Mystery of Egypt’s pyramids shattered by 'advanced' discovery

Almost everything the movies taught you about Egypt's pyramids is wrong — not slaves but paid workers, not marooned in empty desert but built beside a river now vanished, not an undocumented mystery but a supply operation we can still read, day by day, in an inspector's own logbook from four and a half thousand years ago

An inspector named Merer kept a timetable. Two columns a day: where the boat cast off, what it was carrying, where it moored for the night, which stretch of dyke his men worked when there was no stone to move. That timetable is now part of the oldest inscribed papyrus corpus recovered in Egypt, excavated in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, a Red Sea harbour site 119 kilometres south of Suez, by a joint Sorbonne, French Institute of Archaeology in Cairo and…

Mystery of Egypt’s pyramids shattered by 'advanced' discovery

The mystery of how ancient Egyptians developed the skills to build their world-famous pyramids may have taken a major twist.