They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well.
The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).
Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.
I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.
You’re generalizing a few millennia of civilization. That doesn’t really make sense.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century? Might as well have been disease. For all its fertility, farming in water comes with big downsides.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today. But people chose for stability which the pharaoh provided. They weren’t slaves, unlike the actual slaves which they did own.
The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).
Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.
I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.
You’re generalizing a few millennia of civilization. That doesn’t really make sense.
The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century? Might as well have been disease. For all its fertility, farming in water comes with big downsides.
And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today. But people chose for stability which the pharaoh provided. They weren’t slaves, unlike the actual slaves which they did own.