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Who Built the Pyramids?

Egyptologists and historians have long debated the question of who built the Pyramids, and how. Standing at the base of the Pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these enormous monuments could have been built in one pharaoh's lifetime. Yet scholars think they were built over mere decades for three pharaohs who were father, son, and grandson (Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure).

Egyptologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the 20,000 or 30,000 laborers who are thought to have built the Pyramids lived. Ultimately, they hope to learn more about the workforce, their daily lives, and perhaps where they came from. The two scholars believe that Giza housed a skeleton crew of workers who labored on the Pyramids year-round. But during the late summer and early autumn months, when the Nile flooded surrounding fields, a large labor force would appear at Giza to put in time on the Pyramids. These farmers and local villagers gathered at Giza to work for their god-kings, to build their monuments to the hereafter. This would ensure their own afterlife and would also benefit the future and prosperity of Egypt as a whole. They may well have been willing workers, a labor force working for ample rations, for the benefit of man, king, and country. Question #1: Using the paragraph above, how did the building of the pyramids relate to either the power of religion or politics in Ancient Egypt?

Name____________________________ GANGS AND GRAFFITI You've made reference to inscriptions at Giza that indicate who built the Pyramids. What do the inscriptions say?

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have is graffiti on ancient stone monuments in places that they didn't mean to be shown. Like on foundations when we dig down below the floor level, up in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber in the Great Pyramid, and in many monuments of the Old Kingdomtemples, other pyramids. Well, the graffiti gives us a picture of organization where a gang of workmen was organized into two crews, and the crews were subdivided into five phyles. Phyles is the Greek word for tribe. The phyles are subdivided into divisions, and the divisions are identified by single hieroglyphs with names that mean things like endurance, perfection, strong. Okay, so how do we know this? You come to a block of stone in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber. First of all, you see this cartouche of a King and then some scrawls all in red paint after it. That's the gang name. And in the Old Kingdom in the time of the Pyramids of Giza, the gangs were named after kings. So, for example, we have a name, compounded with the name of Menkaure, and it seems to translate "the Drunks (or the Drunkards) of Menkaure." There's one that's well-attested, in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber in the Great Pyramid, "the Friends of Khufu Gang." This doesn't sound like slavery, does it? In fact, it gets more intriguing, because in certain monuments you find the name of one gang on one side of the monument and another gang, we assume competing, on the other side of the monument. You find that to some extent in the Pyramid temple of Menkaure. It's as though these gangs are competing. So from this evidence we deduce that there was a labor force that was assigned to respective crew. Question #2: What does the evidence of graffiti and competition between crews suggest about the people who built the pyramids?

Name____________________________ A PYRAMID-RAISING Where did the gangs come from? Were they local people, or did they travel from afar?

There's some evidence to suggest that people were rotated in and out of the raw labor force. So you could be a young man in a village, say, in Middle Egypt, and you had never seen more than a few hundred people in your village, maybe at market day or something. And the King's men come, and it may not have been entirely forced, but it seems that everybody owed a labor tax. We don't know if it was entirely coercive, or if, in fact, part of it was a natural community donation. But, anyway, they started keeping track of people and their time on the royal labor project. Question #3: What would these young men be donating in this case? And if you were brought from a distance, you were brought by boat. Can you imagine floating down the Nile andsay you're working on Khafre's Pyramidand you float past the Great Pyramid of Meidum and the Pyramids of Dashur, and, my God, you've never seen anything like this. These are the hugest things. We're talking about a society where they didn't have cameras. You didn't see great images. And so here are these stupendous, gigantic things thrust up to the sky, their polished white limestone blazing in the sunshine. And then they go on down to Giza, and they come around this corner, actually the corner of the Wall of the Crow, right into the harbor, and there's the Khufu Pyramid, the biggest thing on the planet actually in the way of a building until the turn of the 20th century. And you see, for the first time in your life, not a few hundred, but thousands of workers and people as well as industries of all kinds. You're rotated into this experience, and you serve in your respective crew and then you're rotated out, and you go back because you have your own large household to whom you are assigned on a kind of an estateorganized society. You have your own village, maybe you even have your own land that you're responsible for. So you're rotated back, but you're not the same. You have seen the central principle of the first nation-state in our planet's historythe Pyramids, the centralization, this organization. They must have been powerful socializing forces. Question #4: How might have Ancient Egyptians have felt when they first saw the Pyramids? How might the experience have affected their view of the pharaoh?

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That's why the Pyramid was the national project of Egypt, because everyone had to participate in building this Pyramid. By food, by workmen, this way the building of the Pyramid was something that everyone felt the need to participate in. Really it was lovethey were not really pushed to do it. When the king took the throne, the people had to be ready to participate in building the Pyramid. But there must have been a core group of very seasoned laborers who really knew how to cut stone so fine that you could join them without getting a razor blade in between. Perhaps they were the stone-cutters and -setters, and the experienced quarry men at the quarry wall. And the people who rotated in and out were those doing all the different raw labor, not only the schlepping of the stone but preparing gypsum (cement). And one of the things that is motivating me now is the question of what vision of society is suggested by a pyramid like Khufu's? Was it, in fact, coercive? Was it a militaristic kind of state WPA project? The answer likely lies in something more closely resembling a poor and willing peasantry providing a labor tax to their respected ruler and in the process becoming more closely tied to the greatness of their civilization. Question #5: How did the Pyramids represent a pharaohs power in Ancient Egypt? Why would a person spend months or years of their life doing free labor to help build these structures in their society?