great wealth and power through stone building

["Marcus" <marcus@zzzzzzzzzzzzzz>]

    From what I read, the Egyptians had an elaborate hierarchy of slaves,
workers, and skilled craftsman.  The most miserable existence I've ever
heard of (other than descriptions of hell) are the Egyptian granite
quarries, where the lowest slaves were sent.  I read about the quarrying of
the unfinished obelisk at Aswan (in the fantastic multivolume set A History
of Technology) where they abandoned work because the 42 meter long chunk of
stone started cracking.  The poor bastards pounded granite with balls of
dolerite by hand until they beat out a trench all the way around and under
the block.
    They probably didn't feel any thrill of being part of a noble and
monumental undertaking, but the average farmers who were called yearly to
work on the actual building of the pyramids every year must have felt some
satisfaction after they set a massive block into place and looked down on
the thousands of fellow citizens all toiling in conjunction to create
something larger than life.
    At least I like to think this while slapping little rocks into place for
some rich guy's obnoxious quest for status.  All I feel is disgust when I
look down from the scaffolding to see beautiful rolling green hills of
southern Appalachia being turned into the same old bland suburbia found
everywhere else in America.  The pharaohs were also pricks obsessed with
displaying their great wealth and power through stone building, but at least
the workers believed they were gods.  And they had some originality and
taste.  The democratizing effect of America has created a whole class of
mini pharaohs all trying to simultaneously outdo and imitate each other in
their conspicuous displays of consumption, all to the detriment of the
environment.
    I've sometimes thought that if I was some insanely rich guy, I might as
well just spend the rest of my life building my tomb.  What with some
cranes, bulldozers, back hoes, dumptrucks, and modern quarrying saws one
could outdo the pharaohs with a crew of 10 guys.  It would be a lot more
interesting and long-lasting than the tacky Bill Gates mansion and at least
you'd leave behind a subject for future archeology PhD dissertations.

Marcus