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Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

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Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#21

Post by gherkinnn »

agumonkey wrote: post #17
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

You could add 'war is a racket' too

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

> 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war

> 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it

> 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense

Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Now it's just poor saps from the Appalachians. Unimportant people dying in unknown places. A small price to pay.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

1 - https://skepticalvet.com/

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#22

Post by api »

guerrilla wrote: post #16
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general.

We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it.

In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar's number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal.

In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it's very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It's also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the "ground truth" and/or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I'm sure sometimes leaders don't set out to abuse their power but kind of "back into it" for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it's kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species' background.

Edit:

I also wonder if there's an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he's going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#23

Post by verve_rat »

gherkinnn wrote: post #12
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome I…

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

Real Engineering did a great series on the logistics of D-day. https://youtu.be/sYXYG_F1EK0

We have shit tons of information about the fine grained details of WWII. You should look it up some time.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#24

Post by dr_dshiv »

The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years.

It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in temple basements because there is essentially no funding or support for preservation.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#25

Post by 1cvmask »

gherkinnn wrote: post #12
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome I…

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army was composed of many groups like Thessalians and Macedonians. Greeks were a small portion of it:

"The Greek cavalry was not considered as effective or versatile as the Thessalian and Macedonian cavalry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_army

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#26

Post by ajuc »

kragen wrote: post #5
bambax wrote: post #3

> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet > a wonder of the ancient world Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet. Not just contemporaneous: we are…

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

> But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually.

Ancient people had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity) for the same purpose. They likely used it up to extinction.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#27

Post by antman »

guerrilla wrote: post #16
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

It was Alexander and his father Filippos whose untimely demise left Alexander with a formidable military machine. So it is people it is the environment it is timing, a good deal of luck on top of capability and perseverance.

People followed in their leadership and did their bit, every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#28

Post by throwaway0a5e »

guerrilla wrote: post #16
gherkinnn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on t…

It's pretty obvious from recent well recorded history that leaders with the necessary skills, motivation and right time/place fitment to actually do world changing things are incredibly rare and when those kind of people do pop up we get world changing events that would have never otherwise happened or if they did would have happened with vastly different details and consequences.

The great man way of describing history leaves a lot to be desired but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse. Remove key figures from history and then try to judge what would have happened had someone else filled their shoes and it becomes painfully obvious. Imagine 9/11 happened +/-20yr. How would the second half of the 1900s played out had Chaing Kai-shek gotten control of mainland china? Would we have gotten the napoleonic wars if Louis XVI kept the throne another 10yr? What would european history look like if church had waited another 200yr before cooking up the idea of the crusades? Imagine if the US hadn't elected an abolitionist sympathizer in 1860 but instead waited until 1872? How would recent European history look without Stalin? Etc. etc. Key details regarding when and the order in which events happen have a huge impact on history and the whims of individuals (like Alexander) massively influence these details.

I'm not here to defend the great man theory of history. I'm here to put the "it mostly would have happened about the same" theory of history in the dumpster where it belongs.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#29

Post by lysurgic »

gherkinnn wrote: post #12
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome I…

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Pri…

Stephen Ambrose actually wrote 2 books that detail the logistics of the invasion of Normandy. D-Day and Band of Brothers.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#30

Post by throwaway0a5e »

gherkinnn wrote: post #21
agumonkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could add 'war is a racket' too

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks. From Wikipedia [0]: > In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket: > 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war > 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it > 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense Reminds me of a point Danny S…

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Important people not having their children in the armed forces is a modern thing. There was a point in time when commanding armies in the field was an all but required resume checkbox for someone in line to inherit the throne and there was no shortage of war back then.

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