• Lifted_lowered@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    Ancient Egyptians didn’t have capitalism. At least in the dynasty where a lot of writing is from like this one scroll that was used to teach scribes writing so there is a fuckload of copies of it, they had a theocratic class system where social roles were pretty rigid. It was highly discouraged to not love your place in life. Like that writing exercise that archaeologists found is like basically copypasta about how cool it is to be a scribe, how you get to sit in the shade and not destroy your body to earn a living like the laborers must do. The cultures extant in ancient Egypt’s like 3000 years of history have been studied pretty extensively and pretty much every conclusion leads to the idea that social mobility through hard work or whatever of the kind promised by the capitalist Horatio Alger story was definitely not a cultural value in ancient Egypt, at least not a cultural value held by the people with the power to decide what got written down for posterity.

    • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      It was highly discouraged to not love your place in life.

      The rich are still trying to tell the rest of us that shit.