You’ve seen the TikToks. Or maybe it was a late-night History Channel binge that got you thinking. There’s a photo—usually grainy, definitely sepia-toned—of a massive skeleton standing next to a normal-sized guy in a pith helmet. The caption always says something like "The truth they don't want you to know" or "Evidence that giants built the pyramids." It’s a compelling hook. Honestly, it’s a lot more fun to imagine a race of 15-foot-tall Nephilim tossing limestone blocks around like Lego bricks than it is to think about thousands of guys sweating in the sun with copper chisels.
But here’s the thing.
When you actually step onto the Giza Plateau, the scale of the Great Pyramid is paralyzing. We’re talking 2.3 million stone blocks. Some weigh two tons; others, like the granite beams above the King’s Chamber, are closer to 80 tons. If you try to wrap your head around how a Bronze Age civilization moved that kind of weight without engines, your brain naturally looks for a shortcut. Giants feel like a logical shortcut.
They aren't.
Archaeology is a messy, dirt-under-the-fingernails science that relies on what we can actually touch. And what we touch in Egypt tells a much more human story. It’s a story of logistics, math, and frankly, a lot of beer.
The "Giant" Myth vs. Biological Reality
Why do so many people think giants built the pyramids in the first place? It usually starts with the "out-of-place artifact" argument. People look at the massive doors in Egyptian temples or the sheer height of the ceilings and assume they were built for larger beings.
It’s a bit of a leap.
Think about our own cathedrals. We build 100-foot ceilings today, but it doesn't mean we expect a giant to walk through the nave of Notre Dame. We build for awe. The Pharaohs were obsessed with the idea of zep tepi—the "first time" or the beginning of the world. They wanted to build for the gods, not for the average height of a worker.
Biologically, the giant theory hits a wall. Specifically, the Square-Cube Law. If you double the height of a human, you don't just double their weight; you triple it. A 15-foot-tall human would have bones that would snap under the sheer pressure of their own body mass unless those bones were unnaturally thick—basically like elephant legs. We have found thousands of skeletons in the "Workers' Village" at Giza. Dr. Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner have spent decades excavating these sites. You know what they found?
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People. Regular-sized people.
Most of the workers were between 5'3" and 5'8". Their skeletons show signs of degenerative arthritis, particularly in the spine. That’s the "smoking gun" of pyramid building. If giants were doing the heavy lifting, we wouldn't see the spinal compression and stress fractures in the remains of the 20,000 to 30,000 laborers who lived and died at the site. These people were working hard. They were eating a high-protein diet of beef and sheep, which was a luxury in the ancient world, but they were definitely human.
How the heavy lifting actually happened
If we toss the giant theory out the window, we're left with a much bigger problem: How did they do it?
One of the most famous examples of Egyptian engineering is the "Unfinished Obelisk" in Aswan. It’s a massive piece of granite that cracked before it could be finished. If it had been completed, it would have weighed nearly 1,200 tons. There are no "giant-sized" tools there. Instead, there are dolerite pounders—round, hard stones used to slowly chip away at the granite.
It’s tedious. It’s slow. It’s incredibly human.
The Ramp Controversy
For a long time, the go-to explanation was a single, massive straight ramp. The problem? To reach the top of the Great Pyramid at a grade that isn't too steep for humans to pull a sled, the ramp would have to be over a mile long. It would contain as much material as the pyramid itself.
Archaeologists like Jean-Pierre Houdin have proposed more "clever" solutions. Houdin’s theory involves an internal spiral ramp. This would allow the Egyptians to build the pyramid from the inside out. While it hasn't been 100% proven, scans of the pyramid have revealed "anomalies" that align with where an internal ramp might be.
Water and Wet Sand
Then there's the friction problem. How do you slide a 2.5-ton block across the desert?
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A wall painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep shows a massive statue being moved on a sled. If you look closely at the front of the sled, there’s a guy pouring liquid onto the sand. For years, people thought it was a ceremonial gesture. Then, physicists at the University of Amsterdam decided to test it.
They found that if you dampen sand just the right amount, it cuts the required pulling force in half. It prevents the sand from "clumping" in front of the sled. It turns the desert into a sliding surface. No giants required—just a guy with a water jug and a basic understanding of fluid dynamics.
The Lost Giants of Newspaper Archives
If you search for "giants" and "archaeology," you’ll inevitably find old newspaper clippings from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The New York Times and the London Daily Post used to run stories about "Seven-foot skeletons found in mounds."
These are the primary "proof" for the giants built the pyramids crowd.
But you have to look at the context of 19th-century journalism. This was the era of the "yellow press" and P.T. Barnum. Hoaxes were a business model. Many of these "discoveries" were actually misinterpreted burials of Indigenous people, or in some cases, outright fakes made of plaster and bone to drum up museum ticket sales. When actual Smithsonian archaeologists went to investigate these claims, the "giant" skeletons almost always vanished or turned out to be regular remains that were "estimated" poorly by amateur diggers.
Hieroglyphs and the "Giant" Misinterpretation
Sometimes, the "evidence" for giants comes from the art itself. In Egyptian relief carvings, the Pharaoh is often depicted as five times larger than the workers or his enemies.
Is this a literal depiction?
No. It’s called hieratic scale. It’s an artistic convention used to show importance. If you looked at a political cartoon today where a president is drawn as a giant looming over a city, you wouldn't assume the president is actually 500 feet tall. You’d understand it’s a metaphor for power. The Egyptians used the same visual shorthand.
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We also have the "Khashm el-Girba" records and other papyri that detail the rations for workers. They weren't ordering giant-sized meals. They were ordering standard units of bread and jars of beer. The bureaucracy of Egypt was meticulous. If there were 12-foot laborers on the payroll, the accountants—who recorded everything down to the last leek—would have mentioned the extra overhead.
The True Engineering Genius
When we attribute the pyramids to giants or aliens or some lost race of supermen, we're kind of insulting the actual Egyptians. We're saying, "You weren't smart enough to figure this out, so someone else must have done it."
But they were brilliant.
They used the stars (specifically the "Indestructible" circumpolar stars) to align the Great Pyramid to true north within three-sixtieths of a degree. They used water-filled trenches to create a perfectly level foundation. They used basic copper saws and sand (which acts as an abrasive) to cut through hard stone.
It’s slow work. It’s "years of your life" work. But it’s possible.
What you can do to see for yourself
If you're still skeptical, the best thing you can do is look at the unfinished projects. They reveal the "seams" of Egyptian construction.
- Visit the Giza Workers' Village: Look at the size of the beds and the doorways in the barracks. They are built for people who are, if anything, slightly smaller than the average modern human.
- Study the "Lesser" Pyramids: The Great Pyramid didn't happen in a vacuum. There was a period of trial and error. The "Bent Pyramid" at Dahshur is a perfect example. The engineers started at too steep an angle (54 degrees), realized the structure was becoming unstable, and had to change the angle mid-build (to 43 degrees). If giants or high-tech beings built these, they wouldn't have made such an obvious, "rookie" structural mistake.
- Check out the Quarry Marks: Many blocks in the pyramids still have red ochre "graffiti" on them. These are crew names like "The Friends of Khufu" or "The Drunkards of Menkaure." These were small teams of men competing against each other.
The idea that giants built the pyramids is a fun story, but the reality is much more impressive. It’s a testament to what humans can do when they have an infinite budget, a god-king to please, and a lot of time on their hands.
Actionable Insights for History Buffs
If you want to dive deeper into how the pyramids were actually constructed without falling into the "giant" rabbit hole, start with these steps:
- Read "The Pyramids" by Miroslav Verner. It’s the gold standard for understanding the evolution of these structures from simple mastabas to the Giza giants.
- Explore the ScanPyramids Project results. This is modern science using cosmic-ray muon radiography to "see" inside the stone. It’s finding hidden chambers that help explain the internal structure.
- Look into experimental archaeology. Groups like Nova have actually built small-scale pyramids using only ancient tools. It’s a great way to see how "impossible" tasks become possible with the right leverage and enough people.
Stop looking for giants and start looking at the math. The Egyptians didn't need to be ten feet tall; they just needed to be the best engineers the world had ever seen.