January 15, 2018

How Were The Pyramids Built? Inside The Worlds FirstDocumented Processes

process.st/how-were-the-pyramids-built/

We talk a lot about processes here at Process Street and we try to give insight into not onlyhow to make current processes better but also into how processes have evolved over time andwhy.

Weve looked at case studies, poor processes, optimized processes, and technical guides tobusiness process management.

But were no stranger to going back in time to explore the development of processes andwhere they came from. In this article, were going to follow up on the theme established in ourpost on surgical processes and look at processes and organizational systems in history.

This is the story of ancient Egypt.

The Great Pyramid is considered one of the wonders of the world. But how did it come to be?

Well look at a number of the classic discussions surrounding the construction of the pyramids,but focus on how a society which existed nearly 5000 years ago was able to construct some ofthe greatest and most iconic monuments known to humankind.

Well explore:

What was the Great Pyramid and how was it built?Who built the Great Pyramid and what was labor like throughout the period of

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construction?How were things organized in ancient Egypt?; Or, how to count from one to ten.What do we know about trade in ancient Egypt?Who were the scribes and why were they important?

Ancient Egypt is one of the first civilized societies for which we have an understanding of theirperceptions of organization and management.

Spoiler alert: they used checklists!

Lets dive in!

How was the Great Pyramid built?

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Throughout this article well have a couple of historical methodological issues to deal with. Themost obvious being that we cannot be wholly certain that all historical occurrences belong tothe same period of time.

The ancient Egyptians have had a civilization existing continuously for thousands of years, andone could even argue continuity to the modern day. The same baking practices, for example,that we find evidence of 3000 years ago still occur in modern Cairo if you look hard enough.

As such, we need to ground our investigation in a certain period of time and accept that someof our findings might span time periods slightly before or slightly after our chosen area.

Well focus broadly on the time period encompassing the building of the Great Pyramid ofGiza; one of the most studied and revered Egyptian monuments. This puts us firmly into thePharaonic period, not the Ptolemaic period.

Distinctions are important.

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The Great Pyramid is sometimes known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops.Its classified as one of the Seven Wonders of the World and was believed to have been builtaround 2500BC as a tomb for the fourth dynasty Pharaoh Khufu hence the name.

Why was the pyramid at Giza so impressive? And why is it worth us thinking about?

As Dr. Craig Smith points out:

The logistics of construction at the Giza site are staggering when you think that the ancientEgyptians had no pulleys, no wheels, and no iron tools. Yet, the dimensions of the pyramid areextremely accurate and the site was leveled within a fraction of an inch over the entire 13.1-acrebase. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laserleveling. Thats astounding. With their rudimentary tools, the pyramid builders of ancient Egyptwere about as accurate as we are today with 20th-century technology.

In short, the Egyptians achieved things architecturally which we would struggle to do withoutmodern technology. This required a level of labor force which dwarfs what modern dayconstruction teams would need for comparable projects. Their organization and managementwould have needed to have been incredible to simply pull this effort off.

For context, lets look at a couple of features of the construction process which may or may nothave played a role in the creation of the pyramids. Academics are still not fully decided onwhich options are most probable, but these are some hotly discussed issues:

The Rolling Stones

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The stones involved in the building of the pyramids were not little bricks or lightweightbreezeblocks. The bricks in the pyramid vary in size but the largest can be found in the Kingschamber. These particular stones differ from the regular limestone blocks and were insteadmade of granite, weighing between 25 to 80 tonnes.

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Some believe the granite slabs were transported from Aswan, a town nearly 500 miles away.

Whether limestone bricks or granite slabs, the Egyptians required a way to transport thematerials over land. The leading theory as to how this would have been achieved lies in rollingthe stones using a cradle-like machine. This suspended the rocks and allowed them to berolled by a team of workers.

Experiments done by the Obayashi Corporation, with concrete blocks 0.8 m square by 1.6 m longand weighing 2.5 tons, showed how 18 men could drag the block over a 1-in-4 incline ramp, at arate of 18 meters per minute.

There is a general consensus that this method may have been effective in transporting 2.5tonne limestone blocks, but it is difficult to find archeological evidence to suggest it would havebeen used for the 80 tonne granite slabs.

This theory is elucidated in Dick Parrys text Engineering the Pyramids, but not everyone is incomplete agreement about the effectiveness of this method.

Corinna Rossi, in the Dutch paleontology and egyptology journal PalArch, presents hermisgivings with Parrys argument as presented in his book:

Undoubtedly, Dick Parrys method works: it is certainly true that rolling a block up a slope iseasier than dragging it. Concerning in general ancient Egypt and in particular the pyramids, theproblem is that there is no archaeological evidence that may confirm that such a method was everused.

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She continues:

Finally, there is absolutely no pictorial or textual evidence that their function was to roll objects,nor that any object was ever rolled around in ancient Egypt. In fact, one wonders, if such a systemwas so successfully adopted to build the most famous Old Kingdom pyramids, why was not itwidely employed also in the New Kingdom? Apart from symbolic representations that show, forinstance, the king erecting obelisks by himself, the few realistic scenes that have survivedshowing blocks being moved around (e.g. from the tomb of Rekhmira at Thebes, or the scenefrom Tura mentioned in Parrys book) depict ramps and sledges.

Gypsum mortar

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To bind the rocks together, the Egyptians used mortar much like in modern building processes.

Evidence points to the Egyptians using gypsum mortar also known as plaster of Paris inconstructing pyramids during the Pharaonic period.

The first Egyptologist to identify this method was Alfred Lucas in 1926. Further studies haveconfirmed these results and point increasingly to the complex production process required tomanufacture this mortar, particularly en masse.

Coppola, Taccia, and Tedeschi outline this process in their 2013 paper Analysis andConservation of Ancient Egyptian gypsum-based binders and mortars from the temple ofRamesses II in Antinoe. The Ramesses II temple is somewhat later than our Great Pyramid,but we can be confident similar methods were in place.

Preliminary investigations (statistic and typological) on macroscopic characters allowed theidentification of 12 different types of mortar: mortars for laying of blocks (5), inner integrationplasters (3), outer coating plasters (4).

These different mortars all had slightly different compositions depending on what purpose theywere meant to serve. Outer cladding required different strengths to mortars used to bindblocks. Depending on the need, other ground stones may be added to the mixture, or themortars were treated at different temperatures.

The general process would have looked like this:

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The constructive culture of Pharaonic Egypt is characterized by the production of bindersobtained from the firing of sulphate rocks. The low-temperature processing is undoubtedly one ofthe main driving factors. At temperatures as low as 110-160C calcium sulfate dihydrate(CaSO42H2O) loses water and turns into hemihydrate (bassanite, CaSO4 H2O) in two forms and . Between 170-300C, the dehydration is complete and anhydrous gypsum or solubleanhydrite (CaSO4) appears.

The production process would have been vast and complex with huge furnaces all working todifferent exact specifications aiming to produce industrial quantities of the mortars required.

This wasnt simply a case of putting blocks on top of one another like legos.

Internal ramp theory

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So, we have some idea now of how rocks were possibly transported across land and howthese structures were held together, but how were they pieced together to create this complexstructure without cranes and modern machines?

Multiple theories exist, but two prevalent ones are centred around ramps. We can find theroots of these theories in the earliest remaining writings on Egyptian construction techniques.The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus describes the following:

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And tis said the stone was transported a great distance from Arabia, and that the edifices wereraised by means of earthen ramps, since machines for lifting had not yet been invented in thosedays; and most surprising it is, that although such large structures were raised in an areasurrounded by sand, no trace remains of either ramps or the dressing of the stones, so that it seemsnot the result of the patient labor of men, but rather as if the whole complex were set down entireupon the surrounding sand by some god.

Diodorus Siculus goes on to explain that he believes the workforce built and then dismantledramps, explaining how they were able to build the pyramid and why we have little evidence oframps leftover.

However, it is dangerous to put too much faith in ancient historians writing, as we are,thousands of years after the event. After all, another Greek historian Herodotus describes awholly different technique:

This pyramid was made like stairs, which some call steps and others, tiers. When this, its firstform, was completed, the workmen used short wooden logs as levers to raise the rest of the stones;they heaved up the blocks from the ground onto the first tier of steps; when the stone had beenraised, it was set on another lever that stood on the first tier, and the lever again used to lift it fromthis tier to the next.

Some historians posit external ramps around the pyramid allowing for blocks to be draggedupwards on the kinds of sledges Rossi mentioned in her quote above.

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Others posit an internal ramp which allowed for bricks to be assembled from the inside out.This article from Archeology Magazine discusses Henri Houdins theories surrounding aninternal ramp and leaves us with this fascinating piece of evidence:

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When the French team surveyed the Great Pyramid, they used microgravimetry, a technique thatenabled them to measure the density of different sections of the pyramid, thus detecting hiddenchambers. The French team concluded that there were no large hidden chambers inside it. If therewas a ramp inside the pyramid, shouldnt the French have detected it? In 2000, Henri Houdin waspresenting this theory at a scientific conference where one of the members of the 1986 Frenchteam was present. He mentioned to Houdin that their computer analysis of the pyramid did yieldone curious image, something they couldnt interpret and therefore ignored. That image showedexactly what Jean-Pierre Houdins theory had predicteda ramp spiraling up through the pyramid.

There are different supporters ofthese different theories, but allhave merits. What we canconclusively conclude from thediscussion which occurs in tryingto expose the true methods behindpyramid construction is thatwhatever method was used it wasnot simple.

The construction of these greatmausoleums was a gargantuantask which required a citys worthof labor and skilled craftsmen toboot.

The slave myth

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https://archive.archaeology.org/0705/etc/pyramid.html

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From what weve seen so far, we can understand that teams of knowledgeable laborers wouldhave been beneficial to create these structures.

The building sites of ancient Egypt werent simply hordes of poorly educated slaves to-ing andfro-ing chunks of rock, but areas where skilled and specialized laborers plied their trade underthe supervision of architects and engineers. The following passage presents an acceptedperception of workforce makeup:

Evidence suggests that around 5,000 were permanent workers on salaries with the balanceworking three or four-month shifts in lieu of taxes while receiving subsistence wages of tenloaves of bread and a jug of beer per day. Zahi Hawass believes that the majority of workers mayhave been volunteers. It is estimated that only 4,000 of the total workforce were labourers whoquarried the stone, hauled blocks to the pyramid and set the blocks in place.

When we start to picture the Egyptian workforce in the same light as a modern workforce westart to uncover new and different questions. Who organized these workers? Where did theyget their materials from? What were management structures like?

Once we stop Othering the Egyptian system and start treating it like any other kind of modernsystem, we can start to understand it better.

How the workers were organized

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Like other large construction projects, bureaucrats played a large role:

The vast majority of the workforce provided support services such as scribes, toolmakers andother backup services.

Moreover, we know how teams were put together and how the pyramid [pun intended] ofcontrol was structured:

The tombs of supervisors contain inscriptions regarding the organisation of the workforce. Therewere two crews of approximately 2,000 workers sub-divided into named gangs of 1,000. Thegangs were divided into five phyles of 200 which were in turn split into groups of around 20workers grouped according to their skills, with each group having their own project leader and aspecific task.

This Harvard Magazine article from Jonathan Shaw tells the story of how we found out thebuilders of the pyramids were not slaves, but workers:

Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvards Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion ananswer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

How to support a massive workforce

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Lehner found the infrastructure which sustained the vast workforce committed to working onthe construction of the pyramids. It started with finding a bakery and followed by finding a goatcemetery large enough to feed an army. From these findings he was able to devote the timeand effort necessary to uncover the realities of the daily lives of ancient Egyptian laborers.

These sites where regular workers lived hold some of the secrets of the most mythic humanrulers in their ruins. Strangely enough, these areas bear many similarities to the modern day:

They have found not one town, but two, side by side. The first is laid out in an organic fashion, asthough it grew slowly over time. Lehner speculates that this was the settlement for permanentworkers. The other town, laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets, on a formal,grid-like system, is bounded to the northwest by the great wall that both Lehner, and Reisnerbefore him, had noted. This wall of the crow turned out to be massive indeed, 30 feet high, witha gateway soaring to 21 feet, one of the largest in the ancient world. The main street leadingthrough the complex is hard-packed limestone, paved with mud, with a gravel-lined drain runningdown the centerengineered, says Lehner, almost like a modern street. His team has partiallyexcavated a royal building filled with hundreds of seals dating from the time of Khufus son,Khafre, and his grandson, Menkaure. And they have found a royal storehouse with circular grainbins just like those depicted in De Milles The Ten Commandments.

These details allow us to place these settlements around the time of Khufu, which in turnexplains why they exist. The vast expanses of temporary city serve not to cater to Cairo but toserve a project; a construction project which was one of humankinds largest achievements upto that point.

All this allows us an insight into the forms of organization which built the pyramids. We seehuge numbers of workers supported by an artificially constructed town, who are in turn splitover and over into small dedicated teams given specialized tasks. Additionally, given thephysical and demanding nature of the work, these teams worked on a few months on fewmonths off like workers on a modern day oil rig, catering to human demands like family.

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Who were the workers?

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These groups of workers would often, it seems, band together. The modern term union mightnot be wholly accurate given our current understanding of the word, but it appears workersorganized to some extent collectively though for what ends remains unclear:

Harvards George Reisner found workers graffiti early in the twentieth century that revealed thatthe pyramid builders were organized into labor units with names like Friends of Khufu orDrunkards of Menkaure. Within these units were five divisions (their roles still unknown)thesame groupings, according to papyrus scrolls of a later period, that served in the pyramid temples.We do know, Lehner says, that service in these temples was rendered by a special class of peopleon a rotating basis determined by those five divisions. Many Egyptologists therefore subscribe tothe hypothesis that the pyramids were also built by a rotating labor force in a modular, team-basedkind of organization.

The difference, for Lehner, between the highly skilled workers and the lesser skilled workerswho received lower pay and had to be there lay not in the difference between worker andslave, but in a cultural understanding of owing to society.

Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in whichalmost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this bak. Everybody owed bak ofsome kind to people above them in the social hierarchy. But it doesnt really work as a word forslavery, he says. Even the highest officials owed bak.

In his paper, Lehner makes the comparison to an Amish society in America where allmembers pitch in to raise a barn. They are not necessarily paid to do it, but they have anunspoken social commitment on behalf of the community to put their labor toward a common

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project.

In our society of formalized give and take with contractual agreements we struggle to conceiveof social comparisons so often consider the payment of this bak as akin to slavery. Lehnerspoint would be that the labor force of the Giza builders was made up of highly skilled workersand citizens who owed bak corve workers not a slave labor force.

Numbering and accounting in Egypt

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None of these incredible feats of engineering would be possible without the levels oforganization and management to support them.

Yet, organization doesnt exist in a vacuum.

It requires a series of social and cultural advances in order to operate on this scale. A huntergatherer society would not be able to achieve this level of organization.

The Egyptians had a well documented writing system, a numerical system, and a series ofhierarchical structures designed to meter out responsibility as and when it was needed.

In the Ptolemaic period, the economy was centralized with a regulated currency calledthe drachmae. However, many economic transactions were done on the basis of barter ortransactions in kind. This informal exchange system complemented the circulation of thecurrency and, as we saw above, workers on projects were often paid in food and wine ratherthan in formal currency.

From the Pharaonic period through to the Ptolemaic, there were periods of unity andcentralization and also periods of fragmentation, yet it seems fair to assume that the FourthDynasty economy of Khufu shared many similarities with later versions. The kinds of barter

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and in kind exchange dynamics we see in the Ptolemaic period likely provide us with insightinto the way transactions operated during the reign of Khufu.

Formal currency, however, would not have been implemented during the reign of Khufu orother dynastic leaders. Joshua J Mark explains that the use of currency as a standardizer forexchange didnt occur in Egypt until the Persian invasion of 525 BCE. What they had insteadduring the Pharaonic period was an evaluation metric known as the deben.

The deben could be considered like the dollar or another international currency against whichother currencies values are measured. There was no coin to represent a deben, but everyoneknew roughly how many debens different items were theoretically worth. This imaginarycurrency helped regulate and guide the barter economy.

Nonetheless, formal currency or no currency, things need to be counted. To facilitate theseends the Egyptians needed an effective numbering system.

Like we have different symbols for a base 10 counting system, the Egyptians had the same:

In order to make larger numbers, thesecharacters would be representedalongside each other. This approach tomathematics differs from our own yet isquite intuitive and can be understoodfairly quickly. In the image below, youllsee how these smaller characters aretransformed into larger numbers:

This numbering system allowed forlayers of bureaucracy within theEgyptian economy, granting the ability tocalculate how much raw material wasneeded to manufacture mortars,communicating how many animals wouldbe needed to feed a workforce, andenabling Egypt to maintain successfultrade relationships with the ancient worldto power their construction efforts.

Trade in ancient Egypt

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Like any successful society, Egypt wasnt operating in isolation.

In Diodorus Siculus description of the building process, the limestone used was quarried andimported from Arabia. The understanding of the term Arabia would have been different thanour modern conceptions, but historians see this as describing the area east of the Nile.

Whether limestone was brought in from afar or generated locally, we know that many of theother items the Egyptians used came from areas outside their boundaries.

According to Joshua J Mark, writing for the Ancient History Encyclopedia, trade in ancientEgypt begun in the predynastic period (c. 6000 c. 3150 BCE). By the time of Khufu, Egypthad a strong trading presence across much of what we now consider to be North Africa andthe Middle East.

Trade with the Mesopotamians and Sumerians is considered to have impacted heavily onEgypts cultural evolution, with designs and motifs appearing which mirror those of the othercivilizations.

Moreover, with the development of strong wooden boats, Egypt was now able to import woodslike cedar from where modern day Lebanon and Syria can be found.

Some of these trade relationships were established peacefully, with some being securedthrough military force. Nubia for example derives its name from the Egyptian word for gold. Noprizes for guessing what happened to the Nubians when they wanted to keep their naturalresources

Beyond simply the surrounding area, Egypt expanded its trade even further. To what extentEgypt traded with countries further into Asia, and to what extent they received Asian goodssecond hand, isnt clear. Yet, there is evidence of items coming through trade from thousandsof miles away.

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In a tomb found in Naqada, on the west bank of the Nile, archaeologists discovered an array ofinteresting finds. The most impressive in relation to trade is likely a small gem which wasprobably used as an ornament or as jewelry; it appears to be a pendant of some kind.

The Afghan jewel

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This small gem was found in a collection from Naqada alongside bead bracelets, ivory, andcopper wire. The gem itself was revealed to be a lapis lazuli.

Egyptologists like Payne have studied lapis lazuli finds in Egypt and decided that the stonescan be found in the area from periods as far back as 3500 BCE 1000 years prior to Khufu.

The amazing thing about the lapis lazuli is that it was only being mined in the Sar-i Sang minesof Afghanistan.

From Cairo to modern day Kabul is over 4000km, and the Sar-i Sang mines are east of thatfurther.

This shows us that ancient Egypt had an active and important trade network from an earlystage, and its connectedness to the world was greater than typically imagined.

Who was the scribe?

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The scribe in ancient Egypt was the modern day bureaucrat.

The scribe recorded the information which would have made the above trade, management,and construction all possible.

The scribe, in a business sense, was how Egypt scaled.

The History Channel have an article, with accompanying video, written by Christopher Klein onEgypts oldest papyri. This tells the story of a recent find currently on display in Cairo whichconsists of early scribe documents outlining a series of tasks which need to be done.

The document came from a larger haul of hundreds of papyri reported and analyzed in theNear Eastern Archeology journal by Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard.

These papyri are in hieratic, some of them are very well dated to the end of Khufus reign thedate of the year after the 13th cattle count appears on one of the best-preserved examples.

This information makes these documents the oldest inscribed papyri that have ever beendiscovered in Egypt.

Tallet and Marouard describe in their paper the two kinds of documents present in the find:

First, there are a large number of accounts organized in tables, which correspond to daily ormonthly deliveries of food from various areas including the Nile Delta.

These are your planning documents which make up the stock take and accountancy parts ofmanaging the trading port where the documents were discovered.

The second category of documents, however, is the one which excites the Process Street18/20

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enthusiast:

It is a personal logbook that records every day activities of a team led by a Memphis official, theinspector Merer (s Mrr), who was in charge of a team of about 200 men.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the worlds earliest recorded checklist.

Organize like an Egyptian

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How were the pyramids built?

The pyramids were built by:

utilizing disciplined engineering featsto transform carefully constructed materialsinto large architecturally-precise structuresthrough a careful and diligent command of skilled laborand documented management processes and hierarchies.

Oh, and with checklists.

The Egyptian principles for building the pyramids share so much in common with our ownmodern practices.

Written communication allowed for huge numbers of disparate people to cooperate on thesame project and achieve incredible results.

If the Egyptians can use effective management techniques and organizational principles to19/20

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build a pyramid without the internet, machinery, or even iron tools, imagine what you couldachieve with the same committed approach!

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How Were The Pyramids Built? Inside The Worlds First Documented ProcessesHow was the Great Pyramid built?The Rolling StonesGypsum mortarInternal ramp theory

The slave mythHow the workers were organizedHow to support a massive workforceWho were the workers?

Numbering and accounting in EgyptTrade in ancient EgyptThe Afghan jewel

Who was the scribe?Organize like an Egyptian