Written by an Egyptian inspector about 4,500 years ago, what does the ‘Diary of Merer’ contain?

The ‘Diary of Merer’ is the name of papyrus logbooks written in hieroglyphs by Merer, a middle ranking official with the title of ‘inspector’. Mostly, the text contains the lists of the daily activities of Merer and his crew. The most well preserved sections document several months of work transporting white limestone blocks from the Tura quarries to Giza by boat. These quarries were located about halfway between modern-day Cairo and Helwan.

Yet today, they are the oldest known papyri with text, dating to the 27th year of the reign of pharaoh Khufu during the 4th dynasty (2613 BC to 2494 BC). Khufu was known to the Greeks as Cheops, and of note, the Great Pyramids of Giza were commissioned by Khufu.

The entries in the logbooks are all arranged along the same line. At the top there is a heading naming the month and the season. Under that, there is a horizontal line listing the days of the month. Under these entries for the days, there are always two vertical columns describing what happened on these days,

The papyri were found and excavated in 2013 by a French mission under the direction of archaeologists Pierre Tallet (born 1966) of Paris-Sorbonne University and Gregory Marouard. The Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, Zaki Hawass (born 1947), describes the ‘Diary of Merer’ as “the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century.”

Parts of the papyri are on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.