Item 01: Ralph Ingram Moore letters, 10 February 1907-15 March 1918 - Page 163
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[Page 163]
7.
It seems wasted energy because after spending all this time on his tomb he was not buried there. He oppressed the people so much that his priests believed and rightly too, that the tomb would be rifled and the mummy destroyed so they buried him secretly elsewhere. During the construction, 100,000 men were employed continually. The same men were not employed all the time. A man worked three months only, when he would be replaced by a man of a fresh contingent. Up to a certain height the stones were dragged up sloping "ways" built of stone sand and mud bricks. These "ways" extended fan shaped from the pyramid. A system of these haulage tracks can still be seen at one of the Abusir pyramids where there is a pyramid only partly finished.
Of course there is a limit to which stones could be taken up by such means. Herodotus in the history of his travels through Egypt says that the stones from the top of the ways to the top of the finished building were put in place by machinery but he does not say what kind of machinery. In many "foundation deposits" various tools have been found: included in some of these are were a number of wooden blocks shaped thus [see image for drawing].