Dr. Zahi Hawass

Zahi Hawass opens with a story he says he has been waiting to tell on air. Years ago Art Bell, the late-night radio host, used his programme to argue that the Egyptians could not have moved the stones of the pyramids, and he used Hawass as the foil.

The Egyptians cannot do that.

Hawass refused the interview unless Bell came to Egypt. Bell came, with his wife. Hawass took him to a working quarry, had a block of about eight tons brought out, and then had a seventy-year-old man cut it while the party stood above the stone.

Stones have weak lines, the way people do. The man drew a line down the block with a pencil, set a piece of iron in it, and struck it twice. The demonstration was not about strength.

They use their brain because the pyramid was the national project of the whole nation.

Hawass gives lectures to American tour groups three or four times a week, and he opens them with two claims. The first is about belief: stand in front of the Great Pyramid and the honest reaction is disbelief.

you will never believe that this pyramid built by human being

The second is about capability. If you tried to build it now, you could not, and the reason is not machinery.

Are you going to hire today 10 southern workmen to work for 10, for 28 years for nothing?

The pyramid was not a contract. It was a national project undertaken by a population of roughly three million so that a king could become a god, which is why no modern budget line can reproduce it.

His first piece of evidence is recent and small in scale. At Abusir he found a tomb with a twenty-ton granite sarcophagus set on top of it. A minister wanted the opening filmed live; Hawass dislikes live.

He put ten workmen on the sarcophagus and they moved it with wooden sledges. Underneath was a second sarcophagus, ten tons, also granite. Under that, a third, five tons. Under that, a coffin with a mummy. He told the workmen to put everything back, then called the minister and said the press could come.

At the site he is excavating now, sixty feet down, the team found a sealed sarcophagus with a lid of about ten tons. The lid is raised with a machine the workmen call the devil, a name inherited from their grandfathers, and no one could tell him why. Wedges of wood go in as the lid lifts, one piece and then another, until there is half a foot of gap and a face with a torch can see inside.

The reason this is possible at all is that the workmen are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians. North of Luxor there is a village where every household works in antiquities, and their faces, he says, are the same faces. All of them work with him.

Hawass receives about fifty fan emails a week, some of them hostile ones. The recurring accusation is that he has found proof of aliens or of a lost civilisation and is sitting on it.

how can I hide anything? I'm not working alone.

He tells the story of a reporter who flew in from California to put the accusation to him in person. The reporter had heard that at noon Hawass leaves his office, goes to the bathroom, opens a tunnel from it, walks to the Great Pyramid, hides objects and comes back. Hawass offered to show him the bathroom. The reporter inspected the panels, found no tunnel, and then announced that he would publish photographs of the bathroom anyway.

Rogan's reading is that the belief is a tax on something genuinely staggering. The achievements are so far beyond anything else of the period that people reach for a non-human explanation, and four and a half thousand years of not knowing how it was done is the space that explanation fills.

Hawass makes a large claim and then narrows it: most of what has been written about the pyramids is wrong, and the exceptions are himself and Mark Lehner. His authority for this is time spent on the ground, which he puts at fifty to seventy years of excavating Giza, every piece of sand.

That the workmen built only four months a year, during the flood. He says the opposite is true: they worked year-round. That the stone of the Great Pyramid came from Tura, twenty-five miles east of Giza. That Khufu reigned 23 years. That the Great Pyramid contains 2,300,000 blocks.

Each of those four is answered later in the conversation, and each answer comes from something dug up rather than something argued: a cemetery, a quarry, a papyrus, a survey.

The workmen are answered first. One mile south of the Sphinx, Hawass found the tombs of the pyramid builders, a discovery he treats as decisive on two questions at once: who built the pyramids, and whether they were slaves.

The names inside the cemetery settle the first question. Hieroglyphic titles settle the second. The lower cemetery is mud brick, built for nothing, and holds a skeleton per tomb: a man is given a beer jar because he will want beer in the afterlife, a woman is given perfume vessels for the same reason.