The Great Pyramids probably not built by slaves

[PlutonianEmpire]

I dunno whether this is old news or not. Oh well.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100110/sc_nm/us_egypt_antiquities_tombs

CAIRO (Reuters) – New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

"If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."

He said the collection of workers' tombs, some of which were found in the 1990s, were among the most significant finds in the 20th and 21st centuries. They belonged to workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.

Hawass had earlier found graffiti on the walls from workers calling themselves "friends of Khufu" -- another sign that they were not slaves.

The tombs, on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo, are 4,510 years old and lie at the entrance of a one-km (half mile)-long necropolis.

Hawass said evidence had been found showing that farmers in the Delta and Upper Egypt had sent 21 buffalo and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the builders, believed to number around 10,000 -- or about a tenth of Greek historian Herodotus's estimate of 100,000.

These farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the government of ancient Egypt -- evidence that he said underscored the fact they were participating in a national project.

The first discovery of workers' tombs in 1990 came about accidentally when a horse stumbled on a brick structure 10 meters (yards) away from the burial area.

What implications could this have?

They might have to rewrite that "The Ten Commandments" movie.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

ALL of the builders were free men? I find it more probable some of them are slaves. Also, seems to be Egypt announcing it. Not biased at all, no siree.

 

[Lillefix]

They've actually been pretty certain about for the last decade at least. But I see at least someone needed to be educated, so the post is more than justified.

 

[ArneHD]

ALL of the builders were free men? I find it more probable some of them are slaves. Also, seems to be Egypt announcing it. Not biased at all, no siree.

Well, according to a discovery channel documentary that I watched oh, five years ago, and how reliable to take it to be, this has been pretty common knowledge that Egyptians used free labour for their projects. Also, slaves were apparently pretty uncommon in ancient Egypt.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

I see. Augmenting memory banks...

 

[jUmpSt0p]

hrm...

kind of raises the question of what "slave" means, though, in an ancient society with a much more feudal type structure.

still, it's easy to see how working on a great structure, for the Pharoah, could have been an honorable and even sought after occupation of the time. it's hard for us to imagine the type of "patriotism" they might have had... at the time the great pyramids were going up, Egypt was already 2000 years old. just imagine the kind of mythical power their own history must have had over them!

but what these terms mean to us, and what the people who built the pyramids actually felt about their own positions...

 

[Lillefix]

That is a very good point. I think conscription is a term that could describe the situation adequately.

 

[GenMarshall]

If they were not slaves, then they were workers whom were oppressed and exploited by there king. But Karl Marx and Lenin were not born centuries and Milena later .

 

[Traitorfish]

I thought this was already well established? It's always what I've been told, at any rate. During the off-season, farmers were employed by the aristocracy on building projects, including the pyramids. I may have been misinformed? (Or as it turns out, of course accidentally correctly informed.)

 

[Huayna Capac357]

We already knew this

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

I dunno whether this is old news or not. Oh well.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100110/sc_nm/us_egypt_antiquities_tombs

What implications could this have?

They might have to rewrite that "The Ten Commandments" movie.

This isn't news. There is even less evidence that Jews were ever slaves in Egypt.

 

[Miles Teg]

Yeah, pretty old stuff. But still, important to keep in mind.

 

[dirtyparrot]

I knew this a long time ago. There was a great deal of time when crops couldn't be grown, so there was lots of labour available. That being said, the work was extremely grueling and had a good deal of risk to it.

 

[Verbose]

Yup, not exactly hot off the presses. By now people like Professor Rainer Stadelmann should be wrapping up his career, having built it around things like how the pyramids were built by corveed labour.

The really interesting bit about the Ancient Egyptian monarchy being able to recruit and ship thousands of workmen from all over the Nile valley to the building sites are the possible implications it had for the development of a collective sense of an Egyptian national identity. The Egyptians are extremely early in developing what seems like a concept of a "motherland", the "Ta-meri", the Beloved Land, which encompassed all of Egypt from the Delta in the north to the First Cataract in the south, which looks rather odd compared to the city states of Mesopotamia, Syria etc.

The workers were housed in a temporary city of their own, where they literally could meet people form all over the valley, which they would probably never inte their lives have done otherwise. So, odds are, the Place To Be in Old Kingdom Ancient Egypt, to get the news, the new ideas etc., including the one about Egypt as a unified country, could very well have been the pyramid work sites.

 

[Lillefix]

Perhaps we should have encouraged Africans to do that after colonial times(among other things obviously). Build great monuments dedicated to the people, in order to forge nation states.

 

[Formaldehyde]

If they weren't slaves then they were pretty stupid. Building a monument to your current ruler.

 

[sophie]

They've actually been pretty certain about for the last decade at least. But I see at least someone needed to be educated, so the post is more than justified.

Yeah, I remember hearing about this quite a long while ago.

 

[innonimatu]

hrm...

kind of raises the question of what "slave" means, though, in an ancient society with a much more feudal type structure.

Good point, good point...

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I heard this a long time ago.


Hollywood movies aside, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Jews built the Pyramids. The bible makes it clear that their labor was building store cities of Pithom and Rameses, which were in the Nile Delta. The pyramids are all located far upstream from there. It seems they were not building monuments so much as granaries. It also makes it clear that their main building material was brick made of sun-baked mud and straw, not the stone used in the pyramids.


Also, in the original language it does not refer to them as slaves, it calls them "workers" and says they were made to "serve with rigor." It would seem more likely that the Jews were technically free, but like Egyptian commoners they were subject to high taxes, were not allowed to leave their lord's land without special written permission, and could be called upon for public works projects. This state of affairs (which they likely shared with a majority of native Egyptians) could probably be better described as Serfdom. (In Genesis we see Joseph and his brothers, along with the Egyptian Priestly and Noble castes, were made exempt from the taxes he himself convinced Pharaoh to institute; their suffering may have simply been the loss of their status as nobles, and the extra freedoms that went with it, when a new dynasty conquered Lower Egypt, likely at the start of the New Kingdom.)


Many scholars equate the Hebrews with what the Eyptians called the "ha ibrw," Canaanite horsemen and archers whom the Hyksos hired as mercenaries. As they had been part of the warrior caste they were exempt from the duties of normal peasants, until the Hyksos were driven out. It is considered probably that the lower ranking mercenaries stayed behind and lost their martial privileges.

 

[Zkribbler]

If the workers had enough money to buy their own tombs, they must have had labor unions.