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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

I love to imagine the life during the construction of the pyramids. While Egyptologists can make pretty good guesses about the construction techniques, it's amusing when they speak to the motivation or 'religious practices' of the people.

Imagine how different the prejudices and outlook of someone 50 years ago look to us today. And consider that the modern Western worldview is about 500 years old. These things were built 4500 years ago. Cleopatra is closer in time to today, than to the construction of the Pyramids. They were built 2000 years before Plato. Maybe 10 or 20 generations before the Epic of Gilgamesh.

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It's kind of sad how much nuance and meaning modern humans are able to crush down into words like "religious practices". It makes me wonder what parts of our present world will be compressed or misunderstood or glossed over by people in 1000+ years

"Religious practices" has always seemed like a coherent concept to me, the way anthropologists use it—but one that doesn't really fit the label we've given it. It's almost a diagnosis of exclusion: "religious practices" are everything about a culture, other than its economy (trade, productive marketable craft), and its politics (tribalism, war, game-theory).

Most art and music in modern culture would fit neatly under the "religious practices" anthropological aegis. Which isn't a bad or wrong thing, I don't think! The category is a correct and natural division, and anthropologists are right to group "all that stuff" together. The label on the grouping is what's silly.

No I think you are very right. It's just all too easy for us, who inhabit a mostly secular public sphere, to apply our own mental/linguistic concept of "religious || non-religious" when thinking about cultures that probably did not apply such a rigid sort of filter to the world around them.

I guess that is a challenge in any kind of historical context.

I find it tempting to try to come up with better labels for the concept, despite it being unlikely that the greater anthropology community will ever shift to using them.

Spiritual zeitgeist might fit, I think—it describes the motivation behind most art that’s not associated with a particular coherent artistic movement. It’s “what people were feeling—and wanting to commiserate about feeling—at the time.”

> They were built 2000 years before Plato. Maybe 10 or 20 generations before the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Seems more likely to be contemporaneous with the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to Wikipedia:

> The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BC).

It's true that 2100 BC is a few hundred years younger than the pyramids, but I find it unlikely that (1) the oldest written sources we have for Gilgamesh just happen to be the first ones ever written; and (2) Gilgamesh was invented out of whole cloth for those poems 2100 years ago.

For comparison, the Iliad is known to draw on an oral tradition about 400 years older than the written one.

I bet you’d enjoy Pyramid by David Macaulay (https://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-David-Macaulay/dp/0395321212). I read it as a kid and loved the glimpse into Egyptian construction with an architect/engineer perspective.

Unlike most people, the Egyptions rather conveniently buried people with religious texts, so we have a fairly decent idea of those religious practices.

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