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Dr Mark Lehner Searches for Information on the Pyramid Builders
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
For 200 years egyptologists had studied
the most important people of the time of the pyramids:
the kings and their officials.
They found their statues, their inscriptions and their large tombs upon the plateau.
But nobody had really answered the question, or even asked it
where are the all workers who built the pyramids?
So, in 1988-89 we did the first excavation here,
in the area about 400 meters South of the Sphinx,
to see, in fact, this is where the workers lived,
this is where some infrastructure was for building the pyramids.
The site is only excavated very recently, because people weren't interested in settlement.
People were interested in tombs, statues, gold bowls and mummies, inscriptions.
Egyptology really started largely as philology.
But we do a different kind of archaeology.
We, actually, analyze, save and analyze every scrap of the ancient animal bone.
When they butchered and consumed goat, sheep, cattle, fish, birds,
they left the bones about in their garbage.
And so we're doing something more like anthropology.
We collect this evidence and we want to understand their diet,
how they lived, what the climate was like, how they produced the food,
how they gathered all this energy in one place to build the pyramids.
We know that these people were fed an enormous quantity of meat.
In fact, we think, that, using the samples from the ancient bone material from their garbage,
people lived here 4,500 years ago.
We think that there was enough meat that was consumed here
to feed 6-7 thousand people, if they ate meat everyday.
And a lot of this meat was cattle.
And when we can age and sex the cattle,
it tends to be under 18 months, under 2 years old, and mostly male.
The people were eating here extraordinary well, prime beef.
And, of course, the beef is the most expensive, you know,
and the most prestigious of all the meat consumed.
The evidence that we have of their diet indicates that they ate very well,
so it tends to argue against the idea that these were slaves building the pyramids.
In fact, the whole idea of slavery,
even the question of it, for the modern audience is completely confused.
And misunderstood.
So, our work is a little bit like a detective, like police detectives work in a crime scene.
If a police detective goes into the crime scene,
ideally, she or he won't move any evidence,
they photograph it, they do the drawings of it,
they collect the fingerprints and the samples of blood, if there's blood in this crime scene.
That's what we do except that it's not the crime scene, it's a scene where thousands of people lived.
But we collect every piece of evidence, we do drawings, we do photographs
and we try to reconstruct their life, because it's far more interesting for us
than, say, you know, another tomb with another series of texts.
In fact, we almost are unhappy if we find nice things.
This excavation is not about finding nice things, it's about finding information
about how people lived and how they were organized.
Most of this city is buried underneath the modern city and we can't get it anymore.
But what we have here, in this area of low desert, is the last remaining open place,
where we can do these large broad excavations.
And it still continues.
