Corvée labor systems are unbelievable to you? Especially in an environment where (because of the annual Nile floods) the homelands of people are uninhabitable for a few months each year?
> Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim
That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor. There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte Chico.
The stonemasons would not have been slaves (or if they were they were highly trusted servants who were too valuable to mistreat and thus may have been technically slaved by some definition but could do anything a free person could do). However there is a lot of brute labor that a slave could do.
Slaves were used for all sorts of things in history, with different areas having different uses. However the most common use would have been farming as 95% of the economy was farming.
I do not know if the people who built the pyramids were slaves or not. I can see how different people would define slave differently and as a result get a different answer. However it seems highly likely slaves would be been known and used for many things in that area/time.
That's fair enough--in any slave society, there's a decent chance that any sufficiently large body of unskilled labor contains slavery simply because some non-negligible fraction of the labor force is slave.
That said, I interpret a statement like "the pyramids were built with slaves" to refer to an idea that the vast majority of the workforce were slaves, as for example was the case for agricultural workers in the antebellum US south (although apparently it was roughly 6 free workers : 7 slave workers specifically in agriculture in the region, a somewhat lower ratio than I would have expected--I guess I'm undercounting the existence of non-slave agricultural lands.)
How many skilled artisan stonemasons were available at the time? If the market for their craft was that large why do there seem to be so few of their projects left behind?
> If the market for their craft was that large why do there seem to be so few of their projects left behind?
Stone for building is comparatively rare, so buildings that are dilapidated tend to see their stonework reused for new buildings. If we're talking about 4000 year-old architecture that has gone through several eras of state collapse and rebuilding, then you'd expect to see lots of reuse.
Note for example that the pyramids--even the great pyramids at Giza--are pretty thoroughly denuded of their outer casing blocks, and there are a few lesser pyramids whose outer structure have been entirely carted away.
Apparently Pharaoh first worked on irrigation and later worked on big pyramids after the irrigation was built but with the same kind of labor force. Farmers who now know how to cut stone and move it around in water.
> Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim
That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor. There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte Chico.