The Diary of Merer: A 4,500-Year-Old Papyrus That Details The Construction of The Great Pyramid

The Great Pyramids of Giza has been one of the world’s greatest enigmas—how did an ancient society build such massive monuments without the help of modern machinery? The first and the largest of them, the Pyramid of Khufu, is 146 meters tall and until about 800 years ago, it was the tallest man-made structure on Earth. The mystery of the pyramids would perhaps never be solved in entirety, but certain discoveries have helped us understand how some of the impossibilities might have been achieved. One such discovery was made in 2013 at a site called Wadi al-Jarf, which was an old harbor on the Red Sea coast. While excavating some drystone buildings and man-made caves which was used to store wooden boats, archeologists Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard discovered entire rolls of papyrus, some a few feet long and others in fragments. They were written in hieroglyphics as well as hieratic, which was the cursive script the ancient Egyptians used for everyday communication. Some of the papyri were even dated to “The year after the 13th cattle count” of King Khufu, meaning around year 26 or 27 of his reign. This makes them the oldest papyrus documents yet found. Even more astonishing was that the papyri were written by men who participated in the building of the Great Pyramid. Some of them were book of accounts, which detailed the movement of bread, beer, cereals and meat to feed the 20,000-strong workforce spread across the pyramid site, quarries and transport teams. “The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet, showing what was needed, what had been delivered and what was still owed,” as per History Today. Papyrus containing the diary of Merer at the Wadi al-Jarf exhibition, Cairo Museum, 2016. Others were journals, detailing the activities on a daily basis.