You're Dead to Me - The Egyptian Pyramids

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Host Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Sarah Parcak and comedian Maria Shehata to learn all about the magnificent Egyptian pyramids. We discover how and why pyramids were built, who constructed them, and how space archaeology can help us discover and protect hundreds of pyramids and tombs that are yet to be found.

BBC Sounds. Music this show, we do things a bit differently. If you're looking for some learning with your lols, then you've come to the right place. Today, we are chucking our chisels, trowels and SPF 50 sunblock into our bum bags and journeying back thousands of years to ancient Egypt to lift the lid on one of the most fascinating facets of the ancient world, Egyptian pyramids. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, we have a full-on archaeological superstar with us. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, not the one in the Midlands, and she's an expert on Egyptology

and also, wait for it, space archaeology. Ha! Just the coolest job in the world. You may have seen her research featured in the award-winning TED Talks. You may have seen her on the BBC show Egypt, What Lies Beneath? and Rome's Lost Empire. It's Professor Sarah Parkak. Hey, Sarah, how are you?

Hi there, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we're thrilled to have her back on the show. She's an award-winning comedian, writer and podcaster. You may have seen her doing stand-up live. You may have caught her on the telly doing things like BBC's period

dramas. You may have heard her new podcast, Two Non Doctors, which is medical advice from people who have no medical training. Sounds terrifying. You'll remember her from the Saladin episode. It's the wonderful Maria Shahata. Maria, how are you? I'm so good. How are you? I'm very good. Last time out, Saladin was a bit of a new experience for you. You didn't know much about him. But you did mention Egyptian pyramids. So does that mean that you are full of knowledge? Just about as much knowledge as I have as medical knowledge. So none? Yeah, no, none. Not to worry. But you are from an American Egyptian background. Your family are from

Cairo. Yeah, my parents are from Cairo, and I from Ohio. So, um, anything with O in the title. Yeah. Anything with O. And so, yeah, I've been to the pyramids three times in my life. Recently, or was that sort of when you were a kid? No, last time was 12 years ago and my mom and my aunt took me and they dropped me off because they'd, they'd seen it before. So they were like, enjoy that. Uh, we'll see you in a couple hours. And they went to Pizza Hut. Ah, sounds like a enjoy that. We'll see you in a couple hours. And they went to Pizza Hut. Oh, sounds like a lovely day.

I've never seen the pyramids. I'm jealous of both you and Sarah for your pyramid knowledge. You are Egyptian. You've seen them three times. So I'm expecting you to be very knowledgeable. I'm going to surprise all of you with how little I know. So Sarah, I have to ask, why are you an Egyptologist? What's the appeal? You know, most Egyptologists will tell you that they've been passionate about ancient Egypt ever since they were small kids.

Age four, age five, apparently I just started talking about ancient Egypt. My parents had no idea why. This is Bangor, Maine. This is the mid 80s, pre-cable, pre-internet. You know, I'm pretty sure I saw some National Geographic magazines and the King Tut exhibit was coming through the US again. And I got obsessed with the gold. So I don't remember the moment, but it's just always called to me ever since I was a small girl. I love how King Tut tours more than I do. I mean, during the times of COVID, it's difficult for any comedian to tour. I know.

But also King Tut was also on tour and then his tour got cancelled. So, you know, it's affecting us all, even the dead. He burned out at a young age. So, what do you know? It's time for me to do the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a guess at what you at home might know about today's subject. The Egyptian pyramids are some of the most famous structures on the planet. So I think you've probably heard of them and you probably have a pretty clear picture

in your mind of what they look like. Giant sandy triangles plopped into the middle of a desert. Very nice. And of course, ancient Egypt crops up in our pop culture all the time and is positively peppered with pyramids. So perhaps you're thinking of the 1932 film The Mummy. Of course you're not. Who's seen that film? No one's seen that film. It's probably not even a real film. Anyway, you've definitely seen the 1999 film The Mummy. Of course you're not. Who's seen that film? No one's seen that film. It's probably not even a real film. Anyway, you've definitely seen the 1999 film The Mummy though, haven't you? Yes, lovely Brendan Fraser, so handsome, and Rachel Weisz. That's a fun film, although, you know, it's a bit mean to Imhotep. And then there's also X-Men Apocalypse, and then there's the idiotically bad Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, where the Great Pyramid of Giza

contains an alien robot machine for destroying the sun. Of course it does. Now, whether it's from books or blockbusters, you probably know the pyramids were often tombs bursting with treasures for really important kings. And you may have heard loads of theories about how these marvellous monuments were built. Spoiler alert, it wasn't bloody aliens, alright? Let it go. But what else is there to know about the pyramids? What are we missing out? Let's find out. OK, Sarah, before we start, sorry, I'm going to have to bring this up here. One Earth is a space archaeologist. Are you like Indiana Jones, but in a spacesuit?

I think in my dreams. So essentially, a space archaeologist is a person that uses pictures taken from satellites or drones or airplanes. taken from satellites or drones or airplanes, and they allow us to look at the Earth and the features on the ground and different parts of the light spectrum, often parts that we can't see. So think of it almost like a space x-ray or CAT scan. I always thought archaeologists just kind of went by instinct, like, should we just start digging here? Like, there's something, I didn't know you use all that technology to find stuff in the middle of the earth. Unfortunately, you know, now with such limited funding and time in the field, we've got to be as laser focused as possible.

And so we use every tool at our disposal, whether it's satellites, whether it's ground penetrating radar. And before we even go into the field, we do what's called hypothesis-driven research. So we come up with a research question, and we have very specific goals and aims when we go out. And we typically have to do an application to the government, to wherever we're working in the world. So not that we know exactly what we're going to find before the season starts, but we have a pretty general sense of the types of things we hope we'll find. But it's still pretty cool that you're now using satellites to pinpoint exactly where to look.

I mean, I described you as Indiana Jones in a spacesuit, but you are a bit like Indiana Jones because you found the lost city of Tannis from the Indiana Jones movie. So obviously we knew about Tannis, you know, our Egyptologists, archaeologists have known about it for 160 plus years, but the outline of the actual city wasn't known. And French Egyptologists

have been working at the site for about 120 years. They've mainly focused on the temples to the north and from space using very high resolution satellite imagery that had a resolution of about 50 centimeters, we were able to map the entirety of the outline of the ancient capital city. So this is a city from about 3000 years ago, you can see clear city streets, homes, administrative buildings, and even potential palaces. Were the French upset? Were they like, we've been working on this for 120 years, you just came in and zeroed in on it? I remember the look on my colleague's face. I said, so I've mapped your city. He went, what?

Oh, no, it's more like, what? It's not like a series of blobby lines. It's super, super clear. And there was a lot of head shaking and swearing, to be honest. I'm like, technology. I mean, I'm not the only one doing this, right? My colleagues are doing this all over the world. There've been amazing discoveries found in Central America, in Cambodia, in Angkor Wat, Amazing discoveries found in Central America, in Cambodia, in Angkor Wat, in Peru. This technology is quite literally revolutionizing the field of archaeology. I lost a set of keys last week. Is there any way you can help out with that? You're being very modest, Sarah, because you literally won the best TED Talk of 2016.

And Maria, guess what she won? A pyramid. Sarah, you won a million dollars. That's a crazy amount of 2016. And Maria, guess what she won? A pyramid. Sarah, you won a million dollars. That's a crazy amount of money. It is. And a lot of people have asked me, like, so did you buy a new house? Did you buy cars? Like, what did you do with the money? And it was like a big grant. My team and I used the funding and we built an online citizen archaeology platform called Global Explorer and it allows anyone in the world to look at satellite images and help us map archaeological sites. You must have used some of it for like a trip to Greece or something like just a little little rest and relaxation before you start digging. Not even a single pencil everything went to the project. Okay so I mean that is an incredible thing that you do but we're here to

talk about the pyramids and they are visible from ground, like we don't need satellites to see them. So let's start with the absolute basics. Sarah, oh, my gosh, you know, it's amazing. How did they do that? Well, pyramids weren't built in a day. They were developed over many hundreds of years. They started off essentially as graves beneath the ground. And then over time, the graves got deeper and there were chambers added and things evolved. Over time, there was something called a mastaba, which is Arabic for bench, built on top around the first dynasty. So this would have been about 5,000 years ago. There would have been rooms for offerings as well as chambers around it where the king would have been buried with many, many goods for the afterlife.

And those things wouldn't have been visible when the monument was complete. These very, very early tombs had small hills over the top, which was the beginning of pyramids. And over time, they evolved and got bigger and bigger and bigger. And about 400 or so years later, that's when we start seeing pyramids. It took them 400 years to like, so the person who started it never got to see the finishing. That sort of sucks for that guy. Just like the person in the end get to put the cap on the pyramid i imagine like that triangle part would be the last part the like point and they

just sat back and was like this is it what are you gonna do with it well i'm gonna die in it i guess still not enjoy it certainly for um the pyramids of snefru then the pyramids at Giza. These are pyramids that would have been built over decades with pretty large work crews. So if the king was lucky, he would get to see the end of the construction of the pyramid. So the earliest pyramids are small structures or hills over a burial chamber, and then things really kick into gear with step pyramids, which sounds like something in a CrossFit gym, but it's not. Sarah, what are the next evolution in pyramids? And is the first pyramid built for King Djoser? That's right. So that would have been the pyramid that would have been built for King Djoser at

Saqqara, built by his architect Imhotep. And instead of a standard mastaba tomb or bench tomb, you know, this rectilinear tomb made of stone. What Imhotep did that was amazing is he decided to stack these mastabas one on top of the other to get this triangular feature reaching up into the sky. And to me, what's extraordinary about the pyramid complex of Saqqara and Djoser, it's not just the pyramid, which is amazing, but Imhotep constructed this recreation of the known ancient Egyptian world with structures made of stone that represented Upper and Lower Egypt. So essentially, it was an entire map of the cosmos of the known Egyptian world in stone for eternity. How is it a map? Do you mean like the hieroglyphs in the tombs?

So there are buildings within the pyramid complex that are symbolic of religious structures from Upper Egypt and from Lower Egypt. And for the ancient Egyptian kings, it was their title, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt. They were this unifying force that connected these two places that even today, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt are still quite distinct from each other. The language is different. The cultures are different. And so by having this architecture and representing these sacred buildings that were formerly built of reeds and stone, he showed he was the king of this whole land. Imhotep, Hollywood's not been very kind to him. Maria, you've seen The Mummy, haven't you? He was the bad guy.

It's been years. I just remember Brendan Fraser, really. How did they make him out to be the bad guy? He's living forever and he's running around trying to kill Rachel Weisz. Oh, that's no good. I know. I mean, Rachel Weisz is lovely. You should never try and kill her. She's lovely. He's sort of like this terrifying, evil, undead guy. But he is one of the great geniuses of the ancient world, Sarah. What is his job title?

Engineer? Is he an administrator? Is he prime minister? What does he do? He was the chief architect for Jozer. And the ancient Egyptians recognized his genius. They, in effect, deified him about 2,000 years later. So in a period of time known as the late period, known as the Late Period, so about 600 BC, we see a lot of amulets and representations in bronze showing Imhotep as a god. So the ancient Egyptians certainly understood when these brilliant people came along. To this day, we haven't found his tomb in Saqqara, but give me a few more years. Get the satellites on him. It's being deified like getting a blue checkmark on Twitter. It's like he's the celebrity of the time. It's a little bit easier.

Okay. Yeah, he's one of the great geniuses of that period. Later on, we then go, you've mentioned already true pyramids, Sarah. Maria, can you guess what a true pyramid is? One that was built first, before the other pyramid, because there are a lot of like, you know, copycat pyramids. Oh, I see. No, the true pyramid is one that's just got the straight lines on it. That's when they've reached their perfect mathematical gorgeous triangular kind of the perfect embodiment of that architectural design. I mean, the thing I find extraordinary

about the Great Pyramid of Giza, for example. This pyramid is so old that Cleopatra would have looked at it and it would have been ancient history to her. How many years before Cleopatra was the Great Pyramid built, Sarah? If Cleopatra is in about 2,000 years ago. So about 2,400 years, plus or minus. Bonkers. That is old. That's 4,000 years now?

4,500 years probably, isn't it? And they're still standing strong. They don't move. This might be a stupid question but is Stonehenge older than the pyramids? Same age. So while we were building like some rocks in a field, Maria do you want to guess how many stones there are in the Great Pyramid of Giza? Maria, do you want to guess how many stones there are in the Great Pyramid of Giza? Oh, 35,271. That's a lovely guess. You're slightly out. It's 2.3 million. Yeah, I'm way off.

Although 32,000 was nice. I did enjoy the speed at which we were like, 32,000, straight in. Just say a number, any number, because I wasn't going to get it right. I was like, just go for it, all six of them. Sarah, how do we know it's 2.3 million? Has someone sat there and counted? Because that sounds like a boring job. So, I mean, it's a rough guesstimate. Satellites did it. Totally. I've mapped it all out. It's actually 2.246 million, but, you know, fine. I just rounded it up. So you can calculate the size of the stones and the area and the volume. So generally speaking, it's about 2.3 million. Are you really good at those games with the jelly beans in the jar when they ask you to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar? And then you get a million dollars or something.

Yeah, that's actually how I won the Ted Prize. I guessed the jelly beans. million dollars or something yeah i that's actually how i won the ted prize i guess king kufu was the king and he received which of the most famous pyramids how do you demand any respect with that name i am king kufu sorry what no king king. King Kung Fu had which pyramid built for him? The Great One. It is the Great One, absolutely. You'd want it to be the Great One, wouldn't you? Of course.

Yeah, but what about the best one? No, I want the Great One. What about the Incredible One? I said Great. The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure on the planet for 4,000 years. So, I mean, they built it a long time ago and it stayed as a sort of record breaker for a long, long, long time.

That seems to be a really important thing for cultures, having the tallest of something to this day. Yeah, I guess so. I guess it's proof that the thing kept standing, which I guess is hard to do. But they don't know what's going on halfway across the world because they didn't have any technology and it would take a really long time to travel, I imagine. So, like, they could just say that and everybody would be like, wow, really? It's like, yeah, the tallest in the world.

Okay. I mean, well, yeah, if you believe people on the internet, aliens transported it. So, you know. Oh, that's not true. My training is in settlement archaeology, and I'm really interested in the lives of everyday people from ancient Egypt and from elsewhere. And to me, the pyramids, especially the pyramids at Giza, are really extraordinary because they're symbols of the formation of the Egyptian state and the bureaucracy.

And when you get really close to the pyramids and you look at the stones, you can see hundreds of chisel marks on each individual stone. And those chisel marks were made by copper. And copper was obtained in Sinai, which is an area where I've done a lot of archaeological work. And so Egyptians would have to send out expeditions across the eastern desert and across the Red Sea to mine for copper to create the tools to build the pyramids. And this huge infrastructure had to be developed. So when you are gnashing your teeth because you're dealing with horrible bureaucracy, whether it's the NHS or immigration in the UK or the US government, wherever you are in the world, when you're angry about bureaucracy, you can blame pyramids because this is where bureaucracy

started. I took a bus from Cairo to Sinai to Sharm. It was a long journey and that was on a bus with a motor. I just can't imagine having to go all the way to Sinai to get copper to come back to build that. Did anybody actually want these besides the kings and rulers? The people who had to build them probably weren't like, yeah, I'm really excited about this. When it's done in 400 years, it's going to be amazing. If you're building the pyramids, think about the amount of calories you're burning in a day. You're going to need massive amounts of protein because you're part of these teams that are pushing these massive stones. And so you would have been fed incredibly well. You would have been given daily

rations of bread and beer and probably good cuts of meat. We know, especially in the fourth dynasty, which is the period of time of Sneferu and Cheops, we see a proliferation of estates across the delta where they're raising cattle. And the reason they're raising cattle is that you can't build a pyramid unless you're doing your protein shakes. And in ancient Egypt, it was cow. And actually, it's funny, there's an inscription inside one of the pyramids. So the gangs of men that moved the blocks had nicknames. And one of the nicknames of one of the gangs was the drunkards of Menkaura, which I love. So you sort of think of this as esprit de corps. Yeah, okay, they're not going to be buried there. But certainly they're getting good afterlife mojo and service of the king and they're able to eat well.

People on the internet are very confident that the pyramids were built by enslaved people. That's the famous thing that everyone knows. But it's not true, is it really? I mean, the vast bulk of this team are not people who are enslaved. They are Egyptians and they are rewarded with, as you say, good food and wages. Do they get wages or how does it work? In ancient Egypt and many ancient cultures, you don't see the development of this concept of payment until much later.

I mean, certainly you're getting rations of bread and beer or measures of grain or cuts of cloth. So in essence, it's kind of payment, but not in our sense. You would have made amazing PR back in the day. Like, well, let's start with what is payment really? Is it not nourishment? Is it not a sense of fulfillment, self-worth? They're doing it for exposure. There's no money for this job, but it's really good exposure and literally exposed to the sunlight.

These workers are getting food and cloth and useful things, which you would buy anyway if you had money. So I guess it is a type of currency. Yeah, there's a whole barter and exchange and value system that existed then. type of currency. Yeah, there's a whole barter and exchange and value system that existed then. We have the tombs of a lot of pyramid builders, and it would have required an enormous amount of skill. Moving heavy stones, you know, if you're kind of a skinny dude. Hello. I'm not pointing any fingers at anyone. You show up on the job. It's like going to the gym. Day one, okay, you're going to be bench pressing 240 pounds go. It's impossible. You have to build up to it.

So you have to think there was an initiation period. Maybe you're clearing rubble at first. You're providing water to the workforces. You're slowly building up your strength over time. And after a couple months on the job, after you've built some muscle, then you're able to join the heavier pushing or pulling. the heavier pushing or pulling. And over time, some people would have shown a real skill and an aptitude for whether it's managing people, carving stone, and there would have been apprenticeships. A lot of people don't realize it's not just these tens of thousands of men that are pushing stone, but there are hundreds, if not thousands of skilled laborers. So there's stonemasons, there's architects, there's engineers, there's

the people that would have had to have made the rope to pull the sleds. And so you imagine this really rich environment. There weren't slaves then, because I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, after I've bragged about my people building the pyramids, like Egyptians didn't build pyramids, slaves built the pyramids. Absolutely no slaves. I'm just going to have to cut this clip out and just play it for people. There's no slaves. But in ancient Egypt, right about now, it would have been flooded. You know, around July, there would have been massive flooding. And when Egypt's fields were flooded, there wasn't much for people to do.

So the ancient Egyptian administrators would have sailed up and down the Nile going, hey, you want to serve your king for a couple months and get good food? Get on my boat right now. In the middle of summer break. I'm probably going to get a lot of trouble with my colleagues for saying this, but I'm sure there were a lot of ladies on site. I was going to say, it's before you were describing tens of thousands of men, and it sounds a bit like a sausage fest. Like the husbands are going off, the wives are like, really? You're going to go for two months? He's like, the floods, I have to.

What are you going to do? I have to serve the king. I'm sure the men were pretty well looked after because it's really, really tough work. There were pretty extensive injuries, you know, broken bones. There were accidents, people were killed. We have evidence that these injuries healed. So there would have been medical staff on site. It's really incredible, isn't it? The sort of scale of this huge project and the cost of it, the fact that it's taking decades, perhaps an enormous army of trained people doing this one thing. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when there's no social media to waste your

time. There's nothing else to do. Why wouldn't they do that? Maria, what could you achieve if there wasn't Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff? I would have had like seven books written by now. Who knows, I might actually become a doctor. So the pyramids are functionally, they are the tomb for one person. So this is where a person goes, but it takes tens of thousands of people to build it, which feels very inefficient

but that also speaks i guess to the cosmology to the hierarchy the the glory of of the pharaohs that's how important they are that one person gets all this work dedicated to them the one percent and yeah it's the the whole the tat se moi you're the state is me just as the pyramids held up the concept of the king as this living God. So they also helped the king to form ancient Egypt and to solidify the state, because you're not going to be able to build a pyramid unless you have people who are very highly organized and efficient. They didn't just say, well, let's just go build this pyramid. What you're looking at when you look at the pyramids of the Giza is the formation of a system of government and rule that lasted for over 2000 years. So it all began here. Isn't there a spiritual aspect to that? I thought it was about a god pointing to the gods. I thought

that something happened. And just like this, when the sun was in the right place, it's shown down on the pyramids. And then like, it was all supposed to be in worship of gods rather than the government. So that was an important part of it, too. So there was a whole ancient Egyptian cosmology, the pyramids helped the king to ascend to the afterlife. There was a whole religious aspect as well. Do you think they were like, hey, king, when you get to the afterlife, like when I die, you'll get me in, right? He's like, yeah, yeah, for sure. Never does. I'm sure that's part of what they told their work.

By working in service of the king, you're accruing goody points to get you into the afterlife. Maria, do you have a quick guess as to which of these tools the workers would have used to build the pyramids? You've already heard sledges so we'll take that one off which of these four wasn't used by ancient egyptian craftspeople so you have drills wooden levers wheelbarrows and rollers and winches which of those four do you not think they had aren't drills don't they require being plugged in am i dumb like it feels like a drill. Like, isn't it?

It's got to be drill. You've gone for drill, Sarah. It's wheelbarrows. Oh. They had drills. What's a drill? But they weren't power drills. Yeah, so Sarah, how does a drill work in the Bronze Age? Think of almost like a metal piece that you stick in.

It's like a winch. You push it around and around and around. It's like a corkscrew. It functions like a corkscrew. Okay. So it's just manpower. You're just having to physically twist this thing, soft copper through hard stone.

Yeah, correct. I love that they can invent the pyramids, but not a wheelbarrow. Maybe they didn't need it. But how are they transporting the stone around, actually, Sarah? Is it on rollers? Is it on boats? I mean, presumably it's coming up the Nile. It's pulled in larger blocks on sleds, loaded into boats. They sail down the Nile and probably up small canals. There would have been a depot area where the stone would have been unloaded and then, yeah, on sleds and on slick ground. So we actually have images from a bit later on, from a period of time known as the Middle Kingdom. And you see groups of hundreds of men moving statues

that are many, many tons in size. And so you get a real sense of the number of men it would take to move these stones. And I've seen groups of 10 or 12 men move stones that weigh several tons. And they're able to do it just by moving in unison. And it's very interesting. The songs that they sing, they do a, hey- a-hup, hey, a-hup.

I bet those go back to ancient Egypt. And my workforce tells me, like, those are just the things we say when we're moving large stones. I'm like, mm-hmm. It sounds like it's breath work. It's like, you know, when somebody who does Kung Fu busts through a bunch of bricks with their fist or their choppy hand. I'm so articulate. Thank you for having me on the podcast. So they had incredible brute strength. They're also incredibly accurate with their measurements.

There's been all sorts of scans done on the Great Pyramid of Giza. The accuracy of their mathematics and of their measuring is fascinating how good they were. And they had a system for measuring that's a bit different to our system. Maria, do you know what a cubit is? Yeah, it's like a cube-shaped rabbit. They're adorable. Adorable, but no. A cubit was how Egyptians measured length.

And it's based on the body, isn't it? The length of the forearm to the elbow? Yeah, correct. That's what a cubit was. And obviously it would have varied depending on the pharaoh, but it was similar-ish enough. So it's about 18 inches plus or minus. About half a meter. So that is the sort of standard measurement. So a cubit is fingertip to elbow for a fully adult human pharaoh, I guess. There aren't many of those about these days. But I mean, the pharaohs were short. They were like three feet tall,

weren't they? Like just judging by the length of their graves. You're thinking of hobbits, I think, Maria. Oh, right. I was confused then. So, all right, we've learned about the skills they've got, the technology, the lifting, the heaving, the measuring. A lot of what you've been saying so far, Sarah, has come from archaeology, where you've dug things out of the ground, you're measuring bones, you're measuring physical objects. But we do actually have historical documents, too. We do have, for example, the logbook of Merere, who was perhaps a project manager. Now, this is Merere, or Merere, M-E-R-E-R.

Merere. Merere. Is he in charge? What's his job? This is a discovery made about five or six years ago from an archaeological site along the Red Sea coast, almost exactly opposite, actually, of the archaeological site along the Red Sea coast, almost exactly opposite actually of the archaeological site where my husband, Greg Mumford, and I have dug along the west coast of Sinai. It's a site called Wadi al-Jarf. And the Egyptians would have gone there. From there,

they would have sailed across the Red Sea into the Marca Plain and from there marched inland to the copper and turquoise mines. There are a series of caves that a French archaeological team excavated and found these papyri. They're from this project manager named Merer. It's a daily accounting of what he saw as he sailed downriver to deliver stones to the pyramids. And what's amazing is he mentions a prince, the brother of Khufu, who we have suspected for a long time was the project manager or the overseer of the work

going on at the Great Pyramid. The opportunity for the first time to see these papyri in the Cairo Museum this past January before the whole world shut down. And it was amazing. It was amazing to know this is written by someone who was a witness to this great wonder of the world. It was a very moving experience for me as an archaeologist. Was it all written in hieroglyphics? Yes. Did he talk about anything else, like his girlfriend? Was he keeping a log of what he ate? Sadly, a lot of the papyri is gone. So we'll never know. We can only hypothesize.

He's like, she hates me. It's really hard to rip up papyrus. You've mentioned papyri there, but just in case people listening don't know what that is. Papyri is a sort of type of paper, but it's made from reeds, isn't it? It's made from a natural plant. And then they would be writing on it with ink, black and red ink, usually, I believe. Black and red ink, correct. So these are historical documents written by eyewitness from 4,300 years ago. It's extraordinary. Essentially, Merer was responsible for picking up limestone at a quarry called Tora. And Tora is still used today. It's just about 10 kilometers south of Cairo to mine limestone.

And he talks about picking it up and bringing it on site. Do you think there'll be any additions to the pyramid? You know, like a terrace or I think they'll add to it at all. What would you add, Maria? I think a terrace. Yeah, like I think, you know, they focus so much on the inside of them. They don't ever like, you know, there's no lawn, there's no flowers. Just a little gardening and a terrace, I think.

What about like a restaurant at the top? There's a pizza hut nearby. Okay. It's where you can get the best pictures of the pyramids. Yes, exactly. It's really weird. It's like, that is the best view. Actually, you've just mentioned, Maria, the fact that, you know,

the little garden nearby would be nice. What did it look like, Sarah, in terms of the landscape? You've kind of got desert around it. You've got the Nile. Are people living nearby? Are there shops? Are there houses? Or is this sort of a flat, almost alien landscape with these three huge Toblerones sticking out the top?

So the pyramids wouldn't have just been pyramids. They would have had their pyramidids. They would have had their pyramid temples, they would have had their causeways. But also a little bit to the south, you would have had a pretty significant workman's village for 15,000, 20,000 men. There would have been large barracks, homes, gardens. And the Nile River would have been flowing right next to the pyramids in antiquity. Today,, today, it's a number of kilometers to the east. But even old photographs from 120 years ago showed just how close to the banks of the Nile the pyramids were. Certainly, there would have been fields that would have been

lusher, although certainly around the pyramids themselves, it still would have been desert. That's really exciting because, sorry, in my head, I'm just visualizing someone using the pyramids as like a water slide and just going all the way down the side and then straight into the Nile and splashing the bottom and going, Hooray! Like a water park. The sleds took the stones to the pyramids and then you get to water slide all the way back. That's how they convince people to do all the hard work. You get to go on the water slide after. But I mean, the Nile coming all the way up to the pyramids, did that make easier to build that and also the position in the landscape you know it's a little bit more elevated

it's pretty close to the toro limestone quarries but also you know there would have been canals connecting to the main nile for delivery essentially right to the doorstep yeah because it's so annoying when a delivery guy comes and he just like leaves stuff that other side of the house and you're like i need over here and you've got to go and pick it up and drag it in it's so boring amazon was crap in the old kingdom terrible delivery it was called nile back then presumably yes yeah and this is kind of a cool fact a lot of people don't realize this so when you go to giza today and you look at the pyramids most of the outer casing stones are missing and they would have been cased or had an exterior stone facade of this amazing bright white limestone. So to look at the pyramids in the middle of the

day in Egypt, you almost couldn't look at them because they'd glow. It's almost like you're seeing this living embodiment of the king's power as a god on earth. So did it wear away? Or is it just that it got so hot? They were like, let's get rid of this white stuff. So a lot of the exterior casing stones were robbed, taken away over time. You can actually see some of the exterior casing stones today around the base of the pyramids. I love the idea that they're so white you couldn't even look at them.

Like Ryland's teeth. Like it's so bright. Like my eyes, I can't see. Do they have gold in the top as well, Sarah, or is it just limestone? The capstone or the pyramidion would have been different materials depending on, you know, the period of time. You can actually see some of them today in the Cairo Museum from the Middle Kingdom. You know, in some cases they probably would have been encased in electrum or gold around them. the gold's gone though right somebody robbed that too

oh yeah i believe the camels you know look at those camels they have those humps on their back they're obviously hiding all this stuff well you're thinking someone lifts up the hump and then pops it in yeah like the trunk of a car or something yeah so we've got a slightly different landscape but ultimately people were living nearby. The work camp was nearby. There are 20,000 people perhaps living nearby. It's quite a busy place, but this was a sacred site, presumably. This wasn't just like a shopping mall. This was holy. It was. And the thing is, when you look at the pyramids, a lot of tourists miss that there are hundreds and hundreds of tombs called the Western Cemetery.

that there are hundreds and hundreds of tombs called the Western Cemetery. And these were the officials that either oversaw the construction of the pyramids, were princes, were administrators in the time of Dynasty IV. You're an important official from the old kingdom. You've helped the king to build this amazing landscape. And congratulations, you have won a tomb for eternity. So there are hundreds and hundreds of these tombs there. And to this day, Egyptologists, especially my colleagues at the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt, are still uncovering new tombs. The tombs are in the pyramids or they're around the pyramids? They're around the pyramids. So they're a little bit to the west. Well, let's talk about what's inside the pyramid then, because as we've already said, these are massive monuments dedicated to one person.

When we think of the inside of pyramids, I'm visualizing hieroglyphs on the wall, beautiful art, all that kind of stuff. Is that there from the very beginning or does that come in later? No, we don't start seeing texts inside pyramids until later. So Dynasty 6, the Pyramid of Unas, which is at Saqqara, that's when we start seeing this thing called the Pyramid Texts. And they're absolutely beautiful. You know, a lot of people are disappointed when they go inside the pyramid, and they kind of go down and they go up into the Grand Chamber, and they go inside the King's Chamber, and there's a sarcophagus, and it's empty. What's a sarcophagus?

So a sarcophagus is a stone or wood rectilinear item in which the coffin would be placed. Okay, wait, so they're disappointed that's just a coffin and nothing else? Yeah, in other words, there's no beautiful hieroglyph. It's not like something that you'd see in the Valley of the Kings from, you know, roughly a thousand plus years later. But this is where it all starts, right? So you have the pyramid, then you have the writing of these texts, and then over time, tombs develop.

It just seems like it's graffiti. People just have to do that. They have to mark with words, and so it's just street graffiti, but it's really beautiful because it's ancient. These texts were a guide for the king. So as they're going through the netherworld or the underworld, they're a guide for him.

They're a series of spells to help him gain passage to the afterlife. Does that mean that the first guy who didn't have the text got stuck? No, you were getting angry. You were going, you didn't leave the manual. I don't know how to get in.

He's got to wait for the next guy to come. Yeah, exactly. Do you have the key to this place? Now, of course, it's time to talk about the thing that Hollywood loves most, the curse. In the classic film, The Mummy, there is obviously a curse. Are curses real, Sarah? I mean, are they written above the doors? There were curses, but not like you think.

And they were very, very rare. It's more like a, you watch yourself, more like a warning, a gentle request. Just like mind the gap. Mind the gap. No, no trespassing, please. I found a quote to share with you because I thought it was really adorable. It is to you that I speak, all the people who surrounding it have been robbed a lot. So obviously it didn't work. Like they should have put a camera in there or something. Yeah.

Or a guard dog. Probably the Great Pyramid of Giza was first robbed by the party that buried the king. No way. I mean, we'll never know, of course. Did you know that King Tut's tomb actually was not intact when it was discovered? A lot of people think it was. So in the jars that would have held like face creams and lotions, Howard Carter found hand scoop marks from the burial party. And they'd gone and then they'd scooped out these very expensive high-end creams that would have been perfumed because it's one thing to steal an amulet um with the king's name on it and if you try to sell it you know you're going to be in big trouble but you take

this expensive hand cream with you no one's going to know so if the curses aren't very good they're more just sort of slightly stern words does that mean that hollywood's uh famous booby traps are also a bit dodgy and not really there in Pyramids either? Because I'm thinking in my head, swinging axes, arrows shooting out the walls, a huge boulder rolling towards you. Does any of that happen or is it just slightly boring? Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm in such good shape. I have to keep fit for the unexpected. for the unexpected. So it's true-ish in that certainly they knew that not just the burial party was going to steal stuff, but later on robbers would try to get in. So they tried to be

a little bit deceptive. You know, they would have large boulders in place, wouldn't necessarily roll into the place to crush whoever was coming in. But they used a lot of different sort of techniques to try to protect the tombs as best they could. I can't believe Hollywood lied to us. Yeah. I mean, they're so reliable. Yeah. Brendan Fraser is the best looking Egyptologist that's ever lived. Oh, that's a shame. I'd argue that Lara Croft is also a very beautiful archaeologist, although maybe not archaeology, more tomb raiding, actually, Sarah.

Yeah. I mean, that's really not what archaeology, more tomb raiding, actually, Sarah? Yeah, I mean, that's really, you know, not what archaeology is about. Certainly in the past, archaeology has a very dodgy history, lots of looting, lots of stealing of objects, the problem of rampant colonialism. You were having a big discussion in archaeology today about how problematic its history was. Now we're collaborating a lot more, we're helping with training. And obviously our colleagues, especially in Egypt, are making all these amazing discoveries. So we're much, much more aware of the painful history around it. It's not just that we know that things were robbed because we can get into a tomb and there's nothing there. We do also have actual historical confessions from tomb robbers from the Bronze Age. We've got a guy called Amen-Panepher. So he was looting in

about the year 1110 BCE and he wrote a little confession. He said, we went to rob tombs, this was our usual habit, and we found the pyramid of King Sobek-Kemsaf. We took our copper tools and we forced our way in. We opened the sarcophagi and the coffins. We found noble mummy of the king equipped with a sword. There were a large number of amulets and jewels of gold. He nicked all the stuff and he got caught, but he bribed the official and got away with it. I really feel like that's Egypt culture now. I don't know if that's okay to say or not. I can't say that, but you can say that maybe. I don't know. It's a lot of bribing going on.

So we do know that people stole stuff. They robbed stuff. Do we know what people did with the gold and the treasure? How do you shift all that stuff? You probably would have had the gold melted down. If you're lucky enough to steal a piece of jewelry that doesn't have the king's name on it, you're fine. You can trade, maybe, you know, maybe you're using it to create your tomb. They put it in their tomb, like they weren't expecting that exact same thing to happen to them. You know, like, I stole this, it's definitely just mine now. Like that's no one's ever going to do that them. You know, like, I stole this. It's definitely just mine now. Like, no one's ever going to do that again. So in terms of the history of Pyramids era,

we start with the really early ones, the Mostaba ones, and we get the true pyramids. And then we get to the Middle Kingdom. They're changing a bit because they're made from mud brick rather than stone. There's a big shift in the Middle Kingdom. The state also changes. You have smaller workforces.

A lot more power flows to the provinces. So the king is unable. You have smaller workforces, a lot more power flows to the provinces. So the king is unable to organize groups of tens of thousands of men. It's probably a couple thousand men. And so the pyramids shrink in size. And instead of being built completely of stone, they will often have rubble or mud brick cores, and they'll just be capped with limestone on the exterior so it takes a lot less effort and it's a lot less expensive and the effort there shifts from the superstructure to what's inside the tomb so you have all of these amazing sculptures statues the sarcophagi papyri the tombs are inscribed so the pyramids are getting smaller they're like chocolate bars in the local corner

shop everything's shrinking but the the inside is is the good stuff that's where all the nugget is exactly the lovely stuff but by the time we get to say tutankhamun that's even further on isn't it that's sort of more like 1400 bc maybe pyramids are just sort of vanishing entirely or they're turning into really small pyramids that like everyone has so like everyone's got a pyramid in their backyard like sheds it's just like they keep their tools in it and their dog sleeps out there so when you visit the valley of the kings in luxor when you look at the very very top there's almost a pyramid shaped top of a mountain for the kings of the new kingdom they're like eh that's like our pyramid close enough and so the tombs all went into the bedrock and they had their superstructure it just was part of the natural

landscape just because then the focus was so much on the spells for the afterlife as well as the goods sounds like lazy contractors just like i wanted a pyramid yeah yeah pyramid but come inside let me show you inside it's much nicer it's like that spinal tap joke where they confuse like 10 feet for 10 inches and you've got tiny little pyramids tiny little stone hinges so pyramids are sort of basically dying out because as you say Sarah really the tombs become about deep buried bedrock tombs and going down rather than going up which I guess leads me to my next question maria how many pyramids do you think there are in egypt i'm gonna go with six six

pyramids sarah they're over a hundred what yeah i was surprised well there's the three that we all know about and then i just figured there were three more that like copied it and then a lot of people don't realize that in time periods like the Middle Kingdom, so at Lisht, around the pyramid of some Wasrith I alone, there are nine smaller pyramids for his queens and his daughters. Right there, there's 10, especially in the Old Kingdom as well. So there's a king, Pepi II, and he had a lot of smaller pyramids around his pyramids. When you think of like 100 pyramids, they're not all massive. A lot of them are really, really small.

So they just started franchising them like McDonald's? If there are 100 pyramids and then you're getting your clever satellite stuff out, does that mean that you're finding new pyramids? There are new pyramids that are out there. I mean, new in the sense of like they're really old, but they're new because we didn't know about them. There are new old pyramids. Okay. Yeah, new old pyramids.

So yes, certainly at a number of these pyramid complexes, if you've got 10 or 11 pyramids or five or six pyramids from assorted kings and queens, chances are pretty good that there will be other pyramids there. I've had some things up my sleeve that I'm not supposed to talk about yet, but I can say for sure that there are other sites in Egypt that have potential pyramids. Are they all in Egypt or do they spill out into Ethiopia? Some of them are in Sudan. There are actually more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt, but a lot of them are teeny, teeny tiny. Some of them are just 30, 40 centimeters tall. It's like how tall I am.

So this is the Nubian kingdom, which is now in Sudan, because the Nubians conquered the Egyptians, don't they? They did, Dynasty 25. So does that mean that they arrived when Egypt went, oh, cool, pyramids are good, we like those, we'll bring those back. Oh, we haven't got enough rock. Okay, tiny pyramids for everyone. Why are they so small?

It's a matter of resources. Where the pyramids are located, you couldn't have thousands of workmen. You probably had a couple dozen workmen and they're queuing rock pretty locally. So they simply can't be big. But they're like, eh, we're a long ways away. As long as we got a pyramid, we're all good. A pyramid's a pyramid. A pyramid is definitely not just a pyramid. Size matters. The nuance window! All right. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our Pyramid Base chat. So it's time for my favourite part of the podcast, which is the Nuance Window. And this is where Maria and I kick back and relax for a couple of minutes

and we listen to our expert, Sarah. I'm going to put two minutes on the stopwatch, Sarah. What are you going to tell us about? The scale of what we don't know about ancient Egypt. Fabulous. Without much further ado, Professor Sarah Parkeck, the nuance window, please. Right. So one of the main questions that I get asked as an archaeologist and Egyptologist is just how much do we have left to find in ancient Egypt? And it's like, how long is a piece of string? Yes, we have 500 pyramids left to find or 10,000 tombs. I wouldn't know. However, I love maths and I'm a bit of a nerd. So I calculated the total volume of all of the known archaeological sites in the ancient Egyptian Delta and roughly guesstimated the

total amount that has been excavated by Egyptologists for the last 150 years. And the number and lots of rounding up and lots of generous room for error, I calculated that in the Egyptian Delta alone, we've excavated less than one one thousandth of one percent of the sites. Add on top of that all of the thousands of archaeological sites that we've been able to map using satellite imagery, and we've confirmed not all of them, but a good percentage enough. And all of these amazing features and things that we keep finding, and I feel very comfortable sharing that I think we've discovered less than 1% of ancient Egypt. And you think about how much we know, there's this rich field that's been around for hundreds of years. I think the next couple decades, you're going to see some of the most

extraordinary discoveries ever found in the history of Egyptology. And what I love is that a lot of them are going to be made by Egyptian scientists, is what you're seeing in the news today. So just because there have been all these amazing pyramids over a hundred and hundreds and hundreds of tombs, you know, if you're out there listening right now, especially for the kids, the field has so much left to discover. Amazing. So in 400 years, your work will finally be done. That's right, 400 years. Wow.

There could be whole other Tutankhamun-level amazing jaw-dropping discoveries. For sure. We know of a number of ancient Egyptian kings. We haven't found their tombs yet. The tomb of Imhotep, I'm sure, is going to be extraordinary when it's discovered. And when they open it up, of course, he'll still be alive

because I've seen the mummy and he lives forever. So, and he's very angry. So we have to be very careful when we go in. So what do you know now? It's time to find out what Maria has learned today. It's called the So What Do You Know Now? It's a 60 find out what Maria has learned today.

It's called the So What Do You Know Now? It's a 60-second quick-fire quiz. Last time, you got 8 out of 10, which is good. Good, strong score. And that was a difficult Saladin episode with lots of complicated history. I have full faith in you today. And, of course, the first question I'm going to ask you

is a really easy one. We've already mentioned that it's nothing to do with aliens, and that is my first question. Question one, the pyramids were definitely not built by what? Aliens. Exactly. Question two, what was the name of the architect who built the step pyramid for King Josa? Oh, Yohannes. No, it's Imhotep. Imhotep. Question three. What makes a pyramid a true pyramid? It's straight. It is, straight sides. Question four.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was made of how many stone blocks? 1.24 million. It was 2.3 million. Question five. King Khufu had which pyramid made for him? The Great. It was the Great Pyramid. I mean, the best pyramid, obviously. Question 5. King Khufu had which pyramid made for him? The Great. It was the Great Pyramid. I mean, the best pyramid, obviously. Question 6. Name one of the tools we know that was used to build pyramids during the Old Kingdom.

The drill? Yes! Question 7. What was the basic measuring unit in ancient Egypt? The hand that... you take your hand to your elbow and then like halfway up your arm. Cubit. Cubit is correct. Well done. Question eight. What exciting discovery was made a few years ago which gave us loads of insight into how pyramids were built?

Yeah, there's that papyrus diary, the guy with the diary. Mayor. Mayor. Murrer. Yes, mayor. Very good. Question nine. Roughly how many pyramids have been discovered in Egypt so far?

One hundred. One hundred is correct. More to find. And question ten. The three main Giza pyramids would have looked very different to ancient Egyptians. Why? They had it surrounded with white limestone to blind you into thinking that it was God. Amazing. Eight out of ten. That's very, very impressive. You've matched your score from before. You have learned lots of fantastic stuff. Well done. I've been a student for years, my whole life. So that brings us to the end of the podcast. Maria, are you now positively potty for pyramids? I am so, like, I wish I could go visit them right now. Just because I've been in lockdown, I need to get out of my house mostly. That's true.

Get a toe blown at the airport. Get out. I want to see those pyramids. That's true. Get a tow-blown at the airport, get out. I want to see those pyramids. Wonderful. Listeners, if you've enjoyed today's show, please do share it with your friends, leave a review online. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. But for now, let me say a huge thank you to our magnificent guests in History Corner, or rather Egyptology Corner, I suppose, Professor Sarah Parkak from the University of Alabama. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for having me on today. It was a blast.

It was an absolute pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, the marvellous Maria Shahata. Thank you, Maria. Thank you. That was so much fun. Thanks for having me. And to you listeners, join me next time for another voyage across space and time. And if you can't wait until then, why not have a sniff around in our back catalogue? You can listen to Maria chatting about Saladin, for example. Or if you enjoyed some Bronze Age stuff, you know, particularly building with large monuments, why not listen to the Stonehenge episode? But for now, I'm off to try and find Atlantis on Google Earth. I'm sure it's there. Bye!

Your Dead to Me was a Muddy Knees media production for BBC Radio 4. The researcher was Olivia Croyle, the script was by Emma Neguse and me. The project manager was Isla Matthews. And the producer was Cornelius Mendez. Have you ever wondered what teachers talk about when no one else is listening? Well, you're about to find out. I'm Maureen Bake and my brand new podcast, The Secret Life of Teachers, goes behind the headlines to see what's really going on as teachers go back to school after the lockdown. I was a teacher for almost a decade, but I never witnessed a time like this. So I've created my own virtual secret staff room,

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