INSIGHT: How the Egyptians Really Built the Pyramids

Maxime Marquette

2026-06-24 13:07:53

A 2,500-Year-Old Mistake

The theory that slaves built the pyramids comes mainly from the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Giza around 450 B.C.— more than 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid was built. He mentioned 100,000 men working in three-month rotations, basing his figures on oral traditions and accounts from local guides. His credibility on this subject is, shall we say, limited—he had no firsthand sources and was visiting a construction site that was two millennia old.

The decisive discovery came in 1990, when Egyptologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner unearthed a builders’ cemetery at the foot of the Giza Plateau. These tombs contained the remains of workers who had died on the job—with evidence of medical care (set fractures, performed amputations, post-surgical follow-up) and honorary inscriptions. Slaves would not have been entitled to dignified tombs or advanced medical care. These men were free workers, either paid or conscripted as part of a labor tax, but treated and buried with respect.

A Complete Workers’ City

Next to the cemetery, Lehner was simultaneously excavating what he called the “Lost City” —the lost city of the builders, a few hundred meters south of the Sphinx. This 7-hectare site included barracks capable of housing 1,600 to 2,000 people per block (likely in bunk beds), industrial bakeries with hundreds of bread molds, copper workshops, fish-processing facilities, and the bones of cattle, sheep, and goats—in quantities sufficient to provide meat for several thousand workers daily. This is not how slaves are treated.

Modern estimates of the number of workers converge around 20, 000 to 30,000 at its peak—including approximately 4,000 to 5,000 permanent skilled workers (quarrymen, stonecutters, masons) and 15,000 to 25,000 rotating workers performing three- to four-month stints. They came from all over Egypt, as confirmed byDNA analyses of the exhumed bones. The construction of the pyramids was a truly national project.

What these archaeologists have unearthed is almost moving: ordinary people, Egyptians from all regions, who came to build the tomb of their god-king and sometimes died on the construction site—cared for, honored, and buried. Not slaves. Men with names and teams bearing names they proudly carried.

The stones: Where did they come from, and how did they get there?

The Discovery of Mérer’s Diary

In 2013, a Franco-Egyptian team led by archaeologist Pierre Tallet (Paris-Sorbonne University) made the most extraordinary discovery since Tutankhamun in the storage caves of the Red Sea port of Wadi al-Jarf: the oldest inscribed papyri ever found in Egypt. These documents date to the 27th year of Khufu’s reign —that is, the final months of the Great Pyramid’s construction.

The most valuable of these texts is the journal of Inspector Mérer, leader of a team of about 40 men (a phyle) belonging to “The Escort of Khufu’s Uraeus is His Bow.” This document is a daily record of his team’s activities: regular round trips between the white limestone quarries at Tura and the Giza Plateau, transporting blocks weighing 2 to 3 metric tons by boat along the Nile. Approximately 200 blocks per month for a single team. The logistical organization revealed here is astonishingly sophisticated: deliveries recorded, rations distributed, and rotations planned.

A network of canals and the Nile as a highway

Mérer’s journal, combined with a study published in 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), confirmed a long-debated hypothesis: the Egyptians had used a branch of the Nile that once flowed at the foot of the Giza Plateau—the “Cheops Canal”—to transport materials to the construction site by water. This branch, now gone, allowed boats loaded with blocks to be floated directly from the quarries at Tura (white limestone for the casing) and from Aswan (pink granite for the interior chambers, transported over 800 km).

The blocks of local limestone (used for the inner core) were quarried immediately at the foot of the plateau—the scars left in the limestone can still be seen today, less than a kilometer from the pyramids. For the pink granite from Aswan used in the King’s Chamber, the logistics were on an entirely different scale: it was transported down the Nile on high-capacity barges, then moved to the construction site via the network of canals. Isotopic analyses of the granite blocks unequivocally confirm their origin in Aswan.

The Mérer Papyrus revealed something unexpected: these ancient builders were meticulous bureaucrats. Progress reports, deliveries, accounting—the pyramid was, above all, a management project. This is perhaps the most modern aspect of the entire story.

Climbing Boulders: The Eternal Question of Ramps

The Debate Between the “Rampists” and the “Machinists”

Once the blocks had been delivered to the base of the plateau, the most spectacular task remained: hoisting them, one by one, onto a structure that grew taller by the day. This is where the archaeological debate is most heated. Two major schools of thought have clashed since antiquity— Diodorus of Sicily already described earthen ramps, while Herodotus mentioned “wooden machines.” Modern archaeologists have inherited this divide: the “rampists” on one side, the “machinists” on the other.

The frontal ramp theory is the most widely accepted: a single ramp made of mud bricks and sand, perpendicular to one face of the pyramid, along which blocks placed on wooden sleds were pulled by teams of men. Modern experiments, notably those by Mark Lehner and Hopkins, have shown that a team of 12 to 20 men could pull a 2-metric-ton block on a sled lubricated with water or oil at a steady pace. Traces of sleds and remnants of lubricant have been found in tomb paintings and in excavations of contemporary construction sites.

The Problem of the Giant Ramp

The problem with a single front ramp is mathematical: to reach the summit of the pyramid with a workable slope (about 8%), the ramp would have had to be longer than the pyramid itself —more than 1,500 meters long for the topmost courses. The volume of materials needed to build such a ramp would have amounted to a quantity of earth and bricks comparable to that of the pyramid itself. Not to mention that it would have had to be demolished afterward.

Other theories have therefore been proposed: a spiral ramp winding around the sides of the pyramid (but with angle issues at the edges), an internal ramp (proposed by architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, who envisioned a helical ramp carved out within the structure itself—a theory now being seriously considered by Egyptologists), and lever systems for the final courses. The truth is likely a combination of methods depending on the height reached and the type of block involved.

What I love about this debate over the ramps is that it’s not over. 4,600 years after construction, the world’s brightest engineers still can’t agree on how it was done. There remains an element of mystery—and that’s just fine.

Organization and precision: what amazes modern engineers

Millimeter-level precision without modern instruments

The Great Pyramid is not just a feat of logistics. It is a feat of geometric precision that surpasses what many engineers would expect from a 21st-century structure built without electronic instruments. The pyramid’s square base is aligned with the four cardinal directions with an error of less than 0.05 degrees. The four sides of the base measure an average of 230.35 meters each, with a maximum variation of 4.4 cm between the longest and shortest sides. The base is level to within 2.1 cm along the entire perimeter.

How did they do it? The Egyptians mastered remarkable measuring tools: the spirit level (for horizontal alignment), the merkhet (a sighting instrument for astronomical alignment), the gnomon (to determine north), and carefully calibrated measuring ropes. Alignment with true north would have been achieved by observing circumpolar stars—likely the North Star of that era, Thuban in the constellation Draco. The Egyptians did not have GPS, but they had the sky and millennia of practical astronomy.

Organization into “phyles” and competitive teams

Merer’s diary and the graffiti found in the pyramid’s inner corridors reveal a surprisingly sophisticated system of work organization. The workers were divided into two large crews of 2,000 men, which were themselves subdivided into five phyles of 200 men, and then into divisions of 20 men led by a foreman. The teams had names—“The Friends of Mykerinos,” “The Drunkards of Mykerinos” for a later construction site—or, in the case of Khufu, names evoking pride and competition. These names suggest a spirit of rivalry between teams, a form of collective motivation reminiscent of modern principles of team management.

Graffiti inscriptions on the pyramid’s inner blocks—discovered during 19th-century excavations—provide the only direct evidence in hieroglyphs from inside the monument. They mention teams, foremen’s names, and celebrations. Beneath those millions of metric tons of stone, men left their collective signatures for eternity.

Graffiti on the blocks of a 4,600-year-old pyramid. Team names. Maybe even jokes. This small detail makes me love these builders more than any epic tale: they were human, and they knew it.

Conclusion: A mystery that has been largely solved, but not entirely

What Science Has Shown

Thanks to archaeological discoveries from the 20th and 21st centuries—the builders’ cemetery, the “Lost City,” Mérer’s diary, and the PNAS study on the Nile—we can now confidently assert several things. The pyramids were built by free Egyptian workers, organized into hierarchical teams, who were fed, cared for, and respected. The blocks were transported by water via a network of canals connected to the Nile. Local limestone formed the bulk of the structure, white limestone from Tura provided the glossy outer casing (now almost entirely stripped away), and granite from Aswan was used for the interior chambers. Ramps, sleds, levers, and highly sophisticated team management made the assembly possible.

What remains uncertain: the exact details of the system used to hoist the blocks for the upper courses, the precise methods of astronomical alignment, and the definitive resolution of the “ramp versus machine” debate. These questions continue to fuel archaeological research—and that’s good news, because they ensure that the Pyramid of Khufu will continue to fascinate and challenge future generations.

The more we know, the greater our admiration grows

There is a common misconception that solving the mystery of an ancient monument diminishes its magic. With the pyramids, the opposite is true. Knowing that it was ordinary people —stonecutters, sailors, bakers, doctors, scribes—who accomplished this using copper tools, ropes, wooden sleds, and human ingenuity makes the whole thing infinitely more impressive than an extraterrestrial explanation. The pyramids of Giza are not an incomprehensible mystery: they are a testament to what humanity can accomplish when it organizes itself, eats well, believes in its project—and leaves graffiti on the walls.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist