These Hieroglyphs Reveal The Machine That Built The Pyramids — And Where It Disappeared To

Hidden in the basement storage of the Cairo Museum sits a limestone relief fragment about as large as a door panel, filed under a catalog number that most researchers have never searched for. It was recovered from a shaft tomb at Saqqara in nineteen fifty-four, but the public has never seen it. Its catalog number is J E nine eight nine four four. Ahmed Fakhry, a senior Egyptologist with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, led the excavation during the nineteen fifty-four field season at Saqqara North. He photographed the fragment, then drew its glyph sequence in detail across three pages of volume seven of his field notes. But the words he used to describe it never appeared in the official registry entry that followed. Fakhry called it “a mechanism of unknown industrial purpose.” Seventeen years later, in March nineteen seventy-one, that description changed. Under Director-General Ibrahim el-Nawawy, the official registry classified the same fragment as decorative funerary art.
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