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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> Build pyramids if you must, but build them like the Egyptians did: with a clear purpose

For dim people, like myself. What was the "clear purpose" for Egypt to build giant stone pyramids? Maybe the rest of this will fall into place for me when I understand that.

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To build a tomb. Not a shrine, not a place of worship, not a functional structure. Not something that could be repaired or repurposed. A tomb and nothing else.

A purposeless pyramid would get bogged down with plumbing and fountains and extra passageways and observation decks and on and on and on. It would have been impossible to build.

i mean there where usually temples around it with cults

> extra passageways

They 100% had these.

There seems to be a yet-explored "big void" in the Pyramid of Gaza, found using "Muon tomography":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScanPyramids#ScanPyramids_Big_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography

IIRC, their society depended on it. During peacetime, it was a major economic engine paid for from the royal treasury, with the work starting as soon as a new pharaoh ascended the throne, and the labor provided steady work when agricultural activity stopped due to Nile flooding. Of course, it's only in hindsight with our modern understanding of economics that we can see how such an activity at face value not important to any basic survival need was in fact a key piece of the economic fabric.

Aka, it was a jobs program.

It was a Keynesian anti-cyclic wealth distribution program.

The jobs did come and go as necessary to maintain stability. It was reasonably well paid, from money collected taxing the luckiest farmers at the good times, stored as a community project.

It's really impressive how the Egyptians created this kind of organization and maintained it for thousands of years, when no government seems to be able to maintain something similar for a decade today.

If only our current leaders could have the vision to build robust infrastructure

> The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, argued that the Great Pyramid had been raised, either "to prevent the lower classes from remaining unoccupied", or as a measure to prevent the pharaoh's riches from falling into the hands of his rivals or successors.

This was the Pliny view.

Reliable secure high-persistence storage.

eg: The Stone Tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Tape

some side effects may occur

I think more than anything else the pyramids were built to stand the test of time.

Regardless of any other objectives, the further that humans progressed into the future, the more this one purpose eclipsed all others.

Until by now what means most is that almost nothing else has come very close to this long-lasting purpose at all.

You think you're getting into the afterlife in a measly $2000 casket? Nah, the dead pharaohs had to ride in style.

> For dim people, like myself. What was the "clear purpose" for Egypt to build giant stone pyramids?

For them to be able to properly descend to and navigate the afterlife of course. This is why society today is so broken, all we get for our afterlife is a shitty urn and some bland sandwiches.

Ah yes, because we are all Pharoah

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