Were the pyramids really built by slaves?
Stumbled on an article in Harvard Magazine about Mark Lehner’s archaeological studies of pyramid builders. Lehner’s team uncovered a town where the workers who had build the three great pyramids of Giza lived. The town contained enormous (by ancient standards) granaries, a fish processing hall, various food-preparation facilities, and barracks for housing a total of at most 2000 workers. The slaughterhouses were the interesting part. You see, there were a lot of cattle bones, mostly belonging to bulls under two years old. Judging by the amount bones, the two thousand workers ate prime beef every day! Nobody feeds slaves prime beef. Look at any society which made use of slave labor on large projects: Ancient Greece, pre-Civil War Southern US, Stalin-era USSR… In all times, slaves, especially slaves working in large groups, were fed only enough to keep them alive — and often less. Furthermore, consider the horribly inefficient cattle-raising techniques of 4500 years ago, and the fact that the beef had to be shipped from distant provinces (no cattle ranches on the Giza plateau).
The excellent diet, as well as graffiti on the town walls, suggests that the pyramids’ workers were in fact free, well-paid Egyptians. They were split into five teams, which presumably rotated, with one team working on the pyramid while the other four were back at home tending to their own farms.
Of course, it’s possible that slave labor was used in addition to the free workers. The professional workers’ town (or rather its foundations, the walls were mostly razed) survived because it was built from good stone. Perhaps it was surrounded by a reed-and-mud shantytown of slave huts, all traces of which disappeared over the millenia… I imagine that more study of pyramid bulders’ graffiti is needed to answer this question.