More Buy-bull "history" debunked...

The old "cruelly treated slaves built the pyramids" stuff. I think most of us already knew that wasn't true. I sure got an earful about it when I lived in Egypt. More than one Egyptian ranted to me about clueless Westerners lecturing them on their own history, which always involved either Charlton Heston or space aliens.

Since 1990 archeologists have found more and more evidence that the Giza pyramids were built by highly-valued workers organized into a complex hierarchy. It was even a hierarchy most of us modern people would recognize immediately - complete with workers, supervisors, union officials and corporate executives.

They even had a medical plan, sort of. There's evidence that workers hurt on the job - fairly common when moving huge blocks of stone - received professional medical care. e.g., broken bones in skeletons did not just heal haphazardly, they had been carefully set.

Further south at Deir al Medinah, workers on the Valley of the Kings lived in stone houses (most ordinary Egyptians then lived in mud-brick houses). They built their own elaborate tombs, showing themselves dutifully worshipping the gods on their best behavior.

Fortunately, they also left a huge trove of notes made on pieces of flat limestone - Bronze Age Post-It notes!

Those notes show that in their daily lives, our ancient Egyptian ancestors were most interested in exactly the same things many of us today are - drinking, gossiping and fornicating.

I saw all this and a lot more in a show called "Egypt's Ten Greatest Discoveries." Saw it on the re-named Military Channel, now called "American Heroes Channel" (ugh - that name has too much of a Lee Greenwood stench for me). Definitely worth a watch.