwarfs.
@Cuchuflete: The English noun dragoman has nothing to do with lobsters but you may be interested to know that it has four cognates in Spanish: drogmán, truchimán, trujamán, and trujimán.
@Y:
Ah, but were all dwarfs dwarfs? Perhaps some were only honorary dwarfs …
it has four cognates in Spanish: drogmán, truchimán, trujamán, and trujimán
Tarjaman in Hausa; the word doesn’t seem to have caught on much in West Africa, though, perhaps because anyone who is anyone in those parts can speak at least three languages anyway.
Many Ghanaian cultures have a hereditary high councillor who speaks on the chief’s behalf on all public occasions, very much like an interpreter, but for the most part in cultures where, in fact, the nobility and the plebs actually speak the same language. In Ghanaian English, he’s called a “linguist”, in Twi, an okyeame, and in Kusaal, a nɔdi’es. The Kusaal Bible translation uses Wina’am nɔdi’es “God’s linguist” for “prophet”, which has always seemed to me to be one of the happier Christian calques.
So a linguist is a prophet without a god?
Quite so.
Unemployed, yet not without honor except in his own dialect.