Builders Of Egypt Download
Karina Edling
One of my favourite games of all time, wot I bang on all the time about, is Pharaoh, the 1999 city builder from Impressions Games, which was the successor to Caesar III and - in many ways - was the high water mark for historical settlement-makers. There has been a Pharaoh-shaped hole in PC gaming for some time, and this time last year, when I put together my list of promising upcoming city builders, it seemed there were a couple of games vying for the twin crowns of the Nile. One of those was Builders Of Egypt, and after having a go on its free demo (sorry, "prologue"), I can confirm it is still exactly that: promising.
There's really not much to this demo. There's a single map, where you can set up a small settlement, with basic food amenities, and a single resource supply chain (clay -> pottery, or clay + straw -> bricks). Because you can't speed up the game pace yet, I played the starting scenario for aaaaages, but it was a bit of a waste of time. I'd seen the vast majority of the content after fifteen minutes, and the rest was just a case of waiting for numbers to tick up. Did it excite me, however? Yeah, it did - with a couple of reservations.
For a start, it's fairly beautiful for a game in its infancy. The Nile in particular - which must be, by definition, the heart of any Egyptian city builder - is lush and full of life, and I was a massive fan of the water lilies in particular. The music was on point too, and if the game can hit the same notes as Pharaoh did with sound design (genuinely, the sound effects, from wind in reeds to grunting hippos, were what made me fall in love with it), it's going to be in very much the right territory, atmosphere-wise.
Secondly, I was happy to see that Builders isn't a total carbon copy of the game it's so clearly aping. Yes, the road grids and the housing tier upgrade system are there. And the fucking fire stations (which, by the way, are my most despised staple of city builder games. Seriously, there's absolutely zero fun or strategic challenge involved in having a cheap little building you need to remember to put down for the express purpose of stopping the irritation of fires). Even the resource supply chain was exactly the same. But for all these straight feature ports, there were little differences that I appreciated - the most notable being the arbitrary "gold" currency replaced with twin currencies of bread and beer for paying workers.
That, I thought, was an extremely cool touch. Or at least, it will be, if it has an impact on the game beyond a cosmetic level. For example, would a brewery or a bakery basically function as a mint, in that case? What about gold mines, when they are introduced - will gold essentially become another trade good? There's a lot of interesting stuff there to play with, if developer Strategy Labs (which used to be just one bloke, but now seems to be a studio, in a publishing deal with "simulator" churner-outer PlayWay) has the appetite to properly flesh it all out.
And that's the thing, really. At the moment, I've seen a demo that does the same thing as a million and one other city builders released, or half-finished, in the last twenty years. It certainly gives me a lot more of a reason to keep an eye on Builders Of Egypt, but it's going to take a lot more than some nice-looking lily pads and a brickmaker's yard to make me truly feel like I have united the upper and the lower kingdoms of mighty Kemet once more.
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Pyramids tell us about the fabulous lives of great pharaohs, who died surrounded by symbols of wealth and privilege. But the story of the ordinary people who built them is less often told. Archaeologist Dr Joyce Tyldesley redresses the balance.
Who built the pyramids? And where did those builders live? Egyptologists used to suspect that Egypt's construction sites were supported by purpose-built villages, but there was no archaeological evidence for this until the end of the Victorian age.
Then in 1888 the theory was finally confirmed, when British archaeologist Flinders Petrie started his investigation into the Middle Kingdom pyramid complex of Senwosert II at Ilahun. Here an associated walled settlement, Kahun, yielded a complete town plan whose neat rows of mud-brick terraced houses provided a wealth of papyri, pottery, tools, clothing and children's toys - all the debris of day-to-day life that is usually missing from Egyptian sites.
If we are to make sense of the Great Pyramid at Giza as a man-made monument, this is precisely the sort of evidence that we need to uncover. But with so many splendid tombs on offer, few early Egyptologists were prepared to 'waste time' looking for domestic architecture. It is only recently, thanks largely to the ongoing excavations of Egyptologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, that excavation around the base of the Great Pyramid has started to reveal the stories of the pyramid-builders there.
King Khufu, responsible for commissioning the Great Pyramid The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Great Pyramid was built by 100,000 slaves who 'laboured constantly and were relieved every three months by a fresh gang'. He is, however, wrong. King Khufu - 4th Dynasty ruler of Egypt - the royal responsible for the commissioning of the Great Pyramid, did not have a vast body of slaves at his disposal, and even if he had, there was no way that 100,000 could work simultaneously on one pyramid.
All archaeologists have their own methods of calculating the number of workers employed at Giza, but most agree that the Great Pyramid was built by approximately 4,000 primary labourers (quarry workers, hauliers and masons). They would have been supported by 16-20,000 secondary workers (ramp builders, tool-makers, mortar mixers and those providing back-up services such as supplying food, clothing and fuel). This gives a total of 20-25,000, labouring for 20 years or more.
The workers may be sub-divided into a permanent workforce of some 5,000 salaried employees who lived, together with their families and dependents, in a well-established pyramid village. There would also have been up to 20,000 temporary workers who arrived to work three- or four-month shifts, and who lived in a less sophisticated camp established alongside the pyramid village.
A reconstruction of men labouring in the quarry close to the Great Pyramid The sacred precincts of the Giza pyramid village cemetery were defined by the 'Wall of the Crow', a massive limestone boundary which separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. The main pyramid village lay outside this wall, close by the valley temple of the Great Pyramid. Unfortunately, this settlement now lies beneath the modern town of Nazlet es-Samman, and is largely inaccessible.
The village dead - men, women and children - were buried in a sloping desert cemetery. Their varied tombs and graves, including miniature pyramids, step-pyramids and domed tombs, incorporate expensive stone elements 'borrowed' from the king's building site. The larger, more sophisticated, limestone tombs lie higher up the cemetery slope; here we find the administrators involved in the building of the pyramid, plus those who furnished its supplies.
Tomb robbers more or less ignored these workers' tombs, their rather basic grave goods being of little interest to thieves in search of gold. Consequently many skeletons have survived intact, allowing scientists to build up a profile of those who lived, worked and died at Giza. Of the 600 or more bodies so far examined, roughly half are female, with children and babies making up over 23 per cent of the total. Thus we have confirmation that the permanent workers lived with their families in the shadow of the rising pyramid.
The tombs of the supervisors include inscriptions relating to the organisation and control of the workforce. These writings provide us with our only understanding of the pyramid-building system. They confirm that the work was organised along tried and tested lines, designed to reduce the vast workforce and their almost overwhelming task to manageable proportions.
The splitting of task and workforce, combined with the use of temporary labourers, was a typical Egyptian answer to a logistical problem. Already temple staff were split into five shifts or 'phyles', and sub-divided into two divisions, which were each required to work one month in ten. Boat crews were always divided into left- and right-side gangs and then sub-divided; the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were decorated following this system, also by left- and right-hand gangs.
At Giza the workforce was divided into crews of approximately 2,000 and then sub-divided into named gangs of 1,000: graffiti show that the builders of the third Giza pyramid named themselves the 'Friends of Menkaure' and the 'Drunkards of Menkaure'. These gangs were divided into phyles of roughly 200. Finally the phyles were split into divisions of maybe 20 workers, who were allocated their own specific task and their own project leader. Thus 20,000 could be separated into efficient, easily monitored, units and a seemingly impossible project, the raising of a huge pyramid, became an achievable ambition.
As bureaucracy responded to the challenges of pyramid building, the builders took full advantage of an efficient administration, which allowed them to summon workers, order supplies and allocate tasks. It is no coincidence that the 4th Dynasty shows the first flourishing of the hieratic script, the cursive, simplified form of hieroglyphics that would henceforth be used in all non-monumental writings.
The many thousands of manual labourers were housed in a temporary camp beside the pyramid town. Here they received a subsistence wage in the form of rations. The standard Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC) ration for a labourer was ten loaves and a measure of beer.
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