• How did they feed 10,000 pyramid builders? Like this...

    Photo by Ricardo Liberato, CC Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

    The pyramid of Menkaure, with three queens' pyramids in front. Behind are the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu. The workers' town being explored by archaeologists was used to house laborers building Menkaure's pyramid.

    By Owen Jarus
    LiveScience

    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 1,300 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 also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called "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 4,000 pounds of meat — 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.

    AERA Inc.

    An image of the "OK (Old Kingdom) Corral" with the Giza pyramids in the distance. Researchers note it was large enough to hold 55 cattle with feeding pens. There may also have been slaughter areas.

    "People were taken care of, and they were well fed 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 work force
    At the workers' town, which was likely occupied 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 25,000 sheep and goats, 8,000 cattle and 1,000 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 10,000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid, with a smaller work force present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work, the AERA team estimates. This smaller work force 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 work force 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, goats and cattle, he estimated. Milk and cheese were probably not consumed 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.

     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 21,900 cattle and 54,750 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 (1,205 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 3,650 overall and, once their families are included, 18,980, 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 likely kept 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 partly hidden 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 the most valued meat in ancient Egypt. "Cattle is, of course, the highest-status meat," he said, noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goats 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 not provisioned; they were not given their meat and food every day," like those in the workers' town were, Redding said. "It's more of a typical urban farming settlement, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two —probably," he said.

    Future discoveries at Giza
    Research at workers' town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have actually camped 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 work force, 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’t) need 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 leveling 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. 

    Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • 4,500-year-old harbor structures and papyrus texts unearthed in Egypt

    Egypt SCA via AP

    This hieroglyphic papyrus was among scores of ancient documents found at Wadi al-Jarf in Egypt.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Archaeologists have stumbled upon what is thought to be the most ancient harbor ever found in Egypt, along with the country's oldest collection of papyrus documents, Egyptian authorities say.

    The harbor goes back 4,500 years, to the days of the Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) in the Fourth Dynasty, the Egypt State Information Service reported on Friday. The Great Pyramid of Giza serves as the tomb of Khufu, who died around 2566 B.C.

    The harbor was built on the Red Sea shore in the Wadi al-Jarf area, 112 miles (180 kilometers) south of Suez. The find was made by a French-Egyptian mission from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies, according to Friday's dispatch. Discovery News quoted the mission's director, Pierre Tallet of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, as saying that the site "predates by more than 1,000 years any other port structure known in the world." 

    The harbor is considered one of the most important commercial ports of ancient Egypt, where trips to export copper and other minerals from the Sinai Peninsula were launched. Egyptian authorities said the archaeologists found a variety of docks, as well as a collection of carved stone anchors.

    The team also unearthed a collection of 40 papyri that detailed the daily lives of ancient Egyptians during the 27th year of Khufu's reign, said Egypt's antiquities minister, Mohamed Ibrahim. "These are the oldest papyri ever found in Egypt," he said. Among the subjects reportedly covered were the arrangements for getting bread and beer to the workers heading out from the port.

    One papyrus is said to detail the daily activities of an official named Merrer, who was involved in building the Great Pyramid.

    "He mainly reported about his many trips to the Turah limestone quarry to fetch block for the building of the pyramid," Tallet told Discovery News. "Although we will not learn anything new about the construction of the Cheops monument, this diary provides for the first time an insight on this matter."

    Egypt SCA via AP

    Fragments of papyri from Wadi al-Jarf shed light on life in ancient Egypt.

    More about Egyptian finds:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Get a closer look at the Middle East's plague of locusts

    Ariel Schalit / AP

    Locusts land on a sand dune in Negev Desert, southern Israel, near the border with Egypt, March 5. A swarm of locusts crossed into Israel from neighboring Egypt Monday, raising fears that Israel could be hit with a biblical plague ahead of the Passover holiday. Israel sent out planes to spray pesticides over agricultural fields to prevent damage by the small swarm of about 2,000 locusts, said Dafna Yurista, a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Ministry. The ministry also set up an emergency hotline and asked Israelis to be vigilant in reporting locust sightings.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Scientists can learn a lot about the locusts swarming over Egypt and Israel just by looking at the pictures. Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, is based hundreds of miles away in Rome — but he can tell that these particular bugs may be on their last legs.

    "The few good pics I have seen of the locusts show that they are a brick red rather than pinkish," Cressman told NBC News in an email. "Both colors indicate they are immature adults, but the dark color suggests they are old and tired rather than young and hungry. Hence, the infestations arriving in northeast Egypt and Israel will probably come to nothing." That's the good news. The bad news is that other locust swarms could pose a more serious threat to the region's agriculture later this year. To get the details, check out the full story in Cosmic Log.

    Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters

    A Palestinian farmer displays locusts at a farm in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, March 5. Palestinian officials said locusts had not hit Gaza in several decades and numbers of locusts that reached Gaza on Tuesday were small but the Agriculture Ministry said they have taken all necessary steps to fight it if larger numbers hit the Gaza Strip.

    Amir Cohen / Reuters

    A swarm of locusts fly near Kmehin in Israel's Negev desert.

    Ariel Schalit / AP

    A locust on a sand dune in Negev Desert, southern Israel.

    Experts estimate that a swarm of 30 million locusts in Egypt will cause severe crop damage. The correlation to the plague of locusts in the Bible has the Internet buzzing.

    More about locusts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Locust swarm of biblical proportions strikes Egypt, Israel before Passover

    Experts say a swarm of locusts in Egypt could cause severe crop damage. The correlation to the plague of locusts in the Bible has the Internet buzzing.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Three weeks before Passover, a plague of locusts is swarming from Egypt to Israel, sparking fears among farmers in the region.

    The timing of the insect invasion is eerie, because the Bible's Book of Exodus tells of 10 plagues that hit Egypt before Moses and the Jews were allowed to leave for the Promised Land. A plague of locusts was the eighth on the list — but Pharaoh didn't relent until the 10th plague, which killed off all of Egypt's firstborn sons. Every year at Passover, Jews commemorate how they were spared.

    This time, even the Israelis are worried that the locusts are out to get them. "They may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," one farmer, Tzachi Rimon, told Israel's Channel 10 TV.

    Locust swarms have the potential to wipe out agricultural crops, and it's been eight years since such a serious assault has hit Egypt's Cairo region and Israel, said Keith Cressman, the senior locust forecasting officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.

    "They came from the Sudan-Egypt border after breeding in December and January, flew north along the coast to nearly Suez, then got caught in some winds associated with a low-pressure system over the central Mediterranean to Cairo," Cressman told NBC News in an email. The weather system moved eastward, and on Monday, changing winds carried the swarm to the northern Sinai Peninsula and Israel's Negev Desert, he said.

    A spokeswoman for Israel's Agriculture Ministry, Dafna Yurista, told The Associated Press that planes have gone out to spray pesticides on agricultural fields, to head off damage by a relatively small swarm of 2,000 locusts. Authorities called upon residents to be vigilant in reporting locust sightings.

    Egypt's Ahram Online reported Sunday that locust swarms were attacking agricultural land in Suez, but other reports quoted Egyptian authorities as saying that the bugs were being "eradicated" and that no significant damage was being done to crops.

    Cressman said the locusts of the Middle East don't follow the predictable kind of cycle that dictates the rise and fall of cicada swarms. "Outbreaks depend on rains in the desert, which are infrequent and irregular," he explained.

    Photos of the locusts involved in the current outbreak suggest that these particular insects are "old and tired rather than young and hungry," Cressman said. If that's the case, this week's plague "will probably come to nothing," he said.

    "However, there are other swarms that have moved from northeast Sudan and southeast Egypt to the Nile Valley in north Sudan, where they quickly matured and started laying eggs last week in winter crops," Cressman said. The eggs are expected to hatch in about a week, producing wingless nymphs that would become adult locusts in about six weeks. Those swarms could move into central Sudan and get a breeding boost from the summer rains that traditionally fall between June and September.

    "Hence, there is good potential for locust infestations to increase," Cressman said. "If so, at the end of summer and late autumn, summer-bred swarms could move to the Red Sea coast of Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia. I may be off very shortly to Khartoum [in Sudan] to discuss these implications with the government."

    To learn more about the locusts of the Middle East, as well as infestations past, present and future, browse through the online resources at the FAO's Locust Watch website. 

    More about plagues of locusts:

    This report includes information from The Associated Press.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Expert insists bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister have been found

    University of Dundee

    Researchers have reconstructed the face of Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra's sister, based on measurements from a skull discovered in Ephesus.

    By Stephanie Pappas
    LiveScience

    A Viennese archaeologist lecturing in North Carolina this week claims to have identified the bones of Cleopatra's murdered sister or half-sister. But not everyone is convinced.

    That's because the evidence linking the bones, discovered in an ancient Greek city, to Cleopatra's sibling Arsinoe IV is largely circumstantial. A DNA test was attempted, said Hilke Thur, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a former director of excavations at the site where the bones were found. However, the 2,000-year-old bones had been moved and handled too many times to get uncontaminated results.

    "It didn't bring the results we hoped to find," Thur told the Charlotte Observer. She will lecture on her research March 1 at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.

    Bloody family history
    Arsinoe IV was Cleopatra's younger half-sister or sister, both of them fathered by Ptolemy XII Auletes, though whether they shared a mother is not clear. Ptolemaic family politics were tough: When Ptolemy XII died, he made Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII joint rulers, but Ptolemy soon ousted Cleopatra. Julius Caesar took Cleopatra's side in the family fight for power, while Arsinoe joined the Egyptian army resisting Caesar and the Roman forces. [Cleopatra and Olympias: Top 12 Warrior Moms in History]

    Rome won out, and Arsinoe was taken captive. She was allowed to live in exile in Ephesus, an ancient Greek city in what is now Turkey. However, Cleopatra saw her half-sister as a threat and had her murdered in 41 B.C.

    Fast forward to 1904. That year, archaeologists began excavating a ruined structure in Ephesus known as the Octagon for its shape. In 1926, they revealed a burial chamber in the Octagon, holding the bones of a young woman.

    Thur argues that the date of the tomb (sometime in the second half of the first century B.C.) and the illustrious within-city location of the grave point to the occupant being Arsinoe IV herself. Thur also believes the octagonal shape may echo that of the great Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That would make the tomb an homage to Arsinoe's hometown, Egypt's ancient capital, Alexandria. 

    Controversial claim
    The skull attributed to Arsinoe disappeared in Germany during World War II, but Thur found the rest of the bones in two niches in the burial chamber in 1985. The remains have been debated every step of the way. Forensic analysis revealed them to belong to a girl of 15 or 16, which would make Arsinoe surprisingly young for someone who was supposed to have played a major leadership role in a war against Rome years before her death. Thur dismisses those criticisms.

    "This academic questioning is normal," she told the News-Observer. "It happens. It's a kind of jealousy."

    In 2009, a BBC documentary, "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer," trumpeted the claim that the bones are Arsinoe's. At the time, the most controversial findings centered on the body's lost skull. Measurements and photographs of the incomplete skull remain in historical records and were used to reconstruct the dead woman's face.

    More about Cleopatra from NBCNews.com

    From the reconstruction, Thur and her colleagues concluded that Arsinoe had an African mother (the Ptolemies were an ethnically Greek dynasty). That conclusion led to splashy headlines suggesting that Cleopatra, too, was African.

    But classicists say the conclusions are shaky.

    "We get this skull business and having Arsinoe's ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?" wrote David Meadows, a Canadian classicist and teacher, on his blog rogueclassicism.

    Not only that, but Cleopatra and Arsinoe may not have shared a mother.

    "In that case, the ethnic argument goes largely out of the window," Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 2009.

    Without more testing, the bones remain in identification limbo.

    "One of my colleagues on the project told me two years ago there is currently no other method to really determine more," Thur told the News-Observer. "But he thinks there may be new methods developing. There is hope."

    Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

    © 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

  • Top Egypt archaeologist sees hope for future in past

    Courtesy of SCA

    A few years ago, looters have tried to cut into pieces a colossal red granite statue of the 19th Dynasty king Ramesses II at the southern quarry of Aswan.

    By Tom Perry,
    Reuters

    CAIRO - The keeper of Egypt's archaeological treasures sees hope for the nation's future in its pharaonic past.

    Mohammed Ibrahim, head of the antiquities ministry, likens Egypt's turbulent emergence from autocracy to the periods of decline that afflicted the nation on the Nile between the fall and rise of its three ancient kingdoms.

    "We have passed through similar periods like that, even in antiquity," said Ibrahim, custodian of the pyramids, tombs and temples that bare witness to one of the world's oldest civilizations. "Every time Egypt passes through this period, it recovers very quickly, very strongly."

    But for now, Ibrahim's ministry, is suffering from the repercussions of unrest that has hit the economy hard, driving away the tourism which pays his ministry's bills.

    Excavation work led by the ministry has ground to a halt because of the financial squeeze. The unrest has also stopped many foreign-financed digs by deterring the archaeologists.

    But the 59-year-old Egyptologist is upbeat: foreign archaeologists are starting to come back. And while the periods of decline between the ancient kingdoms could last 200 years, he expects Egypt to bounce back much sooner this time around.

    "Egypt will be something new," he told Reuters in an interview at his offices in the medieval citadel that towers over the mosques of Cairo's Islamic quarter.

    Head of Egyptian antiquities since late 2011, Ibrahim fills a post occupied for a decade by Zahi Hawass, who left office several months after the uprising that swept former President Hosni Mubarak from power after 30 years of autocratic rule.

    With a doctorate in Egyptology from France, his career includes time as director of Sakkara, an ancient necropolis south of Cairo best known for the stepped pyramid that was a forerunner of the pyramids at Giza.

    The job of managing Egypt's ancient antiquities is more complicated today than it was in Mubarak's era. The rise of Islamists repressed by the deposed autocrat has brought with it calls from a radical, if tiny, fringe for the destruction of pharanoic monuments on the grounds that are contrary to Islam.

    Ibrahim says the issue has been exaggerated out of all proportion by the Egyptian media. Investigations were only able to uncover one such fatwa, or religious edict, he said.

    Nevertheless, Ibrahim asked Egypt's Sunni Muslim authorities, including the prestigious al-Azhar mosque and university, to speak out.

    "They all said we have more than one fatwa saying that pharaonic monuments are not against Islam, or Islam is not against pharaonic monuments," Ibrahim said. "So now this case is closed."

    Recovering stolen artifacts
    Ibrahim has also been trying to recover artifacts stolen at the height of the uprising in 2011. The greatest losses were at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, where some 40 artifacts went missing.

    "We found about 15 objects, 29 artifacts are still missing," said Ibrahim. He takes pride in the fact that the museum housing King Tutankhamun's treasures has been kept open through the spasms of turmoil since the revolt to "send a positive message."

    In an effort to draw back tourists, Ibrahim has reopened tombs and temples closed for years because of restoration.

    These include Sakkara's sprawling underground Serapeum, the catacombs where mummified sacred bulls, or Apis, were buried. The Serapeum had been closed since the late 1990s. Six tombs have also been reopened at Giza plateau, together with the Pyramid of Chephren, the second largest.

    He says the Grand Egyptian Museum being built near the Giza pyramids will be completed by August, 2015.

    In another initiative to boost visitor numbers, Ibrahim said the aviation ministry would soon open routes from Red Sea beach resorts to Luxor and Aswan. "This also might encourage them to go ... at least for a day," he said.

    In Luxor, home to the Valley of the Kings, Ibrahim laments hotel occupancy rates have slumped to 17 percent in the winter months that should mark the high season for cultural tourism.

    "Egypt is still safe and welcoming those who want to come here," said Ibrahim. "If you want to help us, the only thing we need from you is to come back."

  • Modern-day cemetery sprawling toward ancient Egyptian necropolis

    Nasser Nasser / AP

    New construction at a modern-day cemetery is seen spreading toward Egypt's first pyramids and temples at the ancient historic site of Dahshour, Egypt. The illegal expansion of the cemetery has raised a panic among antiquities experts.

    By Lee Keath and Sarah El Deeb, The Associated Press

    DAHSHOUR, Egypt — In this more than 4,500-year-old pharaonic necropolis, Egypt's modern rituals of the dead are starting to encroach on its ancient ones. Steamrollers flatten the desert sand, and trucks haul in bricks as villagers build rows of tombs in a new cemetery nearly up to the feet of Egypt's first pyramids and one of its oldest temples.

    The illegal expansion of a local cemetery has alarmed antiquities experts, who warn the construction endangers the ancient, largely unexplored complex of Dahshour, where Pharaoh Sneferu experimented with the first true, smooth-sided pyramids that his son Khufu — better known as Cheops — later took to new heights at the more famous Giza Plateau nearby.

    The encroachment also reflects the turmoil of today's Egypt, two years after the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

    Police, still in disarray since the revolution, do nothing to enforce regulations. Fired up by the sense of rebellion against authority, Egyptians feel little fear of taking what they want — sometimes to redress neglect or corruption by authorities, sometimes just for personal gain. Also, as the new Islamist rulers and their opponents struggle over the country's identity, experts fear that Egypt's ancient monuments, which hard-liners see as pagan, could pay the price in neglect.

    'Where are the antiquities?'
    In the case of Dahshour, villagers say that their cemeteries are full and that authorities don't give permits or land for new ones. So they took matters into their own hands and grabbed what they insist is empty desert to erect family tombs.

    "The dearest thing for us is burying our dead," said Mohammed Abdel-Qader, a resident of nearby Manshiet Dahshour. "This land here is wide and flat, it's a valley. Where are the antiquities they talk about? ... We have no antiquities here."

    The problem is not just at Dahshour. An explosion of illegal building the past two years is endangering Egypt's ancient treasures around the country, authorities say. Locals living next to some of most beloved pharaonic sites — including the famed Giza Pyramids outside Cairo — are seizing land, building homes, laying farmland or selling off parcels, said Mohammed Younes, head of antiquities for Dahshour.

    At the same time, looting has become more brazen in many places. Just a few weeks ago, several guards at Dahshour were shot and wounded when they confronted thieves doing an illegal dig during the night, he said.

    The cemetery expansion is the most dangerous encroachment yet, because of how close it comes to the Dahshour monuments, which are on the UNESCO World Heritage site list, Younes said. Moreover, Dahshour is largely unexcavated, since the area was a closed military zone until 1996. What remains buried is believed to be a treasure trove shedding light on the largely unknown early dynasties.

    "When you build something over archaeological site, you change everything. We can't dig in and know what is inside," Younes told The Associated Press. "This is the only virgin site in all of Egypt."

    Sudden start to construction
    The area is part of the vast Memphis necropolis where pharaohs built their monumental funeral complexes stretching south from Giza in the desert along the Nile Valley.

    The construction started suddenly about two weeks ago, apparently when one villager added a new tomb in the desert on the edge of an existing cemetery, guards and residents said. Word went out, and hundreds of residents from at least four neighboring villages descended on the site to build tombs of their own, up a small desert valley.

    Police did nothing to stop them — nor did the military, still stationed nearby.

    The tombs are small complexes on their own, built mainly of cheap white bricks. Each is a walled courtyard with multiple enclosed niches where multiple family members can be buried.

    Rows of them now cover several acres inside the UNESCO-defined antiquities zone of Dahshour, coming to within 150 meters (yards) of Sneferu's Valley Temple. The site is the first known such valley temple, which later each pharaoh would build in connection with his pyramid.

    Adjacent to the construction is the crumbled 3,800-year-old Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III, an area that has faced heavy looting over the past two years. Just beyond towers Sneferu's Bent Pyramid, dating some 700 years earlier, with its distinctive bent sides believed to have been caused when the builders had to correct a too-steep angle of ascent halfway through construction. Farther away is the Red Pyramid, in which Sneferu's builders got the job right, producing the first smooth-sided pyramid, evolving from the stepped structures built by earlier dynasties.

    The state minister of antiquities, Mohammed Ibrahim, said in a statement Monday that an order had been issued to remove the construction and the Interior Ministry, in charge of police, had been asked to carry it out. "The financial resources of the ministry are not enough" to protect the sites, it said.

    The question is whether it will be implemented. Younes said the military would have to get involved since police have refused to act. He said past requests for orders to remove illegal construction at archaeological sites had been ignored. "There is no deterrent," he said.

    Worries about antiquities
    He also worries that the rise of Islamists to power brings a dismissive attitude to pre-Islamic antiquities.

    He pointed out that pharaonic treasures — a key part of the country's identity — are mentioned in the Islamist-drafted constitution only as "an afterthought," just in terms of maintaining sites. In fact, the constitution doesn't refer directly to pharaonic sites or Egypt's ancient civilization at all, making only a vague reference to "heritage."

    Some at the construction site said they were sure Islamist President Mohammed Morsi won't order the removal of the modern cemetery because he was a believer and respects Islam's ways.

    Authorities may be wary of forcibly removing the construction and risking a clash with the villagers, who say they won't go unless they are given a new site nearby and compensation for what they have already built.

    Ehab Eddin el-Haddad, one resident building a burial plot, said removing the tombs would require "killing these people, and it would mean a return to the old regime ... it would be the return of repression." Nearby, workers slapped together bricks for a new wall, and a heavy machine flattened the earth for construction.

    Desperate for space
    The villagers come from a string of nearby farming communities crammed amid the palm groves in the narrow, verdant strip of the Nile Valley, where land is limited as Egypt's population of 85 million swells. Residents said they were desperate for new space for burial plots, pointing to old family tombs they said were full. Authorities balked at issuing permits for new tombs or demanded exorbitant fees and bribes, several residents said.

    "What can people do with their dead? They can't throw them in the canal," said Ali Orabi, a local farmer. "There is death and there is birth, these things don't stop ... You dignify the dead by burying them."

    El-Haddad said nearby land had been set aside to expand the cemetery but after the revolution it was seized by armed local "thugs" who started building houses on it and selling off plots, a common problem with Egypt's new lawlessness.

    Like many others, he resented the authorities' concern over antiquities and tourism that the villagers say benefit only rich Egyptians, corrupt officials and foreign archaeologists, with no gains for the poor.

    "Where is the gold that came out of this land? All smuggled out," said el-Haddad. "I'm not waiting for some half-naked foreigner to come take out what she finds in the cemeteries. What do I get out of it? ... I want a place to be buried in."

    Antiquities theft is believed to be big business in Egypt, fueled by post-revolution chaos, and press reports often accuse local officials of involvement, though few cases have gone to court.

    The fear is that looters could also use the construction as cover, even if the villagers are acting out of a legitimate need for land, said Monica Hanna, an independent archaeologist who has worked at Dahshour. Hills nearby are dotted by pits from digs by thieves searching for treasure, mostly from last year.

    In the area in general, "there has been more looting than scientific excavation," Hanna said.

    Saleh Mohammed Shafei, a 77-year-old villager, acknowledged that "there are people who come and dig at night" — but said those like him who are building tombs had nothing to do with the thieves.

    "Where else would people go" with their dead, he said. "These people are building because they're forced to. These old tombs are filled, some three layers deep."

    More about Egyptian antiquities:

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  • Bones and jars of the dead unearthed in 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs

    Egypt Ministry of Antiquities

    A worker studies one of the funerary jars found inside a recently discovered burial chamber in Luxor.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Archaeologists say they have discovered a string of 3,000-year-old rock tombs in the Egyptian city of Luxor, containing the remains of wooden coffins, skeletons, furniture and canopic jars.

    The tombs were dug within the funerary temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep II, who reigned from 1427 to 1401 B.C. during Egypt's 18th Dynasty. However, the newfound tombs appear to be part of a more recent cemetery. In Thursday's announcement of the discovery, Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibrahim said they date back to the beginning of a transitional period that lasted from 1075 to 664 B.C.

    Ibrahim said a team led by Italian archaeologist Angelo Sesana made the discovery while cleaning up the site in the course of an excavation at Amenhotep II's temple, on the west bank of the Nile River.

    "When we began digging, the area was only a mound of debris. We were in no way certain of what we would find." Sesana told the Italian news service ANSA.

    Sesana, who has led excavations within the temple's ruins for 15 years, voiced excitement over the find: "It moves you like little else to bring back to life someone who sought immortality 4,000 years ago."

    Each of the tombs consists of a pit that leads to a burial chamber. The wooden coffins found within the chambers bore decorations in red and black ink, and contained the remains of skeletons, Ibrahim said. Mansour Barek, the antiquities supervisor at Luxor, said the archaeologists found 12 canopic jars — some made of limestone, and others made of fired clay. Such jars were used in ancient Egypt to preserve the internal organs of the dead.

    Barek said the lids of the jars were in the shape of the four sons of the Egyptian god Horus: Imsety, with a human head, the spirit who protects the liver; Hapi, a baboon-headed spirit responsible for the lungs; the jackal-headed Duamutef, who guards the stomach; and falcon-headed Qebehsenuef, who guards the intestines.

    The discovery demonstrates that Amenhotep II's temple continued to be seen as an important site many years after the pharaoh's death, Ibrahim told Egypt's Ahram Online. Sesana said some of the canopic jars came from the tomb of an unidentified woman — and Egyptologist Wafaa El Saddik told the BBC that the jars were of good quality, suggesting that the tombs belonged to wealthy people. 

    The antiquities ministry said the artifacts were transferred to storage in Luxor for maintenance and restoration, in preparation for museum display.

    Egypt Ministry of Antiquities

    Four canopic jars are sculpted to represent spirits who guard the internal organs of the dead.

    More about Egyptian archaeology:

    NBC News' Taha Belal contributed to this report from Cairo.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.