Just found out the Great Pyramid wasn't built by slaves, that blew my mind

I was listening to a podcast on my long drive down I-40 last week, some archaeology show I'd never tried before. The host said something about how ancient Egyptian workers on the pyramids actually had medical care and were paid in beer and bread. I always figured it was like the Bible story with whips and chains, but apparently archaeologists found worker cemeteries with healed bones and good dental work. They had a real organized labor system, not a slave camp like I thought. The podcast said it was more like a national service project where people rotated in from farms during the flood season. I want to go look up those cemetery reports myself now. Has anyone else run into a common story that turned out to be totally wrong when you actually checked the archaeology on it?

2 comments

2 Comments

linda_clark1mo ago

Poke around the worker village excavations at Giza, and you'll find the real kicker isn't just that they weren't slaves, it's that the whole project might have been a giant public works job to keep the economy stable during the Nile flood. Like, when the fields were underwater for months, what else were those farmers going to do? The state gave them food, shelter, and a steady job building a mountain of stone instead of them just sitting around hungry. I remember reading somewhere that the grain tax system basically funded these huge building projects as a way to redistribute surplus food. So the pyramids weren't just tombs, they were like a massive ancient stimulus program that also happened to create the only ancient wonder still standing.

williams.amy1mo ago

Hold up, has anyone looked at how this public works angle connects to the actual calendar itself? @linda_clark you're onto something with the flood season thing, but what if the pyramid building was also a way to prove the state's gods and pharaoh could control time? Like, you've got all these farmers sitting around with nothing to do during the inundation, right. The state gives them work that also creates a giant calendar in stone. The alignments to stars and solstices weren't just decoration, they were a big middle finger to nature showing the king could keep time better than the flood. So it was a stimulus program that doubled as a flex on the whole concept of chaos and uncertainty. The pyramids are basically the ancient Egyptian version of building a clock tower while also handing out paychecks lol.