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

Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?

AFAICT, the cut-off for "ancient" is the fall of the Roman Empire. Basically ~395 CE. Likely due to European civilization needing to rebuild post dark ages.

This is certainly problematic for many reasons, the largest being that civilization went along uninterrupted outside of Europe.

This is so frustrating, they were renovating not building.

Anyone who can remotely work with numbers and has seen a building made with rocks should be able to calculate how much time IN THEORY the Great Pyramid needed from foundation to pinnacle. Let's say it's not that number (supposedly 30 years since that's how long that kheope guy reigned), remember you are actually a common person not an archeologist that needs slaves for 24/7/365 every day and night with every weather or invasion just to match the timelines.

Then you need to add another large support staff to farm, care and replenish the first group.

Then you ask yourself, how it is possible to raise blocks at dozen of meters? How you can use Pi without knowing it, or earth dimensions, or the true north and maintain right angles and orientation for hundred of meters? Just how do you make the base perfectly straight without opticals?

And then you seem to notice that there are wonderful internals: how do you project them to fit before the externals? what about the black stones? How is it possible to cut (carving Mohs scale of 7 is impossible with iron, which they did not have), transport from the nearest hundred miles caves, raise about a hundred meters and assemble 70 tons blocks of granite so precisely than not even a sheet of paper can fit into the contact points?

And only after that, falling in the rabbit hole, you have to admit there was a previous advanced civilization.

"Antiquity" is conventionally considered to end about 1500 years ago, though this really only applies to Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity

The reason for this is the very sparse historical record from the European Dark Ages. Scholars in the High Middle Ages like Petrarch could look back on their own recent history, and then a vast gap of mostly unknown, and then the impressive cultures of Antiquity among whose ruins they lived. We know more about the Dark Ages now than we did then but still not that much.

Here you can see people flying like birds without being canned in metal tubes: https://youtu.be/rvQ9DjJNal0 https://youtu.be/-C_jPcUkVrM https://youtu.be/gtvCnZqZnxc https://youtu.be/UYi9r2eiUhU

It seems likely that we have changed. I suspect Merer's workers, even if they had grown up in modern civilization, would not tolerate being employees, being disarmed, and having their children taken away for education; and probably more of them were dyslexic than in modern populations. But I don't really know.

Generally the rule is that domestic animals are stupider, smaller-skulled, more submissive, weaker, more neotenous, less aggressive, fatter, lower in testosterone, less sexually dimorphic, and possessed of smaller teeth than the wild type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome#In_anim...). Modern humans have these traits to a very notable degree compared to, as you allude to, chimpanzees and even Neandertals or Denisovans; but perhaps we have also been substantially domesticated over the last 4500 years, maybe even over the last 2000. Not because of driving cars, but because of having kings. Are we the Eloi? I don't think Wells thought of the aristocracy as the Morlocks.

As noted elsewhere the Pyramids were not built by slaves, they were built by the best craftsmen in the kingdom.

Second thing to note is the Great Pyramids didn't spring up from nowhere. The Egyptians spent hundreds of years building bigger and bigger Pyramids, refining the techniques. Long enough they were able to look at the older ones to see how they weathered as well as having written records of the many mistakes along the way.