Why did the Ancient Egyptians build the Pyramids...
Believe it or not, this is not a question, it’s the set up for a subtle and brilliant joke. Before I get to the punchline, let me tell you where the joke comes from.
A good friend of mine is married to an ethnic Russian from Ukraine. The joke is a pretty good window into the Russian psyche. It’s cynical to a depth far deeper then it’s appearance suggests, and the more you think about it, the damned funnier it gets.
So, why did the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids?
Because they didn’t have television…
Now, wrap your head around the fact that this is a joke. But it’s also a damned brilliant observation on human nature.
If it were an actual question, rather than a joke, the answer would be quite complicated and involve perceptions related to religious beliefs and economics. So,since it isn’t a question, but rather a cynical observation on human nature masquerading as a joke.
Let’s ask the two most obvious questions.
What is the observation being made?
What makes this funny?
The observation here, is actually deeper than you might suspect. It begins with human motivation and proceeds to political agenda’s and ends in human imagination.
Tragedy is what makes it funny.
Television is an addictive hypnotic device that steals billions of hours of potential human productivity every single day. Individually we may not watch that much television, but collectively we watch billions of hours of it every single day. Remember, there are 8 billion human beings on earth and at least 5 billion of them watch at least 1 hour of television every day.
When seen only from ones own perspective, that hour watching whatever it is you watch, really is a pretty meaningless and small number. It’s time that has already been paid for by whatever it is you do to earn your living. Maybe it’s you watching the news in the morning as you get ready for work, maybe it’s you watching your favorite who dunit after dinner while you wind down and relax before going to bed.
But collectively, it’s enough man hours to build the greatest man made wonders on earth, in a single day.
What makes the joke funny, is that before television, idle time was a lot more work.
Let that percolate for a couple minutes…
Before television, if you wanted to be entertained, you didn’t just plop down in the most comfortable seat in the house and put your brain in park. You had to actually do something. Even if your entertainment was reading. You had to go find that book you were going to read. Whether you got it from a library or a bookstore or from someone else. You had to engage in some small physical activity to obtain that book.
See where this is going? The further back in time you go, the more personal activity you had to engage in to facilitate your idle time.
Which brings us to another aspect. Time.
Modern humans are psychotically obsessed with time. We measure time in minutes and seconds. How many minutes does it take you to get somewhere, how many seconds before you get bored reading an article or watching a video.
In the ancient world, people measured time… In decades. In the life spans of their rulers or religious figures. If you were a farmer, you measured time in seasons, how long between planting and harvesting. How long between summer and winter.
When the ancient Egyptian’s built the pyramids, not a single person involved looked at their watch and calculated how quickly they could get the job done. They never even imagined calculating the per hour cost of building the pyramids.
Their approach was to build until it was done or they ran out of laborers. Remember the old saying, Rome wasn’t built in a day?
The ancient Egyptian’s who built the pyramids drank beer and grilled meat when they weren’t working. Bet ya didn’t know that did ya. Ya, after work and on the weekends the ancient Egyptians working on the pyramids drank beer and BBQ’d.
So… technically speaking, they really weren’t all that much different than today’s modern day Americans.
Well… Except for the television watching…