Who Built the Pyramids of Giza?

Which kings were the Giza pyramids built for?

The Great Pyramid was built as the tomb of King Khufu, the first king to build a pyramid at Giza, and it is the largest of the three.^[1][7] Scholars think all three pyramids went up within a few decades for kings who were father, son and grandson: Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure.^[4]

Exact dates are uncertain, and sources differ by several decades.^[1][2][5][7] The table compares the reigns given by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities with dates from National Geographic.^[1][2][7]

Harvard Magazine dates the Great Pyramid to around 2530 BC, and a 2010 Associated Press report put the whole Fourth Dynasty at 2575–2467 BC.^[5][6]

Where did the pyramid builders live?

Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), the group headed by Egyptologist Mark Lehner, says it began digging in December 1988 at a site 400 meters south of the Sphinx, beside a stone wall called Heit el-Ghurab, the "Wall of the Crow."^[3][5][8] It turned out to be a Fourth Dynasty town of more than 7 hectares (over 17 acres), built by the crown as the base for constructing the pyramid complexes of Menkaure, Khafre and probably Khufu.^[3]

Excavators found houses, streets, a royal administrative building and four huge galleries that may have been barracks where workers slept and cooked.^[2] In 2002 Lehner suggested that the galleries housed a rotating labor force of perhaps 1,600 to 2,000 workers.^[5] The town also had bakeries, workshops and kitchens, and royal silos held the grain that became bread and beer for the workforce.^[3] The ministry says the large amounts of fish, bird, cattle, sheep, goat and pig bones found there show that the state kept its workers healthy.^[2] Much of the cattle bone came from young animals, prime beef that Harvard Magazine reads as a sign of skilled workers rather than slaves.^[5] When Menkaure's pyramid was finished, the town was taken apart and left to collapse.^[3]

Were the pyramids built by slaves?

Harvard Magazine traces the popular picture of slaves building the pyramids for a merciless king to Judeo-Christian tradition, spread by Hollywood films such as The Ten Commandments.^[5] Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, who have both excavated at Giza, reject that picture: Lehner says the builders were not slaves, at least in the modern sense, and Hawass calls them paid laborers.^[4][5][6]

The builders' cemetery lies on the hillside just west of their town.^[2] Low-ranking overseers were buried in modest mud-brick tombs, surrounded by smaller ones possibly for their families and workers, while higher-ranking overseers and craftsmen had large stone tombs further up the slope.^[2] Announcing newly found tombs in 2010, Hawass, then head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, argued that slaves would not have been allowed to build tombs beside their king's pyramid.^[6] Many skeletons show hard labor and broken bones, but most fractures had healed properly, which the ministry takes as a sign of good medical care.^[2]

Graffiti inside the monuments show how the work was organized: gangs named after kings, such as the "Friends of Khufu" and the "Drunkards of Menkaure," were split into smaller divisions.^[4][5]

That does not make the builders volunteers: Lehner thinks almost everyone in Egyptian society owed service, called bak, to people above them, even the highest officials.^[5] He has also said that everybody seems to have owed a labor tax, though it may not have been entirely forced.^[4]

How many people built the Great Pyramid?

No one knows for certain, and published estimates range from a few thousand to 100,000.^[5] The table lists the main figures and who gave them.^[4][5][6]

How were the stones quarried and moved?

Most of the stone came from the Giza plateau itself.^[4] The Great Pyramid was built of local limestone and covered in high-quality limestone brought by ship from Tura (Turah), south of Maadi, while the granite in the burial chamber came from Aswan.^[1][4] Cutting the stone took large amounts of copper, mainly from mines in the Sinai.^[8]

In 2013 Pierre Tallet found the oldest known papyri at Wadi al-Jarf, a harbor on the Red Sea coast that was active under Khufu.^[8] Among them was the logbook of an official named Merer, who led a crew of some 200 men and recorded loading his boat with stone at Tura and taking it along the Nile to Giza.^[8] Merer reported to a noble named Ankh-haf, Khufu's half-brother, and the papyri carry what seems to be the last known date of Khufu's reign, his 27th year.^[8] Because Tura limestone was used for the outer casing, Smithsonian Magazine sees the entries as a snapshot of the Great Pyramid receiving its finishing touches.^[8]

AERA says boats carried materials to the town along long-vanished waterways during the annual Nile flood, and men and animals hauled them at other times.^[3] Lehner sees the papyri as support for a major harbor at Giza, but Tallet is more cautious.^[8]

The ministry says it is still not entirely certain how the pyramid was built.^[1] National Geographic says the general belief is that workers moved blocks up large ramps wetted with water or clay, using sledges, ropes, rollers and levers.^[7] Some researchers think the ramps zig-zagged or spiraled around each pyramid, and a more controversial theory puts them inside.^[7]

How big is the Great Pyramid?

The Great Pyramid originally stood 146.5 meters (about 481 feet) tall, and the ministry says it remained the tallest structure in the world for 3,800 years.^[1][7] It is a little shorter today because its smooth casing stones are gone.^[7] National Geographic estimates that it contains 2.3 million stone blocks, and Harvard Magazine put the stone moved into position at six and a half million tons.^[7][5] The ministry estimates that it took 10 to 20 years to build, and it is the last surviving member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.^[1]