In Ancient Mass Graves, Archaeologists Find Child Slaves of Biblical Egypt

Times of Israel ^ | June 9, 2017 | Amanda Borschel-Dan

[SunkenCiv]

Archaeologist Mary Shepperson, who previously dug with the Amarna Project, reported in The Guardian this week on the discovery of "the simple desert graves of the ordinary Egyptians who lived and worked in Akhenaten's city and never got to leave."

"They paint a picture of poverty, hard work, poor diet, ill-health, frequent injury and relatively early death," ...

"As we started to get the first skeletons out of the ground it was immediately clear that the burials were even simpler than at the South Tombs Cemetery, with almost no grave goods provided for the dead and only rough matting used to wrap the bodies," ...

"As the season progressed, an even weirder trend started to become clear to the excavators. Almost all the skeletons we exhumed were immature; children, teenagers and young adults, but we weren't really finding any infants or older adults... This certainly was unusual and not a little bit creepy," ...

Initial analysis concluded that the remains were of youths aged 7-25, the bulk of whom are thought to have been under 15 when they died. Additionally, wrote Shepperson, the majority of 15- to 25-year-olds had suffered some kind of traumatic injury, and 16 percent of the under-15-year-olds were found to have spinal fractures and other injuries usually associated with heavy workloads...

The physical trauma, the proliferation of multiple burials in a single grave, and the lack of grave goods buried with them all indicate the children were of extremely low status or slaves. Who they were, however, remains a mystery.

"Corvée-style labor, enforced and unpaid, was frequently used in ancient Egypt on major projects," wrote Shepperson, opening up the possibility of them being either Egyptians or the progeny of non-Egyptian slaves.

[SunkenCiv]

There's a site in the Delta where the human remains include men, women, and children, the adults being all different ages, and they were just slaughtered and piled into the building, the result being that the perishable parts of the structure are gone, and the death assemblage (riot of remains) is piled in the box made from the lowest part of the wall (brick or stone) or foundation. There's no record of it of course, so who they were and why it took place remains mysterious.

[Wuli]

Historians and archeologists fawn over the giant monument building civilizations, and always attributing “greatness” to them with the monuments as evidence of it. In most cases the “greatness” was due to slavery of one sort or another and nothing to fawn over.

[dsc]

“The claim is ridiculous of course.”

Has there always been this much lying in the world?

Maybe it’s just the scale of communications that magnifies it, but I tend not to think so.

[ZULU]

Totally disagree with that Israeli historian who discounts the basic accuracy of the Biblical Exodus. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Further, New Kingdom Egypt with its imperial adventures was not the same as Old Kingdom Egypt.
Old Kingdom Egypt used construction work as a public employment function and many of the workers were skilled craftsmen. Empire created a whole new perspective regarding construction laborers.