how do we know the pyramids weren’t built by slaves?
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We know slaves were not the main source of labor because there are inscriptions where the pharaoh brags how well they were taken care of. He lists the amounts of food and beer they were given.
There is significant evidence that the work was done during the”off season” by farmers and other laborers.. Their labor was probably a form of tax. Can’t pay the king in gold, you owe him labor each year.
There is also graffiti where the work gangs brag about the amount of work they did. When you are building a pyramid for a living God, you will be enthusiastic.
Archaeology.
We have records of what workers were compensated with. Beer and bread is the big one, but it probably included other material goods too (clothing, tools, etc). They were given housing, food, drinkable and non-diseased water, access to spiritual guidance, blessings, etc. They basically had all their needs taken care of for the 3-month shifts they worked, at a time when their own farms would have been idle between their planting, growing and harvesting seasons when food would have been the most insecure.
We have archaeological sites for the burials of those who died working on the pyramids. They have nearby burial tombs, with funerary goods and their bodies positioned in a fetal position (archaeology shows that this had a significance to Egyptians, although I don’t recall what). Basically, the burial sites we have for workers near the pyramids are what a laborer would probably have gotten, not a slave. They treated the people who worked there and died there with respect.
Most people have the idea of brutal slave drivers lashing their slaves with whips and beating them to death for things like, “walking slightly slow”. But no archaeological evidence supports that. What the skeletons of workers DO show is that it was very, very hard labor. Musculoskeletal disorders, arthritis, skull injuries – modern-day people saw those injuries and couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that people would work themselves that hard as paid laborers, so it MUST be slaves (particularly since modern-day slavery had its own image of being fairly brutal). They forgot that these were people building monuments to literal god-kings, and that they believed in that divinity. The idea of dying lugging enormous stones for beer and bread is a hard thing to wrap your head around as not being slavery in and of itself, but again, that’s talking from a modern perspective. These were people being given the chance to build their god-king’s monument, for the fulfillment of all their needs, and probably ate better during this work than they ever did the rest of their lives.
This is more of a question for /r/askhistorians (and there are a couple of threads there, including [this one](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9re3hl/were_egypts_pyramids_primarily_built_by_slaves_or/)).
The simple answer is that we have the records of what they were “paid.”
The more complicated answer is that our modern idea of slavery doesn’t really fit with Ancient Egyptian culture. What does slavery look like in a feudal society where the monarch is the absolute ruler? To give an even more extreme case, how can an individual worker be free to choose not to work for someone when that person is essentially their god?
There were enslaved people working there; slavery was common across the ancient (and modern) world. But most of the workers were there as a form of “community service” or a way of paying their taxes (which could be paid either in money if you were rich, or labour if you weren’t).
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