Egyptian Pyramids Built By Slaves

Archaeologists now tell us that the workers who built the pyramids were recruited from poor communities in egypt and worked in three month shifts.

Egyptian pyramids built by slaves. Due to a shrinking budget pyramids gradually got smaller over time. Rooted firmly in the popular imagination is the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves serving a merciless pharaoh. In other words money paid to pyramid laborers to construct elaborate tombs helped destroy ancient egypt s economy. One popular myth that egyptologists say was perpetrated in part by hollywood movies held that ancient israelite slaves ancestors of the jewish people built the pyramids.

This notion of a vast slave class in egypt originated in judeo christian tradition and has been popularized by hollywood productions like cecil b. It took 30 years to build a single pyramid. We know this because archaeologists have located the remains of a purpose built village for the thousands of workers who built the famous giza pyramids nearly 4 500 years ago. Cairo 9 june 2020.

The slaves themselves were seen as an accomplishment to egyptian kings reign and a sign of power. Rather it was farmers who built the pyramids during flooding when they could not work in their lands. Graves of the builders were first. Glen dash an engineer who studies the pyramids at giza as part of ancient egypt research associates aera noted that khufu s pyramid is aligned to true north within one tenth of a degree.

I had the good fortune to work on the site in 2005. Evidence from the workers bones suggests that they had hard lives and died fairly young but they were not slaves. Linking building the great pyramids to slavery is a comical thing to say replied zahi hawass to some english newspaper commentary. But the most undeniable evidence that egypt s pyramids were built by paid workers and not slaves is the pyramids themselves.

De mille s the ten commandments in which a captive people labor in the scorching sun beneath the whips of pharaoh s overseers. There is a consensus among egyptologists that the great pyramids were not built by slaves. There were 10 000 of them considerably fewer than the 100 000 reported by herodotus and they ate relatively well. The ancient greek historian herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves creating what egyptologists say is a myth propagated by hollywood films.