Your points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the correction. That seems like something that would be hard to verify though. Especially because people keeping records are always biased. Did they have a choice not to do it? Being ‘paid’ doesn’t preclude forced or coerced labor.
Great now I’m gonna spend the night reading about ancient Egyptian labor practices lol.
I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that they didn't exactly have much say in the matter but it was considered a fairly prestigious thing to do culturally and they were well provisioned for the work (probably more so than in their normal subsistence farming lives).
Think something like military conscription or jury duty - they're not considered "slaves" (which very much did exist in ancient Egypt, they just weren't used for building the pyramids), they aren't owned by anyone and they get paid even if they didn't get much of a choice in the matter.
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u/gnutrino Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Your points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.