Was Amarna built with child labour?
Posted On: Sep 9th, 2017 at 13:14
Egypt
Most likely they were used, yes, but I do not see the revelation in such a conclusion. And neither did they “build” the city. They may have been used as labourers, but certainly not builders.
Perhaps using children as young as seven is a bit harsh, but certainly teenagers being involved in hard labour is not so unusual – they were fit and healthy, for the most part.
What’s missing from this article is a very important factor regarding Amarma – it was built mostly with adobe bricks, not the typical large stones you might find with the pyramids, etc. Amarna was required to be built very rapidly, so using children for that purpose is not unusual, for they would not have needed to be particularly strong to use bricks.
It amazes me with such an article and its implications that this fact is missing from the data, for it changes the entire perspective and thus the possible conclusions for the use of children as a workforce. Without knowing the city was built with bricks, we instantly get the impression of young children working on massive blocks of stone, which is not the case. I suspect, despite the injuries found in the bones, these children were on “adobe brick duty”. The “normal” workforce, if I may use such a term, was then used on the larger stones while skilled workmen, or bricklayers, put the bricks into place. As for the death toll, health and safety in the modern sense would have been totally ignored and children have little sense of keeping themselves safe in such an environment. And let’s not forget that Amarna was built in a relatively short time, so this wasn’t a workforce that was born into labour until death. It is definitely quite likely these children came from a conquered land, brought back as slaves for the purpose of the building project, but DNA evidence will soon provide that data.
