I remember a humoristic Soviet daily wall calendar that said: "And then we'll destroy the cranes, and the whole world will wonder how we built these pyramids"
Presenting evidence of people who worked on project [X] and were not in group [A] is not the same thing as showing that group [A] did not work on project [X]. Surely that's elementary?
The claim isn't that slaves weren't involved, the claim is that the common knowledge that it was all slaves is wrong.
It was widely believed the pyramids were a massive slave operation because obviously people had to be forced to work on something of that scale and obviously nobody would subject themselves to something this arduous freely. Imagining how they were built conjures up images of Egyptian guards whipping slaves who drag massive slabs in the scorching heat.
But new evidence suggests not only wasn't everybody who worked on it a slave, there's even good reason to believe that slaves didn't play any bigger role than in the society at the time in general.
The very first thing you see when loading the page is "Who Built the Pyramids? Not slaves.".
Later on, the article says (of Lehner): "He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves."
Near the end, it says "Slaves or not, as the last season of his dig began, Lehner still did not know where all the workers slept."
So I think my original comment was salient and reacting to how the article actually presented things. It makes clear statements that slaves weren't involved. Then it leaves the possibility open at the end. It's common in many articles to overstate a claim in the beginning to grab readers, and I don't care for it.
Surely "slaves built the pyramids" implies that at least the majority of people involved were slaves. The article inverses that simplified statement, implying the same caveat: at least the majority of people involved weren't slaves (though some might have been).
If slaves were present in the society, it's absurd to interpret a blanket statement like "not slaves (built the pyramids)" to imply no slaves were involved, especially when it's a direct response to the blanket statements "the pyramids were built by slaves" (which noone would take to mean that no non-slaves were present anywhere near the construction site -- it's a given that someone would need to oversee the slaves somehow).
But we're literally arguing over semantics. Unless you assume that all generalisations are always intended to be understood 100% literally and that archeologists would want to express 100% confidence in knowing exactly what group in society each person involved in a construction project thousands of years ago belonged to, there really isn't anything worth arguing over.
General ignorance has it that the pyramids were built almost entirely by slaves. This article claims that is not the case. Everything else is just fluff to make for a better read.
>Surely "slaves built the pyramids" implies that at least the majority of people involved were slaves.
If I heard "structural engineers built the suspension bridge" I'd simply assume they were involved, not that they were physically responsible for over 50 percent of all tasks.
I'd be curious if you could find the source for that, and I mean legitimately curious - I'd be interested to see what kind of evidence that kind of a claim is based on. Egypt at least does have extensive written records, so that could be codified in a statute somewhere.
I'm sort of skeptical by default of archaeological claims that assert conclusions wider than what their findings directly show - too often it seems like they've gone in with a preconceived big theory that they are grabbing at straws to find support for.
I think what people feel sensitive about is the emphasis on slaves. It's like slaves are being retroactively disenfranchised. That probably irks people when they think in a modern framework. Historians don't care so much, so they throw whatever theory fits current evidence, which, with time could again change.
They have an idea of how many people were required to do the work, and they found evidence of roughly that many people housed nearby who were fed and respected much better than we would expect slaves to be. Also, they found them exactly where they expected to find the slaves.
It's not the strongest evidence, but it seems like enough to displace the presumption that most of the laborers were slaves, unless there's equally strong evidence for that. I would expect the article to have mentioned such evidence, though.
It is one of those topics that crop up every now and then. What emerges from the picture is that few of the low skilled worker at the construction site where slaves in the way we picture slavery today with many in a social situation more akin to serfdom.
At what point slavery becomes serfdom is more a matter of semantic. Then again there were both actual slaves, i.e. prisoner and spoil of wars and skilled craftmen working at the decorations, detailing etc, because building a pyramid was not just the "moving rocks" parts.
Attempting to reduce something that complex to a single slave vs non slave structure is reductive at best, especially in a society with a caste system such as the Ancient Egyptian. Just think about the ideograms, those were written under the direction of the religious caste, even if indirectly.
Thinking of the economics behind this feat, if these were not slaves, but paid employees, I would assume that a whole ecosystem would exist nearby.
These people would need to be housed, buy food with their salaries (stores/markets), send kids to 'school'. A city would need to have been developed to accommodate that population.
Also, if they were slaves they wouldn't have been given the luxury of a proper burial/cremation, so somewhere nearby there should be mass graves.
I am not an archeologist, I am just trying to think with modern days analogies.
The majority of the article talks about the town that they excavated that existed for precisely this reason. The evidence strongly suggests that the residents were very well looked after.
They also speculate that the town was populated as a consequence of a form of feudal duty called bak. This feudalism is documented but isn't known to have been used specifically to build the great pyramids (though it seems likely).
On the assumption that this is true, the lack of family accommodation etc is entirely plausible: the workers are seconded to the town for periods rather than live there full time.
I would really recommend reading the article, even if you're not an archaeologist. It's very interesting what you can learn from the evidence.
You are thinking about this as a state-sponsored project, however it is more akin a governmental agency dedicated to building the Pyramids. People there (almost certainly all men) were likely not paid employees but instead people taken from all over Egypt enrolled in a mandatory public service (akin to mandatory military service), fed and supplied by the Egyptian government, with goods which likely came from taxes created with the explicit purpose of supporting the construction of the Pyramids.
So, all considered, this place must look more akin an ancient Egyptian military camp of a massive scale than a regular city, thus lacking some 'basic' civilian like markets or schools. Also, ancient Egyptians cared a lot about their death ones, so likely a proper burial were given to everybody who died while working in the Pharaon's tomb.
On an unrelated note, I wonder why they were wasting all these massive logistics into piling rocks in middle of the dessert, when they could, you know, be building roads or dams or walls across all their frontiers.
"On an unrelated note, I wonder why they were wasting all these massive logistics into piling rocks in middle of the dessert, when they could, you know, be building roads or dams or walls across all their frontiers"
Was that rhetorical?
In case not: religion. They believed it served a higher purpose. The afterlife of their godlike emperor. And all who took part and did good, got better chances of a better afterlife themself ...
I honestly believe religion to be mostly an instrument to convince people to follow a certain agenda. Which means, from my point of view, that there must be a real reason for the Egyptian religion to promote the construction of pyramids instead of more, let's say, practical goals.
This is definitely what religion was and is widely used for, but I am very sure, that the Pharaoh's for example really believed, that they were incarnations of a god.
I mean, imagine you are being raised up this way, everyone bows his head to you as long as you can remember and they do believe that you are a god in human form ... how can you not believe likewise?
Besides, I met quite a lot people by now who were not raised like this, but developed such an ego that they consider themselve to be enlightened and allmost godlike ...
Also, building a big monument for your glory, is a very practical goal, even if you do get doubts, about there usefulness in afterlife, but when everyone of your underlings measures your greatness in the size of your grave, than you also really have not much choice ...
An acquaintance works in in the oil industry and they can have tens of thousands of people working on projects costing tens of billions. This looks like a similar scenario.
Fortunately, he realised that evidence is better than ignorant speculation and, as a consequence, has done quite a lot for our understanding of the period and the great pyramids in particular.
Because those sections of the Bible were fabricated by neighboring Canaanite herder tribes in the 9th century BC as justification for their unification. Why would they know what Egypt was like?
Not really, no. It has been speculated that Akhenatens elevation of Aten above other Gods inspired the monotheism of Moses. But AFAIK this is pure speculation without a shred of evidence. Moses might not even be historical anyway, and the chronology is off. It is much more likely the later monotheism was inspired by Persian religion.
Was Moses a monotheist, though? I thought that at the time depicted in the Pentateuch, the Israelites were henotheists - they believed that there were many gods but that YHWH was the only one worthy of worship.
On could argue that even jesus did allow for xeno-theism, given that he argued for giving the roman emperor what the roman emperor was due- and the roman emperors at that time considered themselves basically gods or god decendants.
I don't think you can argue that. Jesus argued it was acceptable for Jews to pay taxes, but certainly not that it was acceptable for Jews to worship the emperor. In any case, only some emperors where proclaimed divine, and it only happened after their death. Tiberius (the emperor at the time of Jesus) was never proclaimed divine. Caligula was the first to be proclaimed divine while still living, and this was after Jesus.
What's the connection there? I asked a friend just the other day if he thought the pyramid numerology kooks and the "cosmic A432" kooks had ever joined forces. Would love to watch a 50 minute youtube video of a guy rambling incoherently about it into a bad microphone.
Interesting. As I suspected, the only thing I can find is kooks playing numberwang to "roughly" arrive at 43200 by connecting various geometric properties of the pyramids to various measurements in cubits, meters, miles, seconds. It's an equation where you decide the units and operators, and also get to throw in whatever factors that seem significant to you, and at every stage of the equation you get to choose whether to dismiss the error of the number you "approximately" arrived at or not, so of course you'll find whatever number you want if you look hard enough.
