Interview with Mark Lehner | The People Behind the Pyramids

INTRODUCTION

Mark Lehner is an Egyptologist and American Archaeologist with more than 30 years of experience excavating in Egypt and walking the Giza Plateau, and co-author of "Giza and the Pyramids" with Zahi Hawass. He is the director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), an organization that focuses on training young Egyptian Archeologists in excavations and analysis of archeological sites addressing questions regarding the origin, nature, and development of the Egyptian state.

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Mitchell: So, Mark, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Mark: No, it's good to be here. I appreciate the series that you're doing.

Mitchell: Can you give us a little bit of context about yourself?

Mark: I have been in Egypt, walking the Giza Pyramids for 50 years. I went over in 1972 as a tourist. I was with a group of like-minded young people. We were all followers of the psychic Edgar Cayce. And I resolved to go back. I had a time alone inside the Great Pyramid. The very kind of moving experience. I went down to the Sphinx, and time alone between the paws. Well, with a guide, which is a story in itself. And something just really clicked. And so I went back, I was living in Virginia Beach at the Edgar Cayce, the home of the Edgar Cayce Foundation at the time. I was just really resolved to get back as soon as possible.

So, I saw a news item about the American University in Cairo, which is a Liberal Arts, English language, American University, and that they had a year abroad program. So, I applied, and it was a miracle that they accepted me, but they did. So, I went over there in 1973, In September ‘73, with help from the Edgar Cayce Foundation, who are good friends and supporters.  And I did this year abroad program, and this was three weeks before the October 6th war broke out between Israel and Egypt. And so that was a shock, but they didn't evacuate us. So, I ended up staying another year and taking my B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) from the American University in Cairo, AUC.

And to make a long story shorter, I ended up staying 13 years and I started freelancing for archeological missions. And so over those 13 years, I worked for Egyptian, British, French, German, archeological projects from leading universities and museums and research institutes. That led to…  At that time, I went through a whole experience of doubting the Edgar Cayce ideas that brought me there in the first place. It was kind of a clash against bedrock reality. And as I moved away from those ideas, I started saying, well, what is the real story of this place? You know, psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. And so, it was a real, I really lived that. And so, I said, what is the real story of this place? And I realized that bedrock reality that was giving me this cognitive dissonance also had a lot to offer, a lot of stories that were untold about the people and how the pyramids are really built. Untold even by Egyptologists, because Egyptology grew up as a discipline focusing on the ancient Egyptian language. It’s amazing art and architecture, but not so much the kind of archeology that we do looking for people, how they live their everyday lives.

So, I started publishing actually in academic journals, mainstream archeology, topology. And in 1985, ‘86, I went back for my PhD at Yale University and before graduating, before actually finishing my PhD, I was hired at the University of Chicago on a tenure track, you know, teaching position. And I was there two and a half years before by choice, leaving the tenure track, which was considered insane, growing my own organization, Ancient Egypt Research Associates - AERA. You can see everything about us at aeraweb.org.

And so my passion at this point was finding the real people. Where did they live? How were they housed? How were they fed? And by looking at the whole pyramid plateau from the shape of the landscape, the geomorphology, where were the quarries, where could the ramps have been? And then where were all the people? How are they settled? How are they housed? How are they fed? What would the excavation of their urban footprint tell us about how they organized people.

So you can see now I'm far away from Edgar Cayce and the idea, by the way, which took me there, the Hall of Records of Atlantis. I've done a real arc, you know, in my thinking and activity. And so it's been now 50 years and my organization has been excavating what we call, without too much exaggeration, “The Lost City of the Pyramids” for 37 years. And, and yeah, so I probably know the Giza Plateau just about as well as anybody. I've been walking it for 50 years.

Mitchell: That's incredible. Yeah, that's exactly the reason why I reached out to you. Because you've been you've had your hands in the dirt literally, for that amount of time. And I sensed a real kinship with your philosophy and your thinking behind your, you know, pursuit there. I think in architectural history, we tend to define that history by monuments of these small groups of monarchies, aristocracy. I think a lot of the study of everyday people is left out, which reveals an incredible amount and a more realistic.

Mark: Well it also tells you, it answers some of the questions about the monuments.

Mitchell: Yeah.

Mark: So, you know, to study the great pyramid and the Sphinx or any, any, you know, huge, impressive monument anywhere in the world of any culture and that know about the people who built it and how they lived and the elementary structures of their everyday lives, how they bought eggs and milk and inflation. You don't really understand the monument. Right. And this is part of the problem. If there is a problem in terms of a whole, a whole alternative stream of thinking, and even you could call it “research” on these ancient monuments from the point of view of ancient aliens or Atlantis. So, part of that stream continues to, part of the reason that stream continues to flow, is because people don't know the context, they don't see it. And that's totally understandable. But to take any monuments like the Great Pyramid out of its context, of course it's going to look like it's up for grabs as to who built it and how and when. But all those questions have answers in the context. Context is everything in archeology, in architecture too.  I mean, especially when you do mixed urban use, you know, you can't just design “boom” a building anywhere, whether it’s downtown L.A. or Manhattan, without integrating it with obviously, code and urban planning and everything else.

Mitchell: So, on the Workers Village. Can you tell us about that? Give us some more insight into that. I feel like it's really understudied, under-understood. So, I'd like to hear.

Mark: Well, our site is called The Workers Village, but I think it's, in a way, a bit of a misnomer. It's much more than that. So, as I looked at the whole landscape and, you know, at Giza and say the Great Pyramid, about 350m to the south, there's this big hole.

So, you know, I have a practical side, because I did construction early on and come from North Dakota.

My grandfather had a farm. And I know, you know, when I would dig post holes with him where you dig a hole, you have a pile. So, the Great Pyramid is the pile. There's the hole, the quarry. But if that was teeming with thousands of people, as was the ramp going from the hole to the pile, and the pyramid had thousands of people. Where? How are they supported again? But also, where would we look for this lost city? And it must be a city, because Egyptologists for estimating it took 20 or 30,000 people to build the pyramids. That's the size of some of the world's first cities in Iraq, in north Syria. Now we know in China and you know, the 3000’s B.C. to the 2000’s B.C.

So where was it? Well, to the south of this hole, the quarry. There's a wadi, or what you might call an arroyo, you know, between two, between two plateaus and, just beyond that, there's this gigantic stone wall 200m long. It's actually ten meters tall, and it has a gate that was, most of it was buried, but the gate itself is 21ft high or seven meters high. I'm sorry. I'm going back and forth, I think metric, so I'll try to convert. Yeah. But beyond that wall, nobody had really dug much. And why is it there? So, like I say 200m long, ten meters high. If it were anywhere in my home state of North Dakota, there'd be a national park around it. But so looking at, you know, where the pyramid is, where the ramp had to go from the pyramid to the quarry. And then here's this wadi or arroyo or valley and this big wall. I said, I bet there's a harbor on the north of that wall and a major infrastructure to the south. So, we started excavating in 1988 and ‘89, and we were digging in these small squares, these trenches and everywhere we put down a big trench as one of our grad students put it, something really big is lurking down there because there were all these mud brick like Adobe walls, some of stone broken stone. And, as we worked over the years, the place had been a dumping ground for the local towns’ people and the riding stables. They would take the clean sand, which was like 12ft high above these ancient ruins. The stable hands would take the sand and donkeys, and they would take it to the stables. Why are there stables? Tourist industry, camels, horses to some extent donkeys giving rides to tourists.

And then they would clean the stables, and they would bring the sand back with its new inclusions. So, we called it the HSS layer, for horse and sand, you can fill in. So our colleagues in Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities, the archeologists, official archeologists in charge, and us, we all realized this has to be saved. So, the authorities walled off the whole area and allowed us to go in with mechanized equipment, front loaders, trucks and really get away all this overburden that had been dumped in the dumping from the modern trash from the nearby city.

And then when we came down close to the ancient ruins, we it's like within a meter, within about three feet. We brought in workers and we did the rest by hand. And the amazing thing is there was this massive mud mass very, almost like concrete. And this was the ruins of the ancient settlement made out of Adobe or mud brick. When the mud brick or Adobe collapses, it infills the rooms and everything standard. Very typical in archeology. But somehow forces of erosion, wind, hot sand blowing, forces of erosion that probably signal a major climate change about this time and this time it's about 2500 B.C, or 4500 years ago. These forces of erosion cut the ruins at about waist to ankle level, blew, blew it away, blew the overburden. And so basically, once we clear all this sand and the modern dumping, there was a footprint where we could see the outlines of walls, running in all directions, and so we could map much of the city without actually having to excavate further down to their floor levels. Well, what this revealed. So, you know, we knew we had something as soon as we did our first trenches. And what I'm telling you took place over from 1988 all the way to 2000, 2004, because it's a big site. It's about, sorry, I think metric ten hectares. So, you know, big area. It's about like 7 or 8 football fields. And, so it took a while. But when we got down and we could look at the map, we could see that there are five big blocks of galleries or corridors in, sorry, four, four big blocks of corridors separated by streets. And these corridors are about the width of a hotel hallway, and they're like one after another after another, and they are separated by streets that look precociously modern. They actually were put down a bed of crushed limestone, not unlike some of our paved streets. And then instead of asphalt, they used mud, and they put drains down the middle. And these streets separated these galleries. And in each gallery we found sleeping platforms where people could lay, stretch out, you know, about 20 on one side and 20 on the other.

And so meanwhile, we were starting to excavate down to their floor levels all around these four big blocks of galleries and these four big blocks stretch about 150m. It's about 150 yards. So big, big structure with these streets running through them. And on the sides. Our excavations were showing bakeries, dozens of bakeries, you know, like kind of wonder bread factories churning out, you know, bread.

Meanwhile we were sampling all the, what we call the material culture, the animal bone. We have a way of extracting ancient plant remains, every single bit of chip stone for their chip stone tools. So, archeologists call this, you know, the material culture. This is the material of their everyday lives. And we have people who can analyze the animal bone. And by now we literally have big data, like millions of pieces of animal bone that have been identified. When you have enough of it, you can tell is it cattle, sheep or goat? Is it catfish? Is it Nile perch? Really? And if you have enough of like say cattle bone, you can tell is it male or female. So, we're getting these broad patterns where they're actually feeding the Pyramid City meat and the cattle predominate. And when we can age and sex it, they tend to they tend it looks like they were bringing in young male cattle under 18 months. And, you know, again, North Dakota background helps me here. You don't want to take your females, but you want to provision this, what we were now considering a workforce with high protein and a high carbohydrate diet. The bread. So what we basically were finding as we were clearing the galleries and mapping them and excavating along the sides were the bakeries and even a corral.

We found a what we call the OK Corral, the Old Kingdom corral. But we were saying, well, who are all the consumers? Who who's eating? Well, it made sense. What are these galleries, which are mostly empty.  So, we saw that we had sleeping platforms in it. Now the Egyptians would like actually almost like a Posturepedic, you know, mattress. So, you can raise up they kind of platforms that sloped down. We actually tried out one of the galleries. We had all our workers and team members stretch out and we could get 40 people sleeping. So, we said, oh, these are the consumers. These are the barracks, probably for the workers, but and the backs of the galleries are little houses, probably for overseers. And at the very backs of those little houses there are, each had their own little kitchen where they were cooking, roasting and baking. And we have evidence that each gallery corresponded to a home district. So, they were rotating people through these with home based fellowships.

So yeah, that's overall picture that emerged. That's the central feature of the site. And, and then we found where all the administrators were living, we found a whole, what we call the western town with big houses, where we have evidence of high-ranking officials. We found an eastern town of lower ranking, lower status people who we have evidence they were doing all the grinding of the grain into flour and the big, big enchilada that we waited 20 years to excavate was in the southeast part of the site. It's a royal building, as big as the palaces we know from ancient Egypt. And it turned out to be the storehouse of Pharaoh, where we found 30 big round silo granaries, 30. We only recovered the royal building in its entirety in 2023, because for many years, the, a soccer field and sports club was right on top of it.

So, between 2002 and 2004, we could only excavate the northern end, and only in 2023 did the authorities help to get the soccer field moved by negotiating with the local townspeople, building them a new soccer field and sports club. And then we got the rest of this royal building. So, this is kind of like the command central.

And then further to the south, we found this corral where they were keeping all the cattle. And in between, say the royal building and the corral to the south, we have this very sophisticated harbor, and it's a back service harbor. It's not like the harbor north of the wall of the crow, which was for building the pyramids and bringing things to the temples that were attached to the pyramids. Now, this is a back door service harbor, but only in recent years, like right up to 2023, we find we exposed more of it after moving the soccer field. And it is amazingly, it's amazing in its sophistication. We have big galleries, big big enclosures, and then within the enclosures we have even more galleries and then we have compartments and it's very grid-like, orthogonal. And it kind of looks like the dock, you know, the Brooklyn dockyards, or any port, you know, where they're organized slips for ships and so on. So, this is the overall footprint. And, yeah, it's really shows how the Egyptians express themselves on the ground for building the world's last surviving of the world's seven wonders: The Great Pyramid.

Mitchell: Right. What you described, it’s very clear. In my mind, the picture of the city like you just said.

Mark: Yeah. If it's not a city, it's a proto city. But actually, we call this whole site Heit el-Ghurab, which is Arabic for wall of the crow. That's the name of the big stone wall on the northwest, the 200 meter long wall. And why it's called Wall of the Crow by the locals, robably because crows gather in the trees that are growing out of the end of this wall, where you have modern cemeteries. And so Heit el-Ghurab, HEG or the lot, what you call the Workers’ City, it's only one part of a much larger city that extended even further north around the whole arc of the Giza Plateau.

And the reason we know this, is because of the excavation that was done for the installation of a wastewater system, a sewage system, in the late 1980s actually hit structures of the northern part of the city. These trenches actually hit the valley temple of the Great Pyramid. So, every pyramid had an upper temple, a long causeway, a ramp, and a lower temple called the Valley Temple. And this was standard the standard pyramid complex. The valley temple of Khufu, it’s, we never knew exactly where it was approximately. But some of these, wastewater trenches for, you know, big pipes went right across the Khufu Valley temple. And so, yeah, from the trenching and digging and the core drilling that was done for this wastewater project called “Ambric” ”a- m- b- r -i -c” it's an American British consortium of companies like Camp Dresser & McKee

The Ambric core drilling and trenching really revealed, well, there's a city here too, but then the real, you know, to top it all off, there was this discovery in 2013 of the Wadi al Jarf papyri. Wadi al Jarf is a site on the Red Sea coast. And my colleague and friend Pierre Tallet, who's now the director of the French Institute in Cairo, he's from the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 2013, they found they established this port on the Red Sea of Khufu. There's no doubt it's from the time of Khufu. And there's a huge mole, you know, are like wharf structure and armature going out into the water. There are big buildings on the shore that look like our galleries. They look very much like our galleries. And there's a whole camp of workers, but up in the mountain, you know, in the rocky, in the bedrock, escarpment behind all this, the people of the time of the pyramids dug these big caves or galleries again. They look like Amtrak parking garages, if you ever seen a parking garage where they park, you know, the Amtrak trains. And this is where they stored the ships that took them from the seacoast in the west over to Sinai to get copper. And they needed more copper to do something like the Great Pyramid. Probably they assembled more copper than any other place in the world.

And so this was a really important port. So, what they would do is actually carry the ships in parts. They had ships kits, and they would carry them through the wadis, through the valleys, from the Nile Valley to the Red Sea coast, assemble the ships which, like Khufu's ships or boats from Giza near the Great Pyramid, they were all stitched together with ropes and mortise and tenon. They would assemble the ship, sail over the Sinai, get the copper. Big question, was it ore, did they refine it there? But anyway, bring it back at Wadi al Jarf, disassemble the ships and then park and put all the parts in these parking garages, these caves. So, my friend Pierre Tallet, that was a sensational discovery in its own right. But when they were digging the entrances to some of these parking garages, they actually found papyri which would not preserve on our site. Our site is too low near the Nile Valley. It's too wet. Anything organic kind of deteriorates. But here they actually found papyri. And low and behold, most of the papyri were about building the Great Pyramid. They were about this team of men and their leader named Merer, who was actually, had nothing to do with Wadi al Jarf. The papyri were all about how they were making trips from the eastern quarries near Cairo at Tura, and bringing stone for the pyramid casing over to, explicitly says, the Pyramid of Khufu. And, you know, you had like 16 days running when papyrus was 80cm long, another 850. They are fragments, but so that itself was amazing. The journal of Merer, because he's naming the different waterways and the basins and everything, the harbor basins. It’s kind of like, yeah, a contractor’s log like a timesheet. So, yeah, I mean, the papyrus, the journal of Merer is divided into vertical strips, and the text is written in hieroglyphs from top to bottom and then left, right to left. And they start out, the inspector Merer, that's his title Inspector, together with his Za. Now, Za is a word that the ancient Egyptians wrote with a cattle hobble. Again, I know from North Dakota, where you tie a rope around several calves at once and then stake the end loops to the ground, or you just take out the stakes and they all move together. So Za was a unit of, kind of a fellowship, a labor unit. And, 2000 years later, people who are bilingual translated the Egyptian words Za, it's the Greek word phyle, p-h-y-l-e, which is the word for tribe. And we know about the Za, or the plural is Zaw. Before the discovery of the Wadi al Jarf papyrus from other texts, but none so explicit how they worked in terms of a labor… they were, it was a gig thing. They went on gigs when they weren't bringing stone for Khufu's pyramid for a few… This was the last year of Khufu. It's clear from the papyri, the penultimate, I'm sorry, the penultimate year to the last year of Khufu and I can go into the details of that if you like. But as part of that year, when they weren't delivering stone for the Great Pyramid, they went up to the Delta and they built kind of a wharf up there. And then at the end of that gig, they were over in Wadi al Jarf apparently to go get copper. And then Khufu died. We know that, and, you know, the papyri were dropped for some reason. We don't know. And the fragments got embedded in the debris as they're closing up these Amtrak parking garages. So the reason I did that full loop on the Wadi al Jarf papyri, I mean, it's an amazing discovery. It's probably the biggest discovery in my 50 years working in Egypt.

But the reason to come back and circle back to the city at Giza, my friend Pierre Tallet did an amazing scholarly job of translating and publishing these papyri. He published Merer’s journal first, but then he published… And these are papyrus a, b,  c, more than you need to know. But papyrus D, he saved for a separate volume. And that is kind of the log or journal, the time sheet of Merer’s boss Dedi and… a guy named Dedi.

But in those papyri they're even more fragmentary. There's the mention of Khufu's palace at Giza. There's the mentioned that they name the Valley temple, the same valley temple that the Emperor Trench, you know, cut across. They said they give what they talk about a separate harbor for it. They talk about a granary there. They talk about an archive there, which is probably where they would stash all these timesheets. And, to come back to your question about the Workers Village, it's more than a worker's village because it's part of this greater city. Now that truly, now we're getting to a size about 300 hectares, which is that's, you know, two hectares, 10,000m², figure out acres, but 300 hectares is the size of the world's first cities that we know, say in Iraq, north Syria, the Indus Valley, Mohenjo Daro, Harappa. So, this is truly a huge city. Now, one final thing. Why do I say it's not just a worker's town? Because as we started excavating those galleries, and again, you know, as the motto of our field school goals, you know, we do field school to field schools to teach our scientific archeology to young Egyptian archeologists working for the Egyptian government. And the motto of our field school is, we're not looking for things, we're looking for information. And that means you don't have to be a post middle aged man wearing a fedora and blue denim to be an archeologist. Some of our best archeologists are young women who are very conservative, scarves on. But some, some of our Egyptian colleagues are now among our best excavators.

But so, we're very meticulous and one of the things we do is we save every scrap of charcoal if it doesn't pulverize, but a lot of charcoal stays, and if it retains its structure, we save it along with the animal bone and the plant remains, other plant remains and you know, everything else. So, we had somebody come and study this charcoal. Rainer Gerisch from the Free University of Berlin. And we literally have thousands, probably tens of thousands of fragments of charcoal from our excavations. And when he looked at it, it's like 99, 97, 96% acacia, acacia nilotica, which is Nile Acacia, the most common type of wood, burns very hot fuel. And so that's interesting. It's interesting to see how thermodynamically expensive the Great Pyramid project was.

But suddenly seeing olive and that's weird because, more than I can say on a podcast. But years of doing this kind of archeology in Egypt, we know that olive didn't really appear in Egypt until the Ptolemaic period. So, for another 2000 years or more in a big way where they were growing olive and so on. So generally, if you find, all of it tends to be imported. Then our pottery specialist was finding pottery that didn't look Egyptian at all, but looked very Levantine. So, leaven the Levant means the area that is now Israel Palestine, some extent Syria, Lebanon, but especially Lebanon. And it looked like the kind of pottery they use in the oil industry. Its combed ware, they actually like before the pot dries, they comb it and then they fire it. So, and, you know, it's very good for like slippery, oily. And these were like combed ware jars which were like Roman an for, it was their shipping containers. Loop handled, you know, oil installations have been found in, you know, the Levant, which combed ware vats and combed ware jars.

And then we actually did trace analysis, our ceramicist, and traced it back to the area, Byblos, just north of Beirut and that area. So, we have imports now from Lebanon, where they also imported, we know from other sources. Cedar and now we have cedar in our site, and they also imported wine and, and olive oil and probably resin. But why are we finding these luxury products in a worker's village? So, the most combed ware that was known from the Levant was in the big tombs up on the plateau at Giza, like 50 tombs had these combed ware every wealthy person had to have their combed ware you know, olive jars. So why are we finding it in a worker's town?

They were also finding things like hippo bone, which they were using for ivory and so on. So, our ceramicist, who discovered the pottery imported from Lebanon said, well, maybe the elite. See, there's this very dichotomous elite and everybody else; kind of looks that way these days sometimes. But anyway. But I think it's too simply it's, it's a little bit based on Marxism, you know, those who own the means of production and everybody but this elite and everybody. I think it clouds understanding when we think that way. But a lot of archeologists do. But anyway, a ceramicist said on origins, she said, well, maybe the elite were giving the jars back to the workers so they could use them after they're empty, which is, you know, fair enough. But. Or she said, maybe this was actually an entrepot. So, like the Port of Los Angeles for its time, where everything came in, you know, from, in your case, in the Port of Los Angeles or Seattle, you know, from China and Japan and, you know, Southeast Asia just everywhere in the world. That's what Giza was at that time. Over three generations. Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure. It was like bingo, of course.

And so, these galleries, they said, you know, and the harbor, the back service harbor, as well as the bigger construction harbor to the north of the Wall of the Crow. But it's like, of course, you know, this is, everything's coming in here, and so costly imports like cedarwood and olive oil in the jars and you know, craft work. Hippos were around, but so it's actually much more than just where the grant workers lived. And even there's evidence that those who did stay in the galleries were a little bit less than just raw, slave-like laborers. In fact, there's evidence these were young people, mostly young men recruited from the, you know, leading estates, that existed in Egypt at the time from the elite. For a popular audience, you know, I say think Game of Thrones, you know, where the House of Stark has all the other houses, you know, siding for him. And so does the house of Lannister. There’s a little bit of a feudal aspect to this.

But anyway, back to your original question. Yes, it's a workers’ town. Yes, it's infrastructure. We're also finding the large houses, the administrators, and it's just a lot of, a lot of information. And it's so important for so many disciplines.

Mitchell: Yeah. I mean, that's a beautiful, beautifully put, Mark. And, again, that gives me a really nice visual of what this network could have looked like. My question is, chronologically, it's kind of a chicken and the egg question, are the pyramids being erected, do we think, simultaneously to the village and kind of city around it?

Mark: It's a good question, Mitchell. Everything we have found in this footprint that I say we've captured by mapping, but showed before we even excavated in detail. Everything dates to the reign of Khafre and Menkaure. Khafre built the second pyramid at Giza and Menkaure the third. And after that, things changed and interestingly, pyramids got smaller and so on. But we know there's where it's kind of daunting. But underneath everything we've mapped and everything I've described, there's an older phase, as we call it. The site was structured somewhat differently. Some of it's the same, like we have evidence of older galleries in the north underneath the ones that we have excavated and mapped. But we think that older phase is probably Khufu.

And so apparently what they did is they actually tore down much of what Khufu had built in our area, if it is Khufu. There's no doubt they tore down an earlier layout like an earlier, you know, neighborhood. And they carted the material up over the mountain and dumped it on the other side. This is a huge dump, and we've excavated there. We call it Kromer, the Kromer site, because Carl Kromer, an Austrian historian excavated there in the early 1970s and he found just tons and tons of settlement material, a settlement that had been cut down, razed, r-a-z-e-d and dumped. And, we went back there because he didn't know anything about our site right over the mountain and, you know, covering ten football fields for maybe seven, maybe eight, maybe ten. He didn't know anything about it in the 1970s, of course.  Now we do, and now we see that. So, we went up there and we re-excavated. Part of it excavated further because it's so vast, this dump that he could never have excavated all of it. And we started finding material that matches material on our site, especially the sealings. S-e-a-l- i-n-g, not the ceilings like above us. Sealings are like our old-fashioned wax letter sealings. You know, we used to put a dab of wax on a letter and before it, before it dried, you'd impress it with your initial or your coat of arms or something. And the Egyptians did that all the time, but with clay, they tried extra hard, and they didn't seal letters. They didn't have paper, they did have papyrus. And they sealed their papyrus documents like they would tie a string, put a dab of clay, and then they seal it. And that seal basically is a seal of authority that “I sealed this” and maybe for the person as well, who for whom the document is intended, but they would seal granaries storing grain. They were really kind of compulsive about control and worry about people pilfering things. So, they sealed bags, boxes, jars, doors in this way with string locks. And when they would break the seal, like the string lock on a bag, a box, a jar or a door, the sealings with their hieroglyphs on them in clay would go scattering and get into the archeological record, get into the deposits we excavated. They actually had jars where they would spiral the string around the clay, the conical clay top. And so literally like a pop top, you see. So, we have a whole team. Not only are we compulsive, Freud would love to, you know, do a character study on us. Not only are we compulsive and like ancient plant remains and animal bone and chip stone, but we are for the sealings and we have a whole team led by this amazing archeologist Alexandra Witsell. And this team, with the patience of Job, will take these different little bits, some no bigger than your thumbnail, and they will see overlapping patterns, and they will reconstruct the original cylinder that was etched with the hieroglyphs that left the impression, like ours, initials on a wax letter sealing. And they can reconstruct the original cylinder. These are like little paint rollers. They would actually inscribe these on little cylinders that they would wear around their necks, or around their wrist or whatever. And then they would take them and they would impress the clay with them. And, so now we basically are reconstructing software.

Everything we've been talking about; it's kind of like their soft tissue, are their hardware, you know, their tools, their houses, their bakeries. But now we're reconstructing text, and texts, you know whether you go from the world's first hieroglyphs all the way to large language models. You know, text now you're in a whole different area of reconstructing what happened, which is basically what we're all about, because they can tell you, if you can read. The sealings from our site in the big houses, which I mentioned in the western town, it looks like that's where the overseers were, who were controlling all the people rotating in and out of the galleries and the Royal building with its silos in the stockyard, the O.K. corral. They were living in these big houses, and they really didn't have the idea of an office yet. It was kind of like an official house or a residential office. You basically lived there during your time on the job. These people had their own estates and their own farms and ranches they went back to, of course. But to go back to Kromer, we started finding the same sealings impressed with the same cylinders, the same little paint roller in the Kromer dump as we dig down on our site. And so what? Kromer has our sealings of Khufu as well as Khafre and Menkaure. So…

Mitchell: And that they actually say or refer to Khufu?

Mark: Yeah. They gave his name. Yeah. So, these sealings, they tend to have the name of the king and then an epithet like, you know, beloved of Seshat, the goddess of writing. And then his name and then maybe the title of the official, and then, so it's their formal patterns, you see. And so, once you get enough of the pattern, it's almost like a fingerprint matching. There's no doubt that some of the sealings in Kromer were sealed with the same seals or that those clay fragments were impressed with the same seal as were some of the clay fragments we're finding down on our site. The whole point of this, Mitchell, is that we pretty sure that older phase is Khufu. Yeah.

Mitchell: Interesting.

Mark: Yeah. And the other clue out of the Kromer site was this I've talked about this word “Za”, you know, which is a team. You know of young people, probably men, mostly young people and mostly young men probably. And there is this term in ancient Egypt “Stp Za”. “Stp” that means chosen, and “Za” of course, means, well, the Greeks translated it with their word phylē for tribe, it's almost like chosen tribe, which has too many implications for us. But, back to 4500 years ago, it looks like, so “Stp Za” was one of the words for Palace there are like five major terms for the royal house. It's kind of like the White House, The Presidency, you know, different terms. So, “Stp Za” was specifically that part of the royal house or the palace concerned with barracks with quasi military control. And where the king actually came to make decisions about building and so on. So, in the Kromer site, we actually have sealings that refer to the “Stp Za”.

So back to your question, we think that what we have at the Heit el Ghurab site is part of this much larger city, as big as the biggest cities in the ancient Near East. But what we have at Heit el Ghurab, maybe specifically was the “Stp Za”, part of the palace, the quasi military. “Stp Za” also means entourage or guarding. And so, so yeah. From Merer, his “Za” he actually says in the papyri, I'm joining the “Stp Za” for major works. They were references where they were working on this big dike and so on with other “Zaw” other “Za”. And he says, I'm joining the “Stp Za”. We are part of the “Stp Za”. So, I think that's what we have on the Heit el Ghurab Site. This aspect of the Royal house and the palace, and we have the names Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure.

Mitchell: That's amazing though.  We think that there's infrastructure, there was infrastructure to accompany the rising of Khufu's pyramid.

Mark: For sure. Yeah. It's basically the company town, like they built when they built the high dam at that spot, there was a whole town, you know, inhabited by the first Americans when it began, and then Russians, you know, but it's basically, the Hoover Dam. It's basically you need a whole settlement. Yeah. So, it's really interesting that because we're at the bullseye of the Egyptian state. But we're trying to understand as much as possible about Egypt in general and how Egypt in general made this possible. But we always have to remember that, you know, to what extent was this an exception and to what extent was this the rule, the way that doing things here.

Mitchell: Right. But going back to the chicken and the egg question, is it, it's a very human question, a very kind of human hypothesis to think maybe that, was it the pyramid that helped grow this village, was it the village, you know, that came from, you know, in a lot of civilizations that we look at around the world, they're centralized around a common story. And that common story is warfare, religion, whatever it may be, commerce. I question whether that applies to the Egyptian civilization as well.

Mark: Well, yeah, I think it's kind of symptomatic of a centralized mindset to look for one catalyst for a civilization. Sure. You know, I'm an aficionado of complexity theory, maybe more a dilettante of a complexity theory as it's carried out at the Santa Fe Institute. Google it. Yeah. Basically, how complex systems emerge from local rules like algorithms. One of the rubrics is local rules generate global order. So, one of the things they might say at the Santa Fe Institute, they study civilizations, ecologies, galaxies, you know, and this idea that, you know, very local rules can generate a very global order highly intricate structure and highly intricate patterns without there being a centralized mind. It's counterintuitive to maybe many, maybe most people. But they're finding it true. And all these domains, animate, inanimate, galaxies, ecologies, the Amazon rainforest. It's a system, it's a complex adaptive system. Sure. It's not chaos, so life wouldn't exist in the Amazon rainforest. Similarly in ancient Egypt, I think civilization was to a large extent self-generated. And to some extent the royal house could be a catalyst, could be, could put a new spin on the gyroscope. But a lot of it, a lot of it into the it was organized bottom up, except for building pyramids. Now you have this kind of theoretical interest. It is ironic where I'm digging, you know, basically at the site that is central authority, top-down par excellence. But I always consider, you know, that balance. And how was it possible to get everybody to do this, to mobilize labor like this? It's still an open question, but it's a fascinating one.

Mitchell: Yeah, I, I suppose to look at a city or look at a civilization and to try to apply a one liner to that headlining.

Mark: So yeah, at the Santa Fe Institute, they might say, well, to look for what? Warfare. Cause, you know, warfare was the generator of this civilization or population pressure. So, in archeological theory, it was for a long time a common, you know, and it was common to look for this, but they might have its S.F.I. Santa Fe Institute. They might say this is characteristic of a centralized mindset. But to go back to what generated this spinoff, on complexity theory. And I've said this in a number of documentary films, so it's probably out there online already, but I think it's totally true. Basically, they put so much effort into building these gigantic pyramids, and they're only about five of them. The three that's Sneferu built, Khufu's father but Sneferu basically did all the R&D, the research and development, maybe not consciously to make the Great Pyramid possible, but in effect, he did all the R&D that made the Great Pyramid possible. And the Great Pyramid is so big and so accurately done, with chambers so high up. It’s not the classic pyramid. It's the most anomalous pyramid, which is kind of why it attracts all the New Agers and the alternative theorists. But then you have, you know, this pharaoh who ruled in between Khufu and Khafre, Djedefre who went north to Abu Rawash, maybe finished his pyramid, maybe he didn't. Maybe he reigned eight years, maybe 26. But the pyramid hadn’t been finished, North of Giza was much smaller. I think it's more likely it's only eight years. Khafre comes back. He builds the second pyramid almost as tall as Khufu's. I think the Great Sphinx was newer; alternative theorists don't think so. But you know. And so, it's a pretty fabulous complex. And Khafre starts making statues, hard stone statues in the hundreds. Then you have Menkaure. Menkaure never quite finished. He never quite ,No, he never, he just never finished his pyramid. He finished the pyramid itself, but not his temples. And it was finished in mud brick.

So basically, you have this burst of building from the reign of Sneferu to Khufu to Khafre and then it starts to get they get tired or something. And then in the fifth dynasty, you have this resurgence, and you have this marvelous pyramid field at Abusir, for example, of the pharaohs who came just after Giza. But Userkaf, it’s Sahure. But they're smaller, so much smaller, and they're an order of magnitude, I would think, smaller level of effort for building the pyramid itself. They are expanding the fine relief carving. Now there's tens of thousands of square meters of fine decorative carving on the temple walls that the temples are expanding. They're more important in some ways in the pyramid. And then as you go through the fifth dynasty and into the sixth dynasty, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but I use the term cookie cutter pyramids, where they're very much standard in size and so on.

So, the pyramid of Merenre who ruled nine years is not that much different than the last major pyramid of the Old Kingdom. Pepi the second, who ruled, some say, you know, up to 90 years, but he must have come to the throne as an embryo. But anyway, the point is that that all the infrastructure that was kind of coming into Giza, and before that Dahshur and Meidum for Sneferu. All this coming into Giza for the Great Pyramid in almost centripetal, you know, spiral, became that infrastructure. Those goods became more important than building the giant pyramid itself. The supply lines to Lebanon, supply lines that we haven't even talked about, way out to the west into the Western desert. Wadi al Jarf, which closed off after Khufu. But other ports started appearing to go over to Sinai to get copper. So, the infrastructure that made the Great Pyramid possible became more important than a great pyramid. And I think you see a pattern in like, some say our freeway system was initially conceived to move nuclear weapons around, I don't know. But then there's our internet, you know, it was conceived allegedly in the beginning for military, you know, intelligence communication. And I don't know whether it was Al Gore or not, but, you know, but obviously now the internet is more important than any of its content or any of its products, unless you count artificial intelligence as one of its products. But anyway, so, yeah, I think and that's why I say, and I've said it many times Mitchell, but I'll say it again.

I'm interested in how the Egyptians built the pyramids, but I'm even more interested in how the pyramids helped to build Egypt.

Mitchell: Right. Right. Now as far as the kind of decline of the size and complexity of the pyramids. After, the three primary pyramids on Giza, what do we think, that’s a product of people maybe not subscribing to this tradition, this culture anymore, it's probably a geographical…

Mark: Well, the short answer is, we don't know, of course. But we speculate, you know. So, you know, I think some of my colleagues might think there's a little bit of “My Site-itis” here that, you know, say, well, you know, the Abusir pyramids are pretty respectable. The Neferirkare pyramid is the biggest one at Abusir. It's not bad, you know. But really, if you look at the scale of quarrying at Giza, just locally, the transport of stone, like we read about in Wadi al Jarf, it just is it’s a scaling down on quarrying, transport and stonework. But there's a scaling up perhaps in developing the provinces and there's certainly a scaling up in bureaucracy. And that's really interesting. There's evidence outside of our excavations and even outside of the Wadi al Jarf papyri that the bureaucracy was expanding. This is, the pyramids are contracting, specifically in the reign of Menkaure. And you can see this going through dynasty five, especially in the late dynasty five with a pharaoh called Djedkare, Isesi that the bureaucracy is being reformulated and expanded.

And so, what's really developing here is the Egyptian state. You know, how the pyramids built Egypt. That becomes more important than this icon, than achieving an icon of the pyramid, which is a symbol and a symbol of what, again, we can, you know, sunrays coming down to earth, a gigantic reflective mirror that is reflecting the sun because it must have been brilliant, covered with polished white limestone, almost so brilliant, you know, you couldn't stand to look at it, at high noon. But, the icon, the symbol was still important, but they're putting the emphasis more on their economy and their society, and they're growing up in a way. But again, you know, the Great Pyramid and what led up to it was a huge catalyst. If you think about the Wadi al Jarf papyri in the journal of Merer and I talked about the vertical panels. The account of Papyri, which Pierre Tallet is still working on, and slowly coming out with some of it. They look like ancient Excel spreadsheets, the, you know, row, columns, rows and for all the world, that's what they are. Similarly, too, there's another set of papyri from Abusir, from those pyramid temples, the pyramids just after Giza, the Abusir papyri. They look like ancient Excel spreadsheets and, and if you think about Merer, these are his documents.

He's one guy with one “za”, one team bringing workers back and forth, and he left this archive. Why? We don't know. And that's kind of curious. Why would you just leave it? Khufu died and, interesting questions there. But how many Mererd were there? Well, Pierre Tallet actually worked out how many Merers, how many teams there were to bring the stone from the eastern quarries to keep the pyramid complex. The pyramid project supplied for casing stone and finished stones. But think about the people bringing the cedar from Lebanon. They probably had their own archive. And, just all the other industries that went into it, probably even the quarry workers and their overseers and so on. I mean, you can see how records were adding up here, and like any good company or firm, you almost need an archivist, you know, to keep track of your contracts and disputes and, and labor, and whether things are going efficiently or not.

I mean, big projects, you know, like Bechtel and companies like that. They have the critical path. Don't they have critical path analysis? How do you go from point A, which is signing the contract to getting that thing done? And if you actually don't pay attention to the critical path and analyze it, you have every chance of it not being done. And actually, we have a lot of examples of that in pyramids from ancient Egypt.

Mitchell: Interesting. Yeah. It's something that we experience in our kind of corporate business world now and our current culture. It's just fascinating to think about though that the bureaucracy increased during that period after the great Pyramids.

Mark: It increased because they want to keep track of that in the incoming from Lebanon. cedar, wine, oil. They want to keep track of the produce in the new farms and ranches in the new, the newly colonized, actually, province in Egypt, all that they want to keep track of. And because that's all important now, this established a lifestyle, that wasn't quite there, at least not as widely spread before. And they want to keep track of all that.

Mitchell: What that suggests to me and I could be wrong, let me know. But is that there's more of an emphasis on the citizens and the people and the individuals. And then the material object of the pyramid or the symbol becomes maybe less important possibly.

Mark: Yeah. I don't know that it was altruistic, Mitchell, but I think in an indirect sense, there was more of an interest in people and products and produce and productivity maybe more widespread. You have to consider that the population itself, as a result of all of this, was expanding. I mean, people, Egyptologists, geographers, mainly geographers like one I have in mind, estimated there's 1.1 million people in the Nile Valley, you know, at the time of building the Great Pyramid, the Old Kingdom. And now, of course, there are more than 100 million. So, the population was increasing because as you develop new farms and ranches, you need people to farm them. One of the lessons that I learned from Egyptologists, actually, who looked at land and labor, not so much for the pyramid, but just in general farmland, farm labor, and you know, their names I could name, but I won't. But basically, Egyptologists who look at the text and the textual information from all periods, because as you go through 3000 years of Egyptian history to the Middle Kingdom, to the new kingdom of Tutankhamun and Ramesses, you know, you get many, many more texts and temple accounts and so on. So, we we’re in the very early period.

But as you look at this, one of the lessons was that land was cheap. What you needed was labor. And so, there's this text that everybody who writes about the pyramids and the Old Kingdom and even, you know, I have cited where Sneferu goes to Nubian and grabs people and transplants them into Egypt onto new farms and ranches. So that is captive labor. So, when you ask, you know, did slaves build the pyramid? Well, we do have evidence that they captured people and put them to work. And specifically in the time of Sneferu, you know, the R&D when he's building giant pyramids leading up to the Great Pyramid of Khufu. But the evidence from all periods is that they would settle these people on new farms and ranches and so on and sometimes have them work on the building a temple or a pyramid, but they would integrate them then into Egyptian society. And in fact, it's a pattern kind of in the ancient Near East, where those who are conscripted, especially for military specialists become rulers in their own right, like the Mamluks, you know, in the Arab period.

Mitchell: Yeah. That goes back to that thesis that we were talking about earlier about, you know, it's not that simple. People are looking for the one-liner: Did slaves build a pyramid? And it's not that simple. There are many nuances to that, there's depth to it.

Mark: Right. But the point again is that the. That's true. Very true. And, you know, sometimes in response to some of the research that I have done and that my friend and colleague Zahi Hawass has done, finding the workers cemetery above our site. It’s like, oh, you know, they weren't slaves, and it's all happy. Well, it does have to be nuanced, because there's indisputable evidence that the ancient Egyptians would capture people and put them to work. But they would integrate them into their society. And there is at least in the New Kingdom, I don't know that we know this for the Old Kingdom, for the New Kingdom, there's good evidence that they would then become personnel of the temple that they built and its lands. Every temple was a landlord and become almost more exempt from certain labor obligations and regular Egyptians to the extent that, you know, you can talk about regular Egyptians or not, but yeah. But the point we spun off on that point which gets into slavery, which is a hot button topic, but we spun off onto that because, 1.1 million people, but land is cheap, you need labor. And certainly, they needed labor for working land if labor is being taken away and being put to work on the Great Pyramid. And I think what happens over time with the pyramids decreasing in size is not only that the infrastructure becomes more important than the gigantic object for which it was created, but also that the population is increasing and you have more big estates, more households, the provinces are developed. In fact, you start having prominent tombs in the provinces in the broad valley of Middle Egypt, which is always kind of a somewhat of a provincial area, and certainly the even broader area of the Delta. Egypt’s becoming more populated, there are more people to take care of, there are more householders, there are more, you know, House of Starks happening and, you know, basically House of Stark, if you owe him, if you give him fealty, you know, it's a patronage situation. The House of Stark has to ensure your, not prosperity, but at least sustenance, and that somebody else isn't going to come grab you for their purposes. So, all of that, I think is on the increase following the period of the gigantic pyramids we're dealing with.

One other turning point that's critical to and also somewhat topical is there's good evidence that we're right at the edge of a major climate shift to present aridity, to the dryness that we now see in Egypt, that things were wetter and more moist, it's called the African humid period. And the Sahara has just finished drying up in earlier centuries, not too long before the Great Pyramids and not too long before the first dynasty of Egypt, the Western Desert still had, you know, there are playas which you know well in California. But there were actually lakes that were drying up. And there's evidence that Egypt was getting more arid and drier slowly but progressively from north to south, so that as the monsoons retreated, these are the summer, the summer rains that actually in the far south produce all the streamlets and streams that disintegrate the east African mountains that produce all the silt that come down into the Blue Nile, the Atbara, the White Nile, and basically, you know, during every flood season re silt the Nile Valley. So those monsoon rains, the further north they are though, you are actually getting more rain in the summer. But as they’re retreating south, this aridity that we see today hot, wind, sand, so that it may have been more arid conditions in Giza earlier than there were in Luxor, where you have the Valley of the Kings and so that's an interesting pattern that's coming out of recent research in the Western Sahara. But all these shifts are happening about the same time as they scale down from building the giant pyramid. I think there's probably a population expansion. They're controlling the floodplain more because they had to for all the new farms and ranches, population is increasing. So are the farms and the agricultural produce. The climate is shifting. And you know, that has to be factored in.

Mitchell: Yeah. I love this kind of story that we're putting together about. To me, it's almost about, the evolution of a civilization, right? With monumentality being at the beginning or maybe the central piece of an Egyptian civilization and whatever belief system created that created that or whatever that was about. But as people start to develop, other systems, as you mentioned, start to develop, the monumentality doesn't necessarily serve the same purpose. It doesn't need to serve such a central role because there's other things developing. And I see that in so many other civilizations in this, in our history.

Mark: Yeah, it's an interesting pattern, but, and it's set in by a lot of different lines of research and, well, but I what I would love is if there's more settlement archeology in the first 1000 years of ancient Egyptian history. We have us, we have our German colleagues who have been excavating at the southern island of Elephantine. Colleagues like Nadine Mueller at Yale are excavating settlements. See, but there's still this emphasis within Egyptology, if I may say, on tombs, tombs, tombs, and even, you know, if you look at, the National Geographic series, you know, and ancient Egypt, it's all tomb focused. Now, there's a lot of information in tombs, the biographies, the titles give us an index to the evolving administration and bureaucracy we talked about lot tons of information. But back to where we started our conversation, Mitchell. You got to understand the elementary structures of everyday life. You got to understand the people or you're not understanding the monuments. And that's why I've often said, the hidden lectures, and I'll say it again: I realized at some point I had to turn my back to the pyramid and look out around them, away from them to understand them. And it goes for any big monument or site. And I don't want this to be a hot button necessarily but even like Gobeklitepe, you know, which is cited as monumental architecture, because that's what we're talking about in terms of the big stone pillars there in these circles. Gobeklitepe, you know, it's cited by many of the alternative, archeologist, theorists as being proof that there's an advanced civilization in a far earlier period, kind of in the direction of Atlantis. But even at Gobeklitepe, you know, the more recent excavations are showing settlement, they're showing serial processing, you know, houses and, you know, real people were starting to practice agriculture. And, you know, obviously there's, but so you can't just take stone pillars out of Gobeklitepe and say, whoa, you know, look, ancient aliens, Atlanteans or whatnot. You've got to look at the context and I think that's what recent excavations are giving us.

Mitchell: Yeah. There's a really, nice parallel in my industry, in architecture. And I think the major monuments are studied. You know, we have all the Greek and Roman monuments and cathedrals, all that which is great and it helps enlighten and tell a certain story but I do think there's not enough people, at least in my eyes, studying the back alleys with the little cafes or the strange little shops and what the people in those areas, what they're thinking, how they're living. What does the space look like that they inhabit? What's the rhythm of their daily life? And I think in that kind of milieu is actually what the information that we need that will help us develop better cities, better lives for ourselves

Mark: Because that's how a lot's getting done in terms of the society that's occupying these spaces. It's getting done in the back alleys, at the water cooler in a corporation and over beer, you know, on Friday night, a lot of it's getting done there. And, it's always the case. I think and back to kind of complexity theory that there's the theoretical system and then there's the way things really happened.

Mitchell: Sure. Well, it's frightening.

Mark: There's still this science behind the system. And that's again what I like about settlement archeology, because when you so maybe Merer in his papyri and his reports are somewhat candid, he didn't mean them to be, you know, to be propaganda. But you know, who knows? But at least they're candid more than say Ramesses is the second and his texts about his battle at Kadesh on the front of the Luxor temple wall. Yeah. You know, it's got a lot of information, but you got to kind of calibrate it. If you dig, you know, people settlements and what they actually left behind and what they were throwing out every day and how they were eating and how they were fed. Then you're getting a candid look at how things happened. You know, there was this whole kind of section of archeology, garbology, you know, and there was famous archeologist Phil Roth J. Who started that and I'm being highly simplistic here, but they would go to a neighborhood and say and do interviews to the extent they could get people to talk and about such things and say, well, yeah. How many beers do you have, you know, a week? And he goes, I, I don't know, I drink when I watch the game, you know, maybe a few, you know, Sunday, Saturday night, Friday night, maybe, you know, then they go to their garbage and it's like tons and tons of, you know, beer cans. It's, you know, it's a candid picture. But it's really an important point for our time because how much of the information are we getting, that we are getting on the internet or any source today? Are that what a Ramesses the second wants it to be?

Mitchell: Exactly.

Mark: And how much can we trust that it is what is. Yeah. I mean we could get into deep philosophy about is there a real world and you know are there alternative facts. But facts are really important. Yeah. And it comes down in archeology to: A. Really Happened or [B.] it didn't happen. And you know that's what's been very satisfying for me.

I started in our conversation talking about Edgar Cayce and those ideas. And I still have a lot of respect for him, you know, people and their belief systems. But for me, the entire 50 years of my career has been drilling down on one belief that brought me to Egypt and really getting to know that particular topic. So, yeah, I don't know if I should say any contemporary issues in terms of belief, but you know, I am not a specialist in Covid. I am not a specialist in elections. What I do know really well is the Giza plateau and its archeology and how it, you know, how it developed and its origins and its bedrock reality.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. I think that's again why we reached out to you, because you have been there and, I think as close to that source as possible is where you want to get your information these days.

Mark: Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate that appreciation.

Mitchell: Mark, thanks so much for taking the time. Super enlightening, insightful conversation. I love the kind of, you know, ideas and parallels that we found too, between archeology and architecture. So, thanks so much for taking the time. If there is a way that you want people to be allowed to contact you or reach out, feel free to mention those.

Mark: Thank you, Mitchell. I think people should look at our website, aeraweb.org, and we hope to be back excavating in a big way, and also with our field school program for young Egyptian archeologists starting after the new year, 2026. So go to aeraweb.org and there you'll find a way how to help us carry on.

Mitchell: Okay. Fantastic. Thanks, Mark.

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