Believe it or not, no aliens were likely involved! Just some very smart humans and a massive amount of labor.
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.
I notice you don’t post the names of any of the scientists who believe only a small workforce built the pyramids. Why is that? That’s really the one I was curious about.
Because, again, it’s kind of hard to argue against what they literally carved into a rock.
Because, again, it’s kind of hard to argue against what they literally carved into a rock.
Not arguing with you here, cuz I have no dog in this fight, but you’re seemingly ignoring the possibility of the emperor bragging about
crowd sizethe number of slaves workers utilized?So you’re saying that they used some unknown means of pulling big stones over rocks, but rather bragged about one they didn’t use even though it would have worked?
I mean, he could lie about it, but is there really any doubt a pharaoh could conscript a few hundred guys?
It’s just an easy, obvious solution, and probably the one they used because they weren’t dumb. We also have a lot of surviving paperwork from the organisation of pyramid building, including things like worker’s comp.
Again, there are hundreds of articles about the adjacent work camps. Please look at the publications of Zahi Hawass, chief archeologist of Egypt, and Amihai Mazar, a professor of archeology in Jerusalem.
Most claim that there could have been up to ten thousand workers. Some claim that the number of workers was as low as 1600.
I’m not sure why you think 1600 workers mean they couldn’t just drag large stones over land on sledges using a significant number of those 1600 workers. I’m not even sure why you think ten thousand workers would have been necessary. Can you explain please?
Can’t go doing that m8, that’d suggest they might have known what they were talking about, and they talked about a lot of stuff that’s very unpopular these days
You grease up a sled and drag it down a track carved into some rocks.
Even with the wrong amount of water, sticktion is just proportional to weight. With enough force you can overcome any amount of it.
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.)
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.
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We do sometimes need much heavier loads
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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…
They said fuck-all to efficiency and literally threw bodies at it.
Well, given that they didn’t have trucks, that’s a little unfair. Animals or people with ropes was the most efficient solution.
I swear that I’m not trying to be obtuse, but I have a lot of doubts.
What kind of ropes and wooden sleds, manufactured in 4000 BC, can move 80 ton stones? There are tensile limits…
So, each rope only needs to be too strong for the individual worker to snap. Obviously, that’s pretty easy, even with the worst natural fiber cordage - fibers are strong. Then they meet in some way, and ultimately attach to the wooden sled. The exact math for that is not straightforward, and we don’t really know how they tied it off, but it’s not an unusual amount of load for a large wooden structure. Assuming the sled measured 100 meters2 (80 tons was a special block worthy of an oversize sled), that works out to less than a ton per square meter, and a tree with 1m2 cross section at the trunk can weigh several tons without even considering the wind load on the foliage, which will be larger yet for most species.
80 tons is a lot, but it’s not a lot a lot. Thousands of tons are pretty common if you’re talking about ships, for example. Even the wooden ones; honestly wood is an underrated material.
I don’t know any specifics, but a bunch of ropes divides the force on each one. A bunch of ropes, plus people pushing from behind, would probably be enough force to overcome static friction without exceeding tensile limits on any one rope.
Yeah people really forget how recent an invention good rope is, It’s not like they could just order a few hundred meters on ebay. Making all that rope would probably be more effort and expense than a lot of the stuff that people write of as too complex for them to have considered, like temporary canals or raise and drop sledding.
Rope braiding is pretty fast. Especially if you’re an ancient Egyptian woman who’s done it full time for decades. They had hemp, which is the same stuff that rigged up the giant sailing ships of later on in history.
You’re right, I s’pose.
But it gets back to… was it really worth doing? It’s a monument to a single man’s ego.
Well, what else are you supposed to do when you’re overlord of the only empire in the known world? Something for the peasants? /s
Yeah, sorry, that was just a nitpick. All the rest I agree with.
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(!)
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.
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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.
It’s impressive is year 2024, we sent robots to other planets and so many other technological achievements … and still dont know exactly how the the Giza piramids have been done .
We know several ways it could have been done, and we could do it ourselves for a sliver of the cost. It’s a matter of historical preservation that we’re not sure which they chose.
The uncertain of this specific case and a few others against other thousand of history remains is what makes wonder
We know more about pyramid construction than pretty much everything else that was going on in 2500BC.
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Unrelated, but it would be a very cool project to restore the pyramids to the white gold tipped triangles that they used to be.
Egypt will never allow it. They want their cashcow to be in status quo forever so they can milk them dry. They’re not even allowing research into other, currently unknown chambers (which were found to be there, just never opened)
They tried to restore the Pyramid of Menkaure by adding granite stones to the exterior, but they stopped because of social media pushback.
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Yeah, an upgraded cash cow is still a cash cow, so that’s not the problem.
dude that was like three days ago lol.
I wrote it because it was relevant to the discussion.
Source? I’m not doubting you. I’m just surprised that the government would limit research, probably for political reasons.
They banned destrucive research for new rooms, because some researcher decade ago, enthusiastically drilled a bunch of holes to nowhere in order to do find them.
They still allowed the non destructive muon imaging a few year ago that heavily hinted to an unfound room.
But they won’t allow opening it, so yah.
I guess we’ll just have to build new ones!
it could be kind of disrespectful towards the culture that built them. I dont think we can restore them in such a way it respects the beliefs and culture of those who built them, so best thing to do would be to make sure they dont decay further. Also, restoring them just so tourists can have something to gawk at would be a kin to showing middle finger to those who built and revered them. And i doubt anyone would be interested in doing anything without monetary gain from it.
I didn’t think it was so much a question of how it was done vs how it was done so fast. Iirc, 20 years to build the Great Pyramid?
20 - 30, since they needed to be done for a specific person during their lifetime, and people died young then. The biggest one even has a backup chamber that was to be used if the pharaoh kicked the bucket too early and they couldn’t finish it.
The Great Pyramid isn’t a tomb, though. It has none of the hallmarks of a tomb. Even the Pharoah’s name is suspected to be 18th Century graffiti, and it was in a hidden room on the ceiling in the back where they kept the cleaning supplies or something.
Do you have a source for this?
Last time I checked almost every historian agreed they were almost all tombs.
As the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world, this majestic structure is perhaps the most fascinating of them all. But why Khufu? And why do Egyptologists think it is a tomb? The answer may be rather simple. Based on a mark found in an interior chamber of the pyramid, some experts believe the symbol refers to the fourth-dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Khufu.
That is the only mark that has ever been found in the pyramid. No other marks reference Khufu, nor do any other symbols suggest the pyramid was his eternal resting place meant to protect him in his journey to the afterlife. Given that lonely and ‘miserable symbol, Egyptologists argue that the Great Pyramid of Giza was thus built as a tomb over a 10- to 20-year period concluding around 2560 BC. But no discovery other than that symbol suggests Khufu’s mummy was ever inside the pyramid.
The mummified remains of King Khufu have never been found and are presumed to have been stolen from the Great Pyramid. But that’s just a theory. His mummified remains may very well remain hidden in a burial chamber in a different part of Egypt.
https://curiosmos.com/here-are-3-important-reasons-why-the-pyramids-of-egypt-may-not-be-a-tombs/
The Great Pyramid’s burial chambers lack inscriptions and decorations, the norm for Egyptian tombs of the fourth to late fifth dynasty, apart from work-gang graffiti that include Khufu’s names.[19] Constructed around 2600 BC, it predates the custom of inscribing pyramids with text by over 200 years.[20][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Purpose
The construction date is of some debate. I subscribe to the notion that Khufu claimed the Great Pyramid.
That is interesting. But it says:
The most intact papyri describe several months of work with the transportation of limestone from quarries Tura North and Tura South to Giza in the 27th year of the reign of pharaoh Khufu.[8][9] Though the diary does not specify where the stones were to be used or for what purpose, given the diary may date to what is widely considered the very end of Khufu’s reign, Tallet believes they were most likely for cladding the outside of the Great Pyramid. About every ten days, two or three round trips were done, shipping perhaps 30 blocks of 2–3 tonnes each, amounting to 200 blocks per month.[10][11] About forty boatmen worked under him. The period covered in the papyri extends from July to November.[8]
(Emphasis added) it’s not exactly very specific. Every 10 days a few blocks wouldn’t match the expected construction rate, and there’s no reasoning why they think it was for the Great Pyramid (other than the belief that it’s Khufu’s tomb?)
Every 10 days a few blocks wouldn’t match the expected construction rate, and there’s no reasoning why they think it was for the Great Pyramid
Unless there were other crews, like there almost always is in any construction. The journal also specifically names the pyramid, it’d be odd for the stone they’re moving to go to the site of the Pyramid of Khufu, mention the name of the pyramid of Khufu, and then not be used for the pyramid of Khufu.
I’m really curious when and how quickly the route changed.
Nah, must have been aliens! Those boffins just think they’re so clever.
Did we doubt it was Jewish slaves using levers or did I miss a memo?
Yeah I don’t think anyone believed that for a while now, that was just what people trying to base their world view on the Bible wanted to be true… exodus didn’t happen either and Egypt doesn’t seem to have had many Jewish slaves.
It was Egyptian conscripts, according to their records. They didn’t trust slaves with something that important, I guess.
Aliens.
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It was built by aliens but that scares people so they chalk it up to humans to pat themselves on the back
Imagine slaving off your life to build a wonder and there are some people in the future that will say it was the aliens. That’s crazy disrespect.
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They wish they did
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Imagine coming all the way to a planet light years away and making them awe inspiring monuments just for them to say ‘yeah that’s easy we could do that, in fact we did! We made this!’
Honestly though their fault for using their galaxy age tech to build something about as complex as your average bronze age civ…
[Jesus people, this is a joke as made obvious by the punchline about them building to a bronze age level - you guys really need to work on reading comprehension, it’s such an important life skill]
