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I hadn't heard of that; that would be very interesting. At the moment though I'm somewhat skeptical of this. Given the estimated effort required to build the py

I hadn't heard of that; that would be very interesting. At the moment though I'm somewhat skeptical of this. Given the estimated effort required to build the pyramids at the time, compensating the workers would have impoverished the rulers of early Egypt.

philwelch 17y ago
The rulers of early Egypt were rich enough to have pyramids built. That's an expensive proposition regardless of how you handle the labor force. You don't actually have to pay the workers extra money, either, if pyramid labor was a form of tax payment. It's still somewhat of a mystery how they managed to design and construct the damned things, but it would have required a large amount of skilled and compensated workers even if the brunt physical labor was borne by slaves. "The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 millimeters in length. The base is horizontal and flat to within 21 mm. The sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points (within 4 minutes of arc) based on true north, not magnetic north, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza) EDIT: Once you have enough skilled foremen, the gain from enslaving a bunch of other people to do the heavy lifting isn't as much as you'd think--especially for an already-rich civilization that already had to invent a lot of clever, labor-saving techniques just to get the damned things built.
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  Er, sorry -- I don't mean to dispute that skilled laborers were involved, nor that those skilled laborers were likely compensated in some fashion. I was just questioning that the entire base of labor for the construction of the pyramids was skilled and compensated. I think that if we were to still disagree, it would only be on the relative involvements of the two forces, and frankly I don't know enough on this specific subject to make that kind of argument.

philwelch 17y ago

The rulers of early Egypt were rich enough to have pyramids built. That's an expensive proposition regardless of how you handle the labor force. You don't actually have to pay the workers extra money, either, if pyramid labor was a form of tax payment. It's still somewhat of a mystery how they managed to design and construct the damned things, but it would have required a large amount of skilled and compensated workers even if the brunt physical labor was borne by slaves. "The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 millimeters in length. The base is horizontal and flat to within 21 mm. The sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points (within 4 minutes of arc) based on true north, not magnetic north, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza) EDIT: Once you have enough skilled foremen, the gain from enslaving a bunch of other people to do the heavy lifting isn't as much as you'd think--especially for an already-rich civilization that already had to invent a lot of clever, labor-saving techniques just to get the damned things built.

thaumaturgy 17y ago
Er, sorry -- I don't mean to dispute that skilled laborers were involved, nor that those skilled laborers were likely compensated in some fashion. I was just questioning that the entire base of labor for the construction of the pyramids was skilled and compensated. I think that if we were to still disagree, it would only be on the relative involvements of the two forces, and frankly I don't know enough on this specific subject to make that kind of argument.