10 ms·

Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

152 points by diodorus 5y ago

aemreunal 5y ago
Website seems to be down at the moment, here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/monumental-record https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.histo...
bambax 5y ago
> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet > a wonder of the ancient world Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet. Not just contemporaneous: we are the same.
- kragen 5y ago
  We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another. Upon arrival, they disgorge us unharmed. They run five times as fast as the fastest horse. Eleven years ago, we finished building a tower that is five times as tall as the Great Pyramid; building it took only six years and 22 million person-hours (so perhaps 1000 people, the size of Merer's aper, though unlike Merer's workers they were enslaved). It's not defensive (towers are almost useless for defense now); it's mostly luxury housing. In two centuries it will be gone. We turn night into day whenever we wish, making travel at night just as easy as travel in the day. Only one in 100 children die before age 5 now, a number that was around 20 throughout all human history until a century ago. Most people who are born live threescore years or more. But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually. Most people do not raise their own children any more; they put them into state institutions except for evenings, weekends, and summertime. When someone is badly injured or sick, we put their body into a state of temporary death, cut it open, fix the problem, sew them up like a torn sweater, and bring them back to life; it's so commonplace that people sometimes choose to undergo this procedure for cosmetic reasons such as having bigger breasts. To speak to one another, we often use the power of lightning, invisibly leaping through the air, to convey our thoughts to one another, even though we may be on opposite sides of the earth. We have put thousands of new, tiny moons in the sky because they help this system work better. Usually when we write, instead of using ink, we write in letters of lightning. It's easier that way, because the letters disappear and reappear whenever we wish. 95% of the world's work is now done by servants made of metal such as the elephants I mentioned. For example, almost nobody washes clothes anymore, and we can all listen to music more perfect than any human can play, whenever and wherever we wish, played for us by these metal servants. These servants do not eat food; instead they are fed on lightning made from the black blood of the Earth. Doing too much of this sort of thing is changing the weather and melting the glaciers, so now we are teaching these servants to feed on sunlight instead. Most countries, especially the militarily strongest, no longer have kings. We have the same kind of paintings Merer had, but also a different kind of paintings that glow, move, and speak. Sometimes people sit for hours watching these incredibly lifelike paintings, laughing and crying. Sometimes they show us things that are happening right now, far away, and sometimes they show us things that happened in the past, or that never happened. Most houses no longer have fireplaces. Most people no longer know how to make fire; they have tiny tools that make fire for them. But sure, basically nothing has changed, because we still use spreadsheets.
  - jd115 5y ago
    This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN. Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.
    - 6510 5y ago
      On the contrary, if no one complaints nothing will happen. Moaning always comes before invention. Its just not the moaners themselves who make anything happen but they are very much part of the delicate balance. You could invent something without moaners but no one would recognize it. Take this one for example: > bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I suppose that in a sense any non-playful attempt to change the state of affairs, whether directed at technical progress or not, is rooted in a "complaint": you imagine a possible future and judge that the current state of affairs is worse by comparison. And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future. So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do. > The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us. This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.
- atoav 5y ago
  In the sense of: People in ancient times were also people with needs, urges, dreams, hopes etc. You are right. Looking at ancient people and describing them like a different species makes no sense at all. However believe systems make a huge difference as well. As a child I had problems placing myself into the shoes of my grandfather who was a Nazi, went to the eastern front and had values that differed immensely from what my parents told me was good and right. But we shared at least some common cultural knowledge and social practise. Ancient people can feel foreign because their lived cultural practise, believes etc differ from ours hugely. Not being able to put yourself into the shoes of someone who e.g. lived in a feudal system is normal — you need to be very well informed to be able to imagine how life felt to someone like that, nevertheless is still worth to try of course.
- nathias 5y ago
  Do you think ancient implies a different species or what? Some tech is very old.
- jesussaves 5y ago
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis The night the ocean engulfed it The drowning still bawled for their slaves. The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not have even a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada Went down. Was he the only one to weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who Else won it? Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man? Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how. Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l... In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075. 13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2
  - guerrilla 5y ago
thom 5y ago
The nobleman Ankhhaf, mentioned in these texts and described the article as the ostensible project manager of the pyramid at Giza, was the subject of a truly remarkable bust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture)
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Amazing. The fact that this survived is awesome.
  - thom 5y ago
    Another example, only very slightly later, is this: http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=14910 http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=14910 It's somewhat rare to find such realistic depictions in ancient art and I find any such works extremely arresting.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years. It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in temple basements because there is essentially no funding or support for preservation.
- irrational 5y ago
  Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?
  - xenadu02 5y ago
    This also greatly contributed to the preservation of the Pyramids themselves. The great North African deserts come and go in extremely long cycles however. At some point a wet period will return and much of the preserved artifacts will be severely degraded or erased.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...
    - irrational 5y ago
      Greece and Rome hardly count. They aren't surrounded by incredibly dry deserts where paper or papyrus would last for 4000 years. Would it even last a year in Italy or Greece? Doubtful.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        I mean both Greece and Rome operated Egypt as a major part of their overall empire. So Egypt was, for hundreds of years, not an Egyptian Empire
not_knuth 5y ago
Perhaps @dang can change the link to the blogpost shared by zerforschung at the bottom of the thread which is written in English? https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/ https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/
JAVAL2022 5y ago
This is so frustrating, they were renovating not building. Anyone who can remotely work with numbers and has seen a building made with rocks should be able to calculate how much time IN THEORY the Great Pyramid needed from foundation to pinnacle. Let's say it's not that number (supposedly 30 years since that's how long that kheope guy reigned), remember you are actually a common person not an archeologist that needs slaves for 24/7/365 every day and night with every weather or invasion just to match the timelines. Then you need to add another large support staff to farm, care and replenish the first group. Then you ask yourself, how it is possible to raise blocks at dozen of meters? How you can use Pi without knowing it, or earth dimensions, or the true north and maintain right angles and orientation for hundred of meters? Just how do you make the base perfectly straight without opticals? And then you seem to notice that there are wonderful internals: how do you project them to fit before the externals? what about the black stones? How is it possible to cut (carving Mohs scale of 7 is impossible with iron, which they did not have), transport from the nearest hundred miles caves, raise about a hundred meters and assemble 70 tons blocks of granite so precisely than not even a sheet of paper can fit into the contact points? And only after that, falling in the rabbit hole, you have to admit there was a previous advanced civilization.
- rednerrus 5y ago
  Isn't it some sort of cement and the blocks were cast in place?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    That's the theory that makes the most sense. I think some of the blocks have lines that show where they seemingly ran out of cement that day and came back and finished it later.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  As noted elsewhere the Pyramids were not built by slaves, they were built by the best craftsmen in the kingdom. Second thing to note is the Great Pyramids didn't spring up from nowhere. The Egyptians spent hundreds of years building bigger and bigger Pyramids, refining the techniques. Long enough they were able to look at the older ones to see how they weathered as well as having written records of the many mistakes along the way.

152 points by diodorus 5y ago

Website seems to be down at the moment, here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/monumental-record https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.histo...

bambax 5y ago

> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet > a wonder of the ancient world Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet. Not just contemporaneous: we are the same.

kragen 5y ago
We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another. Upon arrival, they disgorge us unharmed. They run five times as fast as the fastest horse. Eleven years ago, we finished building a tower that is five times as tall as the Great Pyramid; building it took only six years and 22 million person-hours (so perhaps 1000 people, the size of Merer's aper, though unlike Merer's workers they were enslaved). It's not defensive (towers are almost useless for defense now); it's mostly luxury housing. In two centuries it will be gone. We turn night into day whenever we wish, making travel at night just as easy as travel in the day. Only one in 100 children die before age 5 now, a number that was around 20 throughout all human history until a century ago. Most people who are born live threescore years or more. But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually. Most people do not raise their own children any more; they put them into state institutions except for evenings, weekends, and summertime. When someone is badly injured or sick, we put their body into a state of temporary death, cut it open, fix the problem, sew them up like a torn sweater, and bring them back to life; it's so commonplace that people sometimes choose to undergo this procedure for cosmetic reasons such as having bigger breasts. To speak to one another, we often use the power of lightning, invisibly leaping through the air, to convey our thoughts to one another, even though we may be on opposite sides of the earth. We have put thousands of new, tiny moons in the sky because they help this system work better. Usually when we write, instead of using ink, we write in letters of lightning. It's easier that way, because the letters disappear and reappear whenever we wish. 95% of the world's work is now done by servants made of metal such as the elephants I mentioned. For example, almost nobody washes clothes anymore, and we can all listen to music more perfect than any human can play, whenever and wherever we wish, played for us by these metal servants. These servants do not eat food; instead they are fed on lightning made from the black blood of the Earth. Doing too much of this sort of thing is changing the weather and melting the glaciers, so now we are teaching these servants to feed on sunlight instead. Most countries, especially the militarily strongest, no longer have kings. We have the same kind of paintings Merer had, but also a different kind of paintings that glow, move, and speak. Sometimes people sit for hours watching these incredibly lifelike paintings, laughing and crying. Sometimes they show us things that are happening right now, far away, and sometimes they show us things that happened in the past, or that never happened. Most houses no longer have fireplaces. Most people no longer know how to make fire; they have tiny tools that make fire for them. But sure, basically nothing has changed, because we still use spreadsheets.
- jd115 5y ago
  This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN. Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.
  - 6510 5y ago
    On the contrary, if no one complaints nothing will happen. Moaning always comes before invention. Its just not the moaners themselves who make anything happen but they are very much part of the delicate balance. You could invent something without moaners but no one would recognize it. Take this one for example: > bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I suppose that in a sense any non-playful attempt to change the state of affairs, whether directed at technical progress or not, is rooted in a "complaint": you imagine a possible future and judge that the current state of affairs is worse by comparison. And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future. So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do. > The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us. This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.
atoav 5y ago
In the sense of: People in ancient times were also people with needs, urges, dreams, hopes etc. You are right. Looking at ancient people and describing them like a different species makes no sense at all. However believe systems make a huge difference as well. As a child I had problems placing myself into the shoes of my grandfather who was a Nazi, went to the eastern front and had values that differed immensely from what my parents told me was good and right. But we shared at least some common cultural knowledge and social practise. Ancient people can feel foreign because their lived cultural practise, believes etc differ from ours hugely. Not being able to put yourself into the shoes of someone who e.g. lived in a feudal system is normal — you need to be very well informed to be able to imagine how life felt to someone like that, nevertheless is still worth to try of course.
nathias 5y ago
Do you think ancient implies a different species or what? Some tech is very old.
jesussaves 5y ago

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis The night the ocean engulfed it The drowning still bawled for their slaves. The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not have even a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada Went down. Was he the only one to weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who Else won it? Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man? Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions.

gherkinnn 5y ago
I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how. Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l... In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075. 13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2
- guerrilla 5y ago

thom 5y ago

The nobleman Ankhhaf, mentioned in these texts and described the article as the ostensible project manager of the pyramid at Giza, was the subject of a truly remarkable bust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture)

kingcharles 5y ago
Amazing. The fact that this survived is awesome.
- thom 5y ago
  Another example, only very slightly later, is this: http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=14910 http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=14910 It's somewhat rare to find such realistic depictions in ancient art and I find any such works extremely arresting.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years. It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in temple basements because there is essentially no funding or support for preservation.

irrational 5y ago
Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?
- xenadu02 5y ago
  This also greatly contributed to the preservation of the Pyramids themselves. The great North African deserts come and go in extremely long cycles however. At some point a wet period will return and much of the preserved artifacts will be severely degraded or erased.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...
  - irrational 5y ago
    Greece and Rome hardly count. They aren't surrounded by incredibly dry deserts where paper or papyrus would last for 4000 years. Would it even last a year in Italy or Greece? Doubtful.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      I mean both Greece and Rome operated Egypt as a major part of their overall empire. So Egypt was, for hundreds of years, not an Egyptian Empire

not_knuth 5y ago

Perhaps @dang can change the link to the blogpost shared by zerforschung at the bottom of the thread which is written in English? https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/ https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/

JAVAL2022 5y ago

This is so frustrating, they were renovating not building. Anyone who can remotely work with numbers and has seen a building made with rocks should be able to calculate how much time IN THEORY the Great Pyramid needed from foundation to pinnacle. Let's say it's not that number (supposedly 30 years since that's how long that kheope guy reigned), remember you are actually a common person not an archeologist that needs slaves for 24/7/365 every day and night with every weather or invasion just to match the timelines. Then you need to add another large support staff to farm, care and replenish the first group. Then you ask yourself, how it is possible to raise blocks at dozen of meters? How you can use Pi without knowing it, or earth dimensions, or the true north and maintain right angles and orientation for hundred of meters? Just how do you make the base perfectly straight without opticals? And then you seem to notice that there are wonderful internals: how do you project them to fit before the externals? what about the black stones? How is it possible to cut (carving Mohs scale of 7 is impossible with iron, which they did not have), transport from the nearest hundred miles caves, raise about a hundred meters and assemble 70 tons blocks of granite so precisely than not even a sheet of paper can fit into the contact points? And only after that, falling in the rabbit hole, you have to admit there was a previous advanced civilization.

rednerrus 5y ago
Isn't it some sort of cement and the blocks were cast in place?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  That's the theory that makes the most sense. I think some of the blocks have lines that show where they seemingly ran out of cement that day and came back and finished it later.
xenadu02 5y ago
As noted elsewhere the Pyramids were not built by slaves, they were built by the best craftsmen in the kingdom. Second thing to note is the Great Pyramids didn't spring up from nowhere. The Egyptians spent hundreds of years building bigger and bigger Pyramids, refining the techniques. Long enough they were able to look at the older ones to see how they weathered as well as having written records of the many mistakes along the way.