The hat is in the hole. Crouched on one knee under the searing sun a few hundred yards south of the Sphinx, his signature green felt hat on his head and a trowel sticking out of his hip pocket, Mark Lehner sweeps dust with a paintbrush from the remains of an ancient wall. His keen blue eyes and long, sun-reddened nose zero in as he takes measurements with fervent exactitude— and, today, ill-concealed excitement. He adds another tiny mark to his precise drawing. Since he unearthed this wall just a week ago, he has hardly stopped thinking about it. Could it be the royal palace he's been seeking— home of those who ruled the workers who built the pyramids?
The mysterious Wall of the Crow separates Egyptologist Mark Lehner's dig from the pyramids at Giza.
For nearly 30 years, Lehner, a respected authority on ancient Egypt's Sphinx and pyramids, has labored to answer a perplexing question: Where did the more than 20,000 people who built these mysterious monuments live? He is convinced the people lived right here on the Giza plateau, in a lost city that is among the world's oldest, dating from roughly 2500 B.C. So far, he's found plenty of evidence of their work— but thousands of houses, if they exist, still lie invisible beneath the sand.
"We're finding the everyday structures that supported the pyramid-building," says Lehner, squinting against the sun, his hat providing the only shade. "We know from tomb scenes that the people who lived here baked bread, and now we've found the real thing— real bakeries. We've found real streets, real galleries, a great production complex organized in long streets and corridors. We've found Egypt's oldest hypostyle hall, oldest paved street, oldest faience works. It's the largest exposure of an Old-Kingdom [2575-2130 B.C.] settlement, where Egyptians actually carried out work, as opposed to just building tombs and monuments." He pauses. "But why did we find enough bones to have fed 6,000 people a day if they ate meat daily— which they probably didn't— but no houses? Where were all the people? It's very strange, and very cool that we don't know— because that means we're onto something."
Just this week, after decades of digging and measuring, Lehner thinks he may have found a royal residence, home of the ruler whom the laborers served. But in an e-mail dispatch sent home to financial supporters, he doesn't permit himself to use the word palace. So far it's just a "double-walled, buttressed building." He has exposed only a corner of it. He knows that Egyptian royal residences tended to be oriented cleanly from north to south, as this building is, while the rest of the complex is skewed significantly clockwise. If this structure does turn out to be a palace, it will clinch Lehner's notion that there was a workers' city at Giza— no palace could exist without people living nearby to sustain it. And this building is big. Very big. Lehner's hat-shaded face shows surprise, hope, and excitement. "I'm very intrigued by this," he says carefully. "It's possibly fairly significant. It's very suggestive. I can't say, but it looks like a big deal."
