My cousins and I got into a slight argument over who built the pyramids. I showed them sources from Harvard magazine and discovery.com disputing them being built by slaves. They told me that I was wrong and said the bible says otherwise. Who is right here and does the bible explicitly say slaves built the great pyramids?
The bible does not even mention the pyramids! Reaching for Exodus 1:11:
"So they set taskmasters to oppress them with force labor, and they built garrison cities for Pharaoh; Pithom and Raamses"
So they specifically are not described as building them pyramids, but garrison cities, and at any rate most traditional chronologies for when the Exodus is proposed to have happened place it in the New Kingdom, so a very long time after pyramids stopped being built. As for the actual builders of the pyramids, I will leave it to an egyptologist to fill in the details but the general modern academic consensus is that they were mainly built on a seasonal basis by free skilled laborers and farmers who were in the 'off season' and had been conscripted for three-month terms(much like, say, a medieval peasant would be expected to work his or her lord's property for a set number of days a year, or modern countries which maintain universal military service like Israel or Singapore). So not slaves, certainly.
Barry J. Kemp's Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of A Civilization discusses the bureaucratic state of Egypt in its third chapter, conveniently titled "The Bureaucratic Mind". Kemp writes "By conscription the state temporarily cast its net over a larger labour force than was regularly available from the pool of those in part-time or full-time state employment. For its part, the state paid rations, so that those affected did not have their labour taken from them for nothing". So, Kemp certainly does not see it as slavery, by any means, although there is an element of forced labor there.
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt also refutes the idea of slave labor. In the chapter "The Old Kingdom", Jaromir Malek says "The Egyptian economy was not based on slave labour. Even if one allows for much of the work to have been carried out at the time when the annual inundation made it impossible to work in the fields, a large section of the labour force required for pyramid building had to be diverted from agricultural tasks and food production." Once again, there was an element of coercion, but it was not slave labor.
Where is this image? I've been searching on the internet (and Facebook) and I cannot find it.