An Australian Egyptologist has been studying the tombs of the vast Giza cemetery and is re-writing the history of ancient Egypt.

Professor Naguib Kanawati of the Australian Centre for Egyptology at Macquarie University has been recording and interpreting the scenes and hieroglyphs which chronicle the lives of government officials, priests and bureaucrats as far back as the 4th Dynasty, the age that saw the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Although many of the scenes and hieroglyphs had already been documented at the beginning of the last century, Professor Kanawati has discovered many mistakes.

He said he was amazed to find that one famous German text, for example, that he referred to as "almost the Bible of Egyptology" was "full of inaccuracies".

One of the focal points of Professor Kanawati's study has been the lives of the so-called "Viziers". Viziers occupied the highest position in the Egyptian administrative system. The name is Turkish and means "the right hand of the King". These officials were the equivalent of a one-man Cabinet.

Previously it was thought that in the 5th Dynasty, at around 2550 B.C., the position of Vizier, once held exclusively by members of the royal family, was awarded to others of the upper class depending on merit.

However, says Professor Kanawati, his study of four generations of 5th Dynasty Viziers has revealed that none of them came from outside the Royal family.

"This is a major change to our understanding of Egyptian society. Maybe there was some merit involved – after all the Royal family is huge – but it was absolutely not opened up to all officials," he says.

He also argues that there's a strong case for the Viziers and others in Egypt's upper classes being polygamous. Previously, it was thought that only the Pharaoh was allowed to have multiple wives, and that this was a privilege granted to him because he was considered a deity.

Professor Kanawati says that in order to determine the extent of polygamy in Egyptian society it is important to re-examine the tombs of lower officials. Alas, the lives of ordinary people are lost for all time because their tombs are non-existent in the desert cemetery.

Professor Kanawati and a team of eight have spent hours tracing every scene and hieroglyph onto enormous rolls of paper.

The scenes often contain considerable detail all of which must be meticulously copied. The resulting drawings are checked for accuracy against the originals by two people including Professor Kanawati himself, before being shipped back to Macquarie University. There they are photographed, digitally reduced and interpreted.

Although Professor Kanawati's techniques are essentially the same as were used previously in the Giza cemetery, he believes that insufficient care was taken the first time around.

"I suspect a hundred years ago, the archaeologists and Egyptologists relied on drawings from draftsmen and the odd photograph taken in the field and wrote up the record back home in the library," he said.

"There's no way they could have copied it out so wrongly in the field."

Professor Kanawati says his main interest is to have an accurate record of the tombs at Giza.

"I'm not setting out to change Egyptian history. I'm just setting out to correct it," he says. "People may well argue with my interpretations but they can't argue with my photographs."

He says Egyptian archaeological authorities did not want any further excavation until more accurate records were made of the scenes and hieroglyphs already excavated.

"Archaeologists are quick to excavate and slow to publish. One excavated for 35 years and died without publishing anything. Who benefits from that?" Professor Kanawati said.

"I have been working in Egypt since 1979 and I have never gone back without publishing the results of my previous dig."

And that explains his 35 books published over 22 years with another due out in October.

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