this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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Sometimes I bitterly wonder if it was humanity’s acceptance of slavery that enabled those large constructions. Things like safe working conditions didn’t exist back then.
Of course, we basically have prison slavery, but I’m sure they’d prefer the products of that labor not be so publicly visible.
The pyramids were built by skilled labour. One of the options for paying taxes was to work on public works. It was also seen as a religious event, akin to modern missionaries.
And those workers were even afforded healthcare - a rarity at the time? (I would be significantly less enthused if I found out that it only covered work-related accidents rather than all things, but even so, still not the norm for slavery.)
The pyramids were architected and overseen by skilled labor. There was a whole lot of unskilled labor involved to move those blocks across the desert and into place.
I mean, from what I've heard, prison slavery is really widespread in the US, and apparently (this one I'm not really sure about) prisoners are currently being used to put out the fires in LA.
And besides that, we (westeners) can nicely use all the poor countries we fucked over for all our slavery needs. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, the phone I'm using to type this most likely has had at least some slavery involved.
(P.S. as another commenter pointed out, the pyramids weren't built with slave labor. The ancient Greeks came to look at the pyramids much later and thought they were built by slaves because that's how the Greeks built their stuff.)
Not for the pyramids