how do we know the pyramids weren’t built by slaves?
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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.
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