The pyramids were not built by slaves. They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well. Pharaohs were living gods, so building for them and getting paid for it mustn’t have been that different from building a cathedral.
Yes guys it was fine. You just pretend that you are a god through threat of violence and having an uneducated population then get them to do things for you. It’s great!
It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.
No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.
Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.
Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.
But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.
Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.
Yeah the best term that would fit would be peasant or serf but even that feels wrong. Problem is ancient Egypt existed so long ago that a lot of their social structures are a bit alien at this point to the average person, just because it was so damned early in history. Its basically like comparing the stem mammals to modern mammals, real close and lots of similarities but still quite different.
The workers quarters at the Giza necropolis have been excavated, and they found evidence that the work crews lived a pretty high standard of life. Yes, as far as I know other than transporting stones via the Nile they were built with human muscle power, but the men cutting and moving the stones were fed an extremely luxurious diet for the time. Huge numbers of bakeries were found, along with evidence of vegetables, fish, beef…my personal hypothesis is this is a requirement; the Great Pyramid is probably the greatest feat of athleticism ever performed, and you had to feed the men lots of calories, protein, vitamins and minerals to get it done.
They got healthcare, too. There have been bodies found that showed healed amputations. People got hurt on the job but were cared for as best as they knew how 4,000 years ago.
Now imagine you’re a young man living in some village in lower Egypt in the 4th dynasty, and a royal messenger shows up recruiting workers to build some big triangle in the West for the king, and they promise wages along with all the beer, bread and steak you can eat made and served by more young women than you knew existed, plus medical and dental. You’d probably go check out the king’s big triangle thing. I’ve taken worse jobs than that.
They were not forced to do this. It was a privilege, one that actual slaves weren’t allowed. So looking back that makes it a system of a rich guy paying people for his passion project while they didn’t have any other income.
Not quite communism but it’s as much slavery as any other job.
They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well.
The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).
Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.
I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.
You’re generalizing a few millennia of civilization. That doesn’t really make sense.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century? Might as well have been disease. For all its fertility, farming in water comes with big downsides.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today. But people chose for stability which the pharaoh provided. They weren’t slaves, unlike the actual slaves which they did own.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century?
Animal husbandry is the root cause of a host of common diseases.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today.
Traveling by foot across the wilderness into a civilization you know nothing about - not the language nor the customs nor anyone eager to accept you as a foreign migrant?
lol working to build something for a god invented to keep the pharaoh in power and unquestionable in their authority to order you to build the pyramid is still slavery. Human shaped dogs are still slaves, not matter how well treated. “Believe in my divinity or die” is slavery.
except those “slaves” didn’t have to bother about buying food, affording rent or paying up morgage, while still working only for a fraction of time that we do.
People in countries with conscript armies are slaves too, by your logic.
We’re far more enslaved than they ever were, especially if we’re talking about modern physical job workers.
Not to mention that “believe in my divinity or die” is more of a christian shtick. And people did believe in pharaoh’s divinity, as everybody percieved reality as magical at the time. It’s important to remember that rationalism and atheism are relatively new ideas, emerged the moment that people noticed that our new knowledge contradicts christian dogmatics.
And while slavery was a thing pretty much from the beggining of human civilisation, don’t think it was the same as colonial slavery. Colonial slavery is more akin to what nazis did, really. Not that its surprising, considering that both utilised more-less the same rhetoric.
They didnt have a choice, they were sold a lie. It’s absolutely not chattel slavery, but neither is prison slavery but its all still slavery. I agree it is not chattel slavery.
Kenneth Copeland demanding you to volunteer for his benefit while he feeds and clothes you is slavery still, but the pharoah had an army and the priests on his side to subjugate everyone and literally designed around you whipping your own back so the gods wouldnt be upset at you for the bad harvest this season. All punishment was divine and good. Its slavery my friend.
I firmly believe that every single bronze age civilization was no less morally apprehensive than what we have today with capitalism and wage slavery. Ancient egypt is no better—the pharoahs were slavers who had a happy set of cattle at their disposal as far as im concerned, just like employers do today in capitalist nations.
If you are employed and love your employer for giving you everything you need and no worries, live that life my friend, but you would be a slave. Egyptians didn’t have that choice tho
you’re stretching the term “slavery” beyond what is acceptable in the context of historical discussion.
The inequality is one of the core principles of society. And even if the society was magically equal, your freedom would end where other’s freedom would start.
Your definition of slavery is also quite useless simply due to the fact that everyone is a slave by your logic, as everyone has some kind of social obligation they are ought to fullfill, be it for the money or otherwise.
Egyptians didn’t have that choice tho
Do we tho? Not having to work is a privilege. Without a job you’ll most likely die a slow miserable death if you don’t have that privilege, as we no longer raise our food, collect our drinking water, or build our own houses. Not to mention, we still have to pay taxes.
By the way, according to what i heard, working on a pyramid construction was exactly the last case — a form of tax payment.
Anyway, considering that workers were well fed, receiving meat, beer and bread in greater quantities than any peasant of the day would dream of, as well as they had medical care for their conscription period, one might hypothesize that most people of the time would’ve jumped on an opportunity like that.
Your argument is neither constructive, nor it helps to represent reality better, let alone do so historically correct.
Thanks! I’m not used to hear any kind of appraisal, especially online, so i will admit, i do feel a bit awkward right now :D
I guess the Pharaohs actually did achieve some form of immortality…
Well, AFAIR, they did believe that as long as their name was spoken, they continued to live in the afterlife, didn’t they? They definitely were onto something
happens with the best of us. If anything, ability to change one’s opinion instead of blindly insisting on it is always an admirable quality. Vocalizing such fact takes an even greater resolve.
No matter how firm your belief was, you have my respect.
Humans have historically been slavers as leaders. I demand the necessary incredible evidence to believe the pharoahs were truly benevolent. I am okay with us not knowing for certain if they were horrible god-emperor slaver tyrants or just your run of the mill god-emperor slaver tyrants, but I demand the necessary evidence that they werent slaver tyrants. Humans are humans, no matter the time period, and human leaders are slavers historically
What kept the pharaohs in power was crop management and public infrastructure. The pyramids were much closer to public work to combat unemploynent than some power tool.
The pharohs certainly did make their slaves believe they controlled the weather with their brainwashing and the priests were more than happy to help him with their astronomical studies, seeing as they made that pharoah a god by doing so and benefiting from it as such
The authorities would do something for them iirc, then they’d have to pay it off with work, where they were compensated with a protein heavy diet as well.
The pyramids were not built by slaves. They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well. Pharaohs were living gods, so building for them and getting paid for it mustn’t have been that different from building a cathedral.
Yes guys it was fine. You just pretend that you are a god through threat of violence and having an uneducated population then get them to do things for you. It’s great!
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Isn’t it like working for Amazon today?
You work for some pay and all the value goes to the rich person on top.
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We are going backwards, I see.
If Bezos had his way, it would be the same today.
No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.
Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.
Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.
But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.
Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.
I was just responding to someone that said they weren’t slaves when in reality they absolutely were.
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Yeah the best term that would fit would be peasant or serf but even that feels wrong. Problem is ancient Egypt existed so long ago that a lot of their social structures are a bit alien at this point to the average person, just because it was so damned early in history. Its basically like comparing the stem mammals to modern mammals, real close and lots of similarities but still quite different.
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TL;DR Imperfect but fairish
Conscript is a better term
But we know they weren’t living gods, so what does that make this system really?
The workers quarters at the Giza necropolis have been excavated, and they found evidence that the work crews lived a pretty high standard of life. Yes, as far as I know other than transporting stones via the Nile they were built with human muscle power, but the men cutting and moving the stones were fed an extremely luxurious diet for the time. Huge numbers of bakeries were found, along with evidence of vegetables, fish, beef…my personal hypothesis is this is a requirement; the Great Pyramid is probably the greatest feat of athleticism ever performed, and you had to feed the men lots of calories, protein, vitamins and minerals to get it done.
They got healthcare, too. There have been bodies found that showed healed amputations. People got hurt on the job but were cared for as best as they knew how 4,000 years ago.
Now imagine you’re a young man living in some village in lower Egypt in the 4th dynasty, and a royal messenger shows up recruiting workers to build some big triangle in the West for the king, and they promise wages along with all the beer, bread and steak you can eat made and served by more young women than you knew existed, plus medical and dental. You’d probably go check out the king’s big triangle thing. I’ve taken worse jobs than that.
They were not forced to do this. It was a privilege, one that actual slaves weren’t allowed. So looking back that makes it a system of a rich guy paying people for his passion project while they didn’t have any other income.
Not quite communism but it’s as much slavery as any other job.
Why’s that guy holding a whip?
Because it was drawn there?
“I’m not really bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
He’s a motivation coach and this is motivation tool.
I cant tell if this is a joke or serious anymore.
He dangles that little frayed part in front of them and they get so distracted chasing it they forget they’re working
The ancient equivalent of key jingling.
I think that’s a fishing pole, he’s going fishing and stopped to check on his friends.
So actually the labourers on the pyramid got rations of dried fish as part of their payment so this is topical.
He’s ever vigilant for scorpions.
Carl
For rock and stone?
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The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).
Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.
I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.
You’re generalizing a few millennia of civilization. That doesn’t really make sense.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century? Might as well have been disease. For all its fertility, farming in water comes with big downsides.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today. But people chose for stability which the pharaoh provided. They weren’t slaves, unlike the actual slaves which they did own.
A bit more than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States
Animal husbandry is the root cause of a host of common diseases.
Traveling by foot across the wilderness into a civilization you know nothing about - not the language nor the customs nor anyone eager to accept you as a foreign migrant?
Trivial, really. They just used Egypt GPS.
lol working to build something for a god invented to keep the pharaoh in power and unquestionable in their authority to order you to build the pyramid is still slavery. Human shaped dogs are still slaves, not matter how well treated. “Believe in my divinity or die” is slavery.
except those “slaves” didn’t have to bother about buying food, affording rent or paying up morgage, while still working only for a fraction of time that we do.
People in countries with conscript armies are slaves too, by your logic.
We’re far more enslaved than they ever were, especially if we’re talking about modern physical job workers.
Not to mention that “believe in my divinity or die” is more of a christian shtick. And people did believe in pharaoh’s divinity, as everybody percieved reality as magical at the time. It’s important to remember that rationalism and atheism are relatively new ideas, emerged the moment that people noticed that our new knowledge contradicts christian dogmatics.
And while slavery was a thing pretty much from the beggining of human civilisation, don’t think it was the same as colonial slavery. Colonial slavery is more akin to what nazis did, really. Not that its surprising, considering that both utilised more-less the same rhetoric.
They didnt have a choice, they were sold a lie. It’s absolutely not chattel slavery, but neither is prison slavery but its all still slavery. I agree it is not chattel slavery.
Kenneth Copeland demanding you to volunteer for his benefit while he feeds and clothes you is slavery still, but the pharoah had an army and the priests on his side to subjugate everyone and literally designed around you whipping your own back so the gods wouldnt be upset at you for the bad harvest this season. All punishment was divine and good. Its slavery my friend.
deleted by creator
I firmly believe that every single bronze age civilization was no less morally apprehensive than what we have today with capitalism and wage slavery. Ancient egypt is no better—the pharoahs were slavers who had a happy set of cattle at their disposal as far as im concerned, just like employers do today in capitalist nations.
If you are employed and love your employer for giving you everything you need and no worries, live that life my friend, but you would be a slave. Egyptians didn’t have that choice tho
you’re stretching the term “slavery” beyond what is acceptable in the context of historical discussion.
The inequality is one of the core principles of society. And even if the society was magically equal, your freedom would end where other’s freedom would start.
Your definition of slavery is also quite useless simply due to the fact that everyone is a slave by your logic, as everyone has some kind of social obligation they are ought to fullfill, be it for the money or otherwise.
Do we tho? Not having to work is a privilege. Without a job you’ll most likely die a slow miserable death if you don’t have that privilege, as we no longer raise our food, collect our drinking water, or build our own houses. Not to mention, we still have to pay taxes.
By the way, according to what i heard, working on a pyramid construction was exactly the last case — a form of tax payment.
Anyway, considering that workers were well fed, receiving meat, beer and bread in greater quantities than any peasant of the day would dream of, as well as they had medical care for their conscription period, one might hypothesize that most people of the time would’ve jumped on an opportunity like that.
Your argument is neither constructive, nor it helps to represent reality better, let alone do so historically correct.
deleted by creator
Thanks! I’m not used to hear any kind of appraisal, especially online, so i will admit, i do feel a bit awkward right now :D
Well, AFAIR, they did believe that as long as their name was spoken, they continued to live in the afterlife, didn’t they? They definitely were onto something
i no longer firmly believe it
happens with the best of us. If anything, ability to change one’s opinion instead of blindly insisting on it is always an admirable quality. Vocalizing such fact takes an even greater resolve.
No matter how firm your belief was, you have my respect.
deleted by creator
Humans have historically been slavers as leaders. I demand the necessary incredible evidence to believe the pharoahs were truly benevolent. I am okay with us not knowing for certain if they were horrible god-emperor slaver tyrants or just your run of the mill god-emperor slaver tyrants, but I demand the necessary evidence that they werent slaver tyrants. Humans are humans, no matter the time period, and human leaders are slavers historically
deleted by creator
What kept the pharaohs in power was crop management and public infrastructure. The pyramids were much closer to public work to combat unemploynent than some power tool.
The pharohs certainly did make their slaves believe they controlled the weather with their brainwashing and the priests were more than happy to help him with their astronomical studies, seeing as they made that pharoah a god by doing so and benefiting from it as such
The authorities would do something for them iirc, then they’d have to pay it off with work, where they were compensated with a protein heavy diet as well.