'Pyramids were built by leadership skills, not slavery'

Press Trust of India ^ | May 23, 2011 | Staff Reporter

[decimon]

Author User:Factoryjoe

[decimon]

Carrot stick ping.

[ScreamingFist]

Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is absolutely amazing and was built 14,000 years ago, then buried.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo0ZkgqM1TE&feature=related

[SeeSharp]

The whole proposition that the pyramids were built without slave labor is absurd leftwingnut bizzarro agitprop.

See Keynes and the Pyramids. The article is also available as an mp3 audio recording. The author rips Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian antiquities "expert" we see on television so often and makes him look like a fool.

[edcoil]

Back then I would guess it was not called slavery. There were only two classes of citizens those born into royalty aka landowners and those born into servitude.

It was suppose to be an honor to be born into a class to serve the master(s).

Remember words meaning change over time. So do relationships. Only since the founding of America where a “middle-class” of free people were created did the term slavery take to a new meaning.

[SunkenCiv]

· GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach · · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·
	Antiquity Journal  & archive  Archaeologica  Archaeology  Archaeology Channel  BAR  Bronze Age Forum  Discover  Dogpile  Eurekalert  Google  LiveScience  Mirabilis.ca  Nat Geographic  PhysOrg  Science Daily  Science News  Texas AM  Yahoo  Excerpt, or Link only?	Well, kumbaya, [characterization deleted]. No slaves were involved in building all those enormous monuments -- if you didn't do as you were told, you were either killed, driven out into the desert, denied food, or officially enslaved. So, IOW, you had a choice. See? Not slavery. :') Thanks decimon. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
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[SunkenCiv]

[Laissez-faire capitalist]

While I am not sure if it was or wasn’t slaves who built this, it is logically fallacious to say that slaves are only led by those with no leadership skills, or that being led by those with leadership skills means that a slave is no longer that - a slave. This guy from India used what is known as a hidden false dichotomy/false choice in building his argument.

[muawiyah]

The even larger pyramid at Cahokia Illinois was built with free labor ~ they did so as part of their religious observances.

In a lightly populated world where you could just run down the river a few miles and totally disappear slavery would be a difficult institution to maintain. Imagining that Egypt could be run as a gigantic slave camp is bizarre.

Even the ancient Hebrews didn't claim that everybody was a slave ~ just them ~ and they were working on a treasure city, not pyramids.

[SeeSharp]

"those born into royalty aka landowners"

Land ownership was wide spread in ancient Egypt and not limited to royals. The priestly/royal cast were needed to settle boundary disputes, especially after the annual floods, but most of the land was privately owned. I don't think many land owning farmers worked on the pyramids, though I think their taxes paid for them. Slaves, by whatever name you want to call them, built the pyramids.

[ScreamingFist]

The whole proposition that the pyramids were built without slave labor is absurd leftwingnut bizzarro agitprop.

Absolutely correct. And the fact that Göbekli Tepe was built 7000 years prior means the Eqyptions didn't need space gods and spork weasels to accomplish it, the technology had existed for thousands of years.

[Palter]

Great Pyramid tombs unearth 'proof' workers were not slaves

[muawiyah]

The traditional castes and classes were far more complex ~ even at that time. First, there were the warrior class folks, then the ruling class, then the religious class, then the merchant class, then the commoners, then the peasantry, then the.........

Going back further there'd been a hunter class, a gatherer class, a village class, a warrior class, ......

It is easy to imagine that Egypt had a "construction class" with it's own form of engineers, project managers, and acquisitions specialists.

[Ken H]

Nonsense! The slavemasters spent their entire day lashing the workers with a whip. They also took sadistic pleasure in offering slaves water then pouring it on the ground.

[Joe 6-pack]

And here all this time I thought the were built by aliens ;-)

[SeeSharp]

The Egyptian, Zahi Hawass, makes an even more ridiculous argument. He says that because the worker accommodations near the pyramid sites look like ordinary villages where ordinary people would live the workers could not have been slaves. When I first heard that argument I had to laugh at the choice of words. The root of the Saxon word “village” is villain, which means slave.

[sten]

ROTFLMAO

[ScreamingFist]

Interesting article. The egyptians claim they built the pyramids from free labor. I would guess it’s kind of a slap in their face if Jews built their greatest monuments.....just saying.

[Laissez-faire capitalist]

So these workers had the free will choice to say no to building the pyramids? Someone might say that the concept of free will choice to say no would be an unknown concept to them. But just because they didn’t know about the choice or right to say no, or just because they didn’t know they were slaves doesn’t means they weren’t. Ignorance of this fact on their part doesn’t negate this fact.

[SeeSharp]

In a lightly populated world where you could just run down the river a few miles and totally disappear slavery would be a difficult institution to maintain.

Yes it would, but that is not a description of ancient Egypt. Only the land for a few tens of miles on either side of the Nile was habitable. River traffic was policed (and taxed). And where did you get the idea that ancient Egypt was lightly populated?

Imagining that Egypt could be run as a gigantic slave camp is bizarre.

But we are discussing a Pyramid building site.