A few days ago I watched this video by wired about the pyramids in Egypt
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMPLaB1oEo), and something interesting that the expert talks about is that they know exactly where the stones come from- not only is there clear evidence of quarrying in the immediate vicinity, but the dimensions match and they even have contemporary records describing the movement of stone blocks from quarries across the river to the construction site. (2 day round trip.)
Granted it's a Wired video so she didn't go into an overly extraordinary level of detail, but in any case it reminded me of a lecture I attended about 15 years ago when I went a prospective students/parents night at a prestigious university that I was looking to attend.
As part of the presentation, they had this guy give a lecture on his groundbreaking new theory that the pyramids were actually cast in place, rather than quarried. I thought it was interesting at the time, so when I heard about this quarry stuff in the Wired video, I assumed it must be a relatively recent discovery.
Nope! People have literally known about these quarries since ancient times, and they were confirmed by modern methods in the 1980s. This 'prestigious university' literally just had some crackpot give us his pet theory as an example of the kind of fine, high caliber academics that we could look forward to as part of our education at this institution. ๐
(Btw I did end up attending that university for Computer Science, and the lead professor there taught us that we should try to avoid using if statements.) Anyway there's no point or anything just thought I'd share.
Yup!
Another fun one is that the standard (biblical) images of it being all slaves and poor is wrong.
They were well paid and compensated for their time working on government projects. We've found villages including discarded letters and even "newspapers" (clay tablets) of the worker villages.
The method was fairly simple: the Nile floods every year, they knew this. So, while the farms were all flooded/useless, those people all worked on various government projects.
While there were slaves used, the Egyptians were, for slavery, pretty good on it not being a perpetual death sentence for you. That would be the greeks, where once enslaved, your linage would almost always be perpetual slaves.
The Bible says the Israelites were forced to make bricks from clay and straw, which would build buildings not pyramids.
The Bible has a major problem when it comes to claims that fall into the late bronze age.
It's that the elites of the time wrote everything in a script called Linear B(by us) on clay tablets and archived them. We can understand linear B and have found several archives of the tablets. Though those hundreds of thousands of tablets we have a pretty good idea of the goings on, life and relations between the various empires and city states of the region.
Through those tablets we know that the Canaanites(not Israeli) were occasional adversaries but typically peacefully traded with the Egyptians. There is no record, even by groups generally opposed to the Egyptians like the Hittites, of them being liberated slaves of the Egyptians, nor a massive group of wandering people for 40 years.
What's that got to do with your comment about the bible saying slaves built the pyramids?
The Canaanites were never enslaved by the Egyptians, were never in Egypt, and didn't wander the eastern Mediterranean region for 40 years.
You said this: "Another fun one is that the standard (biblical) images of it being all slaves and poor is wrong."
Please provide a quote from the Bible where it says the pyramids were made using slave labour.
I didnt mention the pyramids at all. I said government projects.