FOR THE JUNK HISTORY FILE:

'Israelites didn't build the pyramids'

Head of Egyptian antiquity council files complaint against high school: 'Ancient Egyptians built pyramids. Why do they teach otherwise?'

Smadar Perry (Ynet News)
Published: 02.27.07, 09:32 / Israel Culture

"It is well known that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids; they regarded these structures as a national project for ancient Egypt," said Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Hawass filed an official complaint to the Egyptian attorney general of Egypt against a Cairo high school for teaching the students that it was the Israelites who built the pyramids.

Hawass, prominent figure in Egyptian culture and around the Arab world, criticized the school curriculum for "insisting that the Jews built the pyramids and highlighting the fact that those who refused to partake in the building were physically tortured."

The longstanding debate over who built the five pyramids of Giza, West of Cairo, was rekindled at the first official visit of an Israeli delegation to Egypt, in 1977.

"We built the pyramids," said the late Prime Minster Menahem Begin at the National Museum in Cairo. He spurred fury among Egyptian historians and archeologists. Subsequently, the Egyptian press was full of protest articles.

[...]

Let us be quite clear: there is no "debate" or "dispute" about this among the people who know anything about Eygptian history. The Israelites did not build the pyramids. If Menachem Begin thought so, he was badly misinformed. It is dismaying that misinformation like this is being taught in a school, and it's a pity that Dr. Hawass has to waste his time countering it.

UPDATE: Carla Sulzbach e-mails:

Israelites building pyramids? Blame Josephus (Ant. II.9.1 (203)!

Yep:

NOW it happened that the Egyptians grew delicate and lazy, as to pains-taking, and gave themselves up to other pleasures, and in particular to the love of gain. They also became very ill-affected towards the Hebrews, as touched with envy at their prosperity; for when they saw how the nation of the Israelites flourished, and were become eminent already in plenty of wealth, which they had acquired by their virtue and natural love of labor, they thought their increase was to their own detriment. And having, in length of time, forgotten the benefits they had received from Joseph, particularly the crown being now come into another family, they became very abusive to the Israelites, and contrived many ways of afflicting them; for they enjoined them to cut a great number of channels for the river, and to build walls for their cities and ramparts, that they might restrain the river, and hinder its waters from stagnating, upon its running over its own banks: they set them also to build pyramids, and by all this wore them out; and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, and to accustom themselves to hard labor.

My emphasis.