The Egyptian Pyramids: Good Investment?

[Sisyphus]

At first glance, the pyramids of Giza seem like a spectacular waste of resources. Decades passed, the wealth of a mighty empire, perhaps hundreds of millions of man hours of back breaking labor, and all the ingenuity and education the world then had to offer, all for some tombstones.

 

But then again, they're still there, 5000 years later, still the most massive buildings in the world, attracting throngs of tourists and reminding the entire world of the might of the pharaohs. Everybody knows about the ancient Egyptians. Relatively how many know or care about, say, the Phoenicians?

 

Obviously they weren't worth it within the lifetimes of those who built it. But for their descendants, I'm thinking they might actually have been good investments, in spite of themselves.

[PhDwannabe]

In any discussion of the goodness of the investment, one must consider the expense of the initial investment. To that end, I'll suggest that the marginal value of peasant labor in Old Kingdom Egypt was pretty damned low. When the floodplain is underwater, an Egyptian peasant has very, very, very little else to do. May as well make him drag rocks around, eh? And remember, Egypt of the Old Kingdom wasn't really yet a mighty empire anyway--they'd yet managed the nonetheless commendable task of uniting the chiefdoms of the delta and the upper Nile, but not a whole lot else.

 

And from somebody who has seen them (and had an AK-47 pointed at him by a member of the Egyptian paramilitary for climbing, admittedly, a bit too high), I'll say yeah: very much worth it.

 

 

 

 

Edit: In anticipation of what would be a pretty reasonable response about opportunity cost, I should probably also contend that there wasn't really tons else to do with all that labor back then anyway. Technology hadn't really advanced to the point where things of lasting economic value like highways or aqueducts were really buildable, and ancient Egyptians were already pretty much maxing out the number of canals they'd needed to farm the Nile valley (which, compared to Mesopotamian region, wasn't actually too many). Indeed, other impressive architectural works would really have to wait until technology and knowledge advanced more. (As one professor once explained to me, the pyramids are not so much marvels of architecture are they are of engineering--assuming you've got the hundred million hours of free labor, it's not something that's technically really difficult to design. The Pantheon, while miniscule in comparative size, makes the pyramids look like a kid playing in the sand in terms of complexity.)

Edited August 15, 2010 by PhDwannabe