Or even non-pragmatic reasons we wouldn’t guess in isolation. It’s been thousands of years, and sometimes it’s hard to track the why of how people chose to do stuff, only what they actually did.
We’ve lost details on how to make some of their breads because they never bothered to write it down, because why would you document how to do something everyone does regularly?
It could be something like it wasn’t considered proper. Building the tomb is an honor, or something you wouldn’t want to force someone to do for whatever reason.
I think it’s probably a mix. They probably used slaves to move the stones from the mountains to the work sites, and then Egyptian citizens at the actual work sites.
So you have slaves swapping from fields to stone caravans, and citizens staying at the work site. So maybe they’re not “building” the pyramids by actually placing stones and whatnot, but they’re probably doing most of the work by getting the stones to the work site.
This is the view of people in the antebellum south. So why not slaves all the way down?
It’s possible people didn’t think it was moral. Or maybe they had problems with slave revolts. Or maybe a combination of both.
The reasons in the past for not using slaves for everything were probably the same as the reasons we have today.
Or even non-pragmatic reasons we wouldn’t guess in isolation. It’s been thousands of years, and sometimes it’s hard to track the why of how people chose to do stuff, only what they actually did.
We’ve lost details on how to make some of their breads because they never bothered to write it down, because why would you document how to do something everyone does regularly?
It could be something like it wasn’t considered proper. Building the tomb is an honor, or something you wouldn’t want to force someone to do for whatever reason.
I think it’s probably a mix. They probably used slaves to move the stones from the mountains to the work sites, and then Egyptian citizens at the actual work sites.
So you have slaves swapping from fields to stone caravans, and citizens staying at the work site. So maybe they’re not “building” the pyramids by actually placing stones and whatnot, but they’re probably doing most of the work by getting the stones to the work site.