On the other hand, when Wang Qiu and the others wandered among the magnificent and gorgeous palaces, admiring these masterpieces of art and the bewitching priestesses; When Queen Cleopatra and a bunch of cunning old foxes, big foxes and little foxes in the temple, the political commissar Yang Wenli, who always had the string of class struggle in his heart, wandered around the villages and towns outside Memphis, examining the daily lives of ordinary Egyptians in the Ptolemaic dynasty.

――Although I was angry and devastated, I once said, "What does it matter if the human race is starved to death by 10 billion?" Such a very unruly remark, but in terms of nature, this old professor is still a traditional old party member who cares about the suffering of the public. Even on the other side of the wormhole, he is always used to looking at this society from the perspective of the people at the bottom.

Of course, for the sake of his own safety, Commissar Yang Wenli actually sat on a sedan chair to make rounds, and asked the queen to send a lot of soldiers to accompany him to protect him, and at the same time undertook the work of supervising the distribution of relief food, so as to avoid the hostility of the people at the bottom, and by the way, brush up the favorability among the people.

In general, the current living conditions of Egyptians in Lower Egypt, or in the Nile Delta region, are basically very bad.

-- It would be strange if the Nile had been dry for two years in a row, resulting in reduced crop yields, and the ensuing famine and war!

Alas, look at the streets and alleys, even the big girls are too poor to wear pants!

Looking at a few young girls who were naked or draped in only a burlap, running barefoot and dangling their chests from the streets. Political Commissar Yang Wenli couldn't help but shake his head and sighed incessantly: I have seen a lot in poor places, but it is really rare to be poor in such a civilized country where all the people are naked.

-- In the old China before the liberation. It is true that there are many poor people in ragged clothes who go out covered with sacks, and even the whole family only has a decent pair of pants, and a good dress can be passed down for three generations...... But the towns of ancient Egypt were almost full of naked men and women, and bare-bottomed children running naked and frolicking, making it a permanent naturist camp with a king-sized sky.

On the one hand, this is because the weather in Egypt is hot and dry, and it is impossible to freeze at all. In the case of losing shame, it is possible to live without clothes, and on the other hand, because of the backwardness of productivity. widespread poverty among the people...... Otherwise, the sun is still the same sun, the desert is still this desert, and the Nile is still the Nile. Why Egyptian Muslim women who worship Allah and don't eat pork after 2,000 years. Can rich or poor be able to wrap themselves so tightly from head to toe? Obviously, the production of Jishu in the future has made great progress, which has caused the price of cloth to plummet!

According to the field research of political commissar Yang Wenli, although the flower of civilization has been blooming on the banks of the Nile River for 30 centuries at this time, in the Egyptian countryside of this era, the life of ordinary Egyptian residents is still in a state of very low level of science and technology, living an ignorant life of sunrise and sunset, and suffering heavy exploitation. Drought, squalor and extreme poverty have been the constant rhythm of the region for thousands of years.

-- In several villages that Commissar Yang Wenli saw. Most of the houses are either made of uneven mud bricks or simple sheds made of reeds and thatch. Chinese often say that a family is very poor and that "the house is surrounded by walls", while the reed huts of the poor in Egypt have no walls at all...... And almost without exception in tatters, looking crumbling, as if a breeze blows and immediately becomes a rubble. They have been able to stand in the winds and sands of Egypt until now, and I am afraid that they can be called a miracle in the architectural world. Even the homes of those who live in mud-brick houses usually have old doors and windows, smoky and burning, and look poor and dilapidated.

There are no real roads in the village, and there is not much trace of planning between the messy houses, mud-brick houses and thatched huts built haphazardly, unevenly separated by fruit trees and vegetable beds, and the paths stamped with excrement and garbage emitted a foul stench in the sun.

Moreover, more than 1,000 years after the invention of iron smelting, a considerable part of Egyptian peasants could not afford to buy the expensive metals - iron and copper to use in weapons - and had to continue to use rudimentary wood, stone and bone tools for farming. Also due to the backwardness of the textile jishu, they could only wear extremely coarse linen clothes, or simply naked, except that they did not have many tattoos, and they felt similar to members of ancient American Indian tribes.

Egypt is now in the middle of the Nile water level drops, and the harvest season will start in a month, which should be the busiest time for farmers, and this year's Nile water level has finally reached "abundance", enough to water the farmland along the river and bring a good harvest to the Egyptian people who have been hungry for two years...... The problem, however, was that the war-torn farmland around Memphis had delayed wheat planting, leading to widespread abandonment. Although the situation has now calmed down, the time for planting has long been missed, and the ancient Egyptians did not have such a fast-growing crop as potatoes......

As a result, they had nothing to do but hastily sow some vegetables, and could only wait for the relief food distributed by Queen Cleopatra and the temple of Memphis...... If neither can be counted on, then it means that mass famine and famine are about to erupt.

When Professor Yang sat on the swaying sedan chair and passed by these villages with the same shabby appearance, there were poor people everywhere who had delayed a year's farming, sitting at the door of their homes with nothing to do, all of them hungry and skinny, and their skin tanned by the sun, which may seem to be very in line with the "healthy complexion" in the hearts of some modern petty bourgeoisie, but it is definitely a symbol of miserable life in this era.

Professor Yang continued to look closely, and also found that although the arms of these Egyptian farmers were generally muscular and had thick joints, their skin seemed to be duller and more dull than that of modern people in the prime of life, and the muscles on their arms were bruised and gave people a feeling of dryness, which seemed to be the result of insufficient oil intake and excessive physical extraction, resulting in overdraft of vitality. The situation of women and children is even more dire. Looks thin cheeks, sunken eye sockets, and many people have rickets due to malnutrition.

Out of curiosity, when distributing relief food to a certain village. Professor Yang also personally visited an ordinary farmer's home to observe the daily living environment of ordinary Egyptians. The family was not very poor in their village, and at least had decent houses to live in, but there were only two rooms at full house, and they were already in a dilapidated state, one of which was a dining room and kitchen, and the other was a bedroom for the whole family. In the center of the restaurant is a stove made of mud bricks and stones. In front of him was a pile of wheat straw for fuel, and the walls had long since been blackened by smoke and fire. The family's cutlery, a few broken clay bowls, were haphazardly laid out on the side of the wall, and beside them were piles of miscellaneous items. In the corner of the house were a few dirty farm tools and a large vat presumably used to hold grain. Besides. There's nothing more to say.

Due to the extremely small window openings in the room, the room was unusually dim, and with the beam of a flashlight, Professor Yang leaned in front of the vat to take a look. I found that there was not even a grain of wheat or dates in it. There were just a few onions and garlic scattered around, and a black stone - Professor Yang, who had traveled to many ancient time and space, knew very well that this was the inferior coarse salt used by the poor in ancient times, and there was an unknown amount of sediment impurities mixed in it, and the bitter taste of licking it definitely overshadowed the salty taste...... But even then, for the ancients, such "black salt" was already an expensive luxury.

And in that bedroom, there are also four walls. The so-called bed is nothing more than a few bales of hay spread out on the ground, and there are so many fleas and lice in them that you can play "Ranch Story". At this time, the man in charge of the house was not there. On the dimly lit straw couch, there was only a naked woman with yellow muscles and three and a half children, looking at the men who came in, with neither fear nor joy on their faces, only a kind of numbness that seemed to have completely lost its color.

In the past, he volunteered in refugee camps in Africa and Haiti, and when he traveled to the end of any dynasty, he had seen this numbness of loss of hope countless times, but after seeing it again today, it still gave him a lot of shock.

Thankfully, the Egyptians' expressions, while lifeless, had not yet completely turned into the walking dead - and when they heard that the men were delivering relief food to their families, the women's faces lit up with expectation. When the soldier handed over a bag of wheat, the eyes of the family immediately lit up. Next, when Professor Yang personally gave her a piece of cotton cloth and a small packet of refined salt out of pity, the bare-bottomed housewife was even more grateful, and hurriedly kowtowed to him to thank him, muttering something in her mouth all the time, probably praising the kindness of the "divine envoys" and Queen Cleopatra - although Professor Yang could speak Greek, he could barely understand ancient Egyptian, and he could barely speak a few words with the Greek mercenaries under the command of Queen Cleopatra. But there was no way to communicate with the indigenous people of Egypt.

Despite the poverty of the village, when inspecting the small temple next to the village, Professor Yang was surprised to find a large amount of linen, flour, wheat and preserved fruits in the warehouse, all of which had been looted by the village priests over the years. After the priest was killed in the war, he was all left unowned. These items were supposed to help the villagers who were running out of food, but unfortunately due to poor storage and the fact that the village had just burst its embankment not long ago, the entire temple was soaked in water, and the hoarded cloth was already moldy, and the flour, wheat, and preserved fruits were all moldy and spoiled. Someone in the village couldn't help but be hungry, and ate the moldy wheat discarded in the temple, and actually poisoned it alive......

No matter how good-tempered Professor Rao is, when he sees so much moldy grain, he can't help but scold: on the one hand, the people of the whole village are hungry, and on the other hand, the grain is hoarded like a mountain and let it rot...... What a cruel way this is?!

On the night of that day, Professor Yang wrote a "Survey Report on the Social Conditions in Lower Egypt" based on his own personal experience and historical materials for everyone's reference. However, after Wang Qiu read this masterpiece the next day, he was shocked and incredible.

“…… The land is state-owned, the rural communes, and the division of labor? Professor Yang, are you writing about the ancient Egyptian countryside or the China of the Jihua economic era? (To be continued......)