This is What Life Was Like for an Egyptian Worker Building the Pyramids

This is What Life Was Like for an Egyptian Worker Building the Pyramids

Aimee Heidelberg - February 27, 2023

This is What Life Was Like for an Egyptian Worker Building the Pyramids
Housing built outside city walls, anceint Egypt. Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez (1883).

Suburban Development Around the Pyramids

The low number of houses archaeologists found during excavations of the pyramid city surprised them. They have found only 40 houses, but hundreds of people worked on the pyramids during a shift. That wasn’t nearly enough to house all the workers, given the animal bones they found, enough to feed thousands of workers on a daily basis. But Egyptologists may have an answer for this riddle’ First, villages were like downtowns. Second, houses popped up away from the central village. Third, seasonal workers used transitory housing such as barracks or camps, but most workers did not live permanently in the city. They likely lived in the outer realm, near the other dwellings.

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