Who Actually Built the Pyramids

For a long time, the people who built the pyramids of Giza were filled in by imagination. Ancient Greek visitors were told of armies of labourers driven for decades, and modern stories have offered slaves, lost civilisations and visitors from space. All of them share one assumption: that the builders left no trace.

They did. Over the past forty years, archaeologists have found the builders' names, their town, their food, their tombs and even a logbook kept by one of their crews. Together they give a clear answer to the question in the title.

The scale of the job

The Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty around 2600 BC, over about 26 years. It originally stood 146.6 metres tall, with sides about 230 metres long, and contains roughly 2.3 million blocks: about 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite and 500,000 tonnes of mortar. It remained the tallest structure made by humans for more than 3,700 years.

Those numbers explain why the question of the builders matters. A project this size needs not just labour but planning, supply chains, food and housing, and those leave evidence on the ground.

Names inside the pyramid

The first clue came from inside the pyramid itself. In the small relieving chambers above the King's Chamber, spaces never meant to be seen, the work crews left painted graffiti with their gang names. Several include the king's name, such as "The gang, The white crown of Khnum-Khufu is powerful". These are the marks of organised teams, proud enough of their work to name themselves after the king they served.

A crew's logbook

In 2013 a French mission led by Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard excavated papyri at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient harbour on the Red Sea coast. Among them were the logbooks of an inspector called Merer, written about 4,500 years ago in the reign of Khufu. They are the oldest known papyri with writing on them.

Most of the text lists the daily work of Merer and his crew. The best-preserved part records them moving white limestone by boat from the Tura quarries to Giza, from July to November of year 27 of the reign. The logs use the Great Pyramid's original name, Akhet-Khufu, and mention Ankhhaf, Khufu's half-brother, as an official. Tallet believes the stone was used for the pyramid's outer casing. Zahi Hawass, the former head of Egypt's antiquities service, called it the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century.

The town of the builders

Outside the wall of the Giza complex, south-east of the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure, a team led by the archaeologist Mark Lehner has excavated a planned settlement from the middle of the Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2520 to 2472 BC. It had communal sleeping quarters, bakeries, breweries, kitchens, a copper workshop and a place for treating the sick. Bread, beef and fish were staples of the diet.

A town like this is the logistics of pyramid building made visible. Workers were housed, fed on a scale that needed cattle and fish supplies, and organised into teams, which matches what the graffiti and the logbook show from the other end of the operation.

The builders' tombs

In 1990, tombs of pyramid workers were found close to the pyramids, and another burial site nearby in 2009. The workers were buried in mudbrick tombs with bread and beer for the afterlife, though they were not mummified. Being buried within sight of the king's pyramid was an honour, not something granted to slaves.

The picture that emerges is a permanent core of skilled specialists, architects, masons, metalworkers and carpenters employed by the king, supported by larger rotating crews of labourers, most of them from poor families. Modern estimates put the workforce at 20,000 to 30,000 people working year-round over two decades or more, far fewer than the 100,000 Herodotus was told about when he visited around 450 BC.

Ancient numbers were far larger. Herodotus was told of gangs of 100,000 working in three-month shifts, and the historian Diodorus gave 360,000. A 1999 construction study that worked through the tasks one by one arrived at an average of about 13,200 workers, with a peak of around 40,000.

What is still argued about

How the blocks were raised is still debated. The ancient historian Diodorus wrote of ramps, and most modern theories use ramps of some kind, straight, zigzagging or spiralling, but there is no settled consensus on the exact technique. That is an open engineering question, not an open question about who did the work.

Claims of lost civilisations or outside help usually start from the gap where the evidence used to be, and the gap has been closing for decades. Ancient engineering is often underestimated in the same way; for a story from ancient Greece, see the Antikythera mechanism. And for how new tools are changing the search for sites like these, read about AI in archaeology.