Probably not, actually! Or at least, not usually. There were a lot of pyramids built over a very long period of time, and ancient Egypt definitely did have slavery in general, so I’m not going to claim there was no slavery involved. However, due to the records we have of the workers getting paid and when they worked, it’s thought that most of the labour was done by farmers during the annual Nile floods since they couldn’t work their fields at that time anyway
I’m only guessing here but probably egyptian society had lots of classes and some of them were poorer than others, so it could still both be true: Egypt had not slaves, but very poor people, who felt like slaves. or sth
I think they’re referencing the ancient Israelites specifically. As the story goes, they were slaves in Egypt. Yahweh sends enough plagues to make the pharaoh release them, and then he gets Moses to guide them to a new home. The historicity of this is doubtful; there absolutely could have been a group of slaves in Egypt that got free and went to what would becone Israel, but there’s no non-religious evidence for much of the rest of it.
Since the story is a kind of foundational tale for both Judaism and Christianity (and possibly other Abrahamic faiths like Islam, but I don’t personally know about them), there’s a strong motivation to look at these incredible buildings and say, “That must have been so much work that it could only have been built by forcing people to work on it. And look, the bible/pentateuch says the Israelites were slaves in that place and time.”
Probably not, actually! Or at least, not usually. There were a lot of pyramids built over a very long period of time, and ancient Egypt definitely did have slavery in general, so I’m not going to claim there was no slavery involved. However, due to the records we have of the workers getting paid and when they worked, it’s thought that most of the labour was done by farmers during the annual Nile floods since they couldn’t work their fields at that time anyway
Next question, was the mass slave image created to help push the biblical idea of an oppressed society saved by their deity?
I’m only guessing here but probably egyptian society had lots of classes and some of them were poorer than others, so it could still both be true: Egypt had not slaves, but very poor people, who felt like slaves. or sth
I think they’re referencing the ancient Israelites specifically. As the story goes, they were slaves in Egypt. Yahweh sends enough plagues to make the pharaoh release them, and then he gets Moses to guide them to a new home. The historicity of this is doubtful; there absolutely could have been a group of slaves in Egypt that got free and went to what would becone Israel, but there’s no non-religious evidence for much of the rest of it.
Since the story is a kind of foundational tale for both Judaism and Christianity (and possibly other Abrahamic faiths like Islam, but I don’t personally know about them), there’s a strong motivation to look at these incredible buildings and say, “That must have been so much work that it could only have been built by forcing people to work on it. And look, the bible/pentateuch says the Israelites were slaves in that place and time.”
Like a Serfdom
I’ve no idea, but that does sound like quite a plausible theory
Hmm, learn something new every day!