From an Egyptian website with ties to the museum on labor forces,
Snippet:
To many, the sheer size of the pyramids made such overestimation seem reasonable. Wieslaw Kozinski, a Polish architect, believed that an average of 25
men were required to transport a block weighing one and one-half tons. Therefore, at a time when Egypt's population was probably no more than one and
a half million people, including women and children, he estimated a workforce of 60,000 men outside the construction site and as many as 300,000
inside. Of course, Kozinski believed that the population of Egypt during the early pyramid age to be five to ten million people. Yet modern research
has demonstrated that as few as eight to twelve men could have actually pulled a 2.5 ton block over an even, lubricated (by water) surface, and twenty
men could have drug such a block up a lubricated gradient from the quarries to the Great Pyramid in as little as 30 minutes.
Even Petrie, one of the first great modern Egyptologists, thought that the huge labor force the Greek historian Herodotus reported (100,000 men) to
have been used for the construction of the Great Pyramid was plausible. In his view, which continues to have considerable acceptance by today's
Egyptologists, the labor force was drawn mostly from the rural Egyptian population who would work on the monuments during flood season, when they
could not work in their fields. It is probably not unreasonable to believe that a few slaves were also involved in this construction work, though to
what extent we do not know.
More recent evidence suggests that the ancient Egyptians may have been somewhat more astute builders. In the mid 1980s a French/Egyptian team
investigated the Great Pyramid using ultrasound technology. Their efforts revealed that large cavities within the structure had been filled with pure
sand. This is referred to as the "chamber method", and could have considerably increased the pace of work. In addition, we also know that the Great
Pyramid utilized a rock outcropping as part of its core. These discoveries, as Miroslav Verner notes, made all the careful calculations and estimates
concerning how many millions of stone blocks make up the Great Pyramid, and the associated speculations, useless.
Today, while the question of exactly how many men it would have taken to build the Great Pyramid at Giza remains unanswered, we can speculate on
certain elements of the workforce. The ancient Egyptians became great labor organizers. Part of the labor force working on the pyramids would have
been organized as a crew, perhaps consisting of 2,000 men. This crew was divided into two gangs of 1,000 workers, which in turn was divided into five
zaa (in each gang), a term that was translated by the ancient Greeks as "phyloi" or phyle, meaning tribe, group or brotherhood. Each Phyle consisted
of about 200 mean.
source:
www.touregypt.net...
Numbers don't lie but they can be manipulated.
edit on 11-11-2011 by dcmb1409 because: (no reason given)