AERA|Ancient Egypt Research Associates (original) (raw)
Learn more about AERA, our team, and our work in Egypt.
Explore our excavations on the Giza plateau and across Egypt.
Our field schools help train the next generation of Egyptian archaeologists.
Browse all our publications and download copies of our recent findings.
The latest news from our excavations in Egypt.
Join to help us explore further!
Who Built the Pyramids?
Who built the pyramids and how did the Pyramids help to build Egypt? These questions have driven our research at Giza for over 30 years.
We know the names of the kings who had the Giza Pyramids built: Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Their monuments convey their power and the technical sophistication of their artisans, but tell us very little about the masses of people who did the actual work of building the pyramids 4,600 years ago.
Estimates for the number of people required to build the pyramids range into the tens of thousands—equal to the populations of the earliest cities. But who were these pyramid workers? Where did they live? What was their life like? In order to answer these questions, we realized we needed to find the pyramid builders’ city.
How do you find a lost city? We looked to the landscape. After three years of mapping and model building, everything we found pointed to a site south of the Sphinx, near a large stone wall called the Heit el-Ghurab (or “Wall of the Crow” in English). So we started to dig and in 1988 we discovered the Lost City of the Pyramids, a massive urban settlement where people lived and worked while constructing the Giza pyramids.
Today we continue to work at the Lost City of the Pyramids, as well as the Great Pyramid, Sphinx, and the priests’ towns associated with the tombs of Pharaoh Menkaure and Queen Khentkawes.
Use the slideshow at the left to or visit our Fieldwork or Publications pages to learn more about our work.