How can we know that the Great Pyramids weren´t built by slaves but by paid workers?
In: Other
The tl;dr is that the word used to describe labours, was actually never slave, it was just erroniously translated as slave
Words they did use is bak, hem, hem-nesu, seker-ank, a-mu, heseb, djet, and meryet, neither whos connotion or dennotation means slave, cause there is no word that means slave.
Like they where forced into it, thats true, but they also got housed, fed, watered and paid, and there might also have been entertainment provided, both lewd and non-lewd.
Do remember, that egypt was a tropical region when the pyramids were built, not a desert.
Total compensation package. In exchange for work, they were housed, fed, medically treated, and provided a small stipend for incidentals. On occasion they were provided impromptu deep tissue massages to stimulate work. And granted worry free retirement to optimize work efficiency.
Because it was build for the rulers and needed to be high quality?
If you are going to build your house for all of eternity and you have resources of entire country, will you rather pay absurd amount of money for highly skilled and payed, thus motivated workforce, or use slave/force labour which is unreliable, unskilled and has probability of destroying or even revolting against you?
After the Rosetta Stone, we re-learned how to read Egyptian, and they kept written records of a lot of things. The class they were in wasn’t slavery, but also wasn’t employee as we’d think of it, by a long shot.
[removed]
You are applying modern concepts of slavery and paid to other cultures that don’t match up. Furthermore, the distance between the old kingdom, and the new kingdom is so vast that in the middle of that were several different economic systems.
With that in mind, let’s unpack this concept of slave, and remember that we’re not talking violent American south slavery, we’re talking about an organizational system, where you have a lot of freedom of movement from day-to-day, and then what your assignments are, but you have someone that you have to report to who has absolute authority over whether or not, you can marry or any of those things. And we would say that the primary thing that makes you a slave is that you don’t have the right to pick up and moved to another city and so on.
But consider that the person who’s giving you those orders is also answerable to somebody who has absolutely authority, all the way up to the top. The God King rules and what we might consider nobility Is a lattice that structures, the entire society from top to bottom
People still need to be paid wages for work, and most people were attached to the place that they live from birth to death, so not being able to leave that place wasn’t that big of a stricture for most.
Let’s unpack that concept of paying wages, as well. In a world in which people lived in fairly large compounds with a lot of people in it, all what we might consider slaves to some master or family ownership, a lot of people are living in the place that has control over them and are receiving housing and food as a result. So it’s true that people were paid wages for work, but don’t think of it as our own late states capitalism where you need a coin to cross for every single possible transaction.
Through records/paperwork — empires are just big bureaucracies with a military (which is also a bureaucracy).
Bro this fucking comment section ain’t it. Jews were not paid laborers of Egypt. They were fucking slaves. Yall are erasing history. Soon you’ll say the same thing about cotton plantations in the south. “Yeah they technically didn’t own them but like they were treated well”. Fuck off.
Latest Answers