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 481
feet tall but as since he wrote it down
to 451 feet because of vandalism for you
to better imagine this the average
three-story building stands just 45 feet
tall so if we're doing the math
correctly on this one and we know we are
the pyramid would have stood at the
height of a 32 storey 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 in 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 and north of the city of Memphis
the pyramid was built in 26 30 BC for
King Djoser many of the more popular
eyes din 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 as an interruption
they believed that when a king died a
part of his spirit or his car remained
intact with his physical body the
mummification we've all come to know
about that has also been popularized in
the media serve the purpose of
preserving a king spirit that they
believed lived on they basically hoped
that the Kings soul would return to his
body and give it life again so the Kings
calm 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 the god of the sky
and when he died he took on the form of
a cyrus the god of fertility in the
underworld his responsibility as Osiris
was to set the Sun well the new Pharaoh
his son would raise it they believed
this symbolic relationship was important
in maintaining cosmic balance back to
the pyramids though
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
fame depression
one of the major oasis of the western
desert while alabaster was from luxor a
city on the eastern bank of the Nile
Denis stocks an ancient technology
consultant believed that 45 workers were
needed to move a 35,000 900-pound and
that's 16.3 tons by the way block and
eight people to move a six thousand
sixty pound block as he noted in his
2003 book experiments in Egyptian
archaeology stone working 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 could blame this fake
news first and foremost on Herodotus the
Greek historian who wrote that the Great
Pyramid was constructed by one hundred
thousand slaves who labored constantly
and were relieved every three months by
a fresh gang the BBC further argues that
there's no way King Khufu the fourth
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 two
hundred twenty minutes and portrayed
slaves as the builders another
misconception that circulated is that
the Jews built the pyramids this lie
started when the 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 archaeologists refutes beggins
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
Mazhar was quoted as saying dorothy
Resig an editor of Biblical Archaeology
review in Washington
DC said this falsehood could have also
stemmed from a first in exodus which
says something to the effect of so the
Egyptians enslaved the children of
Israel with back-breaking labor and the
Pharaoh put them to work to build
buildings it's not exactly the way the
first reads but you get the picture
then there are those people out there
who believe aliens are the ones who
built them and let's all let out one
huge exhaustive sigh this far-reaching
theory looks a little bit like this if
light moves at 299,792,458 meters per
second and the geographic coordinates
for the Great Pyramid are twenty nine
point nine seven nine two four five
eight degrees north and humans weren't
capable of measuring the speed of light
with this type of accuracy until 1950
then advanced aliens must've time
traveled back to earth from the future
to build the pyramids people who
believed in the ancient aliens theory
also think that 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're
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
archaeologists have agreed that the work
force 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 haulers and Masons
they live 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 an
archaeologist Zahi Hawass believed that
a skeleton crew could work on the
pyramids throughout the year but a
larger force would labor in the 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 laner shed more light
we know they slept on mud ramps
which served as a barrack style bed
these barracks were in galleries which
can be thought of as huge dorms in which
of the 2,000 temporary workers would
stay these sleeping galleries also had
spaces in the back for cooking and
copper working in 2016 archeologist and
Egyptologist Yuki nori Conway spoke out
to an audience at a taping for an NGO
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 structure
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 up of
horizontally arranged blocks these would
have 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 have been too heavy
and clunky to carry while climbing up
but they did manage to capture twenty
minutes worth of video footage which
they then broke down further into three
hundred thousand 3d images through these
3d image renderings they found out that
the cave was used for 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
that 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 that they eventually stacked
up and illustration in the 12th dynasty
tomb of Djibouti hotel of 172 men
pulling a 60-ton alabaster on a sledge
has given experts a better sense of how
they went about it
those sledges they dragged 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 let the
sand to make it easier to drag the
sledge across
they were old-school when it came to
measuring they didn't use rulers but a
cubit which was equal to the length from
your tip of the middle finger to your
elbow and a hand was a unit that served
as the guide the width of your hand with
the film on the side cubit served them
when they dug post holes at 10 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 size of the structures ran parallel
to the north-south and east-west axis
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 it
was north and then they used sighting
rocks 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 Perry 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 OB yashi corporation a
Japanese construction company went so
far as to conduct the test in 1996 to
see if a 2 and a half ton block could be
dragged by 18 men over 18 metres per
minute and the study proved that it
could be done in 2013 French
archaeologist Pierre telly and his team
discovered the papyrus writings of a
pyramid building official simply named
mirror in a cave and 1tl geography an
area on the red sea coast and these gave
an unprecedented look and how
sophisticated the team's worked
specifically when it came to obtaining
copper and their method involved an
l-shaped jetty that was 200 meters long
according to Mary's writings they'd used
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 the materials for the construction
of the Great Pyramid now using all this
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 the
aliens built them
you make the choice the pyramid building
brain-eating aliens that secretly run
our show and pay us to convince you that
they didn't build the pyramids tell us
that you would enjoy learning more about
ancient Egypt so check out our other
video unbelievable stuff they didn't
teach you about ancient Egypt