Slavery Is Alive And Well- And Making A Big Comeback

jamboss said:

The real term is economic slavery.

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Total Head said:

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Redding’s faunal evidence dealt a serious blow to the Hollywood version of pyramid building, with Charlton Heston as Moses intoning, “Pharaoh, let my people go!” There were slaves in Egypt, says Lehner, but the discovery that pyramid workers were fed like royalty buttresses other evidence that they were not slaves at all, at least in the modern sense of the word. Harvard’s George Reisner found workers’ graffiti early in the twentieth century that revealed that the pyramid builders were organized into labor units with names like “Friends of Khufu” or “Drunkards of Menkaure.” Within these units were five divisions (their roles still unknown)—the same groupings, according to papyrus scrolls of a later period, that served in the pyramid temples. We do know, Lehner says, that service in these temples was rendered by a special class of people on a rotating basis determined by those five divisions. Many Egyptologists therefore subscribe to the hypothesis that the pyramids were also built by a rotating labor force in a modular, team-based kind of organization.

If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been excavating a “workers’ cemetery” just above Lehner’s city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remains of those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous business. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? The answer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in the premodern world. “People were not atomized, separate, individuals with the political and economic freedom that we take for granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say, the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of community obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feasting event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that, you may not have a choice.” Plug that into the pyramid context, says Lehner, “and you have to say, ‘This is a hell of a barn!’”

Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this “bak.” Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy. “But it doesn’t really work as a word for slavery,” he says. “Even the highest officials owed bak.”

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The location of tombs discovered in Egypt helps prove the men who built the great pyramids were not slaves after all, say archeologists.

A set of tombs belonging to the workers who built them has been discovered which sheds light on how they lived and ate more than 4,000 years ago.

The thousands of men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world regularly ate meat and worked three-month rotating shifts.

They were so well regarded they were also given the honour of being buried in mud brick tombs within the shadow of the sacred pyramids they worked on if they died during construction.

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forgetfulpenguin said:

Actually, there is evidence to suggest that slaves did not build the pyramids.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242096/Tomb-discovery-helps-solve-ancient-slavery-riddle-pyramids.html

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jamboss said:

The real term is economic slavery.

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redivider said:

a testament to the will of the jews to skew history in their favor. face it jews, at one point you were slaves.... skilled workers... lol....

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forgetfulpenguin said:

Actually, there is evidence to suggest that slaves did not build the pyramids.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242096/Tomb-discovery-helps-solve-ancient-slavery-riddle-pyramids.html

Click to expand...