How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Thursday May 28, 2020 @10:06PM (#23345564)

> If a work year consists of 300 days, that would mean almost 18,000 man-years, which, spread over 20 years, implies a workforce of about 900 men.

While the analysis is interesting, I think the 300 working days a year is too long. Likely, work on these types of public projects was mostly done during the flood season, which was around 4 months (120 days [0]) so maybe 100 work days at best, so the calculations for required workers should probably be multiplied by 3.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_the_Inundation

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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by lorthemar on Friday May 29, 2020 @04:57AM (#23347819)

Totally agree. I was searching for this comment. It's extremely unlikely that a work year was 300 days thousands of years ago. But I don't think the workers had weekends either. So, might be more than 100 days but still should be roughly 3 times than the article shows.

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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by onion2k on Friday May 29, 2020 @05:16AM (#23347924)

I don't think the workers had weekends either.

Weekends didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution, which was ~4300 years after the pyramids were finished.

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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by pbhjpbhj on Friday May 29, 2020 @07:47AM (#23348814)

Isn't the sabbath a "weekend"?

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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by mamon on Friday May 29, 2020 @09:39AM (#23349846)

One of the reasons for conflict between ancient Egyptians and Jews (as reported by the Bible, iirc) was that Jews had their Sabbath every 7 days, while Egyptians would get their free day every 10 days. That's part of the reason why Jews decided to leave under Moses's leadership. Of course that was almost 1000 years after the Great Pyramid was built, if it even happened at all.

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Re:How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid? by onion2k on Friday May 29, 2020 @08:48AM (#23349316)

I think the term 'weekend' has connotations of not being religious, but sure, maybe weekends were invented earlier than the Industrial Revolution if the definition is generalized to 'a day when you don't work at the end of the week'.

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