8 ms·
And they used that same water canal to stack those huge blocks too? Seems like only half the “secret” revealed.
by alyx 9y ago
And they used that same water canal to stack those huge blocks too?
Seems like only half the “secret” revealed.
- themaninthedark 9y agoYeah, I was really interested in the pyramids when I was a kid, I remember there was a general consensus that the blocks were shipped via water. The real mystery was how were the blocks lifted and stacked.
- jusp 9y agoLarge ramps kms in length. Similar to how Indians built most of their giant temples where btw worship happens to this day. Its easy to build large things on the backs of slaves but keeping culture alive for thousands of years....not just the monuments, takes much more than engineering thought.
- irrational 9y agoWell, the Egyptians managed to keep their culture alive for 3000+ years until the Muslim conquest.
- singularity2001 9y agoEgyptian culture survived the Hyksos, the sea people, the Persians, partly the Greeks and the Romans but was eradicated by Christian fanatics.
- irrational 9y agoSource? All the sources I look at say that Egyptian culture survived more or less intact until the Muslim conquest in the 300s.
- Taniwha 9y agoAnd yet Muhammad was born in 570, perhaps you're thinking of another 'Muslim conquest'
- apoorvkumar 9y agoHaha ... irrational indeed!
- scentoni 9y ago> Source? All the sources I look at say that Egyptian culture survived more or less intact until the Muslim conquest in the 300s. You should recheck your sources if they're telling you about Muslim conquests in the 300s.
- huxley 9y agoThe Egyptians didn't use slaves to build the pyramids http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...
- cypherpunks01 9y agoGreat article, thank you!
- guhcampos 9y agoThe article does not say that. They seem to have implied this by mainly the evidence the builders ate a lot of meat, but their own assessing that the lodging was absurdly dense says otherwise. Sounds quite a bit like cherry picking to me, which is not uncommon for people working on the same subject for decades. At some point you are just too willing to accept your own confirmation bias, no matter how trained you are. And this is just me guessing from the article, there are other reasons to think twice before reaching such conclusions. The concept of "slave" is not as set in stone as we think, it's a generalization of a broader concept. And cattle is not necessarily for the rich: livestock is a pretty good way to store energy. In hot places like the tropics, vegetables go ripe very quickly so the logistics of feeding an army of builders with crops might have been difficult enough that it was just easier to feed the crops to cattle then move the cattle to the people.
- Keeeeeeeks 9y ago> Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves. Idk man, seems like the article does claim that the builders weren't slaves. Also, given the way trophic pyramids work, feeding crops to a cow and feeding the cow to people results in a loss of energy compared to feeding the people plants. By that, I mean it's more expensive to raise a cow and use it to feed 10 people than it would be to give those 10 people crops.
- apoorvkumar 9y ago
- KGIII 9y agoThe canals have been well understood, and known, for quite a while now. They shipped the larger stones down during the flood season. They quarried with dolomite (spelling) pounding stones, loaded them up on reed boats, and shipped when the flood waters were high and they had a surplus of labor. It's probably a good idea to remember how many times they have 'known' how this was done. We have 'known' how it was done a number of different times - and ways. I remain skeptical until I've seen more about it and the idea has withstood scrutiny. As for the construction, that's still a mystery. One of the more interesting theories is from a French architect. He supposes that there was actually a ramp, but that it was built inside the pyramid. He hasn't had much luck, as far as I know, investigating this. They did climb up the side and found a previously unknown chamber behind an area exposed by a missing stone. I'm unqualified to opine about the viability. Err... I watch documentaries, to the exclusion of almost everything else. There are a whole lot of documentaries about egyptology.
- singularity2001 9y agowhat happened to the great theory of the French architect? it sounded really promising back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Houdin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Houdin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs
- KGIII 9y agoI don't know. I saw him in two documentaries and then he disappeared. His idea sounded reasonable to my layman's ears. His mockup looked convincing.
- jpl56 9y agoJP Houdin seems to be involved in the Scan Pyramids project (www.scanpyramids.org). In his 2010 documentary, he was waiting to be able to do that in order to confirm that infrared anomalies he discovered are really linked to the internal corridor.
- cypherpunks01 9y agoInteresting! I don't think most laypeople are aware of this. The French architect you mention is Jean-Pierre Houdin, he claims that a long straight ramp was used for the bottom 1/3 of the pyramid, then an interior spiral for the remaining. There is a large notch 2/3 up the pyramid and other evidence of some spiraling features that lends some weight to this one. Another interesting theory is that water from these canals were used in a series of locks and temporary "ponds" elevated as each layer of the pyramid was built.