The management accomplishments of the pyramid builders were staggering. Remember, above and beyond the construction and architectural expertise of building them, there was enormous infrastructure that had to be installed and functioning before the first stone was laid in place.

The quarries (hundreds of miles away) where the stone was cut had to be developed, and the staff needed to operate them put in place, trained and housed. The barges carrying the stone blocks had to be designed and built, and crews capable of sailing them organized. The whole operation of getting the materials to Giza had to be conceived, engineered and designed way before construction started, and then practiced before it began so construction schedules could be met. Canals, ports and waterworks had to be constructed (and maintained) to float the stone to the construction site from the river, and then, the blocks had to be somehow lifted up to the plateau where the work was done. We think the big stones were rolled on logs, but there are no trees in Egypt! The logs had to be imported from upriver or the Med on ships and barges, which had to be built and manned by expert crews. I could go on and on. There was even a specialist craftsman class trained to sharpen soft copper chisels for re-use.

And all this was done during the Old Kingdom. It was a thousand years before Rameses, three thousand before the Ptolemies.

This was not done with slave labor. The Egyptians had household slaves, or enslaved criminals and war prisoners, like most of the ancient world, but did not have a slave economy or industry like the Romans or in the Americas. We know now the workers were paid, housed and fed at government expense, not just the casual laborers, but all the skilled workmen that were required. We know this because archaeologists have excavated the temporary towns where these workers were housed, fed, lived and paid. And these workers were primarily farmers, the work had to be scheduled around the rise and fall of the Nile so they could be transported back and forth to their farms by river traffic during sowing and harvest time. We suspect these big projects were a form of welfare, to keep the people employed when they were otherwise idle.

I saw a show on TV about the Egyptian war chariot that gives some insight into these people. Chariots were familiar weapons in the ancient world, but the Egyptian machine was not only an engineering marvel exquisitely designed and optimized for their style of warfare, it was mass produced from identical interchangeable parts so they could be easily repaired if damaged while campaigning. AND it was designed to be broken down and folded up so it could be packed and transported on muleback to the battlefield and then quickly assembled before battle. Not even the Egyptians could build a wooden chariot that could be driven from Egypt to the Levant and back without falling apart. They needed specialized transporters to get them to the battlefield, just like our modern tanks!

Human civilization can be divided into two parts, Egypt, and everybody else.