Symmachus wrote:Chap wrote:Without replying at the same length as your comments, I would simply like to recall my original point: the magnificent funerary monuments of ancient Egypt were constructed by the very poor many for the very rich few. If you want to argue the case that the poor many drew a degree of satisfaction from their labor proportionate to the effort it cost them, then you are free to argue that case. I don't think you have done that yet.
Until that is done, I think it remains the more plausible hypothesis that the poor many would probably have preferred to have been doing something else during most of the time they were made to spend constructing the monuments we admire today.
Again, total non sequitur. We learn nothing at all about whether Egyptians derived meaning from their funerary practices or other religious rituals based solely on the fact that it was a stratified society with concentrated wealth at the top. I am saying that the persistence, spread, and consistency over several centuries of religious practices and architecture suggests some lasting value of those practices and buildings for the people in that society. I don't see why that's such a controversial claim.
The trouble is that your claim is so broad that it says very little.
The great distance of ancient Egypt from people in the 21st century tempts us to talk about undifferentiated aggregates such as 'Egyptians' and ' the people in [Egyptian] society'. Yet whenever we are able to get a sharper focus on a given society, we see that at any given place and time in history attitudes to some social institution such as 'religious rituals' differ greatly from one social group to another - even from one gender or one age-group to another.
Contrary to your repeated assertions, it is unnecessary to be a 'Marxist' in order to come to that not very un-obvious conclusion (I'm not a Marxist, by the way).
You are of course correct in saying that there were professional specialists in monumental construction in ancient Egypt: no doubt they were delighted to hear of a new project being planned. Somehow one suspects that the major part of that delight was financial rather than religious in nature, but then I could be wrong about that. It is not however clear how much or what kind of satisfaction was felt by the large majority of the people in this picture, whose job as corvée laborers consists of pulling hard enough to haul a vast mass of stone over the ground on a sled:
If there was any great degree of satisfaction for the peasants conscripted to do such work, it must have been almost entirely religious, at least compared to that of the specialist craftsmen discussed above, since all they seem to have got out of it was being fed. Or it may of course have mainly been the satisfaction of not being beaten up by the squads of soldiers shown in the upper register. The satisfaction of being an essential participant in religious practices does not always seem to have been sufficient to ensure the tranquillity of the Egyptian lower orders. See for instance:
Records of the strike at Deir el Medina under Ramses IIIIt is notable that nobody tries to persuade the strikers to return to work on religious grounds: only the proper provision of their rations seems able to produce that result.
If you disagree with the assumptions of astronomers they can still have a discussion with you about why you disagree with them. You avoid those kind of questions put to you here about how you know the church is true.