Khufu: Irony at its best, biggest and smallest

When we think of the great figures in history, from Caesar to Napoleon we conjure up their likenesses from images of statues or paintings. Napoleon and his odd looking hat masterfully painted on canvas, Caesar and his laurel wreath perpetually carved in marble are familiar to us, we think of their deeds and names and in our mind’s eye we see their faces. However the image of the man responsible for the largest and most iconic building in the history of humanity is relatively unknown to us.  We speak of Khufu and his great pyramid and the scholarly among us might imagine the cartouche of his name, but few conceive of his face.  Every school child has heard of the pyramids of Egypt, and knows that the great pyramid is the last standing the seven wonders of the ancient world.  Few know that it was built by the second pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, Khufu; and even fewer people, when speaking of the pyramid, are able to conjure up a likeness of Khufu. That is simply because no representation of Khufu has survived the millennia, except for a miniscule three inch ivory statue.


A renowned English archeologist by the name of Flinders Petrie is credited with finding the only existing likeness of Khufu.  Imagine, if you will, Petrie sitting in his tent at an excavation at the temple of Abydos 700 kilometers from the great pyramid.  It has been a long day and he is perfunctorily examining an insignificant statue.  The statue is only noteworthy for being carved in ivory rather than stone.  The year is 1903 and in the poor lighting of his tent he discerns the name Khufu on the lower right edge of the statue.  He is holding the only existing likeness of one of the greatest figures in history, but there is a small problem, a very small problem, in fact a problem less than one inch long. The head of the statue is missing.  All excavations are halted and for the next three weeks no one does anything unrelated to finding the missing head of Khufu.  After much frantic and desperate sieving of sand and rubble, Khufu’s head is found, his image is revealed for the first time to the modern world.
Khufu’s statue is currently housed in a little visited corner of the Egyptian Museum.  There is no fanfare; a small spotlight shines over the miniature Khufu in a display cabinet sitting against a wall.   Khufu, in his day, was the most powerful man in the world and yet we know very little about the man, from his appearance to how he built his pyramid, uncertainly is our only foundation.    We will never know whether early one morning, one of his advisers turned to him and said “I’m sorry sir, but what you propose is impossible”, or whether Khufu himself turned to his architect and said “You want to build what?” But we do know that he invested his life and resources in an eternal afterlife, that he may have been unfamiliar with the mathematical concept of zero and that he was certainly unfamiliar with the practical concept of the impossible.


Nowadays we contemplate Khufu’s pyramid and we are flabbergasted by the work, the man-hours pulling and quarrying stones to build such a structure, but we seldom stop to consider the logistics required just to get enough people and resources in one location to even consider the project. Following the upheaval of earlier dynasties, Khufu’s reign was a peaceful and prosperous time for Egypt. The time was ripe for a large scale social organization and standardization of resources required for the implementation of a project of such pharaonic  proportions.  We now estimate that perhaps 20,000 people worked at one time on Khufu’s pyramid.  This large number of people had to be housed, fed, trained, organized, given tools and the basic necessities of life.  It is likely that the organization for the project comprised a number of full time workers who dedicated their entire lives to supervising and planning the building of the pyramid and a number of farmers who only worked on the site while the Nile was in flood.  The workers where efficiently organized into larger groups called phyles (tribe in Greek) and then into smaller subgroups of 10 to 20 workers.  They lived in the village of the Workers, as it has come to be called, and there is evidence that workers ate extremely well judging by the types of animal bones found on the site, and they received the best medical care judging from the healed fractures of workers buried on the site.  The village had to provide the resources and manpower to produce ceramics as well as construction tools (mortar, metal and stone tools), administration functions such as accounting and work/housing assignment, grain storage and religious, medical and mortuary facilities, housing, legislation, transportation and clothing for all the workers and their families.  The scope is daunting, for each necessity met, materials and professionals had to be made available.  A sewer system was built and maintained, potters worked around the clock to provide molds for baking bread, which implies that clay had to be provided by someone, flour, water and yeast for the bread had to come from somewhere, cloth had to be woven and delivered to tailors, cattle and sheep had to be shipped over the river to be slaughtered and cooked, magistrates had to resolve legal suits, priests and tomb builders ministered to the dead and so forth. Each of the activities had to be timely or the entire system would collapse.

Nothing about Khufu was small; everything about him was larger than life.  He achieved immortality and the impossible with his pyramid.  With the only remaining likeness of him, an ivory miniature, Khufu achieved the greatest irony in history: the man responsible for the most colossal monument in the history of humanity is in fact only depicted by the smallest royal Egyptian sculpture ever found.  His pyramid is 481 feet tall while his only existing likeness is a mere 3 inches. What, then is the greatest lesson our current leaders could learn from Khufu? Simply that if you want to achieve immortality and eternal fame, don’t erect statues of yourself in public spaces, build yourself a pyramid.

Today the Village of the Workers is the domain of Egyptologist Mark Lehner who has been working at the site for some years now. Most of what we know we owe to him. Recently the filling of a canal that ran the length of the city has caused water to rise in the site, quickly deteriorating everything.










Lehner and his team backfilled the site with clean sand to protect it from erosion and are now working closer to the Wall of the Crow, which surrounded the ancient town.  Some of the town now lies under a modern cemetery and a soccer field belonging to the city.








The entrance to the Village can be seen on the left side of the Wall of the Crow.

Below are some of the tombs for the pyramid workers. Dr. Hawass, who is not shy about taking credit for all the work that takes place in Giza, is always quick to point out that if the pyramids had been built by slaves, their tombs would never have been located so near the pyramid.  Pyramid workers were free people of significant social rank.