Who Built the Egyptian Pyramids?

Excavations at Giza since the 1990s uncovered a substantial workers' town, including bakeries, breweries, dormitories and administrative buildings, along with records of food supplies delivered on a large scale.

A workers' cemetery was found nearby. The fact that labourers were buried in prepared tombs close to the pyramid, with grave goods and inscriptions, is strong evidence against a slave workforce. Slaves were not given honoured burials beside the monument they built.

Graffiti left by the crews inside the structures records team names, some of them boastful in a way that feels immediately human, including references to being friends of a particular king.

The picture that emerges is of a rotating labour force, with a permanent core of skilled craftsmen and larger numbers of seasonal workers. Many probably served during the annual Nile flood, when farming was impossible and agricultural labour was free. Skeletal remains show healed injuries treated with real medical care.

The idea draws loosely on Herodotus, who described a forced workforce of a hundred thousand men, writing over two thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built, and from later religious and cinematic retellings. It was never based on Egyptian evidence.

Egypt did have enslaved people at various periods, so the question is not whether slavery existed but who built these specific monuments. The archaeological record from Giza points clearly to an organised, provisioned and compensated workforce.

The Great Pyramid contains roughly 2.3 million blocks averaging over two tonnes. Several methods are supported by evidence:

• •Sledges dragged over sand wetted to reduce friction, as shown in an Egyptian wall painting
• •Ramps, though their exact configuration is still debated
• •Boats along the Nile and canals for stone quarried at a distance
• •Copper tools, stone hammers and abrasives for cutting and dressing

Building the Great Pyramid was as much a logistical achievement as an engineering one. It required food production, storage and distribution for thousands of workers, quarrying and transport networks, and administrative record keeping over roughly two decades.

That administrative capacity is arguably the more remarkable accomplishment. A state able to organise this was already sophisticated, and the pyramids are evidence of that sophistication rather than of any mysterious lost knowledge.

The Great Pyramid stood around 146 metres when complete and remained the tallest structure built by humans for roughly 3,800 years, until medieval cathedral spires exceeded it.

That figure is worth pausing on. The pyramid was already more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us. Ancient Greek and Roman tourists visited it as a monument to a distant past and left graffiti that archaeologists still read. Very little else in human history has held a record for that long or been treated as antiquity by people we ourselves consider ancient.

Some of the most detailed evidence about pyramid building was found in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient harbour on the Red Sea coast. Archaeologists recovered fragments of papyrus from the reign of Khufu, among the oldest inscribed papyri known. Part of the find is the logbook of an official called Merer, who led a team of around forty men. It records their work over a period of months in a plain, day by day style.

The log describes the crew collecting fine limestone from the quarries at Tura, across the Nile from Giza, and carrying it by boat along canals to the building site. It mentions rations, stops and the supervision of a senior official. Records like this matter because they come from the builders' own administration rather than from later writers. They show pyramid construction as organised state work, planned and documented by people who expected to be paid and fed.

The smooth-sided pyramids at Giza did not appear from nowhere. They were the result of about a century of experiment. The first large stone pyramid was the Step Pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara, traditionally credited to his official Imhotep, which stacked six layers of decreasing size. Later builders tried to turn stepped structures into true pyramids by filling in the steps. At Meidum, the outer casing of one such pyramid later collapsed, leaving a tower-like core that still stands in a mound of rubble.

The clearest sign of learning on the job is the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, built for King Sneferu, the father of Khufu. Its lower part rises at a steep angle, then the slope changes partway up to a much gentler one, probably because the builders saw signs of instability and adjusted the design. Sneferu then built the Red Pyramid nearby at a lower, more stable angle throughout, generally regarded as the first successful smooth-sided pyramid. The Great Pyramid built for his son benefited directly from these lessons.

The stepped, rough faces you see on the Great Pyramid today are not what its builders intended anyone to see. The visible blocks are mostly the core. When complete, the pyramid was wrapped in a casing of fine white limestone, with each outer block cut at an angle so the faces formed smooth, sloping planes that would have shone brightly in the sun. The casing joints were fitted so closely that the surface looked almost seamless from a distance. A few casing blocks remain in place at the base of the north side, and the pyramid of Khafre still keeps a patch of its casing near the top.

Most of the casing disappeared in the Middle Ages. After a powerful earthquake in 1303 loosened many of the outer stones, builders carried them away for use in mosques, fortifications and other buildings in nearby Cairo, turning the monument into a convenient quarry. The Great Pyramid also lost its uppermost courses and its capstone, so it now stands at roughly 138 metres rather than its original height. The shape you see today has therefore been formed by two groups of people: the workers who raised it and the later builders who quietly took it apart.

The Great Pyramid is aligned to the four cardinal directions with startling accuracy. Its sides point to true north, south, east and west to within about a fifteenth of a degree, and its base is very close to a perfect square. The builders had no magnetic compass, and a compass would not have helped anyway, because magnetic north drifts and differs from true north. Whatever method they used must have relied on the sky. Khafre's pyramid nearby shows a similar small rotation away from true north, which suggests the same technique was used for both.

Researchers have proposed several astronomical methods, and the question is still debated. One uses the stars: watch a bright star rise and set over an artificial horizon, such as a level circular wall, and the point halfway between gives north. Another proposal suggests the builders waited until two stars circling the celestial pole lined up vertically. Because such stars slowly shift over centuries, this could explain why the small errors seem to vary between pyramids built at different dates. A simpler method uses the Sun, marking where a stick's shadow tip falls at equal lengths before and after noon to give an east to west line.

The Egyptian pyramids were built by organised, housed, fed and paid Egyptian workers, many working seasonally, and the excavated workers' town and cemetery at Giza make the slave theory untenable.