‘Friends of [the king] Menkaure’ reads one such, ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ another. These seasonal work units (or phyles, as Egyptologists call them) seem to have been made up only of men who passed through special age-grade rituals, and who modelled themselves on the organization of a boat’s crew.93 Whether such ritual brotherhoods ever took to the water together isn’t clear, but there are notable parallels between the team skills used in maritime engineering and those used in manipulating multi-ton blocks of limestone and granite for royal pyramid-temples or other such monuments.94
