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Comment by the_rosentotter | Hacker News Reader

It seems that peoples through the ages have respected the pyramids enough to leave them mostly intact and undisturbed, giving us the unique heritage that we have today. I can't help but contrast this with the British explorers who just started blowing through it with explosives and pulling stuff out wholesale.

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Not at all. Most of the pyramids, and many many other burials were ransacked by graverobbers and scavengers in antiquity - in a lot of cases, even while there were still pharaohs. It's assumed that a lot of them were robbed immediately, by the same workers who built them - in fact, even as early as the Middle Kingdom, there was a thriving trade in robbed grave goods for the explicit purpose of reuse in another burial, so it's far from uncommon to find people interred with spells on papyri that are centuries older than them, but have had the original owner's name scratched out and the new one inserted. If anything, the respect shown for the Giza complex in the last hundred years or so is the exception in its history. Heck, one of the two smaller pyramids has a huge hole in the side from where a 16th or 17th century caliph tried to demolish it.

Essentially, humans have always been garbage.

> by the same workers who built them

who were, by and large, slaves ...

> Essentially, humans have always been garbage.

I don't really consider them too garbage-y for trying to give even a little F.U. to their masters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-...

They weren't slaves

If I remember my old books correctly, they were not slaves, they were peasants who were paying tax as labour instead of money or produce. Like conscription, but for civilian work.

So there is still compulsion here, and the workers would often have had similar emotions and incentives as slaves. The fact that the workers had more freedom probably gave them more ability to act on that than if they had been proper slaves.

> they were peasants who were paying tax as labour

When you put it like that, it sounds an awful lot like slavery.

Sounds like my job, my life. IN the grand scheme of things, nothing much has changed in millennia.

Or, humans have always had to focus on their own self-preservation and only recently have we had the luxury to care for the past at the expense of the present.

What good would destroying a pyramid do in regards for self-preservation?

There's gold in there!

The Pyramids were originally cased in a layer of white limestone. Almost all of that is gone, since, if I recall, they were small enough that they could be carted away, unlike the granite that remains.

Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.

Almost every pyramid was looted nearly immediately, and the limestone covers on the pyramids were stolen long ago. Most of the reason the pyramids remain as they are is because they are made of very large blocks which are inordinately difficult to move and impractical to use for other purposes.

I'm aware that they were subjected to grave robbing. That seems like more low-level thieving than actual organized pillaging though, which required destroying structure to pull off, as evidenced by the fact that the most important artifacts, including the riches of the burial chamber and the sarcophagus itself, were still there until modern times.

At Giza? No, the burials were long since disrupted by the middle ages. I don't think there's even much solid agreement that there ever even was a burial in the Great Pyramid.

We have written confessions of systematic grave robbing from the time of the Pharoahs, and successive generations of Pharoahs came up with ever-more-elaborate schemes to make tombs more difficult to break into, none of which succeeded.

Finding Tutenkhamen's tomb that hadn't been systematically cleared of all its contents was unprecedented but owed nothing to being protected by any elaborate superstructure that needed destroying, and everything to do with it being concealed by mudslides and workers' huts rather than the sort of superstructure graverobbers were used to partially dismantling to find a way in.

I think you'll find the sarcophagus is there because it is too large to be stolen. As I recall, we've never even found human remains in the pyramids themselves.

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