• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them.

    That’s the impressive thing. Their society had enough spare food that they could “waste” trillions of calories this way. It’s hundreds of thousands of people doing nothing productive (for the survival of themselves or for others) for years on end. And, it happened thousands of years BCE.

    Until just a few hundred years ago, 90% of people worked in jobs related to farming. So, to support 100,000 people building pyramids, they would have needed something like 900k farmers. That’s a million people dedicated to this project for a full generation.