More on Pyramid builders..Zahi Hawass "Pyramids built by peasents-not by slaves!"

Excerpt from: [link to www.drhawass.com]

The Cemetery of the Pyramid Builders
Date:
April 15, 1990 (All day)

Many people have claimed that the pyramids were built by slaves, or even by aliens. In the past, it was difficult to convince the public that it was actually ordinary Egyptians who constructed these great monuments. With the discovery of the Cemetery of the Pyramid Builders, however, I was finally able to reveal the truth to people around the world.

In my 1987 doctoral dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania, I predicted that we should look for the tombs of the workmen who built the pyramids in the area to the south of an ancient stone wall known as the Wall of the Crow (Heit El-Ghurob). This wall lies to the south of the Great Sphinx, and I theorized that it had been built to separate the area where the workmen lived and were buried from the royal necropolis that they had labored to construct.

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Based on the pottery, names, and titles found in association with the tombs, the cemetery was begun as early as the reign of Khufu in Dynasty 4 and continued through the end of Dynasty 5, from ca. 2551 to 2323 B.C. The cemetery probably extends across the escarpment above the low desert plain where we have found production and storage facilities. It seems to be an Old Kingdom version of the New Kingdom (ca.1500-1163 B.C.) cemetery at Deir el-Medineh, where workers who excavated and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were buried. We believe that so far we have found only 20 percent of the tombs buried under the sand along this slope.

None of the workers was mummified, a prerogative of royalty and nobility, but many tombs in this cemetery contained skeletal remains that tell us much about the lives of these people. Study of the remains by Azza Sarry el-Din and Fawziya Hussein of Egypt's National Research Center reveals that males and females were equally represented, mostly buried in fetal positions, with face to the east and head to the north. Many of the men died between age 30 and 35. Below the age of 30 a higher mortality was found in females than in males, a statistic undoubtedly reflecting the hazards of childbirth. Degenerative arthritis occurred in the vertebral column, particularly in the lumbar region, and in the knees. It was frequent and more severe than in the skeletons from the mastaba cemetery. Skeletons of both men and women, particularly those from the lower burials, show such signs of heavy labor. Simple and multiple limb fractures were found in skeletons from both the lower and upper burials. The most frequent were fractures of the ulna and radius, the bones of the upper arm, and of the fibula, the more delicate of the two lower leg bones. Most of the fractures had healed completely, with good realignment of the bone, indicating that the fractures had been set with a splint. We found two cases, both male, that suggested amputation - of a left leg and a right arm respectively. The healed ends of the bones indicate that the amputations were successful. Few other cases of amputation have been recorded in Egyptian archaeology. Depressed fractures of the frontal or parietal skull bones were found in skulls of both males and females. The parietal lesions tended to be left-sided, which may indicate that the injuries resulted from face to face assault by right-handed attackers.

We should contrast the evidence of the tombs and of medical treatment with the notion that pharaohs used slave labor to build the giant pyramids, an idea as old as Herodotus. The scenario of whip-drive slaves received support from the biblical account of Moses and the Exodus and the first-century A.D. historian Josephus. In our era, Cecil B. de Mille's galvanizing screen images reinforced this popular misconception. The pyramid builders were not slaves but peasants conscripted on a rotating part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans and craftsmen who not only built the pyramid complexes for the kings and nobility, but also designed and constructed their own, more modest tombs.

I hope that people who believe that the pyramids belong to lost civilization can read the story of this discovery and understand that until now, everything we have found at Giza dates the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx to the 4th Dynasty, about 4600 years ago.