The pyramids were repurposed as Western observation platforms staffed by forced labor.

Evidence

The Great Pyramid at Giza had now become a viewing platform. Teams of Bedouin were organised to heave and push the writer or tourist to the top, where two more Bedouin would carry the European on their shoulders to all four corners, to observe the view. At the end of the century an Egyptian novel satirised the westernising pretensions among members of the Egyptian upper middle class, by having one such character spend a day climbing the pyramids at Giza, to see the view. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of tourism and the extraction of ‘views’ as a form of colonial labor exploitation — via a novel’s satire on Egyptian westernization.
• SEED: An essay angle: the real labor cost behind the romanticized ‘view from the pyramid’ — who carried whom so that a detached observer could feel authoritative.