The thing about the pyramids is they're probably the greatest feat of athleticism in history and they're from way at the beginning. Moving those huge stones with basically nothing but human muscle, lifting some of them over a hundred meters high. Archeology at the workers' village at the Giza necropolis suggests the pyramid builders ate very well, evidence of fish, meat, vegetables, and literally monumental amounts of bread and beer. I think that was a requirement; you can't move that much stone that far by hand and foot without feeding your crew a power diet. A diet prepared by equally massive teams of women working in industrial scale kitchens.

I love this: The men who built the pyramids worked in a hierarchy of teams. And these teams kind of competed, "we moved more stone than you" sort of thing. The biggest groups were Gangs, they would have cool team names like Friends of Khufu or Drunkards of Menkaure. Each Gang contained five smaller "phyles" or tribes which usually had a directional name, often taken from Egyptian nautical terms, what would translate today into starboard or prow. Phyles were further divided into 10 or 20 man groups of similar workers, so you'd have a team of haulers, a team of stonecutters, each would have single concept word names like Endurance or Perfection.

That sort of thing brings these men to life for me in a similar way to Pompeiian graffiti like "I shat well here" or "The waitress is a great fuck" does. I mean, these dudes named their team The Drunkards of Menkaure, we tell work hard play hard jokes like that to this day. You think those guys raised more hell on or off shift?