![]() The work that Tallet and others have done in the last two decades has shown that the ancient Egyptian Empire was as ambitious in its outward reach as it was in building upward in its colossal monuments at Giza. Before these recent excavations, the ancient Egyptians were not widely known to be notable sea travelers, and were thought to confine themselves to moving up and down the Nile or hugging the Mediterranean coast. On a clear day you can see the Sinai Desert about 40 miles away across the Red Sea from where we stand. And right below there are three lines of a hieroglyphic inscription proclaiming the achievements of the pharaoh, which Tallet translates: “In year one of the king, they sent a troop of 3,000 men to fetch copper, turquoise and all the good products of the desert.” ![]() There is the royal seal of Mentuhotep IV, a little-known pharaoh who ruled for just two years in about 2,000 B.C. You can see the outlines of a set of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs carved delicately into the stone. Tallet leads us up the hillside and clambers on a rocky trail along the cliff face. Above the tents is a steep sandstone hillside into which the ancient Egyptians carved deep caves, or galleries, in which they stored their boats. Tallet and his crew-part French, part Egyptian-sleep in rows of tents set up near the archaeological site. We are standing in an encampment in a desert valley a couple of hundred yards from the Red Sea near the modern Egyptian resort town called Ayn Soukhna. “It’s because the papyri are speaking of the Pyramid of Khufu,” he says. He finds it both amusing and mildly annoying that his discoveries are suddenly attracting attention in the scholarly press and popular media. Tallet has been toiling quietly on the periphery of the ancient Egyptian Empire-from the Libyan Desert to the Sinai and the Red Sea-for more than 20 years without attracting much notice, until now. “One must not enlarge this kind of find.” Was he very emotional when he came upon the cache of papyri? “You know, when you are working like that all the day for one month you cannot realize at once what happens.” “The century is at the beginning,” he says at one of his digs along the Red Sea. Tallet himself is careful to speak in more measured terms. Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian archaeologist, and formerly the chief inspector of the pyramid site and minister of antiquities, says that it is “the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century.” Mark Lehner, the head of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, who has worked on the pyramids and the Sphinx for 40 years, has said it may be as close as he is likely to get to time-traveling back to the age of the pyramid builders. And since the pharaohs used the Tura limestone for the pyramids’ outer casing, and Merer’s journal chronicles the last known year of Khufu’s reign, the entries provide a never-before-seen snapshot of the ancients putting finishing touches on the Great Pyramid.Įxperts are thrilled by this trove of papyri. In fact, Merer mentions reporting to “the noble Ankh-haf,” who was known to be the half-brother of the Pharaoh Khufu and now, for the first time, was definitively identified as overseeing some of the construction of the Great Pyramid. Merer, who accounted for his time in half-day increments, mentions stopping at Tura, a town along the Nile famous for its limestone quarry, filling his boat with stone and taking it up the Nile River to Giza. Among the papyri was the journal of a previously unknown official named Merer, who led a crew of some 200 men who traveled from one end of Egypt to the other picking up and delivering goods of one kind or another. Tallet realized that he was dealing with the oldest known papyri in the world.Īstonishingly, the papyri were written by men who participated in the building of the Great Pyramid, the tomb of the Pharaoh Khufu, the first and largest of the three colossal pyramids at Giza just outside modern Cairo. Then, in 2013, during his third digging season, he came upon something quite unexpected: entire rolls of papyrus, some a few feet long and still relatively intact, written in hieroglyphics as well as hieratic, the cursive script the ancient Egyptians used for everyday communication. During his first digging season, in 2011, he established that the caves had served as a kind of boat storage depot during the fourth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, about 4,600 years ago. ![]() Following notes written by an English traveler in the early 19th century and two French pilots in the 1950s, Pierre Tallet made a stunning discovery: a set of 30 caves honeycombed into limestone hills but sealed up and hidden from view in a remote part of the Egyptian desert, a few miles inland from the Red Sea, far from any city, ancient or modern.
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