Ancient Egyptian pyramid-builders given their own tombs

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

Tomb discovery helps solve ancient slavery riddle of the pyramids

The location of tombs discovered in Egypt helps prove the men who built the great pyramids were not slaves after all, say archeologists.

A set of tombs belonging to the workers who built them has been discovered which sheds light on how they lived and ate more than 4,000 years ago.

The thousands of men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world regularly ate meat and worked three-month rotating shifts.

They were so well regarded they were also given the honour of being buried in mud brick tombs within the shadow of the sacred pyramids they worked on if they died during construction.
The tombs, revealed today by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, date back to the country's fourth dynasty between 2575 BC and 2467 BC.

It was during this time that the great pyramids were built, according to the head of the Council, Zahi Hawass.

Graves belonging to workers who helped build the pyramids were first discovered in the area in 1990 but further discoveries such as this show the workers were paid labourers rather than slaves.

Mr Hawass said: 'These tombs were built beside the King's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves.

'If they were slaves they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's.'

He added that archeological evidence at the site indicated that the 10,000-strong army of workers ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep a day, sent to them from farms in northern and southern Egypt. The workers were rotated every three months.

The discovery also helps experts study the social classes that made up Egyptian society.

Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, said: 'It is important to find tombs that belong to lower class people that are not made out of stone and tell you the social origin and wealth of a range of people.'

Workers' tombs of this era were usually conical in shape and made from mud brick. They would then be covered in white plaster, probably echoing the nearby limestone-clad pyramids of the kings.

The most important of the new discoveries was a tomb belonging to a man named Idu.

It was a regular structure with a plaster-covered mud brick casing. The tomb containing skeletal remains and featured burial shafts encased in white limestone and clay pots.

These ancient Egyptian laborers seem better treated than some construction workers living today.

[Darth Wong]

Interesting, but a couple of questions come to mind:

1) Why couldn't the work force be partially composed of slaves? Why wouldn't you have slaves for the most menial or dangerous parts of the job, and freemen for the other kinds of work? The article seems to suggest that it must be one or the other: either they were all slaves or they weren't.

2) Why does a burial tomb mean that the person couldn't have been a slave? Roman gladiators were slaves, and they got burial tombs.

[Kingmaker]

Err, this is old new. We've known that the Great Pyramids weren't built by slaves for a couple years now at least (I remember learning about this back during High School). I think the source for the use of slave labor came from Herodotus, who was in turn talking to Egyptian priests a couple thousand years later.

Besides, slaves couldn't have built them, since proper runway construction requires highly trained engineers.

[Simon_Jester]

Herodotus may have imagined the task of quarrying and transporting millions of tons of rock and piling them up into artificial mountains and assumed that no free man would agree to do something like that. Natural mistake to make, I'd say.

And yes, this is old news. The image of gangs of slaves toiling away hauling huge stone blocks is a classic in fiction, but like a lot of stuff that Hollywood uses, most educated people already know it wasn't that simple.

The discovery of the tombs of pyramid workers are interesting, though; I wonder how many man-hours of work it took to build one of those smaller tombs?

[Frank Hipper]

2) Why does a burial tomb mean that the person couldn't have been a slave? Roman gladiators were slaves, and they got burial tombs.

Hawass makes the claim in the article that slaves would not be buried in such close proximity to the king.

[Thanas]

2) Why does a burial tomb mean that the person couldn't have been a slave? Roman gladiators were slaves, and they got burial tombs.

Egyptian society does not equal Roman society. In Egyptian society, low-ranking peasants and slaves were not buried in tombs, the best they could hope for was a blanket covering them and a hole in the sand.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm. Perhaps the people buried in the tombs were respected craftsmen involved in the construction- master masons and the like? Would there be any way to tell, such as tools buried with them?

[Norseman]

I always thought that Egypt didn't really depend on slavery at all, but used corvee labour instead?