• TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Shard@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Kerred@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Okay good I vaguely recall pyramid building but thought slaves had less to do with them than what culture shows

      • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yep! Almost everyone that worked on the pyramids were basically skilled contractors or construction workers

        • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            But… That’s… What a barter society does? Ancient Egypt didn’t have currency, it was a barter-based society. You don’t have a farm or land to grow your own food? You work for someone else to get food, or resources to trade for food, drinks, shelter, medicine etc. They were also given good cuts of meat and had good barracks/quarters to live in nearby villages while working there. Workers who died were even buried in well stocked tombs near the pyramids which was a place of honor, slaves would likely be put in mass graves, unmarked graves, and/or far from the pyramids.

            What were non-slave workers (working on the pyramids or not) in ancient Egypt paid with if working for good food, drink, and shelter is only for slaves? A currency that didn’t exist? The profound pleasure of working for the pharaoh while having a farm of their own at home for food?

            • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              They were also given good cuts of meat and had good barracks/quarters to live in nearby villages while working there.

              I’d like to see a source for that.

              Workers who died were even buried in well stocked tombs near the pyramids which was a place of honor

              Man that’s even worse than the bread and beer thing. “You’re not slaves because when you die on the job we bury you in a better hole!”

            • Madison420@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Sure. It’s a barter society where one class holds literally all of the power.

              “It’s this deal because I’m a god!” You’re just not gunna argue with a god on earth.

              • mommykink@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                it’s a barter society where one class holds literally all the power

                You’re phrasing these like they’re contradictory statements when they’re not incompatible concepts at all.

  • Lifted_lowered@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It was highly discouraged to not love your place in life.

      The rich are still trying to tell the rest of us that shit.

  • StarkillerX42@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I can’t get past how their transportation technique requires at least 1 extra person, but it seems like just the two guys.

    • RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • gmtom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

  • _number8_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    i assume everyone in the old days was motivated by thinking god was keeping score? jealous tbh

  • banana_meccanica@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    This disease that is work, many people actually enjoy building pyramids for others, so those who own them happily continue to exist.

    • ooli@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Dont know why you’re downvoted because you are pretty right.

      People enjoy working it give them purpose, this is why capitalism (making more money from wealth than from work) last so long

      • Savas@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is like saying people enjoy breathing, this is why health insurance companies exist…

        Agreed, people enjoy working, if by working you mean being productive, building, creating, especially inventing something.

        You can have two worlds where in one there is manipulative people holding all the wealth, doing nothing or in another where it’s fair.

        Sometime ago someone decided it’s easier to manipulate others to do something and a snowball effect occured.

      • banana_meccanica@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        I think didn’t like that I called this reality a disease. This purpose to build a pyramid of others for non-communal purposes is a serious and very widespread disease, so many people for a purpose are willing to become slaves.