Canadian Inventor: Pyramids Were Rocked Into Place 117
seafortn writes "A Canadian man is claiming he has solved the mystery of the construction of the pyramids - the ancient Egyptians attached curved boards to the building blocks and rolled them into place."
Re:The Reason for the Mystery (Score:5, Informative)
This is all approximate, of course. However...
2 million blocks divided by 87,600 is about 23. That's 23 blocks per hour, or about 2.7 minutes per block.
That's a factor of five different from your estimate, although still impressive. Did you mean 20 to 30 blocks per minute?
Re:Summary of Article. (Score:3, Informative)
i saw a documentary of that a while ago (building pyramids) where they looked into the timescale and workforce what was needed to build it, and they pretty much summed up on something that used ramps till someway up the pyramid and some other method after that(because building the ramp higher than x had no point because it would have been more work than doing it other way
but heres something from the article:
**
"The system of moving rocks by rotation is not a new theory," said Mr. Raina. "It was an inherent trait that has been lost over time."
In fact, Mr. Raina believes the ancient Egyptians tried to preserve the theory in cartography of scarab beetles, a sacred bug in ancient Egypt that Mr. Raina believes gave them the idea of using rotation to move rocks."**
in other words, he doesn't know jack about ancient egypt, just believes something himself.
also **"They hate me because I have skewered ancient Egypt on them," he said with a chuckle.**
by being able to do something by way X doesn't mean the thing was done with X, somebody MIGHT want to tell this guy this but because he is quite old, and likes his theory, i doubt he is willing to consider it much anyways(or that there are other things to take into consideration, like the supply of wood, and the sheer size of the rocks and the fact that would they have stayed in one piece and could the aparatus/wood be attached to it even by their methods.)
Materials Analysis (Score:4, Informative)
As I recall, the main focus of it was the rolling logs for long distance transport (pretty well documented, not only by the tracks left, but discarded and broken logs etc., but also historical pictorial records) and also on leverage multipliers.
With the rollers, the key was sustaining momentum wherever possible (moving friction less than initial friction). No need to re-invent the wheel here (bad pun I know).
The materials analysis of the lever and pulley materials was the most interesting part I though. They demonstrated the feasability of several different methods of lifting/propelling the blocks (all dreamed up by a variety of egyptologists, engineers and wackos like Mr Raina) using only materials available at the time.
In contrast to the mental stimulation provided by that documentary, this article was a complete waste of time.
Mr. Raina has never been to Egypt nor have any scientists travelled to his humble home for a demonstration.
Well surprise, surprise...
Q.
pyramids built with slave labour? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that is what we were taught in school -- that the pyramids were built with slave labour, with brutal working conditions. But there have been a number of documentaries about archeological investigations into the dormitories where the workers lived. IIRC the archeological evidence points to the workers not being slaves. IIRC the archeological evidence points to the workers working and living under reasonable circumstances.
It's a nice theory, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Understand, it's not that things couldn't be done this way, it's just that there isn't any need to invoke curved planks, floats, anti-gravity devices, etc., and there's no evidence of any of these. Building megalithic structures is not as hard as people think it is. Yes, it takes a lot of muscle power, but if you have that (and ancient people did), it's not that big a deal. This is not idle theorizing, either; there are people who actually go out there and try out their theories by building dolmens, giant statues, and the like (something Mr. Raina does not seem to have done). Everybody seems to have this desire to put one over on the establishment, but it's a lot easier to assume that the archaeological establishment is just a big bunch of meanies who put down your theory because it makes them look bad than it is to actually do the research yourself. And somehow these amazing new theories always seem to involve "lost knowledge", which conveniently overlooks the fact that the Egyptians wrote down and otherwise documented a ton of stuff - recipes, spells, contracts - so to assume that a major construction method was completely overlooked seems disingenuous.
Re:The mystery of the great pyramid (Score:4, Informative)
Considering that a major component of the Egyptian army was 'chariots' - that is quite a bold statement.
Heh. He must have been thinking of the Incas. The Incas, though, DID know the wheel (Inca children's toys found with wheels)-- they just didn't have much use for it in the Andes.
What's really funny about his "Egyptians did not know the wheel" comment is that they used a wheel to measure out the planned base of the pyramids, i.e. their pyramid is 100 units high and the base is 100 rotations of a 1-unit-in-diameter wheel in length. This is the source of all the rabid mis-theories about the pyramids having pi encoded into their dimensions even though the ancient Egyptians didn't use mathematics complex enough to calculate pi. It's not mystical crap-- they just used a wheel to measure! Wheels have pi built in!