03/04/2026
The workers who built the pyramids lived in a city built from scratch to keep the construction running, with bakeries, breweries, and meat processing facilities on site. They were farmers recruited during the Nile floods, when fields went underwater, and farming stopped.
The system turned agricultural downtime into a massive labor force.
The construction also wiped out the local forests. Producing the gypsum mortar used to set and align the stone blocks burned through wood on an industrial scale until the local supply ran out.
Carbon-14 dating shows that wood samples found at the pyramids were up to 374 years older than the structures themselves, because by that point, the Egyptians were already burning recycled timber and wood imported from elsewhere.
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