The labor advocate in me loves this. The historian in me hates it.
Okay good I vaguely recall pyramid building but thought slaves had less to do with them than what culture shows
Yep! Almost everyone that worked on the pyramids were basically skilled contractors or construction workers
thoses workers were well paid , right! So are historians
There was forced labor in Egypt but it was mostly agricultural. It was like corvee labor to build irrigation canals and dams and stuff, and it was how people paid their taxes basically
Edit: and just like in places with forced corvee labor today like Uzbekistan, you could pay your way out of it if you were wealthy enough https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-ancient-egypt-people-paid-to-become-temple-servants-674595/
Edit 2: Supposedly the state corvee in Uzbekistan ended March 2022 but I feel like people probably are still picking cotton a lot, they’re probably just getting paid now.
Yes lol the people who built the pyramids were generally well paid.
The crazy thing is we still do things more or less the same way sometimes. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve helped move heavy electrical panels in through a door by rolling them along copper rods.
Well enough to save up for their own pyramid?
No, but a well paid engineer is a bit different to the whipped slaves often depicted.
Ancient Egyptians didn’t have capitalism. At least in the dynasty where a lot of writing is from like this one scroll that was used to teach scribes writing so there is a fuckload of copies of it, they had a theocratic class system where social roles were pretty rigid. It was highly discouraged to not love your place in life. Like that writing exercise that archaeologists found is like basically copypasta about how cool it is to be a scribe, how you get to sit in the shade and not destroy your body to earn a living like the laborers must do. The cultures extant in ancient Egypt’s like 3000 years of history have been studied pretty extensively and pretty much every conclusion leads to the idea that social mobility through hard work or whatever of the kind promised by the capitalist Horatio Alger story was definitely not a cultural value in ancient Egypt, at least not a cultural value held by the people with the power to decide what got written down for posterity.
It was highly discouraged to not love your place in life.
The rich are still trying to tell the rest of us that shit.
Those lowercase a’s are really bothering me next to all those capital letters.
Slaves didn’t build the pyramids.
Workers were paid to do so.
Do you want to stay and build the pyramids (get some food and a place to sleep) or go try your luck on your own in the desert?
Slaves also didn’t do sharecropping, they were “paid” to do so.
No one knows what the implications were for the Egyptian “workers”
It doesn’t make sense to treat your workers bad because you get less work. They probably got a lot of food and water for energy.
But a lot of “workers” were poor when they started and were poor when they died.
Their labor did not bring wealth
I can’t get past how their transportation technique requires at least 1 extra person, but it seems like just the two guys.
And they are pushing that stone just right next to the path, instead of on it.
i assume everyone in the old days was motivated by thinking god was keeping score? jealous tbh
Indoctrination and the slave mindset.
Fun fact! Not many (if any) slaves were used in building the pyramids, a majority of the people were akin to skilled contractors and construction workers.
Mostly agricultural workers, who had little to do outside of harvest season, from my understanding.
This disease that is work, many people actually enjoy building pyramids for others, so those who own them happily continue to exist.
Dont know why you’re downvoted because you are pretty right.
People enjoy working it give them purpose, this is why capitalism (making more money from wealth than from work) last so long
This is like saying people enjoy breathing, this is why health insurance companies exist…
Agreed, people enjoy working, if by working you mean being productive, building, creating, especially inventing something.
You can have two worlds where in one there is manipulative people holding all the wealth, doing nothing or in another where it’s fair.
Sometime ago someone decided it’s easier to manipulate others to do something and a snowball effect occured.
