•   During Egypt's Old Kingdom, the pharaohs established a stable central government in the fertile Nile Valley. Perhaps the greatest testaments to their power were the pyramids and other tombs built to shelter them in the afterlife.

• Kings of the Dead Ancient Egyptians believed that when the pharaoh died, he became Osiris, king of the dead. The new pharaoh became Horus, god of the heavens and protector of the sun god. This cycle was symbolized by the rising and setting of the sun.Some part of a dead pharaoh's spirit, called his ka, was believed to remain with his body. And it was thought that if the corpse did not have proper care, the former pharaoh would not be able to carry out his new duties as king of the dead. If this happened, the cycle would be broken and disaster would befall Egypt.To prevent such a catastrophe, each dead pharaoh was mummified, which preserved his body. Everything the king would need in his afterlife was provided in his grave—vessels made of clay, stone, and gold, furniture, food, even doll-like representations of servants, known as ushabti. His body would continue to receive food offerings long after his death.

THE PEOPLE WHO BUILD THE THE PEOPLE WHO BUILD THE PYRAMIDSPYRAMIDS

• The question of who built the pyramids, and how, has long been debated by Egyptologists and historians. Standing at the base of the pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these enormous monuments could have been built in one pharaoh's lifetime. Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote in the 5th century B.C., 500 years before Christ, is the earliest known chronicler and historian of the Egyptian Pyramid Age. By his accounts, the labor force that built Khufu totalled more than 100,000 people. But Herodotus visited the pyramids 2,700 years after they were built and his impressive figure was an educated guess, based on hearsay. Modern Egyptologists believe the real number is closer to 20,000.

Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the 20,000 - 30,000 laborers who built the pyramids lived. Once they find the workers' living area, they can learn more about the workforce, their daily lives, and perhaps where they came from. Mark has been excavating the bakeries that presumably fed this army of workers, and Zahi has been excavating the cemetery for this grand labor force. It is believed that Giza housed a skeleton crew of workers who labored on the pyramids year round. But during the late summer and early autumn months, during the annual flooding of the fields with water from the annual innundation of the Nile flooded the fields, a large labor force would appear at Giza to put in time on the pyramids. These farmers and local villagers gathered at Giza to work for their god kings, to build their monuments to the hereafter. This would ensure their own afterlife and would also benefit the future and prosperity of Egypt as a whole. They may well have been willing workers, a labor force working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, and country.

The following interviews with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass address the controversial question of who actually built the pyramids at Giza:

MARK LEHNER, Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum

NOVA: In your extensive work and research at Giza have you ever once questioned whether humans built the pyramids?

LEHNER: No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or super intelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in 1972 and ended up living there 13 years. I was imbued with ideas of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive. And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who built these things, they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, bakeries that we actually find.

: Yeah, well, first of all Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying, there's no way they could have done this. I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find.

NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that 100,000 workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20,000 workers. Can you explain that for us?

LEHNER Herodotus just claims he was told that. He said, 100,000 men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of 100,000 men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the 100,000 men. But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid." You know, the popular film that was done by NOVA [where we attempted to build a small pyramid at Giza]. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology 100 percent because there's no way we could replicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the 60-ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques and operations, without testing the entire building project.

One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet -- they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night out there -- if they can quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out somewhere between -- I've got this all written down -- but it comes out in the hundreds of men. Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500 men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so that 12 men become 32. And now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at Giza. You see most of the stone is local stone.

NOVA: Let's address the question of who built the pyramids.

HAWASS: We are lucky because we found this whole evidence of the workmen who built the pyramids and we found the artisans and Mark found the bakery and we found this settlement of the camp, and all the evidence, the hieroglyphical inscriptions of the overseer of the site of the Pyramid, the overseer of the west side of the Pyramid, the craftsman we found, the man who makes the statue of the overseer of the craftsman, the inspector of building tombs, director of building tombs -- I'm telling you all the titles. We found 25 unique new titles connected with these people. Then who built the pyramids? It was the Egyptians who built the pyramids. The Great Pyramid is dated with all the evidence, I'm telling you now to 4,600 years, the reign of Khufu. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is one of 104 pyramids in Egypt with superstructure. And there are 54 pyramids with substructure. There is support (that) the builders of the pyramids were Egyptians. They are not the Jews as has been said, they are not people from a lost civilization. They are not out of space. They are Egyptian and their skeletons are here, and were examined by scholars, doctors and the race of all the people we found are completely supporting that they are Egyptians.

NOVA: The Greek historian Herodotus claimed in 500 B.C. that 100,000 people built the pyramids, and yet modern Egyptologists believe the figure to be more like 20,000 to 30,000.

HAWASS: Herodotus, when he came here, met guides who tell stories and things like that. But I really personally believe that based on the size of the settlement and the whole work of an area that we found, I believe that permanent and temporary workmen who worked at building the pyramid were 36,000.

NOVA: And how do you come to that number?

HAWASS: I came to that number based on the size of the pyramid project, a government project, the size of the tombs, the cemetery. We know we can excavate the cemetery for hundreds of years -- generations after generation can work in the cemetery -- and the second is the settlement area. I really believe there were permanent workmen who were working for the king. They were paid by the king and these are the technicians who cut the stones, and there are workmen who move the stones and they come and work in rotation. You have this group and another group. In the same time there are the people who live around the pyramids that don't need to live in the pyramids. They come by early in the morning and they work fourteen hours from sunrise to sunset.

NOVA: From your excavations of the workers' cemetery you say you found skeletons. Did you analyze the bones, and if so, what did you learn about the workmen?

HAWASS: We found 600 skeletons. And we found that those people, number one, they were Egyptians, the same like you see in every cemetery in Egypt. Number two, we found evidence that those people had emergency treatment. They had accidents during building the pyramids. And we found 12 skeletons who had accidents with their hands. And they supported the two sides of the hand with wood. And we have another one, a stone fell down on his leg, and they made a kind of operation, and they cut his leg and he lived 14 years after that.

NOVA: How do you know that?

HAWASS: Because we have a team here from the National Research Center who are doctors and they use the x-ray and they can find all the evidence about age. They found that the age of death for those workmen were from 30 to 35. Those are the people who really built the pyramids, the poor Egyptians. It's very important to prove how the pyramid was built. The pyramid you know, has magic, it has mystery. It's a structure that was built, you know, 4,600 years ago. There is no accurate book until now that really explained all of that. All the theorists, in other books they say that the stones were taken from Tura, about five miles to the east of the pyramid. This is not true. All the stones have been taken from the plateau, except the casing stones that came from Tura, and the granite in the burial chamber that came from Aswan. But the magic of the pyramid makes people think about it. An amateur comes by and looks at this structure and doesn't know the mechanics. The cult of the Egyptians, the religion, the pyramid, is a part of a whole civilization.

NOVA: There is an inscription above Khufu's burial chamber that identifies the pyramid as that of Khufu. Some people claim that is a fake inscription. Can you comment on that?

HAWASS: They say that the inscriptions inside the five relieving chambers are fake. Fine. I went last week and we lighted all of them. It has been never lighted before. We did beautiful lighting. Then we can read each single inscription.

NOVA: And what do they say?

HAWASS: The workmen who were involved in building the Great Pyramid were divided into gangs, groups, four groups, and each group had a name, and each group had an overseer. They wrote the names of the gangs. And you have the names of the gangs of Khufu as 'Friends of Khufu.' Because they were the friends of Khufu proves that building the pyramid was not really something that the Egyptians would push. You know, it's like today. If you go to any village you will understand the system of ancient Egyptians. When you build, I mean a dam, or you build a big house, people would come to help you. They would work free for you, the households will send food to feed the workmen. And when they build the houses you will do the same for them. And that's why the pyramid was the national project of Egypt because everyone had to participate in building this pyramid. By food, by workmen, this way the building of the pyramid was something that everyone felt to participate, and really it was love. They are not really pushed to do it. When the king takes the throne, the people have to be ready in participating in building the pyramid. And then when they finish it, they celebrate. That's why even now in modern Egypt we still really do celebrations when we finish any project because that's exactly what happened in ancient Egypt.

NOVA: But what about the incriptions in the relieving chambers in Khufu and the claim that they were not written in the time of Khufu?

HAWASS: They say that these inscriptions have been written by people who entered inside. And if you go and see them they are typical graffiti that can be seen around every pyramid in Egypt, because the workmen around the pyramid left this. I would like those people who talked about this to come with me. And I will take them personally to the rooms. First of all they say that only inscribed is the second room -- it's not true. All the five relieving chambers are inscribed. Number two, there are some inscriptions there that cannot be written by anyone except the workmen who put them there. You cannot go and reach there. It has to be the man who put the block above the other one to do that. I think that maybe the only few Egyptologists, the only two Egyptologists in the world that will really have an open mind, it's me and Mark Lehner, because we believe the public has the right for us to tell them the truth. We are really working excavating around the pyramids to tell the world the truth

PG 2PG 2• LEHNER: No. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or super intelligent inspiration? I first went to E

gypt in 1972 and ended up living there 13 years. I was imbued with ideas of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive. And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who built these things, they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, bakeries that we actually find.

Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying, there's no way they could have done this. I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find.

NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that 100,000 workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20,000 workers. Can you explain that for us?

LEHNER: Yeah, well, first of all Herodotus just claims he was told that. He said, 100,000 men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of 100,000 men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the 100,000 men. But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid." You know, the popular film that was done by NOVA [where we attempted to build a small pyramid at Giza]. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology 100 percent because there's no way we could replicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the 60-ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that

PG3PG3• : Yeah, well, first of all Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the

pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying, there's no way they could have done this. I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find.

NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that 100,000 workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20,000 workers. Can you explain that for us?

LEHNER Herodotus just claims he was told that. He said, 100,000 men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of 100,000 men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the 100,000 men. But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid." You know, the popular film that was done by NOVA [where we attempted to build a small pyramid at Giza]. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology 100 percent because there's no way we could replicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the 60-ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques and operations, without testing the entire building project.

One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet -- they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night out there -- if they can quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out somewhere between -- I've got this all written down -- but it comes out in the hundreds of men. Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500 men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so that 12 men become 32. And now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at Giza. You see most of the stone