by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Featured Content, Lost City Project, News
How did the ancient Egyptians feed thousands of workers at Giza? We know from ancient texts that a staple diet of bread and beer were disbursed as rations in royal labor projects. What kind of bread did the pyramid builders eat? In September and October 1993, The...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Lost City Project
How old is the Lost City? How do we know that the settlement located at the foot of the Giza Plateau belongs to the same period of time as when the Egyptians were building Khufu’s Great Pyramid and the other pyramids? Two kinds of evidence tell us that we are...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | GPMP Project
by Mark Lehner High-precision measure of the landscape On November 1, 1984, Inspector Amal Samuel, Salah el-Nasar, Abd al Gadar, David Goodman, and I set off across the Maadi Formation ridge that makes up the southern reaches of the Giza Plateau. We carried with us a...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Featured Content, GPMP Project, News
Where do you look for a lost city? Locating a feature as large as the settlement and infrastructure that accommodated the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders is very different than locating an object or a single building. Landscape analysis combined with survey is...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | GPMP Project
How big of a hole do you have to dig to quarry enough rock to build a mountain? Pretty big when the mountain is the Great Pyramid, as Mark Lehner and David Goodman discovered when they surveyed the Great Pyramid quarry on the Giza Plateau. They were impressed by the...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Sphinx Project
Hor-em-akhet The cult of the Sphinx reached its height in New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1070 BC), when the statue was already 1,200 years old. Certain New Kingdom pharaohs came to Giza in the first year of their reigns, perhaps to be ordained by the Sphinx. They built...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Sphinx Project
Linking the elements There are a number of elements of Pharaoh Khafre’s monuments (2520-2494 BC) that link them together. Some point to the probability that the Sphinx and its temple were the final elements added to Khafre’s building program at Giza. Other elements...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Sphinx Project
Sequencing tells us which happened first When was the Sphinx built? The archaeological evidence points with a high degree of probability to the reign of Pharaoh Khafre, rather than to much earlier dates proposed in recent popular theories. Archaeological sequencing at...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | News, Sphinx Project
The details of mapping the Sphinx Why map a statue? There is no way to understand a monument as complex as the Sphinx without examining in detail of all of its elements. This includes mapping the bedrock of the Sphinx, mapping the ancient and modern restorations, and...
by aera | Oct 13, 2009 | Sphinx Project
Cutting through the layers Arguments proposing a date for the Sphinx that is much earlier than 4th Dynasty Egypt are based on a misreading of the Giza geology. Giza geological formation The Sphinx is carved from the natural limestone of the Giza Plateau known as the...