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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

The "fact" about the pyramids I simply cannot believe is the insistence of many historians that slaves weren't used

If true now THAT is amazing, personally I think the people in power in ancient Egypt simply rewrote their records.

Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim

Great-Wall-of-China they basically used to throw slaves into the filler after they became too old or injured, people today are basically walking and taking photos on top of a mass-grave of horrors

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Corvée labor systems are unbelievable to you? Especially in an environment where (because of the annual Nile floods) the homelands of people are uninhabitable for a few months each year?

> Virtually no other ancient culture and its world-level marvels can make that claim

That is a bold claim. My recollection of lots of historical instances of slavery is that slaves tended to be used in jobs that no one wanted to do, such as mining. Monumental buildings tend to involve a lot of skilled artisanal crafts--stonemasons are not something you'd be likely to trust to slave labor. There are also monuments that are constructed by cultures not known to have practiced slavery, such as Stonehenge or Norte Chico.

The stonemasons would not have been slaves (or if they were they were highly trusted servants who were too valuable to mistreat and thus may have been technically slaved by some definition but could do anything a free person could do). However there is a lot of brute labor that a slave could do.

Slaves were used for all sorts of things in history, with different areas having different uses. However the most common use would have been farming as 95% of the economy was farming.

I do not know if the people who built the pyramids were slaves or not. I can see how different people would define slave differently and as a result get a different answer. However it seems highly likely slaves would be been known and used for many things in that area/time.

That's fair enough--in any slave society, there's a decent chance that any sufficiently large body of unskilled labor contains slavery simply because some non-negligible fraction of the labor force is slave.

That said, I interpret a statement like "the pyramids were built with slaves" to refer to an idea that the vast majority of the workforce were slaves, as for example was the case for agricultural workers in the antebellum US south (although apparently it was roughly 6 free workers : 7 slave workers specifically in agriculture in the region, a somewhat lower ratio than I would have expected--I guess I'm undercounting the existence of non-slave agricultural lands.)

How many skilled artisan stonemasons were available at the time? If the market for their craft was that large why do there seem to be so few of their projects left behind?

> If the market for their craft was that large why do there seem to be so few of their projects left behind?

Stone for building is comparatively rare, so buildings that are dilapidated tend to see their stonework reused for new buildings. If we're talking about 4000 year-old architecture that has gone through several eras of state collapse and rebuilding, then you'd expect to see lots of reuse.

Note for example that the pyramids--even the great pyramids at Giza--are pretty thoroughly denuded of their outer casing blocks, and there are a few lesser pyramids whose outer structure have been entirely carted away.

Apparently Pharaoh first worked on irrigation and later worked on big pyramids after the irrigation was built but with the same kind of labor force. Farmers who now know how to cut stone and move it around in water.

They must have had great foresight to know that 4,500 years later using slave labor would become historically inconvenient.

My understanding is that the claim is slaves weren’t used for the pyramids, not that Egypt didn’t have slaves.

I can think of many reasons slaves wouldn’t be used for the pyramids even if they existed. Politics, availability, even worse jobs to be done, etc.

You might find documents like this interesting: https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

But I think others here have pointed out the larger issue at hand, "slavery" isn't a monolith. The spectrum of forced labor is pretty wide and to our modern colloquial use of the word, the builders of the pyramids weren't "slaves" in the same way that those who built the Great Wall or worked in Rome's silver mines were.

I can believe it. Wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile for growing grain due to the yearly Nile flooding. An abundance of food would mean excess labour to work on other projects.

Egypt was "ridiculously fertile" but it also had a very short but intense growing season, and it was also completely dependent on the quality of the floods, not enough flooding and the fields would not hydrate, and you'd get a famine, too much flooding and it'd overrun the levees and destroy villages.

An abundance of food means an abundance of offspring until there is no abundance of food. You have to make people serfs for them to spend their time with anything but increasing their family size and thereby increasing their power and influence. So maybe they weren't slaves, but for sure they were serfs.

Any citation for this? In the modern world, food security means a lower birthrate.

"A farewell to Alms"

This book explains it extremely well and backs it up with data in excruciating detail (which you can read or skip if you're convinced early on).

People think that Malthus predicted exponential population growth, but his actual observation was exactly what the above comment described. Growth in productivity would lead to growth in population until wealth per capita reached the same point it was at before. No improvement in productivity would ever actually improve the human condition, just increase its size. Malthus was absolutely right at the time he made this observation of his so called "Malthusian trap".

The observation you make about the modern world and lower birth rates started very abruptly not long after Malthus published his findings. The industrial revolution literally invalidated what had been true for all of human civilization up to that point.

That's also with modern medicine. Back in the day you had to have lots of kids because nearly all of them died and you needed someone to work the farm and care for you in old age. In modern society, they're viewed more as an expense.

Look at all of world history for a start.

In the modern world, the population is put through 9 or more years of indoctrination during formative years to conform to a different system. Before then it was have as many children as you can, because when they become adults they can have no stronger allies than their brothers.

Chattel slavery was sort of the extreme historical endpoint of a spectrum of forced labor and is maybe not a good model for discussion.

Is it slavery if the pharaoh demands each family provide 1 male for labor each year? Or each person has to spend a month on the pyramid. Or there's a famine and the only way for your family to get grain is to work on the pyramid?

Doesn't really feel like an interesting point to fixate on tbh. There was undoubtedly a huge amount of coercion since Egypt funneled a ton of resources into a useless project, and the pharaoh had to pay for it somehow. Whether it was heavy taxation that forced people into labor or starve, or explicit forced labor, eh.

We have evidence in the form of writing, e.g. accounting books and the journals of Merer [1], who describes the supervision of the construction and of the workers. The logbooks describe worker strikes (they complain about not being given enough beer) and how they're divided into teams of skilled laborers that compete against each other. These logbooks coincidentally describe canals used to bring supplies close to the pyramids.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-gre...

My alt theory is the pyramids were started from the core first with the blocks and then built out from there. And the stone was right there beneath the pyramid being carved out. But how did they get the blocks to the top? Using a crane system! At the apex there would be a lever balance and ropes would lever the stones into place.

> The "fact" about the pyramids I simply cannot believe is the insistence of many historians that slaves weren't used

I can't speak to evidence that slaves weren't used but we have records of wages paid to laborers and engineers.

> I can't speak to evidence that slaves weren't used but we have records of wages paid to laborers and engineers.

I don't think that's a counter-argument. Depending on context, wages can be paid to slaves, too. "Being forced to work under threat of death" doesn't imply that payment wasn't made.

As a counter-counter argument (yeah, I love arguing with myself), do these records mention any payment for the costs of food and shelter in bulk? Because generally, the food and shelter for slaves is paid for by the slave-drivers, so if slaves were used, I'd expect to see a record of bulk purchases of food and shelter.

Why would it seem that slaves would have had to be used?

People who are paid to do work they don't want to do don't believe in the existence of people who would do work they don't want to do for money.

(In reality the distinction between slave and employee is blurred over thousands of years and it's hard to use our words to talk about their setups. It's likely that both slave and non-slave labor (taking slave to be unpaid coerced labor) was used; just as our society uses both, either openly or discretely.)

I also would assume that the state and/or religion aspect may have resulted in citizens (skilled and otherwise) willing to volunteer as well.

The local church down the road from me can bring out a TON of people to work for free for various activities, and they're upset if they miss out.

It doesn't seem unimaginable that non slave locals in Egypt would be similarly motivated and even enthusiastic about working / being a part of it all.

I would also assume that good pay is a strong incentive, and public works have been used time and again as a form of welfare.

I can imagine a "3 squares a day" meal offering could possibly be a big draw.

Maybe for a slave.

The medieval cathedrals of Europe are known to have been built without slave labor because slavery wasn't practiced in Europe at that time, but they were built by serfs, which is not totally dissimilar. It's hard to describe past labor relationships with modern language since they had very different societies.

Agreed, and we really don't know / have any good information on how the locals felt about things then.

I imagine being common citizen back then is terrible, if only relative to my experience, but on the other hand they may have been enthusiastic to contention to an important religious activity. Really hard to know their circumstances / point of view.

> just as our society uses both, either openly or discretely.

"Prisoners with jobs" are becoming something more people know exist, as opposed to a niche dirty secret, which I think is probably a positive sign of reform rather than an indication of deeper normalization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZHENHICSoE

"Slave" cannot mean unpaid coerced laborer, especially since the society in question predated currency. In point of fact, there isn't a single set of conditions that uniquely define slavery, and historical labor relations were different to the point where using the term "slave" broadly is useless, especially across large differences in culture and time. I don't think the question of whether the Egyptians used slave labor is meaningful.

I thought the consensus was that corvee labor was used, rather than outright slavery.

They were paid in grain and beer.

Enough just to feed them, or enough to actually be considered payment?

The concept of payment beyond present requirements may not have existed back then. People were payed in the resources their family needed to survive between the harvest seasons.

More than an ordinary laborer, much more than an agricultural slave, and you also had social esteem and a higher spiritual acclaim. This all means a LOT in a highly stratified society, like Ancient Egypt. You don't give such things to slaves.

In the modern world we have Qatar and other middle-eastern countries that trick migrants into coming in to work on their massive projects in the insane heat, seize their passports and basically have them "work or die".

They are paid but aren't they technically slaves at that point if they cannot quit?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatar...

What if pyramid workers were like that? Came and started to work, realized the insanity of it all and wanted to quit but if they did they would be killed, starved or blacklisted?

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