• mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It is amazing to me how these people call the ancient Egyptians primitive.

    Although they may be considered primitive by today’s technological standards, they were very, very smart and accomplished tremendous things with very little resource.

    They were not primitive intellectually. They were smart, capable and intelligent people.

    Two more points I’d like to address about the cutting of these rocks number one archaeologists replicated the way these rocks would be cut with technology they would have during the time that these rocks were cut. Number two. They would drag the rocks. They dragged the rocks.

    Oh, and constructions like the Great pyramids would often take generations to complete and these weren’t done in a couple of years these things took decades if not more.

      • HollandJim@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        If these people had the same brains as we do, we’d not be here right now.

        To all downvoting: whooosh!

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          What are you talking about? There has not been anywhere near enough time for evolution to change our brains significantly from theirs.

    • Sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Although they may be considered primitive by today’s technological standards, they were very, very smart and accomplished tremendous things with very little resource.

      They were not primitive intellectually. They were smart, capable and intelligent people.

      This is exactly the point many people don’t understand: People in the past were not less intelligent than today’s people.

      We developed more ways to discover stuff and more precise tools to measure and detect things and of course with computers we got the ability to handle extremely complex data. All of this gives us an edge over past people science wise but we had very capable thinkers 200, 600 and 4000 years ago. All basic principles of mathematics have been developed a long time ago.

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        The pithy version of that is that we know more things than our ancestors, but we’re not smarter than them.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        They also see something like an expertly-knapped flint hand axe and think “I could do that in my back yard in five minutes” because they don’t understand that something that looks primitive might actually be a really useful tool and actually not easy to make.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is why I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who calls any human society, past or present, “primitive.”

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They weren’t super smart, they simply had an infinite supply of slaves.

      • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The “slaves built the Pyramids” thing has been pretty well-debunked by anthropologists and archaeologists, who both agree that something as monumental as building the vehicle of the Pharaoh’s ascent to the afterlife would not have been something Egypt would’ve forced slaves to labor on. Aside from the obvious chances of revolt, there’s a lot of religious reasons, and many agree that it was likely seen as a GREAT honor - backed up by inscriptions of the masons that worked the stone (found in some reliefs), or painters, etc. It’s not unlikely that they used slave labor to quarry and transport the stones to the building site, but not to actually physically haul and build things AT the site.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          As you said yourself - they used slaves for the hardest work while free and proud people did the painting.