Roxana Cooper Wrote:
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> Or possibly there was no unrest to avert?


Possibly... but I can't conceive of any large human society where some kind of unrest wasn't a potential - even when you regarded your leader as a god.

Still, you have a very good point and it's really a chicken and egg question - if unrest was prevented by full employment during the months of the Nile flooding, can you say that there would have been unrest otherwise? No, it can't be proved.

I remember discussing with a colleague whether all the effort put in by programmers to avert the Millenium Bug crisis was a waste of time and money, as the Bug scare turned out to be rather groundless. But did we actually avert it, or would it never have happened anyway? It seems we did avert it, but we'll never know now hwat really would have happened if we did nothing about it - perhaps it would have been nothing, perhaps it would have been the major meltdown predicted by the doomsayers. We can't know.

I believe the 4th Dynasty Pharoahs knew the societal value of stability and full employment, of occupying and including all their people where possible. As you rightly pointed out, conditions for the workers seem to have been good.

Remember, only three centuries or so later, with the death of Pepi II and the end of the Old Kingdom, significant unrest did indeed surface.

I'm inclined to believe the old saying: any civilisation is only about 4 meals away from anarchy.