Cladking~ mummies for you

[cladking]

clad, Why did the ancients spend so much time building big things? Too much time on their hands? Way to harness the energy of the masses so they didn't decide servitude is bullshit? Immortality?

I believe it was none of the above.

First off these things aren't as big as they look. When you contemplate tens of thousands of men dragging millions of stones up ramps then they are enormous but if you picture men sipping seltzer water while sitting in the shade and operating the equipment they become much smaller. It required only a djed operator, shm-sceptre installed, ba-sceptre operator, ferryman, and four signalmen to operate the equipment. Of course it also required as many as 30 loaders, 50 unloaders, and a couple hundred masons to maintain the work shedule. Then you'd need as many as 2000 quarryman and another 25 masons to cut stone. Throw in a few dozen laborers and the various overseers and you have enough people to completely fill the workmen's village to the brim. There were, of course, other jobs required but most of these were not on site. Supplies arrived from the river.

People need to get rid of the nonsense that thousands and thousands of workers toiled to build ramps and drag stones up them. The number of people known to be on site wouldn't even be enough to fetch water for such an army. In essense they had water high up in the air and let it build the pyramid. It's only big by human standards but by the standards of the Gods who built it it's almost tiny.

They did have a few months during the summer when manypeople were displaced because the valley was flooded. This is when the water sprayed from the "Mouth of Caves" and building could proceed. They built because they could and because it was an extension of their world into the heavens. "Ma'at" (balance) was the guiding principle and this applied to both the means to lift the stones but also to the the extension of the natural "Mound of Creation" into heaven. Ma'at applied to the ability of the dead king to continue to intercede in the peoples' behalf in heaven.

These structures also had numerous practical benefits. Besides providing water they also could grow crops during the peak growing season while their other arable land was under water. They grew very important trade crops on "Herb Hill". These were sites for laundry and for sawing stone. The Great Pyramid was a clock and Giza was a calandar. There might well be other usages but until orthodoxy gets its head out of the sand we might never know.

I don't believe any longer that the ancients lived like their more modern counterparts. Once the language became confused things simply went downhill. But even in later times most Egyptians didn't really live in abject servitude. Conditions tended to be harsher and the tax had to be paid but people had the same rights. Before 2000 BC many people could live well and did.