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.
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.
Those lowercase a’s are really bothering me next to all those capital letters.
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.
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
