this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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The pyramids were not built by slaves. They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well. Pharaohs were living gods, so building for them and getting paid for it mustn't have been that different from building a cathedral.
Yes guys it was fine. You just pretend that you are a god through threat of violence and having an uneducated population then get them to do things for you. It's great!
Isn't it like working for Amazon today?
You work for some pay and all the value goes to the rich person on top.
We are going backwards, I see.
If Bezos had his way, it would be the same today.
No it wasn't. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.
Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That's why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.
Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.
But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.
Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We've congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.
Well, building cathedrals wasn't fun either unless you were the guy in charge.
Who says it wasn't? Probably shorter days than us, more community, satisfaction of serving god...
Also allowed for artists to do some kick ass art with restrictions of course
Why's that guy holding a whip?
Because it was drawn there?
βIβm not really bad. Iβm just drawn that way.β
He's a motivation coach and this is motivation tool.
Heβs into some kinky stuff.
I cant tell if this is a joke or serious anymore.
He dangles that little frayed part in front of them and they get so distracted chasing it they forget theyβre working
The ancient equivalent of key jingling.
I think that's a fishing pole, he's going fishing and stopped to check on his friends.
So actually the labourers on the pyramid got rations of dried fish as part of their payment so this is topical.
He's ever vigilant for scorpions.
Carl
For rock and stone?
But we know they weren't living gods, so what does that make this system really?
The workers quarters at the Giza necropolis have been excavated, and they found evidence that the work crews lived a pretty high standard of life. Yes, as far as I know other than transporting stones via the Nile they were built with human muscle power, but the men cutting and moving the stones were fed an extremely luxurious diet for the time. Huge numbers of bakeries were found, along with evidence of vegetables, fish, beef...my personal hypothesis is this is a requirement; the Great Pyramid is probably the greatest feat of athleticism ever performed, and you had to feed the men lots of calories, protein, vitamins and minerals to get it done.
They got healthcare, too. There have been bodies found that showed healed amputations. People got hurt on the job but were cared for as best as they knew how 4,000 years ago.
Now imagine you're a young man living in some village in lower Egypt in the 4th dynasty, and a royal messenger shows up recruiting workers to build some big triangle in the West for the king, and they promise wages along with all the beer, bread and steak you can eat made and served by more young women than you knew existed, plus medical and dental. You'd probably go check out the king's big triangle thing. I've taken worse jobs than that.
They were not forced to do this. It was a privilege, one that actual slaves weren't allowed. So looking back that makes it a system of a rich guy paying people for his passion project while they didn't have any other income.
Not quite communism but it's as much slavery as any other job.
The Pharaoh's government would take a tithe of the farmer's crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh's was the pinnacle).
Idk what "treated well" is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.
I wouldn't call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.
You're generalizing a few millennia of civilization. That doesn't really make sense.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century? Might as well have been disease. For all its fertility, farming in water comes with big downsides.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today. But people chose for stability which the pharaoh provided. They weren't slaves, unlike the actual slaves which they did own.
A bit more than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States
Animal husbandry is the root cause of a host of common diseases.
Traveling by foot across the wilderness into a civilization you know nothing about - not the language nor the customs nor anyone eager to accept you as a foreign migrant?
Trivial, really. They just used Egypt GPS.
lol working to build something for a god invented to keep the pharaoh in power and unquestionable in their authority to order you to build the pyramid is still slavery. Human shaped dogs are still slaves, not matter how well treated. "Believe in my divinity or die" is slavery.
except those "slaves" didn't have to bother about buying food, affording rent or paying up morgage, while still working only for a fraction of time that we do.
People in countries with conscript armies are slaves too, by your logic.
We're far more enslaved than they ever were, especially if we're talking about modern physical job workers.
Not to mention that "believe in my divinity or die" is more of a christian shtick. And people did believe in pharaoh's divinity, as everybody percieved reality as magical at the time. It's important to remember that rationalism and atheism are relatively new ideas, emerged the moment that people noticed that our new knowledge contradicts christian dogmatics.
And while slavery was a thing pretty much from the beggining of human civilisation, don't think it was the same as colonial slavery. Colonial slavery is more akin to what nazis did, really. Not that its surprising, considering that both utilised more-less the same rhetoric.
What kept the pharaohs in power was crop management and public infrastructure. The pyramids were much closer to public work to combat unemploynent than some power tool.
The authorities would do something for them iirc, then they'd have to pay it off with work, where they were compensated with a protein heavy diet as well.