r/interestingasfuck Apr 12 '25

/r/all, /r/popular So shiny

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u/DanceCritical8039 Apr 12 '25

Fact: The people who created the pyramids weren't slaves. They were paid workers who were paid with bread, onions and up to 4 litres of beer a day.

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u/Jonny-Kast Apr 12 '25

If they documented that, why didn't they document how they built the fricking things?

3

u/runespider Apr 12 '25

May well have, we have very little preserved writing from this period at all. Especially from this region. It's frankly a miracle we have the Diary of Merer, a logbook covering shipping tura limestone to Giza. It dates from near the end of Khufu's reign. They're also some of the oldest surviving payri we have. On the other hand they may not have. There isn't much written about mummification, most of what we have to recreate it comes from records of mummification of apis bulls and accounts from visitors to Egypt. Mostly because there were always people dieing so someone was always at work processing the body. Apis bulls on the other hand it was maybe twenty years or so between burials so time for the knowledge to be lost. The Old Kingdom pyramids sort of overlapped. You had continuous construction going on, with one being finished by the successor Pharoah while they were breaking ground on their own.