For centuries, the world believed a lie. The ancient Greek writer Herodotus — writing 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid was built — claimed the pharaoh Khufu forced 100,000 men to work as slaves. Hollywood ran with it. Picture whipped prisoners dragging stones through the desert in chains. The Bible’s story of Israelite slavery in Egypt got mixed into pyramid lore. By the 20th century, everyone “knew” the pyramids were built on human suffering. Everyone was wrong.
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Crowns & Conquests·4/4·1′
The place
Great Pyramids of Giza
The Workers' Village Discovery
The truth that freed the pyramid builders from slavery
Old Kingdom (rediscovered 1990)Great Pyramids of Giza
Moral of the Story
“Truth can take millennia to surface, and the real story is often more inspiring than the myth it replaces.”
Characters
M
Mark Lehner (Archaeologist)Z
Zahi Hawass (Egyptologist)T
The Pyramid WorkersSource
Lehner, Mark. The Complete Pyramids. Thames & Hudson, 1997; Hawass, Zahi. Mountains of the Pharaohs, 2006