3 ms·

For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.

• psunavy03 1y ago
  It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
  • jncfhnb 1y ago
    They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
    • Orbital_Armada 1y ago
      Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes
• nkrisc 1y ago
  Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.