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
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.
I feel like this was a thing in “Brave New World”, just be happy where you are because it’s right where you need to be.
Fuck
I can’t get past how their transportation technique requires at least 1 extra person, but it seems like just the two guys.
It’s because no one is willing to work anymore.
They’ve got nothing but excuses. “I can’t come in today, I got the plague” and “my kid got eviscerated by a hippo, I need the day off for the funeral” and “this famine is making food unaffordable, please pay us more.” They’re all just lazy and ungrateful for the privilege of toiling.
Fun fact, archaeologists have found what is essentially and ancient Egyptian clock in sheet, that had listed reasons why workers couldn’t attend that day and it included things like their wife or daughter being on their periods so they would take time off work to care for them.
So in some ways the ancient Egyptians were more progressive than we are.
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.
