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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Scientists may have solved the mystery behind transporting some of the materials to the pyramid site: a dried-up a river
Fixed the title for you.
The construction of the Giza pyramids is still baffling. Some of the stones are purported to weigh 80 tons. That's four or five times more weight than what modern trucks can pull on paved roads.
It's not so farfetched to presume that this ancient civilization employed technology that is lost to time. I'm not talking about aliens and laser beams, but good ol' fashioned mathematics. They could have exploited a principle of leverage and incline that we simply don't understand or recognize. Or perhaps something entirely different from our six simple machines...
The problem with this theory, of course, is that we like to believe that humanity is always progressing and that we are superior to our forebears by default. That is ultimately a subjective opinion.
You'd have a point if the Egyptians didn't already tell us how they moved giant, heavy things over land.
Lots of human labor.
(Relief from the tomb of Djehutihotep in el-Bersheh)
Yes. I'm familiar with this image. Some scientists claim that when just the right amount of water is poured over sand it reduces the friction by about 30%.
Some also claim that there were not hundreds of thousands of laborers at the Giza pyramids, based on evidence discovered in the work camps near the site.
I'm 38 years old and I think I've read about a new theory every year of my life...
Who are these "some scientists?" Names please.
I'd suggest arguing against what they literally showed us they did is an uphill battle.
"The study was done by Christian Wagner and colleagues at Saarland University in Germany, along with researchers in the Netherlands, Iran and France. The team was inspired by an ancient Egyptian wall painting showing a huge statue being hauled across the sand on a sledge in about 1800 BC. The painting has a detail that has long puzzled Egyptologists: a worker who appears to be pouring water onto the sand in front of the sledge while others appear to be carrying water to replenish his supply."
https://physicsworld.com/a/did-slippery-sand-help-egyptians-build-the-pyramids/
There are hundreds of articles about this theory. It was all the rage a few years ago.
You grease up a sled and drag it down a track carved into some rocks.
How many horsepower is that? Also, what is a horse? (bronze age Egypt joke)
For the record we do understand how they built it.
They used log rollers, ropes and lots and lots of people hauling. They brute forced it… which, the reason our trucks can’t haul that much has far more to do with the weight on the suspension and fuel efficiency. They said fuck-all to efficiency and literally threw bodies at it.
That said, We do sometimes need much heavier loads
It’s a fairly common solution- the Moai heads on Rapa Nui (easter island) and stone henge also come to mind. In the case of Egypt, they used a sled (or sled and rollers.)
For getting it up the face, they used packed earth ramps that they later removed. Actually, we still use this technique in construction today. (Specifically to get vehicle access up otherwise too-steep slopes)(and again, threw bodies at it. Lots and lots of bodies.)
There’s really only a few things that are impressive about the pyramids. The first is the sheer ego it took to order it built. Then there is the celestial alignment between all of them. And finally the sheer scale of the project and vast amounts of human labor that went into it.
What they determined is that the river allowed the blocks to be floated much closer than previously thought (even today barges are superior to trains, never mind trucking.)
There's a new theory that the ramps were actually internal. I like it because it means they don't need to bring a lot of extra material and manpower to the site just for the ramps since they're built into the structure of the same material.
I've also heard of this. It seems to me that this theory should be easy to confirm with some sort x-ray or radar or lidar or something, so that we can see the shape of the structure beneath the superficial layers...
I lot of people look at this and say its just too much material for it to have happened.
But we know of projects that have used more man power. The London to Birmingham railway line took 5 years to build and moved more material than the great pyramid and we know exactly how that was done. The size of individual pieces does add complication, but the absolute quantity and manpower is not unexplainable.
Yeah, it's a failure of imagination, probably combined with wanting to believe.
I wonder if there’s a bit of not wanting to believe what people can accomplish if a massive number of us all teamed up to do something.
Because then they’d feel guilty for not getting up out of their armchair and going to support whatever cause they claim they’re supporting from the comfort of home.
Armchair activism is indeed a scourge.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
We do sometimes need much heavier loads
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This guy shows how to move large, heavy objects using pivot points and physics.
It sounds silly until you see him single handedly move a barn(!)
https://youtu.be/E5pZ7uR6v8c
Yeah, I remember this guy. He claimed that Stonehenge in England could have been built like this. The pyramids of Giza are much more complex, of course. Still, I think it's entirely possible that the pyramids were built using very clever engineering principles that were forgotten and that we don't need because we have cranes and power tools and hydraulics, etc.
That was very cool, thanks for sharing.
I would argue seeing the barn makes it even sillier, but in a good way.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/E5pZ7uR6v8c
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Isn't this old news? I heard this when Assassin Creed Origins came out and thought it was somewhat historically accurate.
So it's not just me. Maybe the discovery here was just the exact and complete layout, and the BBC misunderstood it the way journalists usually do with science stories?
Ah yes, the ancient Egyptian seven simple machines: lever, wheel, pulley, incline, wedge, screw and Agrav engine.