Tales from a lost city
Archaeologists uncover secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of GizaSunday, June 28, 2009 3:37 AM
By Doug Caruso
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
<p>Archaeologists Ana Tavares and Mark Lehner helped COSI set up its Lost Egypt exhibit. The two have spent years uncovering treasures at Giza.</p>
ERIC ALBRECHT | The Dispatch
Archaeologists Ana Tavares and Mark Lehner helped COSI set up its Lost Egypt exhibit. The two have spent years uncovering treasures at Giza.
<p>Archaeologists have been digging for two decades in Egypt, digging up a lost city where Giza pyramid builders lived.</p>
Photo courtesy of Mark Lehner
Archaeologists have been digging for two decades in Egypt, digging up a lost city where Giza pyramid builders lived.
<p>Clay sealings found on site</p>
Clay sealings found on site
<p>Clay sealings found on site</p>
Clay sealings found on site
<p>Clay sealings found on site</p>
Clay sealings found on site
The Egyptians who built the giant pyramids on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago ate dense bread, choice cuts of meat and preserved fish.
They slept in military-style barracks and belonged to work gangs with names such as the "Drunkards of Menkaure."
Archaeologist Mark Lehner knows these details because he spent the past two decades digging them up from their lost city.
Nearby are the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, icons most people associate with Egyptian archaeology. But Lehner likens those to what someone might find someday if they dig up the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
"What would you know about their diet or the economy or a crisis in the economy or how much they changed in 300 years since George Washington unless you dig the outlying parts of D.C.?" he asked.
His team's treasures -- grain mills, animal bones and pieces of clay seals -- are found in bakeries, barracks and the homes of scribes.
Lehner and his colleague, Ana Tavares, were advisors for the Lost Egypt exhibit that opened May 30 at COSI. They spoke with The Dispatch last month when they were in Columbus.
Their work is heavily represented in the exhibit in sections about mapping, animal bones and the imprinted clay seals that scribes used on bags, boxes and important documents.
They focus on the day-to-day life of Old Kingdom Egypt and seek a more intimate view of a culture that disappeared beneath the sand.
"What I take in the title of the COSI exhibit Lost Egypt is that it's talking about getting back that part of Egypt that is lost, which is all the people and the individuals," Lehner said.
"We're trying to reconstruct a whole city and how people lived, so we'll go for anything: the fabric of the pottery, the sealings, we'll go for it all."
First, he had to find the city.
Egyptologists knew that the tens of thousands of people who built the pyramids must have been housed somewhere.
Lehner spent three years surveying the Great Sphinx, mapping it by hand, block by block. He then turned his attention to the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx and the three key Fourth Dynasty pyramids stand.
He grew up in North Dakota and went to Egypt in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo with a New Age idea that refugees from Atlantis had buried their hall of records beneath the Sphinx. But after spending years acquainting himself with what he now calls "bedrock reality," his perspective changed.
"It shifted, really, to one of science, trying to understand where the city was, surveying the landscape to see what stories the landscape told. Saying, 'Here are the quarries, here are the ramps, here's where the harbor was and, therefore, the city should be out there ,' " said Lehner, who also teaches three months a year at the University of Chicago.
"The really neat thing about our project is that we could go out there in 1988 and over the next 20 years we tested that hypothesis, which is the best of science. And guess what? Sure enough, there it was."
Since then, three areas of the city have emerged, said Tavares, assistant field director for Ancient Egypt Research Associates, a donor-funded archaeology group Lehner founded to explore the lost city site.
"You have a barracks, which is tightly controlled with streets and an enclosure wall," she said. "And there in the shape of the houses and the artifacts we find, it tells one story and that's basically of workers, young men, presumably no women or children at this point: a rotating labor force."
Near the barracks, Tavares said, a village grew with smaller houses, twisting streets and a less regimented lifestyle, perhaps with more women and children. The people who lived there appeared to be providing for themselves on a family scale, she said.
And then there is the nearby town where officials lived.
"There you have a lot of evidence of administration, of sealings of documents that came in," she said. "There are very large houses with beautiful painted plaster on the walls and the finds there are quite different: stone vessels, more delicate finds."
The team's sealing expert, John Nolan, painstakingly reassembled the imprinted shards of clay seals that scribes placed on bags, boxes, jars and doors, Lehner said.
"The titles on the sealings are some of the highest scribal titles in the land," Lehner said. "So we have, for example, 'Overseer of the King's Writing Case,' 'Overseer of the Scribes of Royal Tutors,' who tutor the noble children and royal children."
The workers left at the end of the three generations of construction it took to build the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure.
From their excavations, they can see that the barracks site crumbled to ankle or waist height and then the desert blew in and covered it in nearly 20 feet of sand.
The next steps for studying the lost city will take place mostly in the lab, Tavares said.
"After 20 years of mapping and excavation, what we do need to do is interpret and consolidate the information and publish," she said.
Lehner said he'd like to keep digging and leave the lab work to Tavares. But he's also interested in reconstructing some of the buildings they've uncovered to get a practical view of how they might have been used.
dcaruso@dispatch.com http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2009/06/28/sci_Egyptologist.ART_ART_06-28-09_G3_MNE9H7A.html?sid=101