Great Pyramid

In 2013 a French–Egyptian team excavating at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast recovered the earliest inscribed papyri yet found in Egypt. Among them is the logbook of an official named Merer, who ran a boat crew ferrying fine limestone from Tura to Giza. It records journeys, crew sizes, and delivery cycles. It is an administrative document, not a monument inscription, and it is the closest thing to a project schedule that survives.

On the plateau itself, excavation at Heit el-Ghurab exposed bakeries, breweries, dormitory blocks, and cattle bone in quantities that indicate a fed, organised, rotating workforce. Gang graffiti inside relieving chambers name work crews. The picture is bureaucratic, not miraculous.

Ramp geometry. An external straight ramp long enough to reach the upper courses becomes absurdly large; a spiralling external ramp obstructs the corner sightlines needed to keep the structure true; an internal spiral ramp has been proposed on the basis of density anomalies and remains unconfirmed. Each version has advocates and each has a mechanical objection. No ramp survives in situ at Giza in a form that decides it.

The ScanPyramids muon-tomography programme identified a large void above the Grand Gallery. Its existence is now accepted; its function is not. It may be a construction relief space, a corridor, or a chamber. Nobody has been inside it.

Proposals involving lost technology or non-human agency are not rejected because they are exotic. They are rejected because they make no prediction that the excavated evidence confirms and they ignore evidence that already exists: the quarries, the copper tool marks, the abandoned blocks, the workers' cemetery with healed fractures set by physicians. The unglamorous record is unusually complete.