The monuments are so overwhelming that they can obscure the human scale of the civilization that built them.

The pyramid was built by people — not by slaves, as popular legend long maintained, but by a workforce of skilled and semi-skilled workers who were housed, fed, and organized by the state’s administrative apparatus.

Recent archaeological excavations at Heit el-Ghurab, near the Giza plateau, have revealed the remains of the workers’ village: bakeries, breweries, a hospital, administrative buildings, and the tombs of workers and supervisors.

The people who built the pyramids were not anonymous and interchangeable; they were organized into named gangs with specific assignments, they received rations of bread and beer as wages, they built their own tombs and were buried with care.