Exodus, Schmexodus

People with little working knowledge of history but a great love of spinning a good yarn (Dan Brown) often assume that the biblical story of Exodus really happened. Or at least, the Egyptians really held Hebrew slaves and forced them to construct wondrous ego boosts like the Great Pyramid. But there's never been any evidence proving the Egyptians kept Hebrew slaves. And the new discovery of swanky tombs around the pyramid construction site just adds to the growing pile of evidence that these things were built by skilled craftsmen, not slaves at all. These tombs were meant to store the bodies of those who died building the pyramids, and they're uncomfortably close to the tombs of kings. Which means the workers were higher class citizens than slaves, whose bodies were simply thrown into a holding pit before they could be mass-mummified and reanimated as soldiers in the pharaoh's magical necro-army. Of course, it's possible this discovery is simply false propaganda being disseminated by the Egyptian government. It's a matter of national pride that the pyramids are proven too complex to have been slapped together by a bunch of unpaid day laborers like so many Rite Aids. Or that evidence of buried workers might prove they weren't constructed with extraterrestrial anti-gravity guns. So take this all with a grain of salt. More details here.