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#Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers'town near the pyramids. The workers'town is located about 1300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is known also by its Arabic name Heit el-Ghurab and is called sometimes the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders. So far researchers have discovered a nearby cemetery with bodies of pyramid builders; a corral with possible slaughter areas on the southern edge of workers'town; and piles of animal bones. Based on animal bone findings nutritional data and other discoveries at this workers'town site the archaeologists estimate that more than 4000 pounds of meat from cattle sheep and goats were slaughtered every day on average to feed the pyramid builders. See Photos of the Unearthed Giza Pyramid Site This meat-rich diet along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones) would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids. People were taken care of and they were fed well when they were down there working so there would have been an attractiveness to that said Richard Redding chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) a group that has been excavating and studying the workers'town site for about 25 years. They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village Redding told Livescience. Feeding the Giza workforce At the workers'town which was occupied likely for 35 years researchers have discovered a plethora of animal bones. Although the researchers are still unsure of the exact number of bones Redding estimates he has identified about 25000 sheep and goats 8000 cattle and 1000 pig bones he wrote in a paper published in the book Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working group'Archaeozoology of Southwest asia and adjacent Areas'(Peeters Publishing 2013). About 10000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid with a smaller workforce present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work the AERA team estimates. This smaller workforce would have ramped up for a few months starting around July of each year. What they would do is for about four or five months a year they would bring in a big workforce to move blocks and they would do nothing but move blocks explained Redding who is also a research scientist at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan. In Photos: The Beautiful Pyramids of Sudan Needless to say pyramid building is hard work. The workers would need at least 45 to 50 grams of protein a day Redding said. Half of this protein would likely come from fish beans lentils and other non-meat sources while the other half would come from sheep goat and cattle he estimated. Milk and cheese were consumed probably not due to transportation problems and the cattle's low milk yield during that time Redding said. Combining these requirements and other protein sources with the ratio of the bones (and the amount of meat and protein one can get from an animal) Redding determined about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were consumed each day. Â This would be in addition to supplying workers with grain beer and other products. Vast herds...and herders In order to maintain this level of slaughter the ancient Egyptians would have needed a herd of 21900 cattle and 54750 sheep and goats just to keep up regular delivery to the Giza workers Redding estimates. The animals alone would need about 155 square miles (401 square kilometers) of territory to graze. Add in fallow land waste land settlements and agricultural land for the herders and this number triples to about 465 square miles (1205 square km) of land an area about the size of modern-day Los angeles. Even so this area would take up just about 5 percent of the present-day Nile Delta. These animals also needed herders likely one herder for every six cattle and one herder for every 50 sheep or goats based on ethnographic observations. This brings the total number of herders to 3650 overall and once their families are included 18980 just under 2 percent of Egypt's estimated population at the time. These herds would have been spread out in villages across the Nile Delta then brought to the workers'town at Giza to be slaughtered and cooked. At the end of their lives the animals were kept likely in the southern part of the town in a recently unearthed structure that researchers have dubbed the OK corral. OK stands for Old Kingdom the time period in which the Giza pyramids were built. The structure which includes two small enclosures where animals may have been slaughtered and a rounded pen is hidden partly under a modern-day soccer field. Image Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries The boss eats the beef The research revealed interesting details about life in the workers'town. For instance the overseers who lived in a structure the archaeologists call the north street gatehouse got to eat the most cattle and those living in an area called the galleries where the everyday workers lived ate mainly sheep and goats. Redding said it wasn t surprising that the overseers preferred to dine on beef considering it was valued the most meat in ancient Egypt. Cattle is of course the highest-status meat he said noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goat in tomb scenes and that pigs never appear in tomb scenes. The settlement located adjacent to the workers'town dubbed eastern town wasn't as rigidly planned as workers'town and its residents were eating a considerable number of pigs the researchers found. Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers'town for hippo-tusk fragments. These finds suggest that the residents of the eastern town were not as directly involved in pyramid building and had a special relationship with the pyramid workers. They were provisioned not; they were given not their meat and food every day like those in the workers'town were said Redding. It's more of a typical urban farming settlement and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two robably he said. Future discoveries at Giza Research at workers'town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have camped actually out near the Giza pyramids. What we think now is and this is something we're going to be coming out with in the next little while is that more likely it was a large portion of the workforce the more skilled laborers living at workers'town and that there were temporary camps up by the pyramids where the temporary workers who came in would be housed he said. They probably (didn need t much in the way of housing; they would need more shade than anything else. They wouldn't need any kind of warmth because it wouldn't be winter. Future studies will look for the remains of the workers'towns of Khufu and Khafre the two other pharaohs who built pyramids at Giza. A dump area investigated in the 1950s may hold them; seal impressions found at the dump have the rulers'names on them. What we think was going on was that Menkaure came along he establishes his reign he leveled that whole area and he took all the levelling debris took it to the top of the hill and threw it over the back in a big dump Redding said. That dump on the back side of the ridge may represent a remnant of Khufu and Khafre's construction's town Redding said adding that he hopes new excavations will begin on the dump in the next year or two. Â Follow us@livescience Facebook& Google+.+Original article onâ Livescience. com c

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