The labor advocate in me loves this. The historian in me hates it.
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.
No, but a well paid engineer is a bit different to the whipped slaves often depicted.
And then to get it into its final position, we use these fancy things called levers to slowly ease the panels off the rollers and precisely jimmy them till they sit within the square we marked out using chalk or sometimes a rope we dipped in ink.
Oh how far we’ve come since those primitive days.
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
People are barfing that up a lot lately, but the only reliable source I’ve seen shows that the people who built the pyramids were being paid in bread and beer; that is, they were receiving the necessities of life, not payment.
Giving slaves the necessities of life and calling it payment to justify the slavery is as old as … well, the pyramids at least.
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.
