Were the Pyramids Built by Slaves? Check the Payroll

You're Nefer, a farmer called up to haul stone for the pyramids at Giza. Your pay? Bread and beer. Were the pyramids built by slaves? The workers' town, their bones and Merer's logbook tell a stranger story. Centuries later, Egypt's tomb builders left pay records in grain, and when the grain didn't come, they walked off the job: the first strike on record. Nefer is a typical pyramid hauler, not a real person. Real people appear only as names and silhouettes. Chapters 0:00 Your pay: bread and beer 0:52 The grocery bill on the pyramid 1:45 Looking for Atlantis (1972) 2:37 What the crews ate 4:35 A tax paid with your back 6:02 Merer's logbook (2013) 7:22 The tomb builders' pay slips 8:42 "We are hungry": the first strike on record 10:01 Slave or paid worker? How the money is converted No coins: pay was food, priced here in grain. A Deir el-Medina workman's month: 5½ sacks of 76.88 liters = 12 US bushels. A sack was valued at 2 deben of copper (about 91 g, a unit of value; Janssen's yardstick, not a market price), so a month = 11 deben. A coffin on one receipt (Ostracon Deir el-Medina 73) cost 25 deben = about 2¼ months of pay, paid in copper (more than half), a pig, two goats and sycamore logs. The same months full-time at the US federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) come to about $2,900: working time, not inflation, and it understates the tomb builders. Calories: as barley (USDA), 12 bushels a month is about 31,000 kcal a day, our own estimate, on the high side (emmer came in the husk). John Nunn: over 35,000, ten times a laborer's needs. Beer: Barry Kemp's ration (a third of a jug to two jugs a day) times Miroslav Bárta's 2.4-liter Abusir jug = 0.8 to 4.8 liters, about 2 to 13½ twelve-ounce cans by volume. An estimate for laborers in general, not a Giza record. A ration fed a household. Notes on the evidence Giza (Old Kingdom) and Deir el-Medina (New Kingdom) are kept apart: no ration list survives from the pyramid sites; the pay records are the tomb builders'. The strike line has two translations. Frandsen: "We are hungry, for 18 days have already elapsed in this month" (pay-day the 21st in his reading; others say the 28th). Museo Egizio: "It is 18 days this month that (the men) go and sit at the back of the funerary temple". So we don't say how late the grain was. Year 29 follows the museum (Wikipedia: year 25). Slavery: no evidence of slave gangs has been found at Giza, which isn't proof there were none; "not by any means slaves" is Hawass's argument. Slavery was real in New Kingdom Egypt: the year-29 strike records list a ration for "the woman slave", and Rosalie David writes that the king gave the village enslaved women to grind grain. Meat a day: Redding's 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats (used); Hawass: 21 and 23. Merer's crew: about 40 (Archaeology), "some 200" (Smithsonian). Sources (search the titles) Hana Vymazalová, "Ration System", UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2016) Paul J. Frandsen, "Editing Reality: The Turin Strike Papyrus", Studies in Egyptology 1 (1990) Museo Egizio, "Highlights: Turin Strike Papyrus" British Museum, EA 5634, register of attendance Edward Bleiberg, "Prices of Commodities" (Gale) PBS NOVA, "Who Built the Pyramids?" (1997) AERA, "The Lost City of the Pyramids" Live Science, "How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed" (2013) Ahram Online, Hawass, "Who built the Pyramids?" (2010) Smithsonian, "The World's Oldest Papyrus" (2015); "Mark Lehner" (2005) Archaeology, "Journeys of the Pyramid Builders" (2022) Snopes, Giza beer rations fact check (2025) Ancient Egypt magazine, Hilary Wilson, "Bread, beer and economics" (2026) First Things, Joe Carter, reply by Mark Shiffman (2011) Wikipedia, "Diary of Merer"; "Deir el-Medina strikes" Herodotus, Histories, Book 2 (Macaulay) NIST SP 811; USDA FoodData Central; US Dept. of Labor Image credits Photo: Nina Aldin Thune, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (recoloured) Model bakery and brewery from the tomb of Meketre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Bakers and brewers from Meketre's model, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Photo: Djehouty, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped, recoloured) Ostracon detailing the delivery of groceries to Deir el-Medina, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The 'Strike Papyrus' written by Amunnakht, Museo Egizio, Turin, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Edited photos are shared under the same licences. Cartoon illustrations are made for this channel with AI image tools; the narration is a synthetic voice cloned, with permission, from a real person. #CostOfLiving #History #AncientEgypt