Don't listen to Charlton Heston: Pyramids not built by slaves

The tombs of at least a dozen pyramid construction workers have been found in Egypt, near Giza. Egyptologists would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the pyramids were not built by slaves.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: Science

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Xopher

The Ancient Egyptians looked like Sidney Poiter and James Earl Jones rather than Yul Brenner & Charlton Heston.

This is nonsense. They were certainly rather dark-skinned, but no Egyptian had anywhere near as much European blood as Poitier or Jones.

Or didn’t you know that all slave-descended African-Americans are part white? And that the ones who rose to success by the 60s, like those two, are among the whitest (because they had lighter skin and were therefore more acceptable to white audiences)?

You were probably just talking about their skin color, but honestly, try not to spout nonsense.
- biggsdriut
  
  Agreed! Everyone would know James Earl Jones is white if they just sat and watched the end of Return of the Jedi.
biggsdriut

All of you are wrong. I can’t believe none of you ever saw Stargate!
Anonymous

Of course the pyramids were built by slaves. Find me anyone who’s gonna willingly carry big ass stones their entire life. And of course he is gonna say they weren’t. Who wants to reveal that ugly part of their past.

There is archeological evidence of the Jews wandering through the desert leaving egypt.

Egyptians would take slaves of Armies they conquered. Semitic (jewish) and African slaves. The pyramids were built by blacks and jews.
- Orion
  
  Anon, you are telling everyone else that there is no evidence for what they say, but you don’t have any evidence either. Just another person trying to bully your opinions to others.
  
  Let me tell you some facts.
  It is NOT POSSIBLE to have slaves, or PEOPLE as we know it, build the pyramids. Think this is stupid?
  
  Ok, then what do you call this:
  - There are 3 Great Pyramids
  - For supposedly 3 different Pharaohs
  - Estimated there are 6 million blocks/stones used to build the pyramids
  - Each stone/block averages about 3.5 tons
  
  That means that 24-hours-a-day, every day for 100 years, a stone averaging 3.5 tons needs to be set in place every 8.5 minutes!
  
  Really? And slaves did this? Gimme a break. Not all of us are that stupid enough to believe your babble Anon or any other historian who has chosen to find the easy way out and give a silly hypothesis like is in the history books.
  
  Its just what the meaning of the word “Hypothesis”, where it isn’t fact unless someone has seen it with their own eyes, then they can believe it. Otherwise the only way that someone would be able to prove that the Pyramids were built by slaves, or even humans for that matter, would only be proven if photos had been taken or someone from this century was present when the Pyramids were built.
  
  Note: and the Pyramids were built around 17,000 years ago, NOT 2500 or 4500 years ago. Carbon dating isn’t accurate past a certain amount of time, where the 2500 or 4500 years HYPOTHESIS is just a stab in the dark and bears NO FACT and NO ONE can physically prove it. The only way to find out the facts is to understand WHY the Pyramids were built in the first place.
  
  So were the Pyramids built for Kings/Pharaohs?
  The answer, and PROVEN FACT, is NO THEY WERE NOT BUILT FOR THE KINGS! How do we know this? It is because we need to look at the positioning etc… of each of the Pyramids relative to the starts. We even need to check the names of the pyramids to figure this out where they all had names that reference the Pleiades and Orion star constellations. Think this is BS, start here on your journey to the truth, then rebuff what has been discovered with PURE FACT, NOT referencing someone else’s material/books written tens of years ago…
Anonymous

As a contractor, I built houses. Before that, I built houses as a carpenter. I bet the architect and builder take the credit for those homes too.
Do you see where this is going??
strangefriend

Of course, the Hykos invaded Egypt & ended the Old Kingdom. Eventually, the Egyptians threw them out. They were from the steppes of Central Asia. The Greeks had extensive trading with them, served as mercenaries in the Egyptian army, & stole extensively from Egyptian ideas. Later, the Macedonians came over from Persia & conquered Egypt, ending its independence. Cleopatra was Greek & white. The Ancient Egyptians themselves said they came from Ethiopia (they actually meant Sudan.) I’ve read THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION by Cheikh Anta Diop. I agree with him that the Egyptians were an African (black) race. The problem with black Egyptians is that the Greeks lionized them, & took lots of their religion & architecture from them. This is a problem if you are a 18th century racist who wants to pretend that Western civilization was a continuation of the ‘glory that was Greece.’ Letme quote from the Wikipedia entry ‘Ancient Egyptian race controversy’:
“The British Africanist Basil Davidson summarized the issue as follows:

Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown as entirely black, being from the south (from what a later world knew as Nubia): while the Greek writers reported that they were much like all the other Africans whom the Greeks knew.[39] . .”
sapere_aude

In Ancient Greece all manual labor was done by slaves, so it is only natural that Herodotus (a Greek historian) would assume that the pyramids must have been built by slaves. I don’t know enough about the social structure of Ancient Egypt to know how similar it was to that of Ancient Greece; but it’s certainly far from unreasonable to think that Egypt would have relied heavily on slave labor, just as Greece (and later Rome) did.

Of course, it’s important to note that slavery in Ancient Greece (and Rome) was quite different from the sort of slavery that existed in the American South prior to the Civil War. Unlike in the Antebellum South, slavery in the ancient world was not based on race; and slaves were not treated as sub-human work animals with no rights. Slaves simply represented the lowest class or caste within society; but slaves were fully integrated into Ancient Greek (and Roman) society in a way that black slaves in the Americas were not. Most slaves in the ancient world were debtors or prisoners of war who could eventually earn or purchase their own freedom. Some slaves were owned by private households, while others were owned by the state. Some slaves were even well-educated, and served as private secretaries, managers, foremen, administrators, tutors, or government officials. Ancient Greek slaves had certain rights, including the right to own property (even the right to own their own slaves), the right to buy and sell and otherwise participate in the economy, the right (and duty) to serve in the military, the right to marry and have a family, the right to legal due process (including the right to sue people, the right to trial by jury for alleged crimes, the right to demand justice for crimes committed against them, etc.), the right to worship their own gods, the right to exercise authority delegated to them by their masters, the right to try to earn or purchase their own freedom, etc. Slaves even got compensated for their labor. So, our image of slaves as people being treated as animals, driven to exhaustion by whip-wielding taskmasters, is an inaccurate picture of slavery in the ancient world.

I don’t know if the Ancient Egyptians used slaves to build the pyramids or not. But archaeological evidence that suggests that the workers who built the pyramids were well treated does not prove that they were not slaves. The only real difference between a slave and a freeman in the ancient world was that a freeman had a choice about what work to do, whereas a slave did not.
- chenille
  
  In Ancient Greece all manual labor was done by slaves, so it is only natural that Herodotus (a Greek historian) would assume that the pyramids must have been built by slaves.
  
  Ancient Greeks used slavery for a lot of things, but if I remember correctly, the actual building of monuments wasn’t usually one of them.
  
  At any rate, Herodotus doesn’t assume the pyramids were built by slaves. Instead, he talks about how Cheops was a horrible tyrant who overworked the whole population to build his monuments, and it’s fairly clear that his story comes from the Egyptians. His whole history of Egypt is fairly confused, though, and I don’t think many scholars trust it today.
- Moriarty
  
  I agree for the most part, but surely the role of slaves would vary a great deal from city to city, let alone between time periods and regions. Athenian slaves and Spartan Helots were in quite different circumstances, for example.
  
  The comparison with American slavery is interesting, too. It was a totally different institution, it’s true, but I imagine the veneration in the American South for the classical world probably played a big role in the acceptance of black slavery.
  - sapere_aude
    
    @Moriarty (#22): Yes, definitely. I was oversimplifying, of course. The sad thing is that I ramble too much even when I’m oversimplifying. Believe me when I tell you that, had I not oversimplified, my post would have been unreadable. :-)
    
    But, you’re right, there was much diversity in the ancient world; and slavery certainly would have varied quite a lot from time to time and place to place. But the sort of slavery that Herodotus would have been familiar with would have had very little in common with slavery in the Antebellum American South. So, when he claimed that the pyramids were built by slaves, he probably had in mind lower-class, paid laborers, who were drafted by the state and had no choice but to do the work they were told to do. But that’s not what modern readers think of when they hear the word “slaves”. We tend to think of slavery as it existed in the Americas up until the mid-19th century, which was far more oppressive and degrading that the sort of slavery that Herodotus was familiar with. (Though any form of slavery is, by its very nature, oppressive and degrading.)
- chenille
  
  Oh, and…
  
  Unlike in the Antebellum South, slavery in the ancient world was not based on race; and slaves were not treated as sub-human work animals with no rights.
  
  This was sometimes true, but not always. What you’re saying applies best to domestic slaves. For slaves owned by small families, treating them well is good economic sense, but even they could be abused or killed without serious consequences. I should also point out that for female slaves, not being able to choose your “work” is a big deal.
  
  For slaves on great farming estates, I think things were more like early America than you’re giving credit. They weren’t necessarily compensated well. In fact, some Romans cut costs by telling them to feed and clothe themselves on top of the work they were doing. This is an extreme case that occasioned a revolt, but it shows you what kind of respect owners had for them.
  
  I don’t know much about slaves involved in construction, but I’d guess they were closer to the latter. Worst of all were slaves sent to mines, who were miserable and short-lived, although the same can be said of nearly all miners in early history.
  
  This probably doesn’t change your point. I just couldn’t let slide a comment about slaves not being viewed as “sub-human work animals” when the Romans actually called them “speaking beasts”, and even Aristotle thought they were naturally inferior.
  - sapere_aude
    
    @chenille (#27 & #29): As I mentioned in an earlier post, my analysis was an oversimplification. Unfortunately, I oversimplified so much as to leave the false impression that slavery in the ancient world wasn’t such a bad thing (at least when compared to slavery in America); and that all Greek and Roman slaves enjoyed a fairly decent life, deprived only of the freedom to choose their own work. I was wrong to leave that impression.
    
    First of all, slavery of any kind is a bad thing; though I think we can all agree that there are degrees of badness. A slave who is treated well and who has certain basic rights, though still a slave, is far better off than a slave who is abused and who is treated as sub-human. Unlike in the American South, the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome made up a large portion of the population, were fully integrated into society, had an extensive set of rights, were often (though not always) well-treated, were able to retain much of their basic human dignity, and could look forward to the possibility of earning their freedom. And, in the ancient world, slavery was not based specifically on skin color. So, on the whole, slavery in the ancient world, though still bad, was not quite as bad as slavery in the Antebellum South.
    
    One thing I failed to make clear in my earlier posts is that there were different classes of slaves in the ancient world, some treated better than others. As you pointed out, those who worked in the mines were really bad off (and often were literally worked to death). But the point I was trying to make was that we shouldn’t automatically assume that slaves in the ancient world would be treated like slaves in the American South. Therefore, archaeological evidence suggesting that the builders of the pyramids were well treated does not preclude the possibility that they were slaves.
    
    Oh, and I think you’re misinterpreting Aristotle. He argued that only those who were “slaves by nature” (i.e. those who were mentally inferior) ought to be slaves; and that it was wrong to enslave anyone who was not a “slave by nature”. But he acknowledged that many of the slaves of his own day were not “slaves by nature”, and therefore ought to be treated with the same dignity as freemen.
Nevermore

What? So this is not trueâ€¦ http://www.videosift.com/video/Thank-you-slaves-Wonder-Showzen
Xopher

Later, the Macedonians came over from Persia & conquered Egypt, ending its independence.

Not true. Egypt had been conquered by Persia long before Persia was conquered by the Macedonian Alexander. They were glad enough to see Alexander take down Persia that they proclaimed him Pharaoh, and deified him at his death.

Cleopatra was Greek & white.

I presume that you’re referring to Cleopatra VII, who was the famous one. She was part of the Macedonian dynasty founded by Ptolemy. That may be Greek enough for you and me, but don’t say that to an Athenian of the period!
Capissen

Zahi Hawass is one of the coolest people I’ve seen, but his positive bias sometimes reminds me of an Egyptian version of the father from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “The pyramids were built by free workers! Did you know that Egyptians invented language? And the MP3 player!”

One hell of a marketing guy, though.
voidmstr

The Quran clearly states the Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt.

According to the account in the Qur’an, the children of Israel, who had dwelled in peace and security in Egypt, eventually lost their status in the society, and in time, were finally enslaved. From the related verses in the Qur’an we understand that the children of Israel lived in such a condition at the time Musa arrived on the scene. As described in the Qur’an, Musa went to Pharaoh as “a member of an enslaved tribe.

The Egyptians just don’t want to give the Hebrews any credit for building the pyramids.
- Anonymous
  
  Even taking that at face value, though, where does it say the Hebrews were enslaved during the Old Kingdom and built the pyramids?
- ill lich
  
  I don’t care what ancient religious text you quote, the bottom line is that there is no archeological evidence that the pyramids were built by Jewish slaves, or evidence of a mass exodus of said slaves across the Sinai peninsula to present day Israel/Palestine, any more than there is evidence of large wooden ark on Mt. Ararat (yes yes, I’ve seen those photos of the boat-shaped stone outcropping, but a stone shaped like a boat is still a stone.) There IS archeological evidence that the Israelites actually developed out of the Canaanites they claimed to have driven out of Israel post-Egyptian exodus, implying the whole tribes-of-Israel story was just a myth created to give meaning and cohesion to a disparate group of peoples along the Jordan river.
  - Xopher
    
    Thank you. I, too, am an Exodus denier. Israel was never in Egypt. The Egyptians were the only ones trying to write down history at that time, and there’s no mention of the Hebrews at all, except for a minor border skirmish. Certainly no massive plagues, certainly no flight across the Red Sea.
    
    That’s a nice story, but that’s all it is.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    there is no archeological evidence that the pyramids were built by Jewish slaves
    
    Weren’t the pyramids mostly built around 2500 BCE? And isn’t the Hebrew sojourn in Egypt accounted to be around 1500 BCE or later?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Oooh, krazy kreationist links. And it was such a slow day.
Anonymous

Sweet, bible literalism on the boing.
Anonymous

I don’t really know the Bible or the Quran, but the Islam is somewhat rooted in Christianity. And what the Quran or the Bible tell isn’t necessary the historic truth. I have no idea if the pyramids were build by slaves or not, but citing these texts as a source is no proof either.
Brainspore

So the pyramids were built by mummies!? Awesome!
- Moriarty
  
  No, no. The mummies were in charge. My guess is that most of work was done by skeletons:
  
  http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30832
Shay Guy

Pyramids not built by slaves

YES, WE KNOW. Looking at Exodus makes it quite clear that the Hebrews had nothing to do with the pyramids. (I learned this in what, sixth grade?)
Anonymous

Part of the project could of been built by one group of workers, and part by others? It makes sense, use as much resources as you have available to you; lower class, slaves, criminals etc…

Also the bible never states the Pharaoh who was in power of the time of exodus (or any Pharaoh for that matter) so the Bible claims of the Jewish people building the pyramids can be seen as just as controversial.
- Xopher
  
  There’s a certain amount of evidence to suggest that when the Bible says “Pharaoh,” it means Rameses II, whose actual name was Us-Ar-Maat-Re (later corrupted into Ozymandias). That doesn’t mean he did any of the things attributed to him in Exodus, or that any of the events described there actually happened.
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

Okay, low wage migrant workers built the pyramids. Why split hairs, though?
Jonathan Badger

We know this already from Will Cuppy (A sort of proto Dave Barry from the 1940s). His greatest work “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody” has this to say:

“It is very old fashioned to call Khufu a cruel tyrant for making 100,000 fellahin, or peasants, work twenty years on his tomb. Scholars say he worked them only during the three months of the flood season, when they were not engaged in agriculture and were likely to find themselves at a loose end and get into mischief. The Egyptian lower classes were very immoral, always drinking or something. Thus, Khufu was doing them a favor by keeping their minds occupied and the whole affair was more or less one big picnic. At the same time, the exercise developed their characters and taught them the dignity of labor. The majority of pyramid workers were not slaves, as we used to be told. They were free men with rights and privileges specified in the Constitution.”
Anonymous

Finding a tomb with a skeleton inside near the pyramids does not in any way mean that the skeleton is from a worker who built the pyramids. It is completely unscientific for Mr Hawass to make this claim.
These people could have been buried where they were for really any reason.
Mr Hawass is a politician and not a scientist. His first goal is the glorification of Egypt. Science and findings will be changed to fit this goal.
cymk

I think we are all forgetting the obvious answer: the pyramids were built by aliens.
Nadreck

Of course the pyramids weren’t built by slaves. Widespread domestic slavery didn’t show up in Egypt until much later and exporting slaves to the Pacific and the much smaller Atlantic trades came much later than that. It was finally abolished by the good’ol British Empire via General Gordon’s military actions – much to the dismay of the rulers at the time. However there was nothing they nor any of the other African rulers could do about it. Britannia ruled the waves and stopped letting people ship slaves around on them. A few potentates went to London to sue over this patently illegal and unilateral interference in a trade that was perfectly legal under international law but they didn’t get anywhere. Such Imperialism! Such disrespect for the Rule Of Law!
Raj77

It should really be pointed out in reply to Nadreck above that slavery was enthusiastically participated in in the British Empire until 1833.
- Anonymous
  
  32 years before the U.S.A. methinks.
  
  Tedious Captcha
Kobie

I don’t get why this is news everywhere. It’s long been known that the pyramids were built by free workers – the BBC even had a major series years ago depicting the lives of the pyramid builders.

It’s just yet another chance for Zahi Hawass to grab some more attention for himself. I went to see him talk once – supposedly about a new find. He spent a full two hours telling everybody how marvellous he was. Git.
Baldhead

“The Ancient Egyptians looked like Sidney Poiter and James Earl Jones rather than Yul Brenner & Charlton Heston.”

this is where i point out the hieroglyphics which depicted people with many skin tones, the dominant one for egyptians being pretty similar to what you’s see all around you in cairo today. Compare to depictions of Nubians (on/ off vassal nation in what is now ethipoia) which are more “african” looking.
dainel

Cattle weigh about 500kg, sheep about 70kg. About half of this is meat.

10,000 people eating 21 cattle + 23 sheep daily, means each person gets about 0.6kg of meat a day. An American today eats about 0.2kg of meat per day, and that is about double the worldwide average.
- Anonymous
  
  “Cattle weigh about 500kg, sheep about 70kg. About half of this is meat.”
  
  I can’t be bothered to go research right now; but my guess is that your average weights are for 1st world, 21st century cows, which are grossly over-sized and over-fed. Their cows were probably half the size.
jaytkay

That article has no evidence, pro or con-slavery. Nothing. It mentions 12 graves. Of an estimated 10,000 workers.

Also, the blog post, the linked article and commenters here are entangling two questions:
Were the workers slaves? (No clues presented)
Did the Israelites build them? (No, they were built centuries too early for that)
strangefriend

And guess what? The Ancient Egyptians looked like Sidney Poiter and James Earl Jones rather than Yul Brenner & Charlton Heston.
EvilSpirit

What is this, “fair and balanced” all of a sudden, where we have to present both sides no matter how unreasonable? Good luck finding any “evidence pro slavery.” The notion that the pyramids must have been built by slaves is nothing but a wild-ass guess made centuries later by the Greeks.
Afterthought

Yeah, slaves had nothing to do with it.
Anonymous

The Ancient Egyptians looked like Sidney Poiter and James Earl Jones rather than Yul Brenner & Charlton Heston.

Dream on. We have bones, and they looked like Zero Mostel.

Seriously, go ask a real live archeologist instead of somebody with a racial axe to grind.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Actually, ancient Egypt was dominated by several ethnic groups during its multi-millennial history. If his funeral mask is any indication, Tutankhamun looked like people from the present-day Horn of Africa. If his mummy is any indication, Ramesses II looked like Aaron Spelling.
jaytkay

The notion that the pyramids must have been built by slaves is nothing but a wild-ass guess

As is the notion that they were respected paid laborers. I have no idea if they were slaves or not, and I am not arguing either way.

I simply said the article is about 12 graves, and does not support the headline, “New Find Shows Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids”.
aml

The article says that the rumor that the Pyramids were built by slaves stems from Menachem Begin’s visit 1977. I always thought the rumor was started by cheap Haggadot with cheesy clip art.
Deidzoeb

“So shut up and work harder,” says my boss.
SamSam

1) It seems quite likely, from other evidence, that the pyramids were probably not built by slaves, and almost certainly not by Israelites.

2) But as jaytkay says, how on Earth is 12 graves proof of this? Even if there were slaves, there would have been foremen, overseers and what-not. Many of these probably would have been free-born and quite likely high-ranking members of Egyptian society. Heck, the graves could have been those of the chief architects.

Unless there is more evidence in the tombs that the article isn’t telling us, it really doesn’t show anything.