Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pharaohs

Who Actually Built the Great Pyramid of Giza?

The builders of the Great Pyramid were not slaves but skilled Egyptian workers, organized in shifts and well-fed. Here is what archaeology has shown.

Who Actually Built the Great Pyramid of Giza?

For centuries, popular imagination has credited the Great Pyramid of Giza to enslaved laborers, to lost civilizations, even to alien astronauts. None of these ideas has any support in the archaeological record. The Great Pyramid was built by skilled, organized, well-fed Egyptian workers, employed in seasonal shifts, on a project that consumed a large part of the national economy for the better part of two decades. The story of who actually built it is more interesting than any of the legends.

The standard reference for the Giza site as a whole is Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids (1997), and his later Giza and the Pyramids (2010) brings the account up to date with the Wadi al-Jarf discoveries.

The Tradition of the Slaves

The idea that the pyramids were built by slaves comes largely from the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BCE, more than 2,000 years after the pyramids were built. Herodotus described Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, as a harsh ruler who closed the temples and forced the entire population into labor. This image of a pharaoh driving thousands of chained slaves has been the dominant popular image ever since, even though it has no support in the archaeological record.

Herodotus, however, was writing centuries after the events, and he was reporting what Egyptian priests told him, not what he had seen. He was also, in general, inclined to the colorful and the dramatic. Modern archaeology has, for the most part, demolished the slave-labor theory.

The Workers’ Village at Giza

The single most important piece of evidence is the Workers’ Village at Giza, on the south side of the Great Sphinx. Discovered in the 1970s and excavated by the American archaeologist Mark Lehner (with whom the Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass has collaborated at Giza for decades), the village is a planned community of about 200 rectangular houses, connected by galleries, that housed perhaps 1,600 workers at a time.

The site was clearly a community, not a slave camp. The houses have foundations of stone and walls of mudbrick, with central courtyards, sleeping platforms, and even small bakeries. The standard of living was modest, but it was not the standard of slaves. The houses were large enough to have been used by families, and the cemeteries associated with the village contain skeletons of women and children, strong evidence that the workers were not just seasonal male labor.

The Workers’ Cemetery

Just southeast of the workers’ village is the Workers’ Cemetery, a major burial ground containing the tombs of hundreds of the pyramid builders. The graves are simple but well-made, and the skeletons they contain are remarkable.

Studies of the bones, led by the paleopathologist Rosalie David of the Manchester Museum Mummy Project (Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt, 1999), working with I. E. S. Edwards, have shown that the workers were well-nourished Egyptians, not starving slaves. They suffered from the usual hazards of hard physical labor, arthritis, healed fractures, the wear-and-tear of repetitive motion, but not from the chronic malnutrition or abuse that would be expected in a slave population. Some had to be carried up the ramps of the unfinished pyramid.

The inscriptions in the tombs are even more telling. Several of them refer to the deceased as “beloved of the king” or “follower of His Majesty,” and they identify the tomb owner as a worker on the pyramid, with a specific name and a specific role. The names are Egyptian, Niankhkhnum, Khamerernebti, Menkha, and several include the title “overseer of the side of the pyramid” or similar. These were skilled, named, and honored people.

The Skilled Trades and the Work Force

The archaeological evidence suggests a clearly stratified work force:

  • Skilled craftsmen and stonemasons, many of them from the nearby town of Memphis, who worked year-round on the project.
  • Seasonal labor gangs, recruited from villages in the Delta and the Fayum, who came in shifts of three or four months, often during the flood season when agricultural work was impossible.
  • Foremen and supervisors, identified by name and title in the inscriptions, who organized the work and the supply of food and tools.
  • Scribes and administrators, who kept records of the labor and the supplies.

The total work force, by modern estimates, ranged from about 20,000 to 30,000 people at peak times, with perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 skilled craftsmen at the core. For more on the techniques used, see our guide to pyramid construction and moving the massive stone blocks.

The Bureaucracy Behind the Pyramids

Building a pyramid required far more than stonemasons. It required:

  • Quarrymen to cut the stone.
  • Sled-pullers to move it on slipways.
  • Boatmen to transport it along the Nile.
  • Bakers and brewers to feed the workers, the Workers’ Village had bakeries capable of producing thousands of loaves a day.
  • Physicians and embalmers to treat injuries and prepare the dead.
  • Scribes to keep the records and the accounts.

The papyri from the Wadi al-Jarf site, published in 2013 by the French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet, give a vivid picture of this bureaucracy in action. The journals of the inspector Merer, who supervised a team hauling limestone across the Nile, describe his daily activities in detail, how many trips he made, when the stone arrived, when the workers got sick. The documents, the oldest papyri ever found with dates, are dated to the reign of Khufu and show the logistical effort behind a single piece of the pyramid’s outer casing.

The Wadi al-Jarf Papyri

The most detailed evidence we have of the actual work comes from a set of papyri discovered in 2013 at the Wadi al-Jarf site on the Red Sea coast by Pierre Tallet. These are the log books of an inspector named Merer, who led a team of about 200 men ferrying limestone from a quarry at Tura to the Giza plateau. His daily reports include the names of his team captains, the days they worked, and the days they rested.

The papyri also confirm that the workers were organized into a hierarchy. Some of them are described as “trusted men,” others as “stewards,” others as “foremen.” They had ranks and titles, and they received rations, bread, beer, meat, and dates, in standard amounts. The bureaucracy of the Old Kingdom is one of the most efficient in the ancient world.

The Tomb of Petrie

The “tomb of Petrie,” a rock-cut tomb at Giza, contains the skeletons of several pyramid workers. The inscriptions record that the deceased served on the team led by Khufu’s half-brother, Ankhaf. The workers, it seems, were not only honored after death but were specifically associated with the royal family. This was not slave labor; it was a state-organized work force, with royal honor attached to it.

The King and the Workers

The inscriptions and the cemeteries suggest that the pyramid builders considered their work a sacred duty. In Egyptian belief, the king’s mummy needed to be preserved, and the tomb needed to be built to last forever. Workers who helped with this were doing religious work, comparable to serving in a temple. The fact that the workers’ tombs are clustered close to the pyramid, in a place of honor, shows that they were thought of as being in the pharaoh’s eternal service.