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Comment by jusp | Hacker News Reader

Large ramps kms in length. Similar to how Indians built most of their giant temples where btw worship happens to this day. Its easy to build large things on the backs of slaves but keeping culture alive for thousands of years....not just the monuments, takes much more than engineering thought.

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The Egyptians didn't use slaves to build the pyramids

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...

Great article, thank you!

The article does not say that. They seem to have implied this by mainly the evidence the builders ate a lot of meat, but their own assessing that the lodging was absurdly dense says otherwise. Sounds quite a bit like cherry picking to me, which is not uncommon for people working on the same subject for decades. At some point you are just too willing to accept your own confirmation bias, no matter how trained you are.

And this is just me guessing from the article, there are other reasons to think twice before reaching such conclusions. The concept of "slave" is not as set in stone as we think, it's a generalization of a broader concept.

And cattle is not necessarily for the rich: livestock is a pretty good way to store energy. In hot places like the tropics, vegetables go ripe very quickly so the logistics of feeding an army of builders with crops might have been difficult enough that it was just easier to feed the crops to cattle then move the cattle to the people.

> Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Idk man, seems like the article does claim that the builders weren't slaves.

Also, given the way trophic pyramids work, feeding crops to a cow and feeding the cow to people results in a loss of energy compared to feeding the people plants. By that, I mean it's more expensive to raise a cow and use it to feed 10 people than it would be to give those 10 people crops.

I'm not sure you can use 'energy conservation' to determine ideal diet patterns. Everyone should be drinking kerosene otherwise.

Cattle can digest fiber and can eat tons of fodder to extract sufficient protein - both of which humans are incapable of. Eating meat is then consuming refined and concentrated version of that fodder.

Well, the Egyptians managed to keep their culture alive for 3000+ years until the Muslim conquest.

> Source? All the sources I look at say that Egyptian culture survived more or less intact until the Muslim conquest in the 300s.

You should recheck your sources if they're telling you about Muslim conquests in the 300s.

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