Who Really Built the Great Pyramid? What Merer's Logbook Shows

For a long time, the question of who built the Great Pyramid was answered with stories. Herodotus told one. Hollywood told another. The internet keeps inventing new ones. But we no longer have to guess, because one of the men who worked on the project left us his own notes.

His name was Merer. He was an inspector in charge of a crew of about forty men, and around 2560 BC, in the year after the 13th cattle count of Khufu’s reign (about his 27th year), while the Great Pyramid of Giza was being finished for King Khufu, he kept a logbook. That logbook survived. It is the clearest material evidence we have for how the pyramid was supplied, and it says nothing about slaves or anything mysterious. It describes organized, fed, skilled Egyptian labor.

Where was Merer’s logbook found?

In 2013, a team led by the French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet was excavating Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient harbor on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. In Khufu’s time it was a working port, the oldest known harbor of its kind, in Tallet’s assessment, used to send expeditions across to the copper and turquoise mines of Sinai.

The site still shows how serious that operation was. There is an L-shaped stone jetty, still visible at low tide, about a hundred stone anchors, and about thirty storage galleries cut into the hills about 5 to 6 kilometers (3 to 4 miles) inland from the harbor. When the port was closed down, the galleries were sealed with large limestone blocks.

Wedged at the entrance of one of those galleries, between the sealing blocks, the team found papyrus. Hundreds of fragments of it. Tallet and Marouard describe them as the oldest inscribed papyri ever found in Egypt. Most of the documents are accounts of food issued to sailors and workers. Two of them, which scholars call Papyrus A and Papyrus B, are something rarer: day-by-day logbooks covering several months of one crew’s work. Tallet published them in 2017 in Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I: Le “journal de Merer” (MIFAO 136, IFAO, Cairo).

What does the logbook actually say?

The entries are short and practical, the way a work diary should be. In one stretch of Papyrus B, Merer’s crew casts off from Tura loaded with stone for Akhet-Khufu and spends the night at She-Khufu. The next day they sail on and spend the night at Akhet-Khufu.

Those names matter:

• Akhet-Khufu means “Horizon of Khufu.” It is the Egyptian name of the Great Pyramid.
• Tura is the limestone quarry on the east bank of the Nile, across from Giza. Its fine white stone was, in Tallet’s words, most probably used for the pyramid’s outer casing.
• She-Khufu, the “Pool of Khufu,” and Ro-She Khufu, the “Entrance to the Pool of Khufu,” were a harbor basin and waterways that brought boats close to the Giza plateau.

The rhythm of the work comes through clearly. Merer’s crew made two or three round trips every ten days: haul the blocks to the riverbank, load the boats, sail to Giza, unload, and go back for more. In other entries the crew works on the dyke at Ro-She Khufu, maintaining the water system the boats depended on.

A river that no longer exists

The logbook’s boat routes once puzzled people, because today’s Nile is far from the plateau. A 2022 study in PNAS (Sheisha and colleagues) used pollen and sediment cores to reconstruct a now-vanished channel, the “Khufu branch” of the Nile, and found that its water was high during Khufu’s reign. Current evidence shows that the ancient landscape and Merer’s notes fit together: water reached close enough to Giza to float stone to the building site.

Who was in charge?

One name in the logbook changes the picture. Merer reports to “the noble Ankhhaf,” who oversaw the work at Ro-She Khufu. Ankhhaf was a king’s son, most likely Sneferu’s, and so probably Khufu’s brother. The papyri call him chief of all the king’s works, and he later served Khafre as vizier. This was not a shadowy operation. It was run from the top of the royal administration, the institution Egyptians called per-aa, the “Grand House.”

You can still look Ankhhaf in the face. His bust, painted limestone with a thin layer of plaster, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (object 27.442). It is one of the finest portraits to survive from the Old Kingdom.

Were the pyramid builders slaves?

The logbook does not use that word, and neither does the oldest Greek account. Around 450 BC, Herodotus wrote in Histories 2.124 that Khufu “compelled all the Egyptians to work for him,” in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months, and that the pyramid took twenty years. That is a story told by a foreign visitor writing long after Khufu’s reign. Even so, he describes forced labor by Egyptians, not slavery.

The evidence on the ground points somewhere more interesting:

• Food. In one entry an official sails to Heliopolis to fetch food for the crew.
• The workers’ town. South of the Sphinx, near the stone wall known as the Wall of the Crow, Mark Lehner and the Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) have been excavating a settlement called Heit el-Ghurab since 1988–89. It covers more than 17 acres, with bakeries, workshops, sleeping galleries and royal storage silos. Animal bones show that thousands of workers were eating meat regularly.
• The workers’ tombs. In 1990, a horse stumbled on a mudbrick wall near the plateau, and that led to the cemetery of the pyramid builders. Zahi Hawass excavated hundreds of graves, with titles such as “overseer of the side of the pyramid” and “director of workers.” The skeletons show heavy labor, but also fractures that were set and healed, and even successful amputations. Someone was caring for these people.

Hawass’s reading is that most laborers were conscripted on a rotating, part-time basis, working alongside permanent skilled specialists such as masons and draftsmen. Merer’s crew fits that pattern. Their year moved between the Delta, time off, the Red Sea harbor, and the Tura-to-Giza run during the flood months.

How many people did it take?

The logbook shows one crew making two or three round trips every ten days. At that pace, a fairly small number of crews could have delivered the casing stone. That fits Lehner’s estimate that, with support workers included, the project may have involved about 20,000 people at any given time. That is a long way from Herodotus’s hundred thousand.

What the logbook doesn’t tell us

Honest history says what the evidence does not cover. Tallet stresses that the papyri say nothing about how the pyramid was built, which is still hotly debated. Merer tells us how stone got to Giza, not how it was raised.

It’s also worth knowing what to set aside. A 2022 paper in Remote Sensing claimed satellite radar had revealed hidden rooms and corridors inside the Great Pyramid. The journal retracted it on August 10, 2026, citing serious methodological flaws and statistical errors. The authors disagree with the decision. A papyrus written by a man who was there is better evidence than a disputed radar image.

Why Merer matters

The Great Pyramid is usually told as the story of one king. Merer’s logbook lets us see it as the work of an organized society: inspectors who kept records, crews who knew the river, officials who made sure the bread arrived, and people who set broken bones. It is African, Egyptian, Nile Valley history written in the builders’ own hand.

That sense of order, where work, food and fairness were part of keeping the world in balance, runs through everything the Egyptians wrote about Ma’at. If you’d like to go deeper into those ideas and the texts behind them, The Book of Ma’at is where I collected them.

More at MoeOsman.com.

Sources: P. Tallet, MIFAO 136 (IFAO, 2017); P. Tallet and G. Marouard, “The Harbor of Khufu on the Red Sea Coast at Wadi al-Jarf,” Near Eastern Archaeology 77.1 (2014); D. Weiss, “Egypt’s Wadi el-Jarf,” Archaeology, July/August 2022; Herodotus, Histories 2.124; Sheisha et al., PNAS 2022, doi:10.1073/pnas.2202530119; AERA, Lost City of the Pyramid Builders; Mark Lehner, interview, PBS NOVA, “Excavating the Lost City” (pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/lehner-giza/); Z. Hawass, “The Tombs of the Pyramid Builders”; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bust of Ankhhaf (27.442); Remote Sensing retraction notice, 2026, doi:10.3390/rs18162679.