Secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza uncovered

Washington, June 29 (ANI): In a study lasting two decades, archaeologists have uncovered a number of secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

According to a report in The Columbus Dispatch, archaeologists Ana Tavares and Mark Lehner have been digging for two decades in Egypt, digging up a lost city where Giza pyramid builders lived.

The findings indicate that the Egyptians who built the giant pyramids on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago ate dense bread, choice cuts of meat and preserved fish.

They slept in military-style barracks and belonged to work gangs with names such as the "Drunkards of Menkaure."

Archaeologist Mark Lehner knows these details because he spent the past two decades digging them up from their lost city.

Nearby are the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, icons most people associate with Egyptian archaeology.

Lehner spent three years surveying the Great Sphinx, mapping it by hand, block by block. He then turned his attention to the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx and the three key Fourth Dynasty pyramids stand.

"The really neat thing about our project is that we could go out there in 1988 and over the next 20 years we tested that hypothesis, which is the best of science. And guess what? Sure enough, there it was," he said.

"Since then, three areas of the city have emerged," said Tavares, assistant field director for Ancient Egypt Research Associates, a donor-funded archaeology group Lehner founded to explore the lost city site.

"You have a barracks, which is tightly controlled with streets and an enclosure wall," she said. "And there in the shape of the houses and the artifacts we find, it tells one story and that's basically of workers, young men, presumably no women or children at this point: a rotating labor force," she added.

According to Tavares, near the barracks, a village grew with smaller houses, twisting streets and a less regimented lifestyle, perhaps with more women and children.

"The people who lived there appeared to be providing for themselves on a family scale," she said.

And then there is the nearby town where officials lived.

"There, you have a lot of evidence of administration, of sealings of documents that came in," said Tavares. "There are very large houses with beautiful painted plaster on the walls and the finds there are quite different: stone vessels, more delicate finds," she added.

"The next steps for studying the lost city will take place mostly in the lab," she said. (ANI)