The Pyramids Weren't Built by Slaves

Whips, chains, slaves dragging stone: that's the pyramid story we all know, and most of it is wrong.

Herodotus wrote of 100,000 forced workers about 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid rose, and Hollywood added the whips. In 1990 a horse tripped over a buried wall at Giza and uncovered the builders' own tombs, in the shadow of the pyramids. Their town had bakeries, beer and meat, and their skeletons show broken bones that had healed. Work gangs signed the stones ("Friends of Khufu", "Drunkards of Menkaure"), and an inspector named Merer kept a logbook of boats hauling stone. It is the oldest inscribed papyrus ever found.

More than 3,000 years later, tradition says, Caliph al-Ma'mun's men tunnelled inside. Visitors still walk through that tunnel today.

So how did they raise over two million blocks? The answer is in our full film.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 2.124; M. Lehner & Z. Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (2017); AERA excavations at Heit el-Ghurab; P. Tallet, The Red Sea Scrolls (2021); al-Maqrizi, Khitat.

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