Cleopatra lived closer to us than to the pyramids
The great PYRAMID at Giza was finished around 2560 BC. CLEOPATRA died in 30 BC. That is a gap of roughly 2,500 years — and only about 2,050 years separate her from the present day. She was nearer in time to the first Moon landing than to the monument tourists photograph her alongside.
Egyptian history is not one period but about thirty centuries of them, divided into more than thirty numbered dynasties with long collapses in between. When TUTANKHAMUN was buried around 1323 BC, the pyramids were already twelve hundred years old and being visited as ancient ruins. Graffiti left by New Kingdom sightseers survives on monuments that were antiques to them.
The pyramid builders were paid, fed and housed
The slave story comes from Herodotus, writing two thousand years after the fact, and was repeated for centuries. Excavations at Giza since the 1990s have found the workers' town: bakeries, breweries, dormitories, medical care for broken bones, and the remains of cattle and fish brought in daily on a scale that means the state was feeding thousands of people well.
There are also the tombs of the workers themselves, positioned in sight of the PYRAMIDS — an honour nobody grants to forced labour. They appear to have been rotating crews of skilled builders plus seasonal farm labour working during the NILE's annual flood, when the fields were underwater and there was nothing else to do. The pyramid was, among other things, a job-creation scheme with a very long deadline.
Mummification was surgery with a business model
A full embalming took seventy days. The brain was removed through the nose and discarded as useless; the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines were taken out and stored separately; the heart was deliberately left in place, because it was thought to do the work of thinking and would be needed later. The body was then packed in natron salt for forty days to dry it out completely.
It came in price tiers. Herodotus describes three levels of service, from the full treatment down to a budget option involving a cheap injection and a quick salt cure. The SARCOPHAGUS, the wrapped MUMMY, the jackal-headed ANUBIS presiding over the TOMB and the SCARAB placed over the heart were all part of a system with a price list — a funeral industry, running for millennia.
The curse was invented by newspapers
When Tutankhamun's TOMB was opened in 1922, Lord Carnarvon died five months later of an infected mosquito bite. The press had been locked out of the excavation by an exclusive deal with The Times, and rival papers, short of copy, ran the CURSE instead. Arthur Conan Doyle helpfully suggested to reporters that it might be real.
A study later tracked the people present at the opening: most lived into old age, and Howard Carter, who actually opened the sarcophagus, died seventeen years afterwards at sixty-four. The grid holds the rest of the real machinery — the SCRIBE, the PAPYRUS he wrote on, the HIEROGLYPHS he used, the TEMPLE, the OBELISK, the DYNASTY system, the SPHINX and the GODS. Our Egyptian gods page covers the religion itself.