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Ronfar's avatar

Ancient Egypt also had a fairly large labor surplus compared to many other ancient societies: the amount of labor required to feed itself was relatively small, leaving lots of manpower available to do things like build pyramids. Or store excess grain in good years and distribute it in bad ones.

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Techy3's avatar

Goethe was late to that conclusion. In "War and the Rise of The State," Bruce Porter describes strong evidence of links between the emergence of nationalism, state-building and war going back to about 1600.

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