Which egyptians built the pyramids

To prepare for the next world they erected temples to the gods and massive pyramid tombs for themselves—filled with all the things each ruler would need to guide and sustain himself in the next world. Pharaoh Khufu began the first Giza pyramid project, circa B.

His Great Pyramid is the largest in Giza and towers some feet meters above the plateau. Its estimated 2. Khufu's son, Pharaoh Khafre, built the second pyramid at Giza, circa B. His necropolis also included the Sphinx, a mysterious limestone monument with the body of a lion and a pharaoh's head. The Sphinx may stand sentinel for the pharaoh's entire tomb complex. The third of the Giza Pyramids is considerably smaller than the first two. Built by Pharaoh Menkaure circa B.

Each massive pyramid is but one part of a larger complex, including a palace, temples, solar boat pits, and other features. The ancient engineering feats at Giza were so impressive that even today scientists can't be sure how the pyramids were built. Yet they have learned much about the people who built them and the political power necessary to make it happen. The builders were skilled, well-fed Egyptian workers who lived in a nearby temporary city. Archaeological digs on the fascinating site have revealed a highly organized community, rich with resources, that must have been backed by strong central authority.

It's likely that communities across Egypt contributed workers, as well as food and other essentials, for what became in some ways a national project to display the wealth and control of the ancient pharaohs. Such revelations have led Zahi Hawass , secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, to note that in one sense it was the Pyramids that built Egypt—rather than the other way around.

These workers appear to have travelled over much of Egypt, possibly as far as the Sinai Desert, carrying out various construction projects and tasks that had been assigned to them.

This raises the question of whether they were part of a more permanent professional force rather than a group of seasonal agricultural workers who would return to their fields. According to the papyri, the workers were given a diet that included dates, vegetables, poultry and meat, said Pierre Tallet, an Egyptology professor at Paris-Sorbonne University who is deciphering the papyri and is co-leader of the team that found them.

In addition to the healthy diet, the papyri describes members of the work team regularly getting textiles that were "probably considered as a kind of money at that time," Tallet told Live Science.

Additionally, officials in high-ranking positions who were involved in pyramid construction "might have received grants of land," said Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates AERA , a research institute based in Massachusetts.

Historical records show that at times in Egypt's history, land grants were given out to officials. However, it's unknown whether land grants were also given to officials involved with pyramid construction. Lehner's team has been excavating a town at Giza that was lived in and frequented by some of the workers who were constructing the pyramid of Menkaure. So far, the archaeologists have found evidence that this town's ancient inhabitants used to bake large amounts of bread, slaughter thousands of animals and brew copious amounts of beer.

But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid. Our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges; we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques, and operations, without testing the entire building project. One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the Eastern Desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried stones.

Now, they did it with an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet—they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night, out there—if they can quarry stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years.

And it comes out to between and men. Now, I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in an additional team of 20 men, so that 12 men become 32, and now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1, men. And that's quarried locally at Giza—most of the stone is local stone.

So, then, because of our mapping and because of our approach where we looked at what is the shape of the ground here, where is the quarry, where is the Pyramid, where would the ramp have run, we could come up with a figure of how many men it would take to schlep the stones up to the Pyramid.

Now it's often said that the stones were delivered at a rate of one every two minutes or so. And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the Egyptians of Khufu's day.

But the stones didn't go in one after another, you see. And you can actually work out the coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a one-and-a-half-ton block over a slick surface with great ease. And then you could come up with very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an average-sized block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to the Pyramid.

And you could even factor in different configurations of the ramp, which would give you a different length. Well, working in such ways—and I challenge anybody to join in the challenge—it comes out that you can actually get the delivery that you need.

You need stones delivered every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten-hour day, right? Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something like 2,, somewhere in that area. We can go over the exact figures. So now we've got 1, men in the quarry, which is a very generous estimate, 2, men delivering.

So that's 3, Okay, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints. So there's a difference there. But let's gloss over that for a moment. One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could is just how many men can get their hands a two- or three-ton block.

You can't have 50 men working on one block; you can only get about four or five, six guys at most, working on a block—say, two on levers, cutters, and so on. You put pivots under it, and as few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it. There are all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get too many men on a block. So then you figure out how many stones have to be set to keep up with this rate, to do it all in 20 years.

It actually requires 5, or fewer men, including the stone-setters. Now, the stone-setting gets a bit complicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from each corner and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing and then the core. And I'm going to gloss over that. But the challenge is out there: 5, men to actually do the building and the quarrying and the schlepping from the local quarry.

This doesn't count the men cutting the granite and shipping it from Aswan or the men over in Tura [ancient Egypt's principal limestone quarry, east of Giza].

That increases the numbers somewhat, and that's what things like NOVA's series on ancient technologies really bring home, I think. No, we're not recreating ancient society and ancient Pyramid-building percent, probably not even 60 percent.

But we are showing some nuts and bolts that are very useful and insightful, far more than all the armchair theorizing. One of the senior vice presidents decided to take on for a formal address for fellow engineers a program management study of the Great Pyramid. So these are not guys lifting boilers in Manhattan; these are senior civil engineers with one of the largest construction corporations in the United States.

I'm sure they'd be happy to go on record with their study, which looked at what they call "critical path analysis. What tools did they have? They contacted me and other Egyptologists, and we gave them some references. Here's what we know about their tools, the inclined plane, the lever, and so on. And without any secret sophistication or hidden technology, just basically what archeologists say, this is what these folks had. They have very specific calculations on every single aspect, from the gravel for the ramps to baking the bread.

I throw that out there, not because that's gospel truth, but because reasoned construction engineers, who plan great projects like bridges and buildings and earthworks today, look at the Great Pyramid and don't opt out for lost civilizations, extraterrestrials, or hidden technologies.

No, they say it's a very impressive job, extraordinary for the people who lived then and there, but it could be done. They are human monuments. No pyramids are more celebrated than the Great Pyramids of Giza, located on a plateau on the west bank of the Nile River, on the outskirts of modern-day Cairo.

The oldest and largest of the three pyramids at Giza, known as the Great Pyramid , is the only surviving structure out of the famed Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Though Khufu reigned for 23 years B. It was the largest statue in the ancient world, measuring feet long and 66 feet high. In the 18th dynasty c. It is the shortest of the three pyramids feet and is a precursor of the smaller pyramids that would be constructed during the fifth and sixth dynasties.

Though some popular versions of history held that the pyramids were built by slaves or foreigners forced into labor, skeletons excavated from the area show that the workers were probably native Egyptian agricultural laborers who worked on the pyramids during the time of year when the Nile River flooded much of the land nearby.

Approximately 2. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that it took 20 years to build and required the labor of , men, but later archaeological evidence suggests that the workforce might actually have been around 20, Pyramids continued to be built throughout the fifth and sixth dynasties, but the general quality and scale of their construction declined over this period, along with the power and wealth of the kings themselves.

Known as pyramid texts, these are the earliest significant religious compositions known from ancient Egypt. The last of the great pyramid builders was Pepy II B. By the time of his rule, Old Kingdom prosperity was dwindling, and the pharaoh had lost some of his quasi-divine status as the power of non-royal administrative officials grew. Later kings, of the 12th dynasty, would return to pyramid building during the so-called Middle Kingdom phase, but it was never on the same scale as the Great Pyramids.

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