How the Ancient Egyptians (Should Have) Built the Pyramids 202
KentuckyFC writes The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is constructed from 2.4 million limestone blocks, most about 2.5 tonnes but some weighing in at up to 80 tonnes, mostly sourced from local limestone quarries. That raises a famous question. How did the ancient Egyptians move these huge blocks into place? There is no shortage of theories but now a team of physicists has come up with another that is remarkably simple--convert the square cross section of the blocks into dodecadrons making them easy to roll. The team has tested the idea on a 30 kg scaled block the shape of a square prism. They modified the square cross-section by strapping three wooden rods to each long face, creating a dodecahedral profile. Finally, they attached a rope to the top of the block and measured the force necessary to set it rolling. The team say a full-sized block could be modified with poles the size of ships masts and that a work crew of around 50 men could move a block with a mass of 2.5 tonnes at the speed of 0.5 metres per second. The result suggests that this kind of block modification is a serious contender for the method the Egyptians actually used to construct the pyramids, say the researchers.
Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Informative)
While the science may not be settled, the "drag on sled while someone wets the sand" method is corroborated with available records:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-... [kinja-img.com]
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014... [gizmodo.com.au]
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I think it's just that people love to go "If I didn't have modern tools, I could do that. Here's how:"
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Why use rods?
If you're going to strap something to the stones why not use something a bit more rounded that turns them into actual circles?
PS: We know how they did it from paintings on the walls:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oaq... [blogspot.com]
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That picture is of moving a statue, which I would assume couldn't be moved by most of the other methods mentioned. They could very well have used different techniques for transporting different objects. Personally, I'd like to think they planted pyramid seeds and grew them in the rich Nile soil.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone knows aliens built the pyramids.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, yes and no. The aliens did build it, but they used cheap human labor for the grunt work. Sure, they could have just moved the giant blocks with their minds, but aliens are so lazy.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Informative)
...and the Easter Island heads "walked" into place.
They actually could have. A team of scientists actually worked out how this could be done and did a trial run with one of the heads.
The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.
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They also cut down the last tree on their island to make them and descended into cannibalism. Read Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:4, Interesting)
That point of view is being argued. Read "The statues that walked" by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. They postulate that rats introduced by the colonists did most of the damage. The Easter Islanders dealt with this by eating the rats.
NPR article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulw... [npr.org]
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How could the Easter Island heads have walked when their toes poke out at stonehenge?
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By tickling their toes. Everyone gets up for that!
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The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.
Did "Higher and Higher" work on solid stone as well as it did with hollow copper?
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No the Aliens came down fucked the monkeys.
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Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't see what the big deal is. You can store up to 64 blocks of any kind of stone in each inventory slot. It is trivially easy for one person to carry lots of these around. And to stack them.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Informative)
simply stacked the blocks
I think this is the part you mistakenly think is easy.
There's roughly 2.4 million stones in the Great Pyramid of Giza [wikipedia.org], some of which weigh up to 80 tons. "Simply stacking" them is anything but.
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:5, Informative)
some of which weigh up to 80 tons.
The average core stone weighs something like two tons. That's the majority of them. The humongous ones are a few granite pieces.
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It is estimated the Great Pyramid was built in just over twenty years. So say 7500 days - which means placing 320 blocks a day assuming you work 365 days 24 hours a day. Pretty sure the Egyptians would be limited to daylight hours work, so they'd need to cut & move at least 500 blocks a day.
What? No! The limitation to daylight hours meant they had to be faster per stone,
but it didn't suddenly double the amount of stones needed.
A 2.4 million stone pyramid built in 20 years is built at an average rate of 229 stones
per day, completely independent of the length of the work day.
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Nope! They are poured concrete, and now we use the same method to make landing strips in Saudi for the first Gulf War. You can land a c130 on them 48 hrs later. Nova had him cast 5 blocks in place in 1 day with 5 men. With copper tools it takes like 6 months just to cut one block. Who cares how they moved them, how did they machine them? Geopolymer answers all those questions and more.
The Pharos were also they only ones on the planet that knew how to make beer. The labor was paid for in BEER! They had two t
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Doesn't mean they were formed in place.
Of course, a new valid theory about them seems to co out every decade, with little followup.
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Egyptian and Nubuian mummy's bones are stained black because of the tetracycline in their beer.
I rather doubt the Pharaohs were the only one who knew how to brew beer, more likely it was a pries
Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:4, Informative)
Basic fact that any hypothesis needs to allow for:
Dragging things across sand is easy.
Rolling things on sand is hard.
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Re:Corroborating Hieroglyphics? (Score:4, Informative)
Not in the Old Kingdom. The great extents of the Egyptian Empire are New Kingdom, 2000 or so years later. The Old Kingdom was early Bronze Age. Stone Tools were still the rule, not the exception. Bronze was difficult to make and copper tools were more common in the rare instances when metal tools were used. There are records of the gangs whose job it was to sharpen the copper chisels that were used.
We should remember that this was not the first, or the second, or the third, huge pyramid they built, it was the sixth. They had an extensive knowledge to stone and had to deal with it. The Egyptologist Cyril Aldred had an illustrative story. He was traveling down a side branch of the Nile with a local boat crew. They found their way blocked by a rock fall. He assumed that they would have to go all the way back and find a new way. The crew said they could have it cleared in a few hours and it wasn't a big deal, they do this all of the time. He was astonished to watch then use techniques that he hadn't seen before to clear the stones. They would use mud backs to hold fires in place and either splash or pour cold water on the heated stone to shatter it. That, a few levers, and their knowledge was all that was needed to move tons and tons of stone out of the way.
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http://phys.org/news/2014-04-ancient-egyptians-pyramid-stones-sand.html
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So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? (Score:2)
This is very interesting, and maybe that's good enough. But isn't there some evidence of what method they might have used? Wood fragments? Tracks? Tools?
I'm asking this as a completely naive onlooker. I'm sure there is research on this spanning hundreds of years; anyone want to provide a quick summary?
Re:So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this method comes from physicists. So one can assume that whatever they used, it was perfectly spherical.
Problem solved.
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Assume a pyramid worker is cow with a perfectly spherical body.....
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That is absolutely preposterous. However, if you model the stone blocks as frictionless point masses.....
String Theorists (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, this method comes from physicists.
Clearly string theorists since, according to the summary, it creates a "dodecadron" cross-section. So having a cross-section somewhere between a 2D dodecagon and a 3D dodecahedron it clearly relies on converting the block into some multi-dimensional object with a strangely dimensioned cross-section.
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No, it's not really interesting. It's settled science that wetting the sand and dragging the sled is how it was done. This is in the OP. It's not a question.
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See below
http://www.geopolymer.org/arch... [geopolymer.org]
Re:So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? (Score:5, Interesting)
For most blocks, they just strapped four quarter-circle cradles around the stone and rolled them up earthen ramps using ropes. The remains of the ramps still exist around some pyramids, and some original cradles are on display in the Cairo museum. Pretty much considered solved by the archeologists; it's just armchair physicists who want to invent problems and propose new solutions.
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This is very interesting, and maybe that's good enough. But isn't there some evidence of what method they might have used? Wood fragments? Tracks? Tools?
I'm asking this as a completely naive onlooker. I'm sure there is research on this spanning hundreds of years; anyone want to provide a quick summary?
How about the edges of the stone blocks that would have rotated about 500 times on their way to the pyramid? There should be systematic chipping on the edges of all of the blocks if this was used. Also, this method of movement looks suspiciously like a wheel, which Egypt did not get until many centuries after the great pyramids were constructed. In a pre-wheel culture this mode of transport might not be at all evident.
Re:So, is there any shred of EVIDENCE? (Score:4, Interesting)
Earliest Egyptian pyramid 2630 BCE. Earliest verified vehicular use of wheel is Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE and Egypt developed the spoked wheel around 2000 BCE. These are just records, it's rather obvious the wheel goes back much further. So yes, the Egyptians had the wheel when the pyramids were built. Did they use them for that? Probably not, due to weight. We *know* they used sledges, so why come up with more complicated methods based solely on supposition?
They made the blocks into wheels (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jas... [upenn.edu]
using wooden 'cradles' shaped like circle segments, 'wrapped' around each end of the block making them a lot easier to roll than the proposition in this article.
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Cradles have actually been found in archaological excavations, as the original article mentions. However, it also says the cradles as found don't have holes for ropes to tie them around the blocks, so we could be looking at a not very efficient design, for example one where the 'cradels" were really rockers which lay loose on the ground, and the workers have to keep building chains of rockers ahead of the blocks, piching up the trail or frockers as the block is moved, etc., or there's something we are missi
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I don't think they need holes, the rope could go around the rim of the 'wheel' forming a kind of tire.
Re:They made the blocks into wheels (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you read this article you linked to? It refutes this theory:
The key failing of the cradle and the (actually extremely similar) pole theory is that it does not explain how they moved the far larger slabs that were not square blocks.
Also we have actual evidence of their methods - dragging on sledges. We have sledges, sledge tracks, and pictures of giant statues being dragged on sledges. They took the time to draw us a diagram, and people still look for other answers.
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It's also more or less refuted in TFA:
Another theory is that the Egyptians attached quarter circle rockers to the flat surfaces of the blocks effectively turning them into cylinders and allowing them to be rolled. Experiments have shown that this method allows the blocks to be moved relatively quickly with just a few men.
But this method also has a disadvantage— these cylinders would exert huge pressure on the ground causing considerable damage to roads. Modern estimates of the rate at which the pyramid was built suggest that workers put in place some 40 blocks per day. In that case, even well-engineered roads would have required considerable maintenance.
If you like damaged blocks ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Their 'rolling' method is going to damage the corners of the blocks, and the surface of the path it rolls on.
Now, it's possible that the blocks were finished on site, and so they could use this trick to move the blocks from the quary to the worksite ... but it shouldn't be used to move finished blocks into their final location.
(and then you've got to roll all of the logs back to the quary ... assuming they're strong enough to survive this process ... which probably isn't as much work as what's needed for moving the stones, but it cuts into your energy savings ... as does transporting larger stones so you can finish them once they're at the worksite)
How did they build the pyramids (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so Nice:Whips and violence
Some of the confusion seems to come from an unwillingness to accept that humans can be very self absorbed and mean. While some form of simple machinery must have been used, the basic resource for the pyramids was an expendable supply of labor. People tend to accept harder or more dangerous work if that is the life they know. We saw that recently in coal mining disaster where many people died because the owners did not have a practice of clearing the mine between shift changes. It increases profits and make coal cheaper, but is a huge risk to the workers. Raising the pyramids was probably not different.
Re:How did they build the pyramids (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, no, we have more than enough historical evidence to know that Khufu was an absolute asshole to his people. At least a couple different almost contemporary historians wrote about it. That Khufu was a vile tyrant isn't something that has a lot of denial.
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Yeah, I mean Herodotus is biased, but his isn't the only account that suggests that.
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Yeah, I mean Herodotus is biased, but his isn't the only account that suggests that.
It isn't that Herodotus was biased, it is that he really did not know anything at all about Khufu, who had lived 2000 years earlier. Herodotus was simply passing on the sorts of tales that travelers hear about events that occurred thousands of years earlier in a culture where historical scholarship as we think of it was unknown.
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Watch out, the "ends justify the means" crowd will be here shortly talking about how magnificent the pyramids are and how long they have lasted.
The graveyards of bodies [hawaii.edu] are a small price to pay for such greatness!
Re:How did they build the pyramids (Score:4, Interesting)
The labour was not expendable. When the River Nile floods and your whole population is 1) homeless and 2) unemployed, and public works projects in the desert start to sound like very good ideas, but you needed that labour in good condition to return to the farms once the annual flood ended.
Stupid theory... (Score:5, Interesting)
the flats around the pyramids are perfectly flat. And where flooded with water when the Nile was at a yearly peak.
The water was trapped inside. The fence to keep the water inside is still standing
A corridor in the middle towards the pyramid was build and had dams to move the ships upward
The signs of the dam plates are still there in the corridors
The pyramid itself was a water basin, with the outside walls keeping the water inside
That's why they are all perfectly level
The ships moved the bricks in and lowered them to fill the pyramid. as a result the water rises.
However, water evaporates, and the movement of the ships upwards needs a water displacement at least equal to the mass moved up
So the ancient egyptians left clues everywhere to explain how they did it: everywhere, in the tombs in the pyramids, and even in New Kingdom in the Valley of the Kings, they drew how they accomplished it: by carrying buckets of water on their head.
That's how they build the pyramids; by putting water in the top of the pyramid, till all the ships with the stones where there.
Now, was that so hard to figure out? Stupid archeologists!
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It's exactly what he says it is, a stupid theory, and he knows it!
I don't know HOW he got a +5 interesting moderation on it!
At most a +3 funny.
I mean, can you IMAGINE the dam structure you'd need to create a pool of water deep enough to float a block of stone to the top of the pyramid? Hint, it'd dwarf the pyramid!
Now, for getting the BASE of the pyramid really flat, yeah, a big shallow pool of water might have helped a lot with that, but anything above it? Not so much!
--PM
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Not really. Remember, the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. So your dam walls only need to be higher than one layer of stones: after a layer of is finished, move the walls on top of its outer edge and refill. Sure, you need a system of levees to get the ships to the lake at the top of the growing pyramid, but that's okay: it can j
Re:Stupid theory... (Score:5, Funny)
", the pyramid gets less wide towards the top. "
That's what I've been doing wrong!
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Or
http://www.geopolymer.org/arch... [geopolymer.org]
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Time-cube meets ancient Egypt...
Obligatory D & D joke (Score:2)
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Obviously, they had their slaves roll for initiative. The ones who didn't have good initiative were stationed in FRONT of the giant stone dice.
Not all the blocks (Score:4, Interesting)
Saw a television documentary where they showed some blocks that seemed to have been poured like concrete, complete with marks of wooden crating. See http://www.visual--media.com/w... [visual--media.com] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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Well, it passed the KISS test, I guess that settles it. Lets totally forget other methods that pass the KISS test, and we will also forget the myriad of other thing that where done more difficult because of social reason and they didn't have the advantage of hind site.
They still need to move them after they were made.
...that lasts thousands of years? (Score:2)
We should be using that on our roads instead of whatever stuff we are using now.
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Roman concrete is still around. Not as many thousands of years, but modern concrete is not made to last as long as possible. Some ancient concrete was.
Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
The Egyptians did not move those blocks into place. They did like those companies we know and admire, they made plans and outsourced the backbreaking work to unscrupulous partners in countries where labor is cheap and workers safety is not a priority. And then pretended they were not aware of the abysmal work conditions in the pyramid factories.
I'm pretty sure that if someone was to raise the pyramid there would be a Made in China label at the bottom.
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I know that was a joke, but at the time the cheap labor and no worker safety was right there. Why outsource when slaves will do anything you tell them to do? (Or else!) As for worker safety? Who cares if a few dozen slaves get worked to death? They're cheap enough to replace.
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Evidence at this time indicates it wasn't done by slaves.
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When you have an absolute monarch, the entire population is slaves for practical purposes, even if they're not formally slaves in the sense we mean the word today.
Slave labor is still the best explanation (Score:5, Funny)
Surely the physicists should have just made their grad students move them?
Re:Slave labor is still the best explanation (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding slave labor:
"Slave" is a hard term to use. It evokes American chattel slavery, where on person owns another, and we're more likely talking about agricultural workers(peasants) who didn't have work to do during the floods of the nile.
In ancient Egypt, the food reserves were controlled by the temples and thus by priests and other upper class members of society.
So there was a socially powerless labor class, and a means to control them. Certainly they also had force, but it wasn't the "main" means of control. The line between "peasant" and "slave" in ancient societies is a vague one.
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Sounds a lot like the meaning of "wage slave."
We're not so honest with our labels these days.
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Slave is a pretty accurate term for that arrangement. It also works for midieval European peasants too.
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I was just trying to say that being clear helps.
If it helps, Marx would agree with you.
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...The line between "peasant" and "slave" in ancient societies is a vague one.
I would put it this way - the concept of a "free man" did not exist.
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Working on a crew may have been an option the workers got to choose (here's why):
1. When a government taxes peasants, it's sometimes awkward to use the revenues. Imagine you are the guy who has to actually process the payments from a lot of really poor farmer types. Peasants may only be able to pay you with a share of their harvest. If they can't hand you gold coins, or anything easily stored and lasting, you end up having to sell their wheat or whatever to get the taxes into a form you can use.You have lim
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Careful though - what you say is pretty much correct as far as I know for Old Kingdom Egypt, but it's not universally true of ancient cultures.
In Rome, for instance, the distinction between slave and citizen-peasant was a Really Big Deal, with a whole host of legally enforced distinctions.
Sometimes it even varied within a single civilization - in the Byzantine Empire, the Anatolian lower classes did indeed form a single amorphous serf-like peasantry of the type you describe, while the European portion of th
A little late (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this suggestion for a design modification just a little late?
It's not that difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember that guy who was moving Stonehenge size concrete blocks around his back yard and erecting them in place, single-handedly? To stand them upright he would fill the pit with loose sand and slope one side of the pit, then he kept dumping water in. The mud was soft enough to be compressed and ejected from the pit as the stone slowly sank into place.
If you counter-balance the blocks you can move them fairly easily with just a few people. Or put them on a sled and use logs to roll them. Or flood the basin using Nile flood water and float them into place.
It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.
These dumb "How did the Egyptians do it?!?!?!" stories are highly annoying. They did it first and foremost by deciding they were going to do it, trying and failing several times, then perfecting their techniques. Same damn way we got to the moon. The hardest part is step 1.
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More technology can dramatically reduces the time and manpower needed. With the technology they had, it's hard to figure out how they made the huge structures they did, with the numbers of people they had, in the time-frame they had to do it.
The Egyptian pyramids are a much harder problem than something small like stone-henge. It's the difference between someone building a wagon in their garage, and an assembly
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They had boats and knew everything about locks and irrigation.
Stonehenge? I think that's a different matter.
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I said it above somewhere but moving them is only one small problem with the quarried limestone theory. It takes 6 months with copper tools to cut each block.
Why dodecawhetever? (Score:3)
It RAISES the question, godammit! (Score:2)
That raises a famous question.
No it bloody doesn't, it raises a...
Oh, wait. Carry on.
Two possible problems (Score:2)
I see two possible flaws in this theory.
First, if the attached rods are wood, wouldn't there be a limit to how much the block could weigh before crushing the rods?
If the resulting dodecagon utilizes the block's original four edges among its vertices, wouldn't they suffer some damage while being rolled? If those edges are capped in some way to protect them, we inevitably return to #1 regarding the edge caps.
Dodecagons, not dodeca-something (Score:3)
They are not "dodecadrons", nor are they dodecahedral. They have a cross-section which is a dodecagon.
They Used Water to Wet the Sand (Score:3)
Rolling the stones as huge cylinders would've been cool but they used water to wet the sand, which reduced friction. There's even some hieroglyphs that show it being done. Was big news back in the spring. See:
Apply the razor (Score:2)
Interesting intellectual execise for these folks, but Occam's Razor suggests the sled/water bucket/rows of slaves on ropes behind whips is far more likely.
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Egyptians *should* have invented the steam machine
Actually, they did.
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Well yeah, but that was long after the pyramids had already been built.
It's really hard to get a proper sense of how long-lasting and unchanging ancient Egyptian civilization was. Ctesibius probably invented the aeolipile steam engine sometime around 250 BC in Alexandria. The first Egyptian pyramid was built ca. 2700 BC, and the last pyramids were completed ca. 1750 BC.
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If by "Egyptians" you mean "Greeks".
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Yep they were poured in place. Soft limestone, natron salt, fly ash, and water. Portable stone. They also used it to make thousands of identical stone vases.
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No one knows that. It's a idea in 1(one) paper. Just like dozens of other solutions.
BTW, pouring them 'in place' brings up a whole new set of problems.
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yeah but Davotis demonstrated make 5 blocks in one day with 5 workers for Nova using only copper level tools. That is an incredible accomplishment. We also use the result for tarmacs today in Lonestar"s Pyracrete.
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Limestone is a segimentary rock. Are we sure they didn't quarry limestone aggregate that just turned into limestone blocks because of all the weight on top of them for hundreds of years?
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You were expecting medium.com to know the difference between a polygon and a polyhedron?
And for the plebs who still don't know what we're talking about:
Dodecagon [wikipedia.org] Dodecahederon [wikipedia.org]