You probably remember learning about the Egyptian
pyramids at some point in elementary school. And even if you weren’t part of the public
school system, you were bound to encounter some information about them at a museum or
in a book. These mammoths of structures are hard to escape
as they’re famous for being grandiose in nature -- to put it lightly. The tallest pyramid in Egypt, the Great Pyramid
of Giza, once stood at 481 feet tall, but has since eroded down to 451 feet because
of vandalism. For you to better imagine this, the average
three-story building stands at just 45 feet tall. So, if we’re doing the math correctly on
this one -- and we know we are -- this pyramid would’ve stood at the height of a 32-story
building. So, who’s responsible for the creation of
these ridiculously tall and ever-elusive, mysterious pyramids? We’ll get to the bottom of it today on this
episode of The Infographics Show -- Who Built the Pyramids? Before we get into the nitty gritty of who
built them, let’s start with some Pyramid 101, shall we? There are about 80 pyramids currently standing
in Egypt. The oldest is the Pyramid of Djoser, and it’s
located in Saqqara, north of the city Memphis. The pyramid was built in 2630 B.C. for King
Djoser. Many of the more popularized and notable pyramids
are in Giza, a city on the outskirts of Cairo, some of which include the Giza Necropolis,
Pyramid of Khufu -- one of the Seven Wonders of the World -- and the Khafre Pyramid. Ancient Egyptians were one of the first civilizations
of people who believed in an afterlife. They didn’t see death as the cessation of
life, but rather an interruption. They believed that when a king died, a part
of his spirit, or his ka, remained intact with his physical body. The mummification we’ve all come to know
about that has also been popularized in media served the purpose of preserving a king’s
spirit that they believed lived on. They basically hoped the king’s soul would
return to his body and give it life again. So the king’s ka was never left wanting,
they’d also bury riches like gold vessels, food and furniture along with the dead king. Egyptians really weren’t messing around
with this belief. When the pharaoh was still alive, they revered
him as an incarnate of Horus, God of the Sky, and when he died, he took on the form of Osiris,
the God of fertility and the underworld. His responsibility as Osiris was to set the
sun, while the new pharaoh, his son, would raise it. They believed this symbiotic relationship
was important in maintaining cosmic balance. Back to pyramids, though. They were built to last -- made mostly of
stone, like limestone, which was used to build the core of the pyramid, while white limestone
was used for its outer casing and for the interior walls. Pink granite was used on the walls inside,
and basalt and alabaster were sometimes used for the floors. Egypt has sometimes been referred to as the
“state of stone,” so there was never a shortage of it. The basalt they used sometimes came from the
Fayum depression, one of the major oases of the Western desert, while alabaster was from
Luxor, a city on the eastern bank of the Nile. Denys Stocks, an ancient technology consultant,
believed that 45 workers were needed to move a 35,900-lb -- that’s 16.3 tons, by the
way -- block, and eight people to move a 6,060 block, as he noted in his 2003 book Experiments
in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt. One single pyramid project could have taken
between 20 to 30 years to finish building. For the longest time, it was thought that
slaves who were at the behest of an evil pharaoh built the pyramids, and we can blame this
fake news first and foremost on Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote that the Great
Pyramid was constructed by 100,000 slaves who 'laboured constantly and were relieved
every three months by a fresh gang'. The BBC further argues that there’s no way
King Khufu - 4th Dynasty ruler of Egypt responsible for the commissioning of the Great Pyramid,
had a body of slaves this large to work for him, and there’s no way that all of them
could work at the same time. We can also thank western Hollywood movies
in part for perpetuating the myth. Movies like The Ten Commandments, that epic
from 1956 -- and we’re not just saying that, it’s literally an epic saga that ran for
220 minutes -- portrayed slaves as the builders. Another misconception that’s circulated
is that Jews built the pyramids. This lie started when former Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin made the claim when he visited the National Museum of Cairo in
1977. Amihai Mazar, a professor at the Institute
of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Israeli archaeologist, refutes
Begin’s claim because it simply doesn’t make any sense. “No Jews built the pyramids because Jews
didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built," Mazar was quoted saying. Dorothy Resig, an editor of Biblical Archaeology
Review in Washington D.C., said this falsehood could’ve also stemmed from a verse in Exodus
which says something to the effect of: "So the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel
with backbreaking labor" and the Pharaoh put them to work to build buildings.” That’s not exactly the way the verse reads,
but you get the picture. Then there are those people out there who
believe aliens are the ones who built them. Let’s all let out one huge exhaustive sigh. This far-reaching theory looks a little bit
like this: If light moves 299,792,458 metres per second
and the geographic coordinates for the Great Pyramid are 29.9792458°N, and humans weren’t
capable of measuring the speed of light with this type of accuracy until 1950, then "advanced
aliens" must have time traveled back to Earth from the future to build the pyramids. People who believe in the Ancient Aliens theory
also think aliens built Stonehenge in the UK, and other ancient monuments. Look, we’re not responsible for what you
guys believe and don’t believe, but we are saying that graffiti inside the pyramids,
along with other evidence, tell a much different story and have gotten archaeologists -- and
now us -- closer to having a better idea of who built the pyramids, how they would have
lived and how they did it. The BBC notes that archeologists have agreed
that the workforce behind the Great Pyramid was made up of two teams -- the primary workers
and the temporary workers. There were about 4,000 primary workers who
worked on the quarries and were hauliers and masons. They lived with their families in a pyramid
village. The temporary team was made up of 16,000 to
20,000 workers who built ramps, shaped tools, made mortar and were in charge of miscellaneous
activities like supplying food, clothing and fuel. They lived in a separate camp near the pyramid
village. The state of the Nile was also important for
pyramid builders to take into account. For the building of the pyramid at Giza, Mark
Lehner -- more on him later -- and archaeologist Zahi Hawass believed that a skeleton crew
would work on the pyramids throughout the year, but a larger force would labor in late
summer and early autumn, when the Nile flooded surrounding fields. Archaeologists haven’t discovered all there
is to know about the villages and camps where pyramid builders dwelled, but excavations
done between 1999 and 2002 by archaeologist Lehner shed more light. We know they slept on mud ramps, which served
as barracks-style beds. These barracks were in galleries, which can
be thought of as like huge dorms in which up to 2,000 temporary workers would stay. These sleeping galleries also had spaces in
the back for cooking and copper-working. In 2016, archaeologist and Egyptologist Yukinori
Kawae spoke out to an audience at a taping for Nat Geo Live. In that discussion, he said there was a vast
amount of data on the outside of the pyramid, but not enough on the inside -- or core -- of
the structures themselves, which would shed even more light on the construction techniques. Before going into his discoveries, he laid
out three hypotheses for how the core of a pyramid would shed light on construction techniques. For example, if the inside of the pyramid
was made of horizontally arranged blocks, this would’ve been amenable to using a straight
ramp. What he found was unlike any of these, though:
He and other members of his team -- some of which were computer scientists -- climbed
the Great Pyramid for two and a half hours and found a notch with a crevice and then
a cave that was further in. The team didn’t have a laser scanner that
would’ve been too heavy and clunky to carry while climbing up, but they did manage to
capture 20 minutes worth of video footage, which they then broke down further into 300,000
3-D images. Through these 3-D image renderings, they found
that the cave was used for the packing of sand and debris -- something called the chamber
method. He noted that it was also used for the construction
of Egyptian temples and cities. What did pyramid builders eat? Turns out they had no beef with beef. As much as 21 cattle and 23 sheep were sent
to them daily from farms to get their meat fix in. They also ate fish and liked to kick it back
with some beers. And while we noted before that these people
weren’t slaves, pyramid building came at a cost: Discoveries of their bodies show they
suffered from arthritis, and their lower vertebrae were impacted by the wear and tear. Ouch. As we mentioned before, an enormous amount
of stone was needed to build these pyramids, so the Egyptians had to figure out an efficient
way of moving the blocks they eventually stacked up. An illustration in Twelfth Dynasty tomb of
Djehutihotep of 172 men pulling a 60-ton alabaster on a sledge has given experts a better sense
of how they went about it. These sledges they’d drag across the hot
desert sand were simply wooden planks with upturned edges. So, not the most sophisticated, but still
clever. To make their lives easier, they’d wet the
sand to make it easier to drag the sledge across. And they were old-school when it came to measuring. They didn’t use rulers, but a "cubit" was
equal to the length from the tip of your middle finger to your elbow, and a “hand” was
a unit that served as the guide -- the width of your hand with the thumb on the side. Cubits served them when they dug post holes
at ten cubits along the base outline and laid out the site in a grid. Pyramid builders were precise in that they
wanted to make sure the sides of the structures ran parallel to the north-south and east-west
axes, according to How Stuff Works. To achieve this, they had to rely on nature
instead of using compasses, which weren’t at their disposal. The movements of the stars helped them identify
which way was North and they used sighting rods and circles to identify the rising and
setting stars or the sun's shadow. Finding out the other cardinal directions
using lines and right angles then became a piece of cake. They were certainly a resourceful bunch. In his book Engineering the Pyramids, Dr.
Richard Parry hypothesizes that they might have also used a cradle-like machine that
suspended the rocks and allowed them to be rolled by a few people. The Obayashi Corporation, a Japanese construction
company, went so far as to conduct a test in 1996 to see if a two-and a half-ton block
could be dragged by 18 men over 18 metres per minute and the study proved it could be
done. In 2013, French archaeologist Pierre Tallet
and his team discovered the papyrus writings of a pyramid-building official simply named
Merer in a cave in Wadi-al Jarf -- an area on the Red Sea Coast -- and these gave an
unprecedented look at how sophisticated the teams worked, specifically when it came to
obtaining copper. And their method involved an L-shaped jetty
that was 200 meters long. According to Merer’s writings, they’d
use this harbour to protect a fleet of cargo boats that would sail to the Sinai Peninsula,
where copper would be mined, before returning to Wadi al-Jarf, then using those materials
for the construction of the Great Pyramid. After all this, now you can whip out your
impressive pyramid-building knowledge at the next cocktail party when the topic comes up,
or simply slap your silly friend who thinks aliens built them. You make the choice. The pyramid-building, brain-eating aliens
that secretly run our show and pay us to convince you they didn’t build the pyramids tell
us that you would enjoy learning more about ancient egypt, so check out our video Unbelievable
stuff they didn’t teach you about ancient egypt.