Who Really Built the Pyramids?

It is a question people have asked for centuries, and it has attracted some of the worst answers in history: armies of slaves driven by whips, or visitors from space. The real answer, built from tombs, bakeries and a bundle of papyri, is both more ordinary and more impressive.

The story of the slaves

The popular image comes largely from Herodotus, a Greek traveller who visited Egypt around 450 BCE, some two thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built. He wrote that 100,000 men worked in shifts for decades. He was repeating what local guides told him. The image was then reinforced by films and by biblical associations that have nothing to do with the Old Kingdom.

What archaeology found

In the 1990s, Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass uncovered a settlement south of the pyramids at Giza. It contained bakeries, breweries, storage areas and housing for thousands. Nearby were cemeteries where workers and overseers were buried with care, some in modest tombs close to the pyramid itself, an honour unlikely to be given to slaves. Skeletons show signs of heavy labour but also of medical treatment, including healed fractures.

The papyri

In 2013 a team led by Pierre Tallet found papyri at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea. They include the logbook of an official named Merer, who recorded the movement of limestone blocks by boat from the Tura quarries to Giza during the reign of Khufu. It is the oldest known inscribed papyrus, and a rare first-hand record of the state organising such a project.

Editorial assessment

The alien theories are more than a joke. They imply that ancient Africans could not have built such monuments, an assumption that is both false and prejudiced. The evidence shows a highly organised state that fed its workers, rotated crews and honoured those who died, a form of labour closer to a national project than to forced captivity. The pyramids are not a mystery. They are a testament to human organisation.