Comment by psunavy03
1 month ago
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