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By Dr. Richard Redding (Archaeozoologist, University of Michigan) and Brian V. Hunt

Pastoral farming near the pyramids.

Egyptians of the 4th Dynasty (2575-2465 BC) witnessed the construction of some of the world’s most enduring symbols: the pyramids, the temples, and the Sphinx of Giza. Tens of thousands of workers came together in great public works projects, undertaken to ensure the successful afterlife of kings. The problems this created for planners and administrators were monumental as well.

They could not, for example, solve the problems of provisioning a city of ten or twenty thousand by just scaling up the methods used for a village of a few hundred. The methods the Egyptians employed at Giza may have influenced the royal administration of the country for millennia to come.

How did the royal house manage to feed this massive workforce? What can the remains of animals in the archaeological record at Giza tell us about how the Egyptians solved this problem?

Prime beef for pyramid builders
In an area of the world where people have traditionally reserved meat eating mostly for special occasions and feast-days, we have found evidence that the ancient state provisioned the pyramid city with enough cattle, sheep, and goat to feed thousands of people prime cuts of meat for more than a generation—even if they ate it every day.

We have examined and identified over 175,000 bones and bone fragments from the excavations at the Giza pyramid settlement. The bones are from fish, reptiles, birds and mammals. About 10% have been identifiable to at least the level of the genus (a group of closely related species).

Cattle and sheep dominate the fauna. We have found:

• 3,356 cattle fragments
• 6,897 sheep and goat fragments
• 536 pig fragments

The ratio of individual sheep and goat to individual cattle is 5 to 1.

It might appear that sheep and goats were more common at Giza than cattle, and that sheep and goats were more important. But remember that an 18-month-old bull produces 10 to 12 times as much meat as an 18-month-old ram

The ratio of sheep to goats at Giza is biased towards sheep. For the entire settlement site, the ratio of sheep to goat is 3 to 1.

There is a low frequency of pig bones.

The cattle and sheep consumed at the settlement were young.

• 30% of the cattle died before 8 months, 50% before 16 months, and only 20% were older than 24 months.
• 90% of the sheep and goats survived 10 months, only 50% were older than 16 months, and only 10% older than 24 months.

The cattle and sheep are predominately male.

• The ratio of male to female cattle is 6 to 1.
• The ratio of male to female sheep and goats is 11 to 1.

What does this tell us about life at the pyramid settlement?

Problems in scale
The agrarian society of ancient Egypt was centered on crops and animals. The Egyptians’ colorful tomb paintings depict a rich agricultural life and we find evidence of this life in the archaeological remains of their settlements.

Agricultural scene, tomb of Sennedjem at Luxor.

The Egyptians could not catch fish, birds, and wild mammals in numbers adequate to support a large settlement like that at Giza.

Feeding the pyramid builders required an increased production of domestic mammals: sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. But there may have been inadequate space near Giza to support large herds of animals to feed the pyramid builders. Where did the supply of meat protein come from?

Expectations at Giza
Our models of animal use in the Middle East and Egypt are based on studies of the ecological, reproductive, productive, physiological and behavioral characteristics of domestic cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. These models help us make predictions.

Tomb scene: driving cattle.

The royal administrators had to develop a system that encouraged the production of animals beyond the needs of the villages of the Nile Delta and the Nile valley. They then collected the surplus and moved it along the Nile to Giza.

If the Giza settlement was organized and provisioned by a central authority (the royal administration), then we expect certain evidence to emerge from the archaeological data. Based on our knowledge of agrarian societies and food production, the evidence at Giza should show:

1. Pigs are evident at very low frequency.
2. Cattle and sheep dominate the fauna.
3. The cattle and sheep are mostly young males.

Animal utility

Pigs would have been unsatisfactory for provisioning a workforce on a large-scale in the ancient world. They cannot be herded and do not travel well over long distances. There are no nomadic pig herders anywhere in the world today.

Tomb scene: ritual buthering.

Pigs have a dispersed birthing pattern that is not seasonal; they give birth up to three times a year. Therefore, young pigs are available at almost anytime for consumption.

Pigs provided no secondary products (hair, milk, etc.) and were therefore less valuable than cattle, sheep, and goats.

Because of the pig’s unsuitability for feeding workers on a large scale, the Egyptian workforce administrators were not interested in them as stock, and pigs were not involved in inter-regional exchange the way other animal stocks like cattle, sheep, and goats were.

Our studies indicate, however, that while the central authority did not consider pigs a valued provisioning resource, Egyptian families reared pigs for protein. Even today, in rural and urban areas around the world, farmers and non-farmers use pigs (where they are not proscribed by religion).

Delivered when needed

We know that the Egyptians recorded regular and detailed counts of animal stocks throughout the Nile Valley. These counts are a clear indication of the value of animals as a commodity to the state.

Tomb model: counting cattle.

Although they cannot provide the quantity of meat that cattle do, sheep and goats are valuable for similar reasons. They can be herded and provide secondary products.

Sheep, goats, and cattle can and do travel long distances. Americans in the 19th century drove cattle to market over vast distances. Nomadic sheep and goat pastoralists today move animals 1,000 miles (1,609 km) by hoof in migration (e.g. Qashghi in Iran).

In the 4th Dynasty, it was not possible to rear sheep, goats, and cattle around Giza in the numbers needed for the pyramid builders. We are working on an estimate of the farm area required to rear these animals in sufficient numbers to provide a surplus that would support 8,000-10,000 workers laboring at ancient Giza. Preliminary estimates suggest a required area substantially larger than the Giza environs would allow.

The administrators would have organized drives of sheep, goats, and cattle between the Nile Valley and the high desert to move the required animals to Giza. In a foreshadowing of modern manufacturing, the animals would arrive in waves—a “just in time” delivery system.

Secondary produce
Sheep, cattle, and goats all have secondary products beyond their meat:

• Sheep’s wool can be woven for cloth.
• Leather is valuable for clothing and tools.
• Cattle bones can be used to make tools.

The ancient inhabitants may also have consumed milk from cows and goats, but not in such large quantities that it would have been signficant for the diet of the pyramid labor force. Secondary produce makes all of these animals more valuable resources.

Birth cycles and surplus males
Sheep and goats have tight birthing seasons (compared to pigs) and produce age classes from which the young male surplus needs to be harvested. As with cattle, female sheep and goats are needed to produce offspring, while only a few males are needed for breeding.

Without a central authority, this surplus creates a labor problem for herders and agriculturists. Do they reduce the herd size or increase meat consumption seasonally? It would therefore have been relatively easy for administrators to encourage villages to increase production. The central authority then becomes a convenient market for the surplus in exchange for goods and services.

Ideal grazing
In Egypt, ranchers would have raised cattle in grassy areas with wells and watering holes like the Nile Delta. They would have raised sheep in the drier areas. Goats could have thrived in both places and would have complimented cattle rearing because these animals do not compete for food.

Imagine a division across the Nile Delta or Valley: cattle and goats in the middle and sheep and goats along the edges. Sheep and goats would go out into the high deserts in the rainy season and returned to the edges of the delta or valley in the dry season.

Kom el-Hisn: contradiction and example

Dr. Redding at Kom el-Hisn, 1988.Photo courtesy of Dr. Anthony J. Cagle

The Old Kingdom (5th and 6th Dynasty, 2465-2150 BC) Egyptian village, Kom el-Hisn, was excavated by archaeologists in 1985, 1986, and 1988. A contradiction appears in the archaeological record there.

There is abundant evidence of cattle dung from the Old Kingdom level at Kom el-Hisn, which means there must have been large herds there. Yet the cattle bones indicate two things: the numbers of cattle slaughtered at Kom el-Hisn are relatively few and the bones that exist are from very old or very young individuals.

Where are the prime, young males, which provide the best cuts of beef?

The residents were not consuming the cattle they reared and were consuming few of the sheep. They only used very old animals or animals that were very young and ill. The residents of Kom el-Hisn were dependent on the pig as a source of protein and, unsurprisingly, we find a dominance of pig bone at the site.

Kom el-Hisn is just 4 kilometers from the ecotone where the Nile Valley meets the desert. The Egyptians could have reared cattle in the grassy areas around their villages and sent herders out with flocks of sheep and goats to exploit the ecotonal area.

The royal cattlemen periodically gathered up herds of young, male cattle and sheep (1 to 2 years) and drove them along the Nile to a central point for redistribution. These young male animals were not consumed locally and so their remains did not enter the archaeological record at Kom el-Hisn.

Cattle were raised at Kom el-Hisn but not consumed there. Where were the consumers?

We hypothesize that Kom el-Hisn was a regional or provincial center for raising cattle, but that the young males were sent to the core area of the Old Kingdom state—the capital zone and the pyramid zone—for feeding cities. Our systematic excavations and retrieval of animal bone from such core-area settlements, like Giza, allow us to test our hypothesis. In fact, we find the inverse ratios of Kom el-Hisn: lots of cattle, sheep, and goat but very little pig.

Conclusions
Our study of the 4,500-year-old animal bones at Giza are another piece of the puzzle of life in ancient Egypt. Based on the data above, we see that the pyramid settlement at Giza was a well-provisioned site, supplied by the central authority; the archaeological pattern is not one of a livestock producing site.

A central authority gathered predominately young, male sheep, goats, and cattle and brought them to the site to feed the occupants; the bones of these animals dominate the faunal remains and pigs are in very little evidence. Once again we find that an interdisciplinary approach to our examination of the evidence at Giza, yields a much fuller picture of life at the settlement and reveals clues to the organization of the ancient Egyptian state.

More to tell
There’s yet another story to tell about animal use at Giza. Further analysis now indicates that species are not equally, or randomly, distributed around the site. Patterns exist in animal use across the site and these patterns need to be explained.

Please visit our site again to read a future article that discusses the unequal distribution of animal remains across the pyramid settlement and what that might mean about the people who lived there.

By Edward Johnson (Archaeological Conservator), Günter Heindl (Architect/archaeologist), Ashraf Abdel Aziz (Archaeologist), and Brian V. Hunt

ETH before reconstruction

Trying to visualize living space from an architectural plan can be challenging. Walking around in a 3-dimensional space provides a different perspective on the use of that space.

Over a period of more than ten years, AERA archaeologists have exposed and analyzed a number of architecturally varied structures at the Giza pyramid settlement. In the autumn of 2005, AERA initiated a project to not only conserve but to reconstruct one architectural unit of the ancient Egyptian settlement we are excavating.

Of three candidate test structures, which varied in form and content, we selected the building with the smallest surface area and volume. The structure sits among other ancient Egyptian housing at the eastern reach of our concession, an area we appropriately call Eastern Town.

Our test object, Eastern Town House (ETH), is an almost completely intact house foundation with clear evidence of remodeling during the period in which it was inhabited, during Egypt’s 4th Dynasty (ca. 2575-2465 BC).

Dan Housel and Emma Hancox excavated ETH in 2004 and recorded six phases of ancient remodeling. The layout of the house, the objects found, and attested to activities of a family household, like houses at the Middle Kingdom pyramid-town at Lahun.

ETH included an enclosure wall, courtyards, a vestibule separating public and private areas, a main room with a sitting bench, and a sleeping niche.

There was an area for grinding and storage facilities, pottery jars set in the floor, and a small circular granary. The second set of courtyards could be entered both from the front and the back of the house. Here we found traces of baking and cooking.

The spaces inside ETH would have been crowded and bustling, with no provision for the kind of individual personal space taken for granted by many cultures today.

Conservation challenges
There is little in the Egyptological publications about mud brick conservation, although a number of archaeological missions have carried out extensive conservation projects. Our colleagues from other missions gave us valuable input as we surveyed existing mud brick conservation near Giza, Abu Sir, Dahshur and Abu Roash.

Every conservation project is unique, due to the local environmental exposure and the construction materials used in building. The ancient inhabitants built Eastern Town House of mud brick, with a few elements of undressed stone and possibly wooden columns. Ancient mud brick presents great challenges to conservation due to its fragility.

Options
We needed to use a conservation technique that was best suited to the environment and structures at Giza.

Enclosing ETH in a protective structure was less than ideal for aesthetic and practical reasons. Such an enclosure would also have limited effectiveness. Capping the ancient walls with a new layer of mud brick was inadequate because it might actually accelerate the deterioration. The original walls would still be exposed to rain—water being mud brick’s greatest enemy. Chemical consolidants arry their own problems and limitations, penetrating only the surface of a wall, creating stress with the raw core.

Backfilling ETH and burying the structure would effectively protect the ancient mud bricks and provide a base for reconstruction.

Backfilling and reburying

ETH—backfilled under platform

The reason these ancient walls survive to our time is because they were buried and protected beneath the sand. We chose to rebury Eastern Town House to recreate its pre-excavation environment.

To isolate our reconstruction from ground moisture, we backfilled the walls beneath a deep layer of clean sand upon which we constructed a platform of mud brick. The raised, mud brick platform provided a base for the reconstructed house.

As we built a framing wall around ETH, workers backfilled directly over the ancient structure, allowing us to reconstruct ETH at the same site and with the same orientation as the original.

The platform

Elevation showing layers.

The platform had to be strong and stable to support the reconstructed house. We examined several options for building the platform, including single- and double-layered solutions.

The single-layered options may have been adequate, but caution led us to carefully consider the pressure the walls would be subject to with being walked upon or bearing the weight of the reconstructed walls.

We chose to lay a double-layered mud brick platform directly on the sand. We bonded the bricks with sand and mortar, and covered with a plaster made with Nile clay, chaff, and water.

We constructed the lower layer with stretchers, headers, and half-bricks arranged relatively irregularly (long, continuous joints decrease stability). We laid The second layer in a herringbone pattern. We now had a solid base on which to construct new walls.

Material
Proper techniques require that everything we do in conservation and reconstruction must be reversible (which is a problem with chemical consolidants). Future archaeologists and researchers must be able to undo what we have done so that they can study the original structure underneath.

Best bricks
AERA archaeologist, Ashraf Abdel Aziz, is creating a typology of ancient mud bricks. It is interesting to note that he has identified differences in bricks from buildings across the Giza Plateau. Ashraf brought his knowledge to our reconstruction project and was involved in our analysis of other conservation sites in Egypt.

We wanted to use brick of similar material and of the same approximate size as the brick originally used in the construction of the Eastern Townhouse (28 x 14 x 8 centimeters). We estimated that the platform base, framing wall, and house walls of ETH would require approximately 24,500 bricks.

Salah, our longtime guard at the site, of somewhat advanced age, had agitated from the beginning for an opportunity to make bricks. When he persisted, we acquiesced in order to raise the production rate.

To our delight, he made the best bricks of all, using a somewhat different technique from all the other brick makers. He put the mixture in the brick-forms without re-watering, the wet mortar, packed it down forcefully by hand, and added a little water on the top surface to smooth it down.

He made a very well-formed brick (without any temper other than sand) with clean sharp edges, completely filled ends, and without any melting or slumping from excess water.

He was a bit slower than the younger brick makers, but his product was so superior, that we continued to rely on him in this capacity until we finished.

The walls
We used varying heights of walls to demarcate different parts of the house complex. The completed reconstruction has:

• four courses of bricks for features like the silo
• six courses for the courtyard walls
• eight courses for the central building—the core house

Eastern Town House rises.

There are enough substantial walls left in the settlement to allow us a clear understanding of the ancient construction techniques. We built our new walls in exactly the same way that the old walls were built.

We filled the wide joints with brick chippings and mortar. The corner bricks of each layer were measured and adjusted to the same height using an automatic level.

As the brick layers rose we incorporated doorways. We built a limestone threshold for the main entrance in the west wall based on examples we have excavated at the site. For the entrance of the private quarters, we installed an exact copy of a stone door socket that we excavated in situ.

The floor
To level the floor, we used a layer of coarse plaster followed by a finer plaster made of sieved Nile clay, sieved sand, straw, and water. We left the plaster to dry for a few days with a watchman on duty each night to protect the floor from damage by feral dogs.

Reconstructed features
Finally we added the grain silo, the bed, two wall extensions, and what may have been a grinding vat.

Reconstructed silo.

Ancient silo.

The ancient grain silo was originally constructed as an ellipsoid, because a full circle would have left too little room for people to squeeze between the silo and the adjacent walls. We reconstructed the silo to reflect this interesting example of how the occupants adapted the structures of everyday life to the tight spaces in the house.

Based on comparative evidence, we estimate ETH could have housed four to eight people (perhaps more). The house had only one bed platform, which raises the question of how many people actually lived, slept or otherwise utilized the house.

Conclusions
We may surmise, based on what we know about ancient Egyptian society and households that Eastern Town House was a crowded place by the standards of housing in modern, developed societies but perhaps typical for ancient Egypt. Our reconstruction revealed a little urban estate that felt much more roomy than the footprint we mapped during excavation.

ETH reconstructed.

Eastern Town House

Within the confines of the house and courtyards, the cooking and craft work in and around ETH would have made for an often smoky place. Inhabitants would have constantly negotiated space with other people, stored goods, and animals, including sheep, goats, and possibly a pig or two.

While the original structure is now unavailable for viewing, Eastern Town House is now protected from the elements. The reconstruction represents an extremely faithful model of what this structure really looked like and how it functioned. Our techniques are entirely reversible and future researchers can undo what we have done.

Reconstructing Eastern Town House and building other test walls on the Giza settlement site help us understand the living spaces and construction methodology employed by the ancient pyramid builders. The test walls allow us to monitor erosion—caused by wind, rain, and rising moisture—before proceeding with further conservation.

We look forward to doing more of this kind of work at the city of the pyramid builders. Incorporating interdisciplinary, experimental archaeology into our mission broadens our interpretation of the reality of the ancient Egyptians and reinforces our methodology.

By Marie-Astrid Calmettes (Egyptologist), Jessica Kaiser (Osteologist), and Brian V. Hunt

Hatmehyt amulet

More than 2,500 years ago, a very ill young woman died and was buried at the already long-abandoned site of the city of the pyramid builders at Giza. Her grave goods included an amulet of an obscure goddess that suggests the woman may not have been from the Giza area.

Not only that, but she may not have been of Egyptian descent.

AERA’s primary investigation at Giza is the 4th dynasty settlement of the pyramid builders. In one quarter of our dig site, however, we’re faced with the reality that hundreds of Late Period (747-525 BC) burials and a few Old Kingdom (2575-2134 BC) burials cover the site above the 4th dynasty levels. We cannot investigate the older levels without first carefully excavating, recording, and removing the Late Period burials.

At the end of the 4th Dynasty, the pyramid builders abandoned their city to the desert sands. Two millennia later, the ancient Egyptians began burying their dead at the site of the former Giza workmen’s village, by then deeply buried under sand. The first of these burials were interred on a slope along the western edge of our dig site.

A sick girl

Note the Hatmehyt amulet near the woman’s shoulder.

In 2005, osteo-archaeologists Jessica Kaiser and Tom Westlin uncovered 11 burials in this area of the Late Period cemetery. Recovered ceramics suggest the burials date to the 25th Dynasty, earlier than other Late Period burials at our site.

One of the richest interments of this group, burial 407, was that of a young woman of about 16 to 20 years old. Analysis by AERA osteologists showed that she suffered health problems during her short life. Lines in her tooth enamel (enamel hypoplasia) suggest that she was seriously ill during tooth formation in childhood. She survived this illness, but severe pitting in the roofs of her eye sockets (Cribra orbitalia) indicate she probably suffered from iron-deficiency anemia at the time of her death.

Finally, marks on the bones around the ear canals of this young woman (mastoiditis) point to a severe ear infection. This may have been what killed her, since deaths due to ear-infection complications were not uncommon before the introduction of antibiotics.

A non-Egyptian burial?

Drawing of Hatmehyt amulet

Although this is clearly an Egyptian interment with Egyptian burial goods, our craniometrical analysis of the woman implies that she may have been of Central European descent rather than Egyptian. If the amulet suggests the girl had a connection with the Delta city of Mendes (more below), that may be the link with Central Europe, as the Delta had immigrant colonies in the Late Period.

Because of the poor preservation of many of the Late Period skeletons, only a few skulls allowed craniometric analysis. The range of natural variation in the skeletal population is therefore unknown. However, our analysis is based on the vast database in FORDISC 2.0, which also includes both Egyptian (Saite) and Sub-Saharan crania, and burial 407 did not match either of those groups.

Hatmehyt: a sacred connection to Mendes

The woman in burial 407 was interred with a collar made of beads and a faience amulet, about 13 cm high, to protect her in the afterlife. Initially we thought the amulet represented Isis, a very powerful and important mother-goddess of late Egyptian history.

Although the hieroglyphs carved into the amulet are difficult to read and cannot be used to identify the goddess, she wears a headdress topped by a fish. The fish is a key indicator of Hatmehyt, a goddess known as “Foremost of the Fishes.”

Hatmehyt was a local deity, native to Mendes, a town in the eastern Delta. The goddess is often shown seated on a throne with a fish headdress and occasionally crisscrossed with incised lines, perhaps to indicate water. On our amulet, the tail of the fish was long, going down the back of the goddess’ head and then curling back up to create a loop for attaching the amulet to the necklace.

Occasionally Hatmehyt is depicted solely as a fish, like the amulets in the British Museum described by Egyptologist W.M. Flinders Petrie. But her identity is more secure when she takes the form of a woman with a fish headdress, as is the case with our specimen.

Why Hatmehyt?

Amulet with beads from burial necklace

Very little is known about Hatmehyt. She seems to have been a minor goddess, important in Mendes but perhaps not beyond it. Her earliest documented appearance is in the 21st Dynasty, but she may date from earlier periods.

Her epithet “Foremost of the Fishes” is known from the Old Kingdom in the geographical processions with rows of nome deities offering the products of their nome to the gods. But the name “Hatmehyt” is not known before the Ramesside period.

Dr. Richard Redding, our faunal analyst, identified the fish on our amulet as a Schilbe (probably Schilbe mystus, the more northerly of that Nile species), the sacred fish of Mendes.

Hatmehyt may have been selected for inclusion in this burial for a couple of reasons. The Schilbe was said to be in front of other fish; that is, it goes faster and may jump over the water surface. The dead would have to cross the waters of the underworld on their journey to the afterlife and the amulet would offer protection.

In some texts, a fish helped search for parts of Osiris’ body after he was dismembered in the myth of Osiris and Seth. Osiris, of course, was an important deity whom the deceased would meet at the conclusion of her journey through the underworld.

Conclusion
The sacred and profane history of the site of the ancient Giza settlement is richly varied. Although abandoned after the construction of the pyramids, the site apparently retained some sacred association, as the site was not reused until the Late Period Egyptians established their cemetery there. The Late Period burials are teaching us more about the burial practices of that time and adding an important chapter to the history of the site. Once in a while, we are rewarded with something special, like the poignant grave of an ill young woman, protected by a goddess obscure to us but important to her.