Unearthing Egypt’s ‘Pyramid City’ : Archeology: Discoveries are the strongest evidence of a town where artisans and farmers--not slaves--built the tomb of Pharaoh Cheops. Findings are discussed at symposium in Los Angeles.

The discovery of the remains of the long-sought city occupied by pyramid workers more than 4,000 years ago is providing new details about how pyramids were constructed and giving archeologists their first glimpse into an important facet of life in ancient Egypt.

The remains were unearthed by workers digging trenches to install a sewage system in a community now settled by Egyptian peasants who service the tourist industry on the historic Giza Plateau in Egypt. The discoveries provide the strongest evidence yet that the city’s original occupants, artisans and farmers--not slaves or spacemen--built the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Cheops 4,600 years ago.

“This discovery is much more important to Egyptology than all the gold in Tutankhamen’s tomb . . . because it will give us accurate information about the life of ordinary Egyptians 4,600 years ago,” said archeologist Zahi Hawass, director general of the Giza Plateau, where the pyramids and the Sphinx are located. Hawass discussed the discoveries for the first time in the United States on Saturday at a symposium at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles.

New information about this “Pyramid City,” where as many as 30,000 workmen may have lived, is extremely important because there are no written records describing how the pyramids were built, said archeologist Ogden Goelet Jr. of New York University.

“For the first time, we’re now getting some information about how the people who actually built these massive structures actually lived while they were on site, how they were fed, and a lot more about the organization of the work force.”

“The general picture that is emerging is not of isolated tombs with the desert wind whistling around, but of ‘downtown Egypt’--a virtual city into which goods were being brought and redistributed to the people serving the complex and where laborers were being brought from the provinces and returned again,” said archeologist Mark Lehner of the University of Chicago.

“It is an aspect of ancient Egypt that we very rarely get into,” said archeologist Lanny Bell of the University of Chicago. “We’re always accused of spending time looking into monuments of the elite . . . and forgetting about houses of the common man. This is an attempt to find out a little bit more about how they lived.”

In other recent excavations at Giza, which is located on the Nile River just south of Cairo, the Egyptian researchers have also discovered a series of architecturally unique tombs occupied by the workers and their overseers, others occupied by dwarfs who were Cheops’s court jesters and the great causeway that connected Cheops’ funeral temple at his pyramid to the valley temple that served as an entrance to the pyramid complex.

Taken together, the discoveries are painting a vivid picture of what the plateau was like in the time of Cheops, who built the first pyramid there, and of the life of the common man.

Hawass noted that the new discoveries will also “end, once and for all, the idea that pyramids were built by people who came from outer space.” More seriously, he added that it would also end other theories, such as that they were built by slaves. “That’s not true because the king permitted those workers, the poor Egyptians, to be buried beside him. That’s exciting. We’ve never seen that in ancient Egypt, although it did occur more than 1,000 years later at Deir-el Medina in Luxor.”

Hawass, 43, was placed in charge of the plateau in 1987. The discovery of Pyramid City resulted from his efforts to protect the monuments from damaging salt and pollutants in the water table under the pyramids and the Sphinx. The main source of the pollutants was the village of Nazlet-el Samman, which had no sewage lines and is home to 70,000 camel drivers, horse drivers, souvenir salesmen and money-changers.

Excavation for a new sewage system turned up mud brick walls over the entire city, butchered animal bones indicating that large numbers of workers were fed in the area, and literally millions of pottery shards from beer cups, wine cups, plates, trays and food storage vessels. The pottery shards “showed the great importance of beer and wine to the ancient Egyptians,” Hawass said.

Other evidence indicating that the pyramids were not built by slaves included scales and weights that were used for measuring portions of the barley and wheat seeds used to pay workers every 10 days. The scales were found in the ruins of what Hawass believes to be the administrative center for the project.

Combing carefully through the ruins, Hawass identified extensive amounts of pollen from plants, which is being analyzed by botanists. Knowing what plants were growing when the pyramids were built, Hawass hopes, will settle the debate over what the climate was like then.

The excavations also revealed evidence of widespread burning, confirming legends that the Pyramid City was destroyed during the people’s revolt against the iron-fisted Pharaonic rule that ended the 450-year era of the Old Kingdom in 2134 BC.

Pyramid City has two different types of dwellings, Hawass said. Overseers and the artisans who cut and decorated the blocks lived at the site permanently and had large, relatively luxurious houses. The workers and farmers who moved the stones and worked only during the yearly floods lived in more barracks-like buildings, sleeping five and six per room, Hawass said.

The trenching work for the sewers also has for the first time revealed most of the limestone causeway that connected Cheops’ funeral temple in front of the pyramid to the valley temple that serves as its entrance. The Greek historian Herodotus noted that its sides were decorated with scenes of the Pharaoh’s triumphs, but those scenes had not been seen by modern man until now.

The discovery of the overseers’ and workers’ tombs was also accidental, and is reminiscent of the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. That tomb was found when a horse being led by English Egyptologist Howard Carter stuck its foot into a hole under the sand. The new tombs were identified after a horse being ridden by an American tourist tripped in a similar fashion.

“Over the last nine months, we found 70 tombs there,” Hawass said. “We would find a large tomb (of an overseer) and behind it the smaller tombs of the men who worked for him. You never in ancient Egypt find a style of architecture like the tombs at this site. The tombs of the overseers have vaulted ceilings, which is unique in ancient Egypt.”

The tombs are constructed from limestone, granite and basalt left over from building the temples at the complex, and then capped with mud brick. “Interestingly, we found that some of the tombs have domes of pyramid shape,” Hawass said. “This showed the pyramidal god who created the whole world and they wanted to be buried beneath this shape.”

In one overseer’s tomb, opened earlier this month, Hawass found three small limestone statues, one of the overseer, one of his wife and one of a servant grinding pigments for decorating the tombs and temples. “This is one of the most wonderful statues. . . . It could be one of the treasures of the Cairo Museum,” he said.

Another accidental discovery came while Hawass was excavating around the tomb of a dwarf named Seneb. Under a pile of sand and rubbish from previous excavations more than 90 feet high, he found a series of tombs of dwarfs and handicapped individuals.

“It could be that the king cared about this type of people and he ordered that they should be near him, beside his pyramid,” Hawass said.

In one tomb, Hawass found a statue of a dwarf, called Per-ny-ankhu, that is “one of the most interesting Old Kingdom statues that we have ever found.” Inscriptions on the shoulder of the 1 1/2-foot basalt statue identify it as “he who pleases his master every day,” suggesting that Per-ny-ankhu was the Pharaoh’s court jester.

Hawass would like to excavate all of Pyramid City and has plans to move all residents of Nazlet-el Samman to a site 10 miles away. That plan has created a political storm in Cairo and is now on a back burner. For the present, he will have to be content to excavate a large open area in the village this fall.