You've made reference to inscriptions at Giza that indicate who built the Pyramids. What do the inscriptions say?

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have is graffiti on ancient stone monuments in places that they didn't mean to be shown. Like on foundations when we dig down below the floor level, up in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber in the Great Pyramid, and in many monuments of the Old Kingdom—temples, other pyramids. Well, the graffiti gives us a picture of organization where a gang of workmen was organized into two crews, and the crews were subdivided into fivephyles. Phyles is the Greek word for tribe.

The phyles are subdivided into divisions, and the divisions are identified by single hieroglyphs with names that mean things like endurance, perfection, strong. Okay, so how do we know this? You come to a block of stone in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber. First of all, you see this cartouche of a King and then some scrawls all in red paint after it. That's the gang name. And in the Old Kingdom in the time of the Pyramids of Giza, the gangs were named after kings. So, for example, we have a name, compounded with the name of Menkaure, and it seems to translate "the Drunks (or the Drunkards) of Menkaure." There's one that's well-attested, in the relieving chambers above the King's chamber in the Great Pyramid, "the Friends of Khufu Gang." This doesn't sound like slavery, does it?

In fact, it gets more intriguing, because in certain monuments you find the name of one gang on one side of the monument and another gang, we assume competing, on the other side of the monument. You find that to some extent in the Pyramid temple of Menkaure. It's as though these gangs are competing. So from this evidence we deduce that there was a labor force that was assigned to respective crew, gang, phyles, and divisions.

The Meidum Pyramid, which villagers brought up the Nile from the south by boat would have seen before arriving in Giza to work on the PyramidsEnlargePhoto credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation

There's some evidence to suggest that people were rotated in and out of the raw labor force. So you could be a young man in a village, say, in Middle Egypt, and you had never seen more than a few hundred people in your village, maybe at market day or something. And the King's men come, and it may not have been entirely coercion, but it seems that everybody owed a labor tax. We don't know if it was entirely coercive, or if, in fact, part of it was a natural community donation as in the Incan Empire, for example, to building projects where they had a great party and so on. But, anyway, they started keeping track of people and their time on the royal labor project.

And if you were brought from a distance, you were brought by boat. Can you imagine floating down the Nile and—say you're working on Khafre's Pyramid—and you float past the Great Pyramid of Meidum and the Pyramids of Dashur, and, my God, you've never seen anything like this. These are the hugest things. We're talking about a society where they didn't have cameras, you didn't see yourself age. You didn't see great images. And so here are these stupendous, gigantic things thrust up to the sky, their polished white limestone blazing in the sunshine. And then they go on down to Giza, and they come around this corner, actually the corner of the Wall of the Crow, right into the harbor, and there's the Khufu Pyramid, the biggest thing on the planet actually in the way of a building until the turn of the 20th century.

And you see, for the first time in your life, not a few hundred, but thousands, probably, of workers and people as well as industries of all kinds. You're rotated into this experience, and you serve in your respective crew, gang, phyles, and divisions, and then you're rotated out, and you go back because you have your own large household to whom you are assigned on a kind of an estate-organized society. You have your own village, maybe you even have your own land that you're responsible for. So you're rotated back, but you're not the same. You have seen the central principle of the first nation-state in our planet's history—the Pyramids, the centralization, this organization. They must have been powerful socializing forces. Anyway, we think that that was the experience of the raw recruits.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, with ancient tombs at its base and modern Cairo stretching off to the east EnlargePhoto credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation

But there must have been a cadre of very seasoned laborers who really knew how to cut stone so fine that you could join them without getting a razor blade in between. Perhaps they were the stone-cutters and -setters, and the experienced quarry men at the quarry wall. And the people who rotated in and out were those doing all the different raw labor, not only the schlepping of the stone but preparing gypsum. We don't know to what extent the other industries were also organized in the phyles system. But it's quite an amazing picture.

"This was as great as it comes in terms of art and sculpture and building ships in the whole repertoire of ancient cultures."

And one of the things that is motivating me now is the question of what vision of society is suggested by a pyramid like Khufu's? Was it, in fact, coercive? Was it a militaristic kind of state WPA project? Or is it possible that we could find evidence that would bring Egypt into line with what we know of other traditional ancient societies? Like when the Inca build a bridge, and every household winds its twine together, and the twine of all the households in the village are wound into the villages' contribution to the rope. And the rope on the great day of bridge-building is wound into a great cable, and all the villages' cables are wound into this virtual bridge. Or in Mesopotamia we know that they built great mud-brick city walls by the clans turning out and giving their contribution, a kind of organic, natural community involvement in the building project. I wonder if that wasn't the case with the Great Pyramid of Khufu. You know, it's almost like an Amish barnraising—but, of course, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is one hell of a barn.

Statue of the pharaoh Khafre in the Egyptian Museum in CairoEnlargePhoto credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation