The 4,500-Year-Old Diary of a Man Who Built the Great Pyramid

In 2013, archaeologists digging at an ancient harbour on Egypt's Red Sea coast found the oldest papyri with writing ever discovered in Egypt. One of them is the logbook of Merer, a crew boss whose team ferried white limestone down the Nile to the Great Pyramid of Giza. This is what his "diary" tells us: what his crew did all day, what they ate, who visited, and how it fits with everything else we know about how the pyramid was built. That includes the quarry next door, the wet-sand trick, the lost branch of the Nile, and the argument about ramps that still isn't settled. So: aliens, or forty guys with a boat and a jar of water? Tell me in the comments. Chapters 0:00 The diary 0:46 Chapter 1: The find 1:50 Chapter 2: Meet Merer 2:38 Chapter 3: A week in the life 4:41 Chapter 4: How it actually worked 7:20 Chapter 5: Who really built it 8:15 Chapter 6: What we still don't know 8:50 Aliens? Sources: Pierre Tallet's editions of the Wadi al-Jarf papyri (IFAO, 2017, 2021, 2024); Tallet & Marouard (2014, 2016); Fall et al., Physical Review Letters (2014); Sheisha et al., PNAS (2022); Ghoneim et al., Communications Earth & Environment (2024); Morishima et al., Nature (2017); Procureur et al., Nature Communications (2023); AERA / Mark Lehner. Narration is AI-generated. Animation is made in code by HowItTicks. The logbook entries are paraphrased. #ancientegypt #pyramids #history #archaeology #greatpyramid #egypt #howitworks