Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2022 - 31

floodgates to fill the basins and canals that allowed goods to
be delivered to the foot of the pyramid complex construction
site. (See " Giza's Layout, " below.)
With these waterways open, Merer's men then spent several
months hauling loads of fine limestone blocks from the Tura
quarries to the Giza Plateau. A typical set of entries reads
" Inspector Merer casts off with his phyle from Tura, loaded
with stone, for Akhet Khufu; spends the night at She Khufu....
GIZA'S LAYOUT
Fragments of wood and rope from disassembled boats were
uncovered in one of Wadi el-Jarf's storage galleries.
Is Its Prow.' " The discovery was highly serendipitous. Such
records would normally have been brought back to the Nile
Valley to be archived, but, for some reason, these documents
were left at Wadi el-Jarf. The surviving papyri seem to have
been originally buried in a pit between the limestone blocks
and subsequently moved, most likely as part of an attempt
to open the gallery. Those papyri that remained in the pit
had largely decomposed after sitting in stagnant water, while
those that were disturbed were saved for posterity. " This kind
of narrative is very rare from the time, " says Tallet. " All the
narrative texts we have from the Fourth Dynasty are basically
biographical texts found in tombs. For the first time, we had
I
n addition to ProvidinG unique insight into the
experience of workers who helped build Khufu's (r. ca.
2633-2605 b.c.) Great Pyramid, the papyri discovered
at Wadi el-Jarf offer revealing clues to the layout of the Giza
Plateau and its maritime infrastructure during the period of
the pyramid's construction. In the papyri, when Inspector
Merer and his men are described approaching the plateau
with a boatful of limestone blocks, they pass through the
Ro-She Khufu (Mouth of the Lake of Khufu) into either the
She Khufu (Lake of Khufu) or the She Akhet Khufu (Lake
of the Horizon of Khufu). According to Egyptologist Mark
Map of Giza Plateau
Valley
temple
She Khufu
Ro-She
Khufu
A piece of wood from an ancient boat (left) and a section of
rope (right) are among the many finds at Wadi el-Jarf.
f
d f
eft) and
something that was by a real person giving a precise and real
account of their work. "
The logbooks cover the phyle's activities for just over a year
near the very end of Khufu's tenure. In the summer months,
roughly June to November, the workers operated in the vicinity
of Giza. The beginning of this period was the first month
of the inundation season, called Akhet, corresponding to the
arrival of the annual Nile flood. The phyle's first assignment
appears to have involved transporting around 600 workers
to the Ro-She Khufu. There, Tallet believes, based on references
in the logbooks to " works related to the dike of Ro-She
Khufu, " " the dam of the entrance of Khufu's lake, " and the
team " lifting the piles of the dike, " these workers opened the
archaeology.org
Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, who
has led excavations at the Giza Plateau for three decades, this
supports scholars' theory that the ancient Egyptians built a
network of artificial basins that allowed heavily laden boats
to deposit their cargo at the plateau's edge, facilitating the
delivery of materials necessary to construct the pyramid.
What appears to be the outline of one of these basins-
likely the She Akhet Khufu-was detected through test
excavations carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The basin's western edge seems to have been the site of
Khufu's valley temple, which had a massive limestone
foundation covered with black basalt slabs. Sections of
colossal walls forming the other three sides of the basin,
also composed of basalt on limestone foundations, have
been located as well. In all, the basin measured around a
quarter of a mile by a third of a mile. Based on cores taken
from its center, Lehner believes the basin was dredged to a
depth of between 26 and 33 feet, allowing ample clearance
for boats such as that captained by Inspector Merer. " The
correspondence between archaeology and the texts from
Wadi el-Jarf is phenomenal, " says Lehner.-D.W.
31
She Akhet
Khufu
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Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2022

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