They included spreadsheets and logs - including the log of a man named Merer, who supervised a work gang of 40 men who, for part of the time covered in the log, were working shipping the fine white casing stone to the Great Pyramid and the temples around it. Tucked in between stones that had once sealed a storage bay was a scatter of papyrus, the oldest ever found. Probably the most important discovery in Egyptology of this century so far was made by a team led by Pierre Tallet, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, at a small, temporary port facility used briefly during the 4th Dynasty on the west coast of the Red Sea at a place now called Wadi el-Jarf. You realize you're reading the logbook of a man whose work gang was delivering fine Tura limestone to a project the Egyptians called Akhet Khufu - in English, the Horizon of Khufu. In the morning sets sail from Ro-She Khufu, sails towards Akhet Khufu." You stop. Slowly, you work your way through the hieroglyphs, perhaps glancing at a dictionary now and then. Imagine being an Egyptologist, with a tattered papyrus scroll laid on the table before you to translate. This lavishly illustrated book captures the excitement and significance of these seminal findings, conveying above all how astonishing it is to discover a contemporary eyewitness testimony to the creation of the only remaining Wonder of the Ancient World. Tallet and Lehner narrate this thrilling discovery and explore how the building of the pyramids helped create a unified state, propelling Egyptian civilization forward. Combined with Lehner’s excavations of the harbor at the pyramid construction site the Red Sea Papyri have greatly advanced our understanding of how the ancient Egyptians were able to build monuments that survive to this day. The translation of the papyri reveals how the stones of the Great Pyramid ended up in Giza. The story begins with Tallet’s hunt for hieroglyphic rock inscriptions in the Sinai Peninsula and leads up to the discovery of the papyri, the diary of Inspector Merer, who oversaw workers in the reign of Pharaoh Khufu in Wadi el-Jarf, the site of an ancient harbor on the Red Sea. Here, for the first time, the world-renowned Egyptologists Tallet and Lehner give us the definitive account of this astounding discovery. These papyri, written some 4,600 years ago, and combined with Mark Lehner’s research, changed what we thought we knew about the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Pierre Tallet’s discovery of the Red Sea Scrolls―the world’s oldest surviving written documents―in 2013 was one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Egyptology. But once the papyrus was carbonised by the volcanic gas, it meant the ink and the papyrus fibres had a similar density, making it impossible for conventional X-ray techniques to distinguish the ink from the papyrus fibres.The inside story, told by excavators of the extraordinary discovery of the world’s oldest papyri, revealing how Egyptian King Khufu’s men built the Great Pyramid at Giza. In Antiquity, writers used black carbon-based ink, or charcoal, from smoke residues. "This pioneering research opens up new prospects not only for the many papyri still unopened, but also for others that have not yet been discovered," said the team of scientists, led by Vito Mocella from the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of the National Council of Research in Naples. While it's unlikely these newly discovered works of classical literature will appear on bookshelves anytime soon, the study does demonstrate the potential of X-ray phase-contrast tomography for interpreting other ancient texts. Other texts of his have been recovered and unrolled because they were less damaged. They believe the author was likely to have been the philosopher and poet Philodemus. The ancient archaeological site of Pompeii.
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