Throughout the decades, thousands upon thousands of schoolchildren have grown up in the belief that the pyramids were built by slaves. In Hollywood epics, we watch as they are forced to drag enormous blocks of stone, their bodies undernourished, their backs lashed by the whips of vicious overseers as they plead for water.
It was a Greek, Herodotus, who first made mention of slave labour during his visit to Egypt in 450 BCE. The thousands of labourers required for such a monument could never, in his eyes, be found through free will. Without any surviving records to tell the true story, it’s a notion that has
