What does a 4,500-year-old logbook reveal about how the Great Pyramid was built?

The logbook shows a well-run shipping operation: a crew moving fine white limestone to Giza by boat, in the reign of Khufu. The Diary of Merer is a set of papyrus logbooks more than 4,500 years old, written by a middle-ranking official called an inspector and dating to the 26th year of Khufu's reign. They are the oldest known papyri with text, and a French mission led by Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard found them in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, buried in front of man-made caves where boats were stored.

What the diary records is daily routine. The best-preserved sections document the transport of white limestone blocks from the Tura quarries to Giza by boat. About every ten days, two or three round trips were made, shipping perhaps 30 blocks of 2 to 3 tonnes each, around 200 blocks per month, with about forty boatmen working under Merer. A typical entry reads: "Inspector Merer spends the day with his phyle hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura South." The diary also gives the pyramid's original name, Akhet-Khufu, "Horizon of Khufu".

It does not say what the stones were for, but Tallet believes they were most likely for the outer casing of the Great Pyramid. Zahi Hawass called the diary "the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century".

It does not, however, answer the harder question of how stones were lifted up the pyramid. Most Egyptologists consider ramps the most tenable method, but an incomplete one that needs another device, and the debate about which ramp, and how, is still open.