G'morning, guys.
CP is right. Not only is there no evidence of any "Hebrews" being enslaved there is precious little evidence of anyone being enslaved in Egypt. Certainly not entire populations. Such slaves as there were seem to be more of the household variety and one imagines that only the wealthiest elite could have afforded them.
Ancient Egypt's building projects seem to have been based on a system of corvee labor where citizens are expected to provide work for the government for a certain portion of the year. They were not slaves. They were paid in food or beer (not a bad deal) as coins had not been invented.
Rather than Herodotus' gang of 100,000 slaves building the pyramid in 20 years, Zahi Hawass suggests that a permanent force of perhaps 8,000 craftsmen were augmented by 20,000 laborers during the annual Nile Flood period when they couldn't work in the fields anyway.
The idea of mass slavery of an entire population is one of those anachronisms which lead scholars to believe that these stories were written (or at least finalized) during the Hellenistic period when such mass slavery was actually practiced.
CP is right. Not only is there no evidence of any "Hebrews" being enslaved there is precious little evidence of anyone being enslaved in Egypt. Certainly not entire populations. Such slaves as there were seem to be more of the household variety and one imagines that only the wealthiest elite could have afforded them.
Ancient Egypt's building projects seem to have been based on a system of corvee labor where citizens are expected to provide work for the government for a certain portion of the year. They were not slaves. They were paid in food or beer (not a bad deal) as coins had not been invented.
Rather than Herodotus' gang of 100,000 slaves building the pyramid in 20 years, Zahi Hawass suggests that a permanent force of perhaps 8,000 craftsmen were augmented by 20,000 laborers during the annual Nile Flood period when they couldn't work in the fields anyway.
The idea of mass slavery of an entire population is one of those anachronisms which lead scholars to believe that these stories were written (or at least finalized) during the Hellenistic period when such mass slavery was actually practiced.
