Yes guys it was fine. You just pretend that you are a god through threat of violence and having an uneducated population then get them to do things for you. It’s great!
It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.
No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.
Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.
Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.
But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.
Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.
Yeah the best term that would fit would be peasant or serf but even that feels wrong. Problem is ancient Egypt existed so long ago that a lot of their social structures are a bit alien at this point to the average person, just because it was so damned early in history. Its basically like comparing the stem mammals to modern mammals, real close and lots of similarities but still quite different.
Yes guys it was fine. You just pretend that you are a god through threat of violence and having an uneducated population then get them to do things for you. It’s great!
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Isn’t it like working for Amazon today?
You work for some pay and all the value goes to the rich person on top.
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We are going backwards, I see.
If Bezos had his way, it would be the same today.
No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.
Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.
Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.
But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.
Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.
I was just responding to someone that said they weren’t slaves when in reality they absolutely were.
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Yeah the best term that would fit would be peasant or serf but even that feels wrong. Problem is ancient Egypt existed so long ago that a lot of their social structures are a bit alien at this point to the average person, just because it was so damned early in history. Its basically like comparing the stem mammals to modern mammals, real close and lots of similarities but still quite different.
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TL;DR Imperfect but fairish
Conscript is a better term