How can we know that the Great Pyramids weren´t built by slaves but by paid workers?

Question

How can we know that the Great Pyramids weren´t built by slaves but by paid workers?

In: Other

Answer 1

Remember that there are hundreds of Egyptian pyramids built over a period of 1000+ years. All attempts to generalize any aspect of that large a slice of history are bound to be futile, and the real answer to how they were built is likely “a bit of everything”. There are historical records of payments to skilled artisans. There is record of farmers building the pyramids when the Nile flooded and they could not work on their fields. There is evidence of some prisoners of war being forced to work on them. Some workers got religious burials near the construction site, a dignity not offered to slaves. There were foreigners brought in from as far as Canaan (modern day Israel, Lebanon and Jordan).

Overall, modern historians don’t claim that zero slaves were used in building the pyramids, just that a more reasonable and evidence-based explanation is that they were treated like any other large construction project requiring a skilled labor force.