Evidence Reveals How the Pyramids Were Actually Built

You probably remember learning about the Egyptian pyramids at some point in elementary school, and even if you weren't part of the public school system, you were bound to encounter some information about them at a museum or in a book. These mammoths of structures are hard to escape, as they're famous for being grandiose in nature, to put it lightly. The tallest pyramid in Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Giza, once stood 481 feet tall, but has since eroded down to 451 feet because of vandalism. For you to better imagine this, the average three-story building stands just 45 feet tall. So if we're doing the math correctly on this one, and we know we are, the pyramid would have stood at the height of a 32-story building. So who's responsible for the creation of these ridiculously tall and ever-elusive mysterious pyramids? We'll get to the bottom of it today, in this episode of The Infographics Show, Who Built The Pyramids? Before we get into the nitty-gritty of who built them, let's start with some Pyramid 101, shall we? There are about 80 pyramids currently standing in Egypt. The oldest is the Pyramid of Djoser, and it's located in Saqqara, north of the city of Memphis. The pyramid was built in 2630 BC for King Djoser. Many of the more popularized and notable pyramids are in Giza, a city on the outskirts of Cairo, some of which include the Giza Necropolis, Pyramid of Khufu, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and the Khafre Pyramid. Ancient Egyptians were one of the first civilizations of people who believed in an afterlife. They didn't see death as the cessation of life, but rather as an interruption. They believed that when a king died, a part of his spirit, or his kha, remained intact with his physical body. The mummification we've all come to know about that has also been popularized in the media served the purpose of preserving a king's spirit that they believed lived on. They basically hoped that the king's soul would return to his body and give it life again. So, the king's kha was never left wanting. They'd also bury riches like gold, vessels, food, and furniture along with the dead king. Egyptians really weren't messing around with this belief. When the pharaoh was still alive, they revered him as an incarnate of Horus, the god of the sky, and when he died, he took on the form of Osiris, the god of fertility and the underworld. His responsibility as Osiris was to set the sun, while the new pharaoh, his son, would raise it. They believed this symbolic relationship was important in maintaining cosmic balance. Back to the pyramids though. They were built to last, made mostly of stone, like limestone, which was used to build the core of the pyramid. While white limestone was used for its outer casing and for the interior walls, pink granite was used on the walls inside and basalt and alabaster were sometimes used for the floors. Egypt has sometimes been referred to as the state of stone, so there was never a shortage of it. The basalt they used sometimes came from the Fayum Depression, one of the major oases of the western desert, while alabaster was from Luxor, a city on the eastern bank of the Nile. Dennis Stocks, an ancient technology consultant, believed that 45 workers were needed to move a 35,900 pound, that's 16.3 tons by the way, block, and 8 people to move a 6,060 pound block, as he noted in his 2003 book, Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology, Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt. One single pyramid project could have taken between 20 to 30 years to finish building. For the longest time, it was thought that slaves who were at the behest of an evil pharaoh built the pyramids, and we can blame this fake news first and foremost on Herodotus. The Greek historian who wrote that the Great Pyramid was constructed by 100,000 slaves who labored constantly and were relieved every three months by a fresh gang. The BBC further argues that there's no way King Khufu, the fourth dynasty ruler of Egypt responsible for the commissioning of the Great Pyramid, had a body of slaves this large to work for him, and there's no way that all of them could work at the same time. We can also thank western Hollywood movies in part for perpetuating the myth. Movies like The Ten Commandments, that epic from 1956, and we're not just saying that. It's literally an epic saga that ran for 220 minutes, and portrayed slaves as the builders. Another misconception that's circulated is that the Jews built the pyramids. This lie started when the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menahem Begin, made the claim when he visited the National Museum of Cairo in 1977. Amahai Mazar, a professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Israeli archaeologist, refutes Begin's claim because it simply doesn't make any sense. No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built, Mazar was quoted as saying. Dorothy Resig, an editor of Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington, D.C., said this falsehood could have also stemmed from a verse in Exodus which says something to the effect of, So the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel with backbreaking labor, and the Pharaoh put them to work to build buildings. That's not exactly the way the verse reads, but you get the picture. Then there are those people out there who believe aliens are the ones who built them, and let's all let out one huge, exhaustive sigh. This far-reaching theory looks a little bit like this. If light moves at 299,792,458 meters per second and the geographic coordinates for the Great Pyramid are 29,979,2458 degrees north, and humans weren't capable of measuring the speed of light with this type of accuracy until 1950, then advanced aliens must have time traveled back to Earth from the future to build the pyramids. People who believe in the ancient aliens theory also think that aliens built Stonehenge in the UK and other ancient monuments. Look, we're not responsible for what you guys believe and don't believe, but we're saying that graffiti inside the pyramids along with other evidence tell a much different story and have gotten archaeologists, and now us, closer to having a better idea of who built the pyramids, how they would have lived, and how they did it. The BBC notes that archaeologists have agreed that the workforce behind the Great Pyramid was made up of two teams, the primary workers and the temporary workers. There were about 4,000 primary workers who worked on the quarries and were haulers and masons. They lived with their families in a pyramid village. The temporary team was made up of 16,000 to 20,000 workers who built ramps, shaped tools, made mortar, and were in charge of miscellaneous activities like supplying food, clothing, and fuel. They lived in a separate camp near the pyramid village. The state of denial was also important for pyramid builders to take into account. For the building of the pyramid at Giza, Mark Lehner, more on him later, and archaeologist Zahi Hawass believed that a skeleton crew could work on the pyramids throughout the year, but a larger force would labor in the late summer and early autumn when the Nile flooded surrounding fields. Archaeologists haven't discovered all there is to know about the villages and camps where pyramid builders dwelled, but excavations done between 1999 and 2002 by archaeologist Lehner shed more light. We know they slept on mud ramps, which served as a barrack-style bed. These barracks were in galleries, which can be thought of as huge dorms in which up to 2,000 temporary workers would stay. These sleeping galleries also had spaces in the back for cooking and copperworking. In 2016, archaeologist and Egyptologist Yuki Norikawa spoke out to an audience at a taping for Nat Geo Live. In that discussion, he said there was a vast amount of data on the outside of the pyramid, but not enough on the inside, or core, of the structure themselves, which would shed even more light on the construction techniques. Before going into his discoveries, he laid out three hypotheses for how the core of a pyramid would shed light on construction techniques. For example, if the inside of the pyramid was made up of horizontally arranged blocks, these would have been amenable to using a straight ramp. What he found was unlike any of these, though. He and other members of his team, some of which were computer scientists, climbed the Great Pyramid for two and a half hours and found a notch with a crevice and then a cave that was further in. The team didn't have a laser scanner that would have been too heavy and clunky to carry while climbing up, but they did manage to capture 20 minutes worth of video footage, which they then broke down further into 300,000 3D images. Through these 3D image renderings, they found out that the cave was used for packing of sand and debris, something called the chamber method. He noted that it was also used for the construction of Egyptian temples and cities. What did pyramid builders eat? Turns out they had no beef with beef. As much as 21 cattle and 23 sheep were sent to them daily from farms to get their meat fix in, they also ate fish and liked to kick it back with some beers. And while we noted before that these people weren't slaves, pyramid building came at a cost. Discoveries of their bodies show that they suffered from arthritis and their lower vertebrae were impacted by the wear and tear. Ouch. As we mentioned before, an enormous amount of stone was needed to build these pyramids, so the Egyptians had to figure out an efficient way of moving the blocks that they eventually stacked up. An illustration in the 12th Dynasty tomb of Jehutyhotep of 172 men pulling a 60-ton alabaster on a sledge has given experts a better sense of how they went about it. Those sledges they'd drag across the hot desert sand were simply wooden planks with upturned edges. So, not the most sophisticated, but still clever. To make their lives easier, they'd wet the sand to make it easier to drag the sledge across. And they were old school when it came to measuring. They didn't use rulers, but a cubit, which was equal to the length from your tip of the middle finger to your elbow, and a hand was a unit that served as the guide, the width of your hand with the thumb on the side. Cubits served them when they dug post holes at ten cubits along the base outline and laid out the site in a grid. Pyramid builders were precise in that they wanted to make sure the sides of the structures ran parallel to the north-south and east-west axes according to how stuff works. To achieve this, they had to rely on nature instead of using compasses, which weren't at their disposal. The movements of the stars helped them identify which way was north, and then they used sighting rocks and circles to identify the rising and setting stars, or the sun's shadow. Finding out the other cardinal directions using lines and right angles then became a piece of cake. They were certainly a resourceful bunch. In his book, Engineering the Pyramids, Dr. Richard Perry hypothesizes that they might have also used a cradle-like machine that suspended the rocks and allowed them to be rolled by a few people. The Obayashi Corporation, a Japanese construction company, went so far as to conduct a test in 1996 to see if a two-and-a-half-ton block could be dragged by 18 men over 18 meters per minute, and the study proved that it could be done. In 2013, French archaeologist Pierre Tallet and his team discovered the papyrus writings of a pyramid-building official simply named Merreux in a cave in Wadi al-Jarf, an area on the Red Sea coast. These gave an unprecedented look at how sophisticated the teams worked, specifically when it came to obtaining copper. And their method involved an L-shaped jetty that was 200 meters long. According to Merreux's writings, they'd use this harbor to protect a fleet of cargo boats that would sail to the Sinai Peninsula, where copper would be mined, before returning to Wadi al-Jarf, then using the materials for the construction of the Great Pyramid. Now, using all this, you can whip out your impressive pyramid-building knowledge at the next cocktail party when the topic comes up, or simply slap your silly friend who thinks the aliens built them. You make the choice. The pyramid-building, brain-eating aliens that secretly run our show and pay us to convince you that they didn't build the pyramids tell us that you would enjoy learning more about ancient Egypt. So, check out our other video, Unbelievable Stuff They Didn't Teach You About Ancient Egypt.