In 2013, archaeologists working in sealed caves along Egypt’s Red Sea coast discovered what are now recognized as the oldest inscribed papyri ever found in Egypt. Among the documents was the work log of an official named Merer, whose crew transported limestone from the quarries at Tura to the construction site of the Great Pyramid, referred to in the text by its ancient Egyptian name, Akhet Khufu.
The find provided a firsthand written account of how the pyramid was built, a project long understood primarily through the writing of the Greek historian Herodotus. Around 450 BC, Herodotus visited Egypt and recorded an account he had heard from local guides, claiming that 100,000 men labored for 20 years under harsh conditions to construct the monument. He did not witness the work himself and was relaying oral tradition passed down over roughly two millennia. That account became the foundation for most popular depictions of pyramid construction, reinforced in later centuries by films and popular culture. Egyptologists, however, have long regarded it as a myth with little support in contemporary Egyptian records.
A series of archaeological discoveries beginning in 1990 changed the picture significantly. In April of that year, a tourist riding a horse near the Giza Plateau was thrown when the animal stumbled over a mudbrick wall buried beneath the sand. The incident led to the excavation of a tomb belonging to a man named Pet Absisu and his wife. Continued digging revealed an entire cemetery for ordinary workers, not nobles or royalty. Parallel excavations led by archaeologist Mark Lehner uncovered a nearby settlement, now known as Heit el-Ghurab, covering roughly 39 acres just south of the pyramids.
The settlement included barracks-style housing, bakeries, breweries, butchery workshops, copper smelting facilities, grain storage buildings, and what researchers believe may have been a facility for treating workplace injuries. Zooarchaeologist Richard Redding, analyzing animal bones recovered from the site, found evidence that workers regularly ate beef, sheep, and pork. That diet suggests a workforce receiving substantial rations rather than subsistence-level provisions. Researchers estimate the settlement housed and fed between 10,000 and 20,000 workers at a time.
Further evidence came from markings found in the pyramid itself. In 1837, British Army officer Richard William Howard Vyse used gunpowder to enter a series of sealed relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber. Inside, he found red ochre inscriptions left by workers, including the names of labor gangs such as “the Friends of Khufu” and “the Drunkards of Menkaure.” The names suggest organized crews with their own identities, working under a rotation system that historians call phyles, which appears to have mirrored the crew structure used on boats.
The papyri from Wadi el-Jarf added a detailed daily account of this system. Merer’s log records the activities of his 200-man crew over several months in a straightforward format, listing where they traveled and what tasks they completed each day. The entries describe hauling limestone blocks from Tura and sailing them toward the pyramid complex. Other papyri document the movement of bread, beer, grain, and meat to feed the workforce. In 2017, the full translation of the documents was published by the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo.
Physical remains from the worker cemetery also support the picture of a cared-for workforce. Skeletal evidence shows healed bone fractures and healed amputations, indicating that injured workers received medical treatment and survived long enough to recover. In January 2010, Egyptian authorities announced the discovery of additional tombs containing a dozen skeletons alongside jars that had once held beer and bread, provisions intended for the afterlife. Zahi Hawass, then Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the discoveries showed the pyramid builders had been paid laborers who came from poor families across Egypt and were honored with burial near the pyramids when they died.
Scholars now describe the workforce as peasants conscripted on a rotating, part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans who remained on site year-round. This system, sometimes referred to as corvée labor, was a form of obligatory service owed to the state. Workers were not permanently owned as property, were fed and housed during their service, and rotated in and out on a schedule tied to the agricultural calendar. The annual Nile flood made farmland unworkable for part of the year, freeing up a large rural labor force for such projects.
Mark Lehner has noted that obligatory labor owed to a ruler was a normal feature of many ancient economies, not a uniquely Egyptian arrangement. He has also cautioned against oversimplifying the picture in the opposite direction, noting that there is evidence ancient Egyptians did capture people and put them to work, though the details of that practice are better documented for later periods than for the Old Kingdom era when the pyramids were built.
The existence of alternative theories involving lost civilizations or extraterrestrial builders is not supported by any archaeological evidence. No inscription, papyrus, or physical find from Giza, Wadi el-Jarf, Tura, or related sites suggests anything other than organized human labor using documented tools and techniques. The graffiti names ordinary work gangs, Merer’s log describes routine boat schedules and cargo loads, and the workers’ cemetery contains ordinary human remains with ordinary injuries and medical treatment.
For roughly 2,500 years, popular understanding of who built the pyramids rested on Herodotus’s secondhand account. Over the past three decades, archaeological work has replaced that account with a more detailed and better-documented picture. The pyramids were built by organized, provisioned, rotating crews of Egyptian laborers under a system of obligatory state service, supervised by skilled year-round craftsmen. The evidence, in stone, bone, and papyrus, had been there all along, waiting for anyone to look properly.
