Workers or Slaves? Who Actually Built the Pyramids

For more than two thousand years, the dominant tradition in Western thought held that the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. The image is familiar: long lines of captives, whipped by Egyptian overseers, dragging massive stones across the desert. The image is wrong. Modern archaeology has shown that the pyramids were built by skilled, well-fed Egyptian workers, organized by the state, and honored in death. The story of who actually built the pyramids is one of the most dramatic corrections in the history of Egyptology.

The Ancient Tradition

The idea that the pyramids were built by slaves goes back to the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BCE, more than 2,000 years after the pyramids were built. Herodotus wrote that the pharaoh Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, had been a harsh ruler who closed the temples and forced the entire population into labor. The image of a pharaoh driving thousands of chained slaves has been the dominant popular image ever since.

The biblical tradition, drawn in part from Herodotus and from later Greek sources, reinforced the picture. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century CE, reported that the pyramids had been built by Hebrew slaves, a tradition that, in the early modern era, would be picked up by the Dutch Orientalist Adriaan Reland and rooted in the much earlier writings of the Egyptian priest Manetho (3rd century BCE), and become the basis of the “pyramids built by the Israelites” tradition.

The Archaeological Evidence

The first major challenge to the slave-labor theory came in the late nineteenth century, when archaeologists began to find the remains of the workers who actually built the pyramids. In 1990, the American archaeologist Mark Lehner and the Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass began a systematic excavation of a site on the south side of the Sphinx, which turned out to be a major workers’ settlement: the Workers’ Village.

The Workers’ Village contains the remains of a planned community of about 200 rectangular houses, connected by galleries, that housed perhaps 1,600 workers at a time. 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 and others, 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 Papyrus of Merer

The most detailed evidence of who built the pyramids comes from a set of papyri discovered in 2013 at the Wadi al-Jarf site on the Red Sea coast. 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. The papyri, dated to the reign of Khufu, describe Merer’s daily activities in detail.

The papyri 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 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, see our guide to moving the massive stone blocks and to who actually built the Great Pyramid.

The Pay and Conditions

The pay of the pyramid workers is difficult to estimate, because the Egyptian economy was not based on coinage. The workers were paid in rations (bread, beer, meat, and dates) and they may have also received clothing, sandals, and other goods. The standard ration for a laborer was about 10 loaves of bread and a measure of beer per day, supplemented by fish, vegetables, and occasionally meat.

The conditions of work were not easy. The workers toiled in the Egyptian heat, lifting heavy stones, dragging sledges, and performing repetitive tasks. Some of them were injured, as the skeletons in the Workers’ Cemetery show, and a few of them died in the course of the work. But the conditions were far from the horrors of a slave labor camp. The workers ate well, lived in planned communities, and were honored after death.

The Religious Dimension

The Egyptians viewed the work on the pyramid as 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.

The inscriptions on the workers’ tombs make the religious dimension explicit. The names of the deceased are often accompanied by the title “follower of His Majesty,” and the tombs themselves are in the royal necropolis. To be buried in the shadow of the pyramid, the Egyptians believed, was a great honor.

The Politicization of the Question

I want to take a position on the politics of this question, because it is genuinely strange. The question of who built the pyramids has been a politically charged one since the early modern era. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tradition that the pyramids had been built by Hebrew slaves was used both to justify the slave trade and to attack it; defenders of slavery pointed to the biblical tradition as evidence that the construction of great works required slave labor, while abolitionists pointed to the same tradition as evidence of the cruelty of the institution. Both sides of the Atlantic debate used the same story to argue opposite conclusions, and the same debate continues today in slightly different forms.

The archaeological facts have not changed. The pyramids were not built by slaves. They were built by skilled, well-fed, well-organized Egyptian workers, who were honored in life and in death. That is what the evidence from the Giza plateau, the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, the AERA excavations, the workers’ cemetery, and the Merer diary all converge to show.

Why, then, does the slave story persist? Three reasons, I think. First, the Herodotus tradition is genuinely old, and people repeat what they have read. Second, the “lost-wisdom” narrative, in which the pyramids were built by a forgotten superior civilization, is psychologically attractive in a way that “they were built by paid Egyptian laborers” is not. Third, the slave story flatters the modern reader, who gets to feel both morally superior to the ancient Egyptians and to imagine a vanished golden age of mysterious power. The most useful correctives, in my view, are the Wadi al-Jarf papyri (which anyone can read about in Pierre Tallet’s published edition) and the AERA volumes (which lay out the workers’ village in detail). Both are well within the reach of a non-specialist reader who wants to be done with the Herodotus tradition.