ProGRAMS

Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA): Exploring the Origins of Civilization

AERA’s mission is to explore the origins of civilization in the archaeological record with an eye to understanding the cultural evolution of the human race. The Waitt Family Foundation is funding the efforts of AERA’s cofounder, Mark Lehner, to uncover a city where the pyramid builders were thought to have lived. The site is yielding interesting answers to the question: who built the pyramids?

AERA's Work and Mission

AERA, Ancient Egypt Research Associates, was incorporated in 1985 for the purpose of funding and facilitating the research of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, which grew out of the Sphinx Project sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt.

Carried out between 1979 and 1983, under project director James Allen, Director of the American Research Center in Egypt at that time, and field director Mark Lehner, the purpose of the Sphinx Project was to document and study the great Sphinx.

Until 1994 AERA played a minor role in this research at the Giza Plateau. AERA administered part of the funds supporting the exhibit, "The Sphinx and Pyramids: 100 Years of American Archaeology at Giza," which can currently be seen at the Harvard Semitic Museum.

Egyptologist Mark Lehner and Ted Waitt survey the digsite at Giza

Egyptologist Mark Lehner gives Ted Waitt a tour of the site at Giza

A view over the Sphinx's shoulder shows the encroaching suburb of Giza

Recent findings have discovered that the settlement extends farther west than previously thought, which has important implications for the interpretation of the entire area. They've also found many more mud sealings dated to the reigns of the pharaohs who built the Giza pyramids. Some of the Late Period (26th Dynasty) burials have yielded beautiful artifacts.

The Waitt Institute for Discovery's participation is helping AERA to protect and study this World Heritage Site.

AERA's mission, defined in its charter, is to explore the origins of civilization in the archaeological record and from this work contribute insight and understanding to our present awareness of cultural evolution. With this mission in mind, AERA's attention has naturally focused on the Giza Plateau, the center of Old Kingdom pyramid building---one of the earliest turning points in the cultural evolution of ancient Egypt, the world's first nation-state.

Who Built the Pyramids?

Rising inexplicably from the desert at Giza, the pyramids and the Great Sphinx are relics of a vanished culture. The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu, was until early in the twentieth century the biggest building on the planet. To raise it, laborers moved six and a half million tons of stone—some in blocks as large as nine tons—with nothing but wood and rope.

The question of who labored to build them, and why, has long been part of their fascination. There is much speculation that the pyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless pharaoh. But graffiti from inside the Giza monuments themselves have long suggested something very different.

Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, and Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) co-founder, is discovering a new answer. He has found a city of pyramid builders, and they were definitely not slaves.

Studying the Sphinx since 1973, Lehner became convinced that the quest was misguided. His first big break came in 1977, when the Stanford Research Institute conducted a remote sensing project at the Sphinx and the pyramids— a search for cavities using non-invasive technologies. The Sphinx which is carved directly from the sedimentary rock at Giza, sits below the surface of the surrounding plateau.

Lehner asked the director of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE, a consortium of institutions including museums and universities such as Harvard) if they would sponsor his effort to map the Sphinx and Lehner soon produced the first scale drawings of the Sphinx, which are now on display at the Semitic Museum.

Lehner continued to work in Egypt on the excavation of the pyramid city. In October 1999, with funding from philanthropists Ann Lurie, Peter Norton, David Koch, and others, he launched a "millennium project" to uncover the pyramid city. Lehner believes the city was intentionally razed and erosion then swept away the rubble before the sand blew in. Today, all across the site, the ruins stand only ankle to waist high.

"We now have an exposure of about five hectares, and have mapped the city over the whole area," he says. His international team of 30 archaeologists has excavated 10 percent—or 5,000 square meters—intensively, a huge undertaking when using modern stratigraphic standards. With more than 100 workers in total, they have amassed the largest collection of material culture from any dig anywhere in Egypt.

Who Built the Pyramids, by Jonathan Shaw, editor Harvard Magazine.

Copyright Harvard Magazine