Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves

[Paullus Scipio]

Sean wrote:

It occurs to me that in modern English we have these two meanings of "slave" too: the scientific sense of "a person owned by another person" and the metaphorical one of "a person who is subject to harsh controls, like a slave." Herodotus might have thought that the Egyptians were slaves in the second sense, but not in the first.

...but as we have seen, the Greeks had not two, but many concepts and words encompassing 'slave' - a person owned by another as a chattel. We have also seen that, to the Greeks, anyone not 'free' ( eleutheroi) is a literal, rather than metaphorical, slave (doulos), and that there were many types of slavery for which there were many different words.Thus, any subject of an Absolute Ruler such as Pharoah or The Great King, was a literal ( not metaphorical) 'slave' because they had to obey and were not 'free' to make decisions..... We have also seen that, to a Greek, a war-captive/prisoner-of-war was automatically a 'slave' (andropon), thus 'conquered/captured' to a Greek is synonymous with 'enslaved'....

We also have several words such as slave, serf, servant, subject, indentured servant, et cetera. In short, Digital Age English and Herodotus' Greek aren't completely different: both have several technical words for a slave, each surrounded by a cloud of metaphor.

I think there is a danger of blurring important distinctions here - a serf ( whose service is attached to a piece of land, and goes with it) is not a slave ( a chattel who may be bought and sold), which is different again from an indentured servant ( a servant bound by written contract, usually for a period of time) etc.etc...all are different and none are synonymous with 'slave'.
Greek too had such distinctions, and a 'Helot'/state serf, for example, was recognised by the Greeks as being neither 'free' nor 'slave' (e.g. Pollux III.83 where they are described as 'half-slave, half free' ). There is still the important difference that English has only one word for a 'proper' slave, but Greek has many words for many types of 'proper' slave......