Hieroglyphs in the Great Pyramid: the work gangs who wrote Khufu's name

Red paint covers the hidden chambers above the King's Chamber

Above the flat granite ceiling of the King's Chamber lie five low compartments, built to spread the weight of the stone above. Nathaniel Davison entered the lowest in the 1760s. The four above it had no way in. In 1837 Colonel Howard Vyse saw a crack in the ceiling of Davison's Chamber, pushed a reed through it and spent about three and a half months blasting upward with gunpowder. He named the new rooms Wellington's, Nelson's, Lady Arbuthnot's and Campbell's Chambers.

Their walls carry red ochre marks: levelling lines, mason's signs and the names of work gangs. The blocks were painted at the quarry or on the building site before they were laid, so some marks run into the joints, sideways or upside down, and parts of them vanish behind the neighbouring stones. Samuel Birch of the British Museum read the cartouche as the Cheops of Herodotus, the first proof from the pyramid itself of whose it was.

Every gang named itself after the king

Khufu's builders were organised in large crews split into smaller units, and each crew's name praised the king. Translations differ a little. Nigel Strudwick gives "the companions of Khufu", a gang often quoted as the "Friends of Khufu", and "the white crown of Khnum-Khufu is pure". Other renderings read the last one as "is powerful". Further gangs use his Horus name, Medjedu, as in "the pure ones of Horus Medjedu".

Two forms of the king's name appear inside cartouches. One is the short Khufu. The longer form, Khnum-Khufu, ẖnmw-ḫwfw, said "khnum-khufu", means "Khnum protects me" and adds the god's name with the stone jug (W9), which writes ẖnm. Khufu is the short form of it.

Four signs spell Khufu

The cartouche in Campbell's Chamber, the highest of the five, reads ḫwfw, "khufu". The circle with lines across it (Aa1), usually called a placenta or a sieve, writes ḫ, a rasping kh. The quail chick (G43) writes w. The horned viper (I9) writes f, and a second quail chick closes the name.

In red brush strokes the signs are quick and rounded, and the chick can shrink to a loop. Learn the shapes from carved examples first, such as the cartouches in the tombs of Khufu's family on the plateau, then look again at photographs of the chamber walls.

Read all of Khufu's names

Scholars reject the forgery claim on several grounds

In 1980 Zecharia Sitchin argued in The Stairway to Heaven that Vyse and his men painted the marks themselves. He claimed the cartouche used the sun disc of Ra (N5) instead of Aa1, an error he said was copied from a faulty book of the time, and that the script belonged to a later age.

Photographs show the hatched circle of Aa1. Marks continue into joints and behind blocks that nobody could reach once the stones were set. The forms Khnum-Khufu and Horus Medjedu, and the cursive gang names, were not understood in 1837 and were read only decades later. Gang marks of the same kind turn up at the pyramids of Menkaure and Sahure. The Diary of Merer adds a written record from Khufu's own time that never passed through Vyse's hands.

A boatman's diary records stone for Akhet-Khufu

In 2013 a French mission led by Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard found papyrus rolls at Wadi al-Jarf, an old harbour on the Red Sea. The best preserved is the logbook of an inspector called Merer, who led a crew of about forty men late in Khufu's reign. It is dated to around his 26th or 27th year.

Merer records trips by boat carrying white limestone from the Tura quarries across the Nile to Giza, for the pyramid's outer casing. The pyramid appears under its ancient name, Akhet-Khufu, "Horizon of Khufu". The work was overseen by Ankhhaf, Khufu's half-brother. Parts of the papyri have been shown at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Three later inscriptions stand around the pyramid

Above the original entrance on the north face, the Prussian expedition of Karl Richard Lepsius carved a square text in hieroglyphs in 1842, honouring King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Its columns and cartouches can be seen from the ground with a zoom lens.

In 1954 two boat pits were found at the south foot of the pyramid. One held Khufu's cedar ship in pieces. Many of the blocks covering the pits carry the cartouche of Djedefre, his son and successor, who probably saw to the burial. The rebuilt ship is now at the Grand Egyptian Museum.

The Inventory Stela, found by Auguste Mariette in 1858 in a temple of Isis beside the queens' pyramids, dates to the 26th Dynasty, almost two thousand years after Khufu. It claims that Khufu found the Isis temple already standing near the Sphinx and rebuilt it. Historians read it as a later story told to give the temple an older pedigree. It is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Questions

People in this article

• Khufu c. 2589–2566 BC
• Djedefre c. 2566–2558 BC
• Menkaure c. 2532–2503 BC

Where to see it

• Great Pyramid of Khufu monument
• Giza Pyramids site
• Grand Egyptian Museum museum
• Egyptian Museum, Cairo museum
• Pyramid of Unas monument

More to read

• The temple of Seti I at Abydos: what to read on its walls Temple of Seti I, Abydos: its raised reliefs and Ramesses II's sunk ones, the seven chapels, the king list, the Osiris halls and the helicopter signs.
• A hieroglyph walk through Karnak Karnak hieroglyphics to read on a walk: cartouches on the Hypostyle Hall columns, Hatshepsut's obelisk, Shoshenq's list of towns and the White Chapel.
• Reading Abu Simbel: the king's name in stone, from façade to sanctuary Abu Simbel hieroglyphics to read: the rebus of Ramesses II's name over the door, Greek soldiers' graffiti, the Kadesh reliefs and Nefertari's temple.