Not Slaves: One Pyramid Crew Was 'The Drunkards of Menkaure'

Forget the movie version with whips and chains. The people who built the Giza pyramids left their own names on the stones.

Archaeologists excavated the builders' town just outside the pyramid plateau, with bakeries, breweries and kitchens. The crews lived on bread and beer, the staples of the Egyptian diet; one estimate puts the beer ration at about four to five liters a day. They weren't free volunteers either. Many probably served a labor duty owed to the king, a system Egyptologists say doesn't fit the word "slavery".

The workforce was organized into named gangs, and those gangs painted their names in red on stones in places nobody was meant to see, such as the chambers above the Great Pyramid's burial room. One gang was "Friends of Khufu". Another name is roughly translated as "the Drunkards of Menkaure". Khufu and Menkaure were the pharaohs whose pyramids stand at Giza.

More from the dig:
• Workers were buried in their own cemetery near the pyramids. Some skeletons show healed injuries from building-site accidents.
• Animal bones in the town show the crews also ate plenty of beef, not just bread.
• Rival gangs sometimes painted their names on opposite sides of the same monument, as if they were competing.
• Nobody knows the exact size of the workforce. Herodotus was told 100,000 men; modern estimates are far lower, often given as about 20,000 to 30,000.
• The slave picture goes back to Greek writers centuries after the pyramids were built, and Hollywood epics made it famous.

Notes: "Drunkards of Menkaure" is an approximate translation, and the beer ration is an estimate. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt; the evidence shows it wasn't how the pyramids got built.

What would your pyramid crew call itself? Tell us in the comments.

#history #ancientegypt #pyramids #shorts

Sources:
- Who Built the Pyramids? (interviews with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass) (PBS NOVA Online (WGBH)): https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/builders.html
- Who Built the Pyramids? Not slaves. Archaeologist Mark Lehner, digging deeper, discovers a city of privileged workers (Jonathan Shaw, July-August 2003) (Harvard Magazine): https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html
- Giza pyramid complex (Workers' village section) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&explaintext=1&format=json&titles=Giza_pyramid_complex
- Construction of the Egyptian pyramids (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&explaintext=1&format=json&titles=Construction_of_the_Egyptian_pyramids
- Ancient Egyptian cuisine (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&explaintext=1&format=json&titles=Ancient_Egyptian_cuisine
- History of beer (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&explaintext=1&format=json&titles=History_of_beer
- Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA): Who Built the Pyramids? / Lost City of the Pyramids (Ancient Egypt Research Associates): https://aeraweb.org/

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