The Great Pyramid of Giza was built mainly by paid laborers, not slaves.

Excavations near the Giza pyramids since the 1990s uncovered a purpose-built workers’ village nearby, complete with bakeries, breweries, and worker cemeteries, along with skeletal evidence of medical care for injuries sustained on the job. The findings support the view held by most Egyptologists today: the pyramids were raised largely by rotating crews of skilled and unskilled Egyptian laborers organized into work gangs, rather than by enslaved people.

Workers appear to have eaten a diet that included bread and beer and were buried with a measure of respect close to the monument they helped build — an honor unlikely to have been extended to slaves. The old image of whip-driven slave gangs owes more to later Greek writers like Herodotus, writing many centuries after the fact, than to the archaeological record itself.