17. Did Slaves Build the Pyramids?
Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2530 BC for the Pharaoh Khufu, was the world’s biggest building until the early twentieth century. Its construction had been a massive endeavor that involved moving and piling up six and a half million tons of stone, in blocks weighing as much as nine tons each. All of that was accomplished via manual labor, using little more than ropes and wood. The Old Testament’s portrayal of the Ancient Israelites’ forced labor for Pharaoh popularized the notion that widespread slave labor was common in Ancient Egypt.
Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and subsequent historians, fiction, as well as film in the modern era, further cemented the perception that the Pharaohs used slave labor for their great building projects. As a result, the notion that slaves – and specifically, ancient Israelite slaves – had built the Egyptian pyramids became entrenched in the popular imagination.
