Around 4,500 years ago, an Egyptian inspector named Merer was moving limestone down the River Nile towards the Great Pyramid of Giza. On one recorded day, his crew left the quarries at Tura with a boat loaded with stone. They spent the night at a place called She-Khufu. The following day, they reached the pyramid complex. Then they turned around and headed back for another load.
How on earth do we know this?
Because someone wrote it down. The details survive in the Diary of Merer, a set of papyrus logbooks discovered in 2013. They record the daily work of a crew moving limestone for the Great Pyramid. We can see where the crew went, what it carried and where it spent the night. The logbooks do not tell us how the stone was put in place, but they give us a rare view of the work behind the pyramid.
Merer didn’t just write a diary
Merer’s title was inspector. He led a section of roughly 40 boatmen within a larger royal work team. His pages were ruled into days of the month, with entries describing what his crew did and where they spent the night. Some days they hauled and loaded stone. On others, they worked on a dyke (water barrier embankment). Another entry records a man sailing to Heliopolis for food and returning with 40 sacks and some bread.
The rest of the archive makes the picture more interesting. A scribe named Dedi compiled reports covering several crews, including Merer’s. Between the columns of one report, a note instructs someone to give Merer either equipment or fabric. Other papyri from the same find tracked supplies: bread, grain, beer, dried fish and sometimes dates. Another ledger set out what was expected, what arrived and what was still owed. The shortfalls were marked in red ink.
These records also show the limits of a diary. Merer tells us about the limestone arriving at Giza, but almost nothing about what happened to it afterwards. His log captured his crew’s part of the job; much of the rest has been lost. That is one reason we still do not have a complete account of how the pyramids were built.
Merer got digitised
Most software for capturing a site diary starts with a blank daily entry. The fields may be easier to store and search than a paper book, but someone still has to assemble the day into a finished document. They decide which details belong under work completed, delays, labour, plant or notes, and they do it when they have a moment to sit down and write, just like Merer.
The day has usually been talked through before anyone opens the diary. People explain changes, make decisions and discuss what needs to happen next. Later, someone has to remember those conversations and turn them into a written record. By then, details that were clear on site may already be gone.
Putting the form on a screen makes the finished diary easier to store, but it does not remove the work of piecing the day together. We wanted to start with the account people already give, then build the diary from it.
Make the account first, then the record
Since its invention, software has needed someone to put the day’s information into the right fields before it could use it. Speech recognition has allowed us to replace typing. AI can now interpret a spoken account in its project context, identify events and relationships, and prepare structured records while keeping the original account available.
That changes the order: conversation first, structure afterwards.
At Alloovium, we started by changing the first step. A site team can talk through what happened while the day is still fresh, even collecting information throughout the day. The written diary can then be prepared from that account for the team to check and correct.
The person on site gives the account in their own words and the software puts it into a usable record, keeping the original account attached. This is the part of the 4,500-year-old process we are working to rethink.
A site diary that calls you
With Alloovium, a phone call takes the place of the blank diary page. The site team talks through who was there, what work went in and what changed. Alloovium turns that conversation into a diary for the project, pulls out actions and keeps the transcript with the record.
At the end of the week, Alloovium drafts the weekly report from those daily diaries. Each detail points back to the day it came from, and the crew reviews and approves the report before it goes out to stakeholders.
There is still hard work in this approach. Site language is messy: people correct themselves, use shorthand and mention an issue without explaining its impact. A useful system has to preserve that uncertainty, ask for or flag missing detail where it matters, and leave consequential decisions with the people responsible for them.
Merer’s papyrus has lasted four and a half millennia. It tells us where his crew went and what it carried, but it cannot answer every question about the pyramids. That is the lesson we take from it: a record is only as useful as the account captured at the time.
We can now make that first account as natural as a conversation, then do the work of turning it into a record that people can inspect, correct and use.