The enslaved people labored upon the monuments of their masters, often during the entire lifetime of these latter. It may be seen from contemporary wall-paintings that the discipline maintained during the work of construction was not lacking in strictness, but it was certainly not that excessive oppression generally imagined. A body of over one hundred thousand workmen sorely oppressed might, even in Egypt, have been difficult to manage by a hated despot. It was principally during the annual inundations of the Nile that the kings employed and fed the poorer classes, at that time, perhaps, unable otherwise to subsist. During other seasons the rulers could not have taken the tillers of the soil from fields and flocks without great injury to their own interests. It is no mark of a selfish despotism, which builds without reference to the welfare of land and subjects, that the kings removed their enormous sepulchral piles from the vicinity of their residences--from the valuable alluvion of the Nile to the barren edge of the desert. They thus, as Plato recommends, occupied no place with dwellings of the dead where it would be possible for the living to find nourishment. The fertile ground of the valley was not encumbered by the colossal pyramids, which were so numerous in ancient Egypt that Lepsius found the remains of sixty-seven in the forty-eight kilometers alone between Cairo and the Fayoum, on the western bank of the river. Supposing only five score such pyramids, with an average area of one hundred ares each, two elevenths of that of the great pyramid of Gizeh, to have stood in the narrow valley of the Nile, what an enormous loss in the grain production of that most fertile but limited land would so great a reduction of arable surface have caused during the past five thousand years!