Not according to these articles;
At worst some workers had to work for a few months before they could go back to their families. At best, they were all willing volunteers that happily built the pyramids as an offering to their Pharaoh and gods.
Zahi Hawass said the discovery dismissed the popular perception as depicted by Hollywood of the pyramids being the fruit of the labour of slaves toiling away in the desert.
"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," he said on Sunday. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."
He said the collection of workers' tombs, some of which were first detected in the 1990s, were among the most significant finds in the 20th and 21st centuries. They belonged to workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.
Mr Hawass had earlier found graffiti on the walls from workers calling themselves "friends of Khufu" - another sign that they were not slaves.
The tombs, on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo, are 4,510 years old and lie at the entrance of a half-mile-long necropolis.
Mr Hawass said evidence had been found showing that farmers in the Delta and Upper Egypt had sent 21 buffalo and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the builders, believed to number around 10,000 - or about a tenth of the Greek historian Herodotus's estimate of 100,000.
These farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the government of ancient Egypt - evidence that he said underscored the fact they were participating in a national project.
The first discovery of workers' tombs in 1990 came about accidentally when a horse stumbled on a brick structure 10 yards away from the burial area.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/6962860/Pyramids-not-built-by-slaves.html
But, in a complete reversal of the story of oppression told by Herodotus, Lehner and Hawass have suggested that the labourers may have been volunteers. Zahi Hawass believes that the symbolism of the pyramid was already strong enough to encourage people to volunteer for the supreme national project. Mark Lehner has gone further, comparing pyramid building to American Amish barn raising, which is done on a volunteer basis. He might equally well have compared it to the staffing of archaeological digs, which tend to be manned by enthusiastic, unpaid volunteers supervised by a few paid professionals.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/pyramid_builders_01.shtml
I didn't know you were an Egyptologist KKKynes!? When did you get time to study the pyramids in between making all your implicit and explicit, racially motivated, hate mongering posts on RIU?
