RE: Was the Exodus natural or supernatural, fact or fiction?
February 8, 2013 at 7:44 am
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2013 at 7:46 am by Confused Ape.)
(February 7, 2013 at 10:39 pm)Justtristo Wrote: You cannot compare Anglo-Saxon England with Ptolemaic Egypt.
I wasn't trying to. I was just pointing out that a change in rulers can affect the lives of peasants.
When Pharaohs decided to go in for pyramid building, that effected the lives of peasants, too, even though they hand't had a change in rulers. The bodies indicate that pyramid building wasn't all that good for peasants' health.
The Discovery Of The Tombsof the Pyramid Builders at Giza
Quote:The pyramid builders were not slaves but peasants conscripted on a rotating part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans and craftsmen who not only built the pyramid complexes for the kings and nobility, but also designed and constructed their own, more modest tombs.
The peasants didn't get any fancy tombs.
Quote:None of the workers was mummified, a prerogative of royalty and nobility, but many tombs in this cemetery contained skeletal remains that tell us much about the lives of these people. Study of the remains by Azza Sarry el-Din and Fawziya Hussein of Egypt's National Research Center reveals that males and females were equally represented, mostly buried in fetal positions, with face to the east and head to the north. Many of the men died between age 30 and 35. Below the age of 30 a higher mortality was found in females than in males, a statistic undoubtedly reflecting the hazards of childbirth.
Skeletons from the great mastaba cemetery west of the Khufu pyramid, in which members of the upper class were buried, reflect a healthier population whose women lived five to ten years longer than those of the artisan and worker community.
Degenerative arthritis occurred in the vertebral column, particularly in the lumbar region, and in the knees. It was frequent and more severe than in the skeletons from the mastaba cemetery. Skeletons of both men and women, particularly those from the lower burials, show such signs of heavy labor.
Simple and multiple limb fractures were found in skeletons from both the lower and upper burials. The most frequent were fractures of the ulna and radius, the bones of the upper arm, and of the fibula, the more delicate of the two lower leg bones. Most of the fractures had healed completely, with good realignment of the bone, indicating that the fractures had been set with a splint. We found two cases, both male, that suggested amputation, of a left leg and a right arm. The healed ends of the bones indicate that the amputations were successful. Few other cases of amputation have been recorded in Egyptian archaeology. Depressed fractures of the frontal or parietal skull bones were found in skulls of both males and females. The parietal lesions tended to be left-sided, which may indicate that the injuries resulted from face to face assault by right-handed attackers.
So, back to the Hyksos kingdom. A change in rulers could have affected the lives of peasants if the Hyksos treated them better or worse than the Egyptian Pharaohs
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?