this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.
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.
Isn't it like working for Amazon today?
You work for some pay and all the value goes to the rich person on top.
It makes less sense today, in the modern age we have the capability to provide for people in mass-scale, and today we have more alternatives for different lifestyles. Like, if you can't stand working for Amazon, there are ways you can go live off the land if you know your agriculture and farming. Or you can self-employ, you can gamble on all kinds of things if you're good at navigating the system, you can save money and change your location or your career. Not always easy but for a lot of people the option is there.
In around 4000 BC your options were either getting work stacking giant rocks for a living God, or go out to the wilderness and pray to whatever gods you believe in that you don't grow enough crops or build a large enough family that it attracts the attention of another tribe with no qualms about murdering everyone and taking your stockpiles.
Not exactly the best options either way, but it gets even worse the further back you go.
We are going backwards, I see.
If Bezos had his way, it would be the same today.
I was just responding to someone that said they weren't slaves when in reality they absolutely were.
that's oversimplifying a complex area of history.
Every time some uneducated schlub on the internet says "They were built by slaves" or "they were built by happy, well-fed capitalists" an actual archeologists' eye twitches and we all get stupider. They're not accurate descriptions either way. Learn more.
Yeah the best term that would fit would be peasant or serf but even that feels wrong. Problem is ancient Egypt existed so long ago that a lot of their social structures are a bit alien at this point to the average person, just because it was so damned early in history. Its basically like comparing the stem mammals to modern mammals, real close and lots of similarities but still quite different.
100% this, we wouldn't recognize the attitudes and social systems, so while it's true there was a lot of injustice and suffering in early history, (I can point anyone at mass graves with butchering marks on the bones if people really want to know how bad things were) it's not appropriate to try to use the building of the pyramids as an example of well, anything really. All we know is that the people were paid a kind of ration system, maybe more. Maybe it was more complicated than that, but they also weren't chained and whipped like we imagine slavery in other periods.
I think it makes people uncomfortable because we want to point to any kind of indentured servitude with moral absolutism. And big, giant stone monoliths are great things to point at to use as examples of human hubris. But most of the people who feel anything about it couldn't connect with social attitudes and cultural norms of the 1980's much less four-thousand-fucking-years ago.
The greatest words in science are "I don't know."
TL;DR Imperfect but fairish