Egyptian tourists have been told for decades that tens of thousands of slaves built the pyramids, but a temple wall suggests something far stranger. High-priest records and village pay stubs reveal the workers were fed, housed, and respected laborers.
For most of recorded modern history, popular understanding of how the Great Pyramid was built rested on a single secondhand account. Around 450 BC, the Greek traveler Herodotus visited Egypt and reported that 100,000 men had labored for 20 years under harsh conditions to raise the monument. He recorded oral tradition passed down across roughly two thousand years, a gap comparable to someone today…