Comment by methyl
1 month ago
For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
1 month ago
For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes
Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.