How can we know that the Great Pyramids weren´t built by slaves but by paid workers?
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Well it is a little of column A, a little of column B.
lots of brute labor (either slaves, conscripts, serfs) to move the blocks into place.
and then paid highly skilled labor to do the finishing work.
The pyramids required thousands and thousands of workers at any given time. Prior to the invention of gunpowder you would need an army of slave drivers just to maintain order, which then defeats the purpose of unpaid labor.
the stones are cut and fit together so well you can’t even slide a credit card between them.
and it was done with just copper tools and sand as abrasive. It’s not just paid workers it was very skilled workers
They’ve found records from the time where people kept track of who missed work and why. If you’re a slave, I doubt you can take a day off because you’re wife is on her period. But that was an acceptable excuse at the time.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/3200-year-old-egyptian-tablet-shows-why-people-missed-work-the-scorpion-bit-him-brewing-beer-more.html
Some of the medical fasilities where good for the time, to good for expendable slaves(look it up, around the pyramids a lot of people where found that had broken bones that where healt, meaning effort was put in them, those people where given time to heal, again not something you would do for slaves
Food. Food was too expensive. The builders of the pyramids were skilled craftsmen who employed long forgotten methods to source and move materials. The pyramids were built by smart people not brute force.
I don’t think we can. There are no records we are aware of, because they were built in the last period of advanced civilizations extending 10k or more years ago (I realize academia says it’s only 2k or so, they have a narrative they refuse to change). And there was most likely one or many events that wiped out a lot of evidence of these civilizations.
If they were built by slaves, the slaves back then had more advanced tools than our best free men have access to today. There are more questions than answers with regard to Pyramids construction.
The story of the pyramids being built by slaves came from the Greeks who came from a culture that freely used slave labour for all large construction projects.
There’s no physical evidence at Giza of the sort of facilities that would be built to control a large number of slaves, nor are there any signs of large numbers of soldiers or other security, nor of the weapons they’d be using.
So then best explanation is that the labour force was conscripted from the local population as part of a form of state intervention- keeping them fed and occupied during the annual flood season when the fields were under water.
There are a number of finds showing how men were put into units of ten and these units were grouped into four as a ‘zau’. We even know from painted inscriptions on some of the blocks in the Red Pyramid at Dahsur and the Great Pyramid itself that these work teams had names that translate as Khufu : Endurance, Khufu : Perfection Gang and Khufu : Green Gang amongst others. Similar finds have been made at the river port at Wadi el-Jarf which supplies materials such as Tura limestone, copper and Aswan granite to the Giza complex.
alongside everything in here. You also have to remember that the pyramids were literally THE BIGGEST engineering projects of their time, and literally centuries after, to respect their dead rulers. That entailed LOTS AND LOTS of skilled workers, in a field where only a handful of mistakes could have MAJOR consequences. When you look at the quality of the work, its also incredible just how good their stone-cutting abilities were.
Thinking about it with the rest of this information, is it really a surprise? These people were people who cared about their work, and produced phenomenal work, not slaves just doing the minimum to live.
Think of it like this: would you use slaves to build your pyramid with the technology of that era? It’s high tech, requiring the smartest people you have available. It can be exponentially more expensive if the workers make mistakes. Naturally you want them to make as few mistakes as possible. You don’t let slaves nowhere near the important stuff. At most, you employ them to haul food and water to the construction workers.
It’s like hiring people to develop the first atomic bomb. Who do you employ? The bottom half of recent graduates who you don’t have to pay much? Didn’t think so.
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