Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt's 'Great Pyramid' Mystery (newsweek.com) 253
schwit1 was the first Slashdot reader to bring us the news. Newsweek reports:
Archaeologists believe they have found the key to unlocking a mystery almost as old as the Great Pyramid itself: Who built the structure and how were they able to transport two-ton blocks of stone to the ancient wonder more than 4,500 years ago...?
Experts had long established that the stones from the pyramid's chambers were transported from as far away as Luxor, more than 500 miles to the south of Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid, but had never agreed how they got there. However, the diary of an overseer, uncovered in the seaport of Wadi al-Jafr, appears to answer the age-old question, showing the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of the Nile to transport the giant blocks of stone.
According to a new British documentary Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.'s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer's team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid.
According to a new British documentary Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.'s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer's team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid.
Water pump theory (Score:3, Interesting)
The base of the Great Pyramid may have been designed as a water pump. [sentinelkennels.com] Maybe it was part of the waterworks.
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I read that link, and wow, it's some pseudoscientific claptrap. Here are a few choice quotes:
"The shape has been shown to have dramatic energizing effects. An example being water does not freeze at -40 C. within a pyramid structure."
What??
Then we have lots of woo about the "energy of the pyramids": "The glyph is associated with the energy of the pyramids...". And lots of unsubstantiated assertions, like: "The granite coffer and many remnants around the Giza plateau had been machined with some type of tripl
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An example being water does not freeze at -40 C. within a pyramid structure.
That's actually a true statement. It doesn't freeze at -40 C because it's already frozen long before that.
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Heh. I want to know the last time that part of Egypt hit -40 C. (Or -40 F, for that matter.)
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Man, there are a lot of crazy people out there. They just can't see the simplest explanation: the rich Egyptians in charge liked to have extravagant tombs and had lots and lots of slaves and lots and lots of whips with which to build these tombs.
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Well, we know that this simple explanation is wrong. The workers were paid for their work and there were even strikes when there was a shortage of mascara, which was used to protect the workers' eyes from the harsh sunlight.
Thanks Science! (Score:2, Insightful)
Ramps, boats and good rope. I pretty much guessed that as a child but you know well done to those involved.
Re:Thanks Science! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to suspect and hypothesize. It's quite another thing to prove it.
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I know, I am being trite about it. It is interesting what they have found but it's not exactly new information.
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The proof is new. You know, the "new" part of "news".
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fwiw, I decided to break an old /. tradition, and read TFA. And I'll agree that TFA is somewhat breathless about "we've wondered for centuries", or whatever. So I withdraw my snark at your snark. I apologize if changing my mind upon review seems un-american.
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I've got an old mule and her name is Nenet
Fifteen years on the Khufu Canal
She's as good an old worker as you're gonna get
Fifteen years on the Khufu Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
Filled with giant blocks and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Luxor to Khufu - Ho!
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Khufu Canal
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Ramps, boats and good rope. I pretty much guessed that as a child but you know well done to those involved.
No, not ramps.
Water channels, pumps, water locks, boats, and a tiny amount of rope but not as much rope as you'd think.
You'd need channels to get to the location of the pyramid, then you'd need a couple of water locks [h-cdn.co] along the way to slowly get the vessels to the starting elevation of the pyramid.
But think of the pyramid as being one giant reservoir, once a vessel gets inside, the water inside the pyramid acts like an elevator, the water level rises to the level needed. The only tricky part is completing t
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Actually they used ramps (made from sand)
A chain of water locks going a few hundred meters high, is extremely impractical, on such a tight place.
And if they tried that, we likely knew it from the remainings.
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Locks require a regular supply of water to work. The photo you link to is of the Caen Hill flight, but if you look at the map [google.com], you'll see the extensive storage ponds needed for the water to operate this flight. That's in relatively moist Britain ; the engineering needed to operate a significant set of locks in Egypt wou
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I understand that he's talking about channeling water, but what causes the water level to rise up to (I presume) nearly the top of the pyramid? The pyramids are clearly higher than the surrounding ground, so you can't just let the water flow in; you have to pump it *up*. (In principle, you could collect rain. Except it doesn't rain much there...) I doubt that they had any pumps, certainly not pumps sufficient to pump millions of liters of water more than a hundred meters up.
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Put the beer keg at the bottom & the toilet at the top. Then add frat boys.
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Ramps, boats and good rope. I pretty much guessed that as a child but you know well done to those involved.
Surely you didn't guess that on your own as a child, since we were taught exactly this as a possible theory when we were kids. It always made sense, now there is more evidence pertaining to how it worked.
Re:Thanks Science! (Score:4, Interesting)
I am aware of this, but they got the stone from near a river and they built the pyramids near the same river. It's impressive that they did it at all I grant and the technical details are interesting. But I'd really like to know how they built Stonehenge with Welsh stone. No river there.
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It's not a given that they came from Wales for what it's worth, they could just as well have come from much closer.
One likely site is only 20 miles north, and it's not as though they didn't have oxen back then. The biggest stones could be pulled by 4 oxen, and it's pretty flat around there as the terrain consists of plains, and where there are hills there are shallow paths up them, with few obstacles like dense forests or rocks. The terrain is hardly difficult to traverse.
I think the stonehenge story is a b
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You can guess a lot of things, especially as a child. That doesn't make it practical until you know a great many details. Especially when you take the context of now to make your guess about the past.
I mean good rope sounds neat and all, but this was 4500 years ago. Incidentally almost 3000 years before Archimedes described the principles of flotation. But I'm sure your childhood guess would have just said the Pharaoh could look it up on Wikipedia too.
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So, nobody built boats before about 500CE? That would explain how the Romans didn't besiege Syracuse in 212BCE, killing Archimedes in the process - they didn't have any boats to get to the island of Sicily.
Our ancestors knew very how to do a lot of things that they didn't have a comprehensive understanding of.
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So, nobody built boats before about 500CE?
Based on what? Evidence? That's kind of my point. 500CE, 2500BC, 10000BC, first bipeds walking on land... we have nothing to go on the capabilities of people other than evidence that they were able to do something.
After the principles of flotation were published the requirement for evidence was greatly reduced when discussing people making floating things. A child's mind would extrapolate: We know how to send ships to the other side of the world carrying 100000T cargo, so they must have used ships!
An adult'
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Dad, is that you? Howzit going up there?
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Ooo, good jab tovarishch.
Junky video. Be warned (Score:2)
Foget Net neuatrality? These sites will kill internet as we know it.
Bullcrap! It was Aliens! Ancient Aliens! (Score:2, Troll)
Those "archeologists" were not present there.
That "surveyer" was only part of a conspiracy to surpress the truth about our ancient overlords.
No ammount of "evidence" will change that.
I still can not conceive how that could be done by mere humans, therefore: Aliens!
Anything and everything else is all fake news.
Comments Section (Score:2)
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I presume you mean responses from those with a low UID. This very question has been asked in the past and one of the reasons was similar to what IHateFatCashews wrote. Even before I decided to finally create an account and ending up with a pathetic late-to-the-party 6 digit UID, there'd been a mass exodus. It happens with an almost predictable frequency, like solar minima.
Not all have travelled beyond the Rim. Many remain.
Re:Comments Section (Score:4, Funny)
They're just waiting, watching for a time when the universe might need them again.
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As long as that universe has good personal time breaks and isn't too uphill.
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Comment longer than 140^H^H^H280 characters. TL;DR
intellectually brilliant (Score:2)
Dr. Daniel Jackson isn't posting here any more.
Not really solved. (Score:2)
The real mystery is how they lifted these blocks up the structure. The descendant of the caste of temple builders in South India says they build a helical wall that spirals around the structure. The wall is filled with sand. Stones are rolled up the he
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BTW the helical inclined plane is used day in day out by us, we call them the threads in nuts and bolts.
I'm so glad you were paying attention in 3rd grade when they taught us about simple machines. Good for you.
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They could be raised up a water tight shaft made of stone. So entry at the bottom of the shaft, securely water tightly block the entry to the shaft and then fill the shaft full of water raising the stone on it's floating platform. You are still having to shift the same mass up to the top by hand but now you are doing it bit by bit carting water up there. If you have more than one shaft, you can regain some efficiency, by using the full shaft to half, fill other shafts. You could also displace water with san
No shit (Score:3)
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It is an excellent way to have the government spent its money and have basically zero unemployment.
And unlike you, 5 years ago, hey had universal health care in Egypt 5000 years ago.
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The only mystery is why anybody has such trouble understanding that ancient peoples weren't idiots.
You don't need to be an idiot to not understand something and to leave future people questioning if you were able to come up with the idea at all. There is a fundamental disconnect between building something and understanding something. Therefore we are able to only rely on physical records or evidence that people actually did something.
E.g. given a complete absence of any records before Christ, what would be your basis for belief that Egyptians could build barges? Archimedes didn't describe the principles
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People are^H^H^H seem only as intelligent as the records show they were. Nothing more, nothing less.
We know like forever than the ancient world had barges, so not really sure at what you are aiming.
How would the copper from Cypern/Cyprus reach Egypt if they had no sea going vessels?
And yes, most likely the Egyptians knew the earth is round. After all they traveled over sea on the east side of Africa down to Somalia and beyond. (The south tip of Somalia is beyond the Equator)
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"A more perplexing mystery is why we continue to bother answering half-assed garbage posts by the likes of you. The world may never know."
QFT
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Cast in place? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I think the most obvious theory is likely to be the closest to the correct explanation: that the blocks WEREN'T quarried, but are some form of manmade cast stone made from ancient concrete.
If they were cast instead of directly quarried, the builders could have just built the whole thing like a modern freeway embankment... build the perimeter, backfill the inside with sifted & graded crushed rock & sand. Maybe put down an occasional layer of cloth to stabilize it horizontally (knowing the cloth will eventually decay, but only really NEEDING it for stabilization during construction). Cast the next row of stones, move them horizontally into place, and backfill the interior up to the next level. Stir, rinse, and repeat until you're done. Modern retained-earth construction obviously goes quite a bit further, (like using steel cables to pull the retaining walls inward so they can be vertical instead of sloped, and using precast wall segments instead of casting them on-site), but the basic idea is the same.
Moving big, heavy things HORIZONTALLY is fairly straightforward. So is moving crushed-rock cementious slurry up a hill in small buckets. If they're cast stone, the pyramids' construction basically just becomes a matter of having lots of money, immense HR management resources, and good supply-chain management.
From what I've read, Egypt's antiquities ministry is part of the reason why relatively little is known about the "nuts and bolts" construction details of the pyramids. It WANTS to preserve the aura of mystery, because the official narrative drives tourism and brings enormous amounts of money into Egypt. From their point of view, the absolute WORST thing that could happen is if someone were to demonstrate that the pyramids were no more special than a random freeway embankment.
Re:Cast in place? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except it is known the blocks used are quarried limestone and granite, not concrete.
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> Except it is known the blocks used are quarried limestone and granite, not concrete.
No, they've always been ASSUMED to have been quarried limestone and granite. About 10 years ago, someone analyzed a chunk of "stone" from one of the pyramids & discovered the same kind of bubbles you'd find in manmade cast stone.
http://www.materials.drexel.ed... [drexel.edu]
The conclusion of the above: the pyramids are a combination of cast and quarried stone... basically the lower stones were quarried, and the upper stones were
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You're confused, that's a paper on the "casing", the mostly removed covering that made them pretty and white and smooth at one time but no longer. What we see today is the core, which is quarried rock. Your paper is NOT about "how the pyramids were built" but only on how they were made pretty.
Re:Cast in place? (Score:5, Informative)
The granite is absolutely quarried. No one denies this. The limestone is debatable, but it matches what's found in a quarry in its consistency. The theory you mention is interesting, but it was mostly dismissed a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The biggest problem with the theory is... it's limestone. Limestone is a sedimentary rock made from fossilized sea creatures, and it's loaded full of fossils. Pulverizing limestone to make a mixture to re-form into stone would destroy most of those fossils. The pyramids blocks are full of such fossils -- most tiny and in clusters, but some are quite large. That's why no one takes this limestone concrete theory seriously. It'd be impossible to have so many completely intact fossils -- some larger than an average sized hand -- embedded in the "concrete."
While it's possible they had the technology to do it and maybe even used it in some areas, the evidence strongly suggests that at least most of the blocks were cut and hauled... just like the heavy granite stones.
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From what I've read, Egypt's antiquities ministry is part of the reason why relatively little is known about the "nuts and bolts" construction details of the pyramids. It WANTS to preserve the aura of mystery, because the official narrative drives tourism and brings enormous amounts of money into Egypt. From their point of view, the absolute WORST thing that could happen is if someone were to demonstrate that the pyramids were no more special than a random freeway embankment.
I really doubt that your hypothesis, but I can think of a few reasons why Egypt's antiquities ministry might be blocking excavations.
1. In the past, excavation sites have been pilfered.
2. It takes money to excavate, secure, protect from the elements, display, catalog, and maintain artifacts.
3. Most of the archeologists are foreigners. And when foreigners write your history, their narratives can be quite unflattering and even racist.
4. The sites and artifacts could have been built by multiple civilizations,
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that the blocks WEREN'T quarried, but are some form of manmade cast stone made from ancient concrete.
Which would be obvious for even a layman like me by just looking at a stone.
We know for certain from where the stones were quarried, that os easy to analyze.
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I live in Florida. My house sits on several feet of crushed limestone, with quite a few underground globs of waste cement (presumably whatever the construction workers dumped at the end of the day whenever they were doing concrete work). I dug up a bunch of the limestone boulders and concrete globs earlier this year while redoing my front yard's landscaping. After ~35 years underground, exposed to groundwater, plant roots, and everything else, the two can be pretty damn hard to tell apart... they've both be
Seriously? (Score:2)
i read a book (Score:2)
alternative theory (Score:2)
Dunno why my idea never caught on :-) .
Ask any sculptor, and they'll say "take a block of wood/stone and remove everything that doesn't look like a [final object].
Clearly the Egyptians set up a gigantic block of stone and then carved away everything that didn't look like a stepped pyramid.
Waiting for my Nobel Prize..
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Why cannot use any modern technology to prove its feasability?
I mean we had a lot of people die during this process. You could prably measure the force of a thousand people to move a stone 1 meter. Then use heavy machinery to test the rest of the process.
They don’t need to make a whole structure. Just each of the tricky parts as a proof of concept.
Re:Great. Now prove it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Water locks and water channels are already proven technologies. Even ancient China had them.
Once the water is level, it doesn't take much energy to pull a vessel on a channel. For instance in France, I've seen a horse pull a multi-ton vessel with no working motor without much effort at all.
And once the vessel is inside the pyramid and assuming the pyramid acts like a giant water reservoir, then filling up that reservoir and raising the water level, and then pulling the vessel to the side where you need the blocks shouldn't take much energy either.
The only tricky part might be the ancient water pumping mechanism and how efficient it was before the water would evaporate or seep away.
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The hanging gardens of Babylon used Archimedes screws. Egyptians must have used water in order to keep the dust down and keep the workers hydrated as well as used them for canal boats.
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It is actually well known that they used a sand ramp circling around the pyramid, which had a center made of mud (here comes your water) and round logs.
The workers were mostly hydrated with beer, well,during work time probably more with water or thinned down beer.
Re:Great. Now prove it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Water channels probably would work. However, there may be a bit of a problem. The Sphinx, pyramids, etc at Giza are built on top of a limestone plateau. It looks like the Giza Plateau is at least 30 meters (100feet) above the peak level of the Nile back in pre-Aswan Dam times. I would think that any system of engineering works capable of lifting boats, innumerable BIG rocks, and prodigious amounts of water up to the top of the plateau would have left some pretty obvious traces.
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The Sphinx (face) is _carved_ out of a rock. It was a huge rock just sitting there and they cut away the outside rock to carve the figurine.
The rest, like legs etc. are made from relatively small bricks.
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You mean like these traces?
http://sentinelkennels.com/Res... [sentinelkennels.com]
Oh please (Score:2)
No need to get fancy about such ideas; levers, rollers, ramps, chisels, hammers, muscle. It's not only possible, it's obviously possible. They were metalworkers.
And that's not to say they didn't apply something, or several somethings, more clever to the problem, either - it's just that excavating such blocks can be done with those things and nothing more.
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Damn, so no aliens, huh? The Greek guy with the electric hair will be disappointed.
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"It could possibly have been done this way" is not the same as "proved it can be done".
As for your specifc "proof" by "basic physics" well... that's another matter entirely. I don't even know where to begin.
Re:Great. Now prove it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's not exactly Lord God King Writing either.
Perhaps he's ... using .. speech to text ...... and he talks ... like Sha..................t...n....er.
That can only prove it's impossible. But .. (Score:2)
You've heard the expression "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Theoretical calculation can show why something is IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot show that there is no unforeseen, insurmountable impediment. Only actually doing it can prove that there is not anything that makes it impossible to actually do.
Having said that, accomplishing each part, separately, is strong evidence that the entire process can be done. If people build appropriately sized canals in similar geography u
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Thanks to Obama and Hillary there is an abundance of illiterate undocumented laborers ready to be exploited for the task!
They're poor and desperate, so they're necessarily illiterate, and came here because of Hillary? You've already called them rapists and murderers, Mr. Trump, so you need not continue to insult and demonize them.
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Why would the aliens necessarily be ancient? Maybe they were just alien kids playing with blocks, and now that they've grown up they've moved on to other worlds.
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Just watch out when the impatient/overworked/stressed out alien parents show up to pick after their kids.
Its not gonna be pretty.
Yeah, we bitch about stepping on those damned legos all laying about. Wait 'til someone steps on a pyramid! It's all fun 'til someone gets hurt!
Re:Alternate theory (Score:5, Informative)
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You are right, but some were. There are other historical records.
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Yes and no.
Strictly speaking ancient Egypt had no slaves.
On the Pyramids only free men worked.
In the quarries however also convicted criminals.
The only slaves usually where prisoners of war, who worked everywhere but not on pyramids, and got released into freedom when they spoke enough Egyptian to settle down or to go home.
There are "ceremonial slaves" like the Eunuchs in old China.
The only other way to fall into slavery was huge debts, which could made you a slave to your creditor.
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In Egypt, there are still large obelisks, and large carved stones, including granite!
Your solution doesn't explain those.
My explanation does not have to. I'm not trying to explain the construction technique of every stone structure from ancient Egypt, only how some of the large stones came to be in the pyramids. Even the people that believe in the use of poured lime slurry blocks will agree that some of the stones were quarried far away and brought in with boats, sledges, and muscle. Perhaps they used the large stones as the forms, not wood. There was not a lot of wood in ancient Egypt.
Carving granite was done in ancient
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A small pickup is in the ton and a half range. But, point taken.
In the past I think a lot of the guessing was by scientists that were not engineers.
And then there was Erich von Däniken. Great fun for pubescent minds.
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The point is that indeed there must have been some pretty sophisticated tools at work, well beyond what is attributed the ancient peoples.
The mystery is NOT whether ancient peoples moved large blocks, but rather HOW they did so without sophisticated setups that they weren't supposed to have known about.
Even stranger is the fact that the oldest structures (some perhaps much older than has been attributed) seem to be the grandest and most perplexing.
The mystery is: What kinds of technology did the ancients actually have, and why did they seem to lose their knowledge of these things.
The thing about ancient civilizations is that their collapse buried technology/knowledge that then get discovered again centuries or millennia later. Writing was discovered, lost, rediscovered... probably a few times. Most likely because reading and writing wasn't wide-spread in the society, but only in a specific class. If our civilization was to collapse tomorrow, I'm relatively confident that it wouldn't regress too much as literacy is more widespread in our civilization than in any before and we still h
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If they were poured, they wouldn't have chiseled tool marks on them. Duh.
Have you ever poured concrete? I have. Sometimes the forms move on you, things break, and now you have a very hard material that has gone beyond the bounds of where you want it to be and you have to do something about it. What do you do? You get out some chisels and hammers. Today we'd use power saws, jackhammers, and so forth but the problem and solution is much the same.
Again, as I recall the explanation on how the pyramids were built, is that it was a combination of quarried and poured blocks. Some
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That means most any chemical, radiological, and such testing might not show which was poured and which was not.
You don't need an analysis to see if a stone us poured.
You see that with blank eye.
It is extremely unlikely that the Egyptians used poured blocks. If they had: we had literature about it. Like we have about basically everything covering their lives.
And we probably had ruins of stuff that *obviously* used pouring techniques.
If you can make poured blocks, it would make much more sense to simply use p
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If you can make poured blocks, it would make much more sense to simply use pouring to make big structures instead of pouring blocks on site and then moving them just like you move the chiseled blocks.
The blocks where not moved once poured, they were poured in place. The theory is that many of the blocks were quarried and moved to the site. When carrying the large blocks became difficult, or they wanted a smooth surface to work with, they would pour the blocks in place. Sometimes the blocks poured in place would have to be trimmed to allow for the placement of carved blocks, and that would mean chiseling into the poured block.
You don't need an analysis to see if a stone us poured.
You see that with blank eye.
You are correct, the evidence of poured blocks can be plainly seen. I was m
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Sorry, it is extremely obvious that they never used any pouring techniques.
A) no literature
B) no poured building parts of ordinary architecture (temples, walls)
C) no poured blocks, or what ever, in the pyramids
If you can prove otherwise, I'm sure you get a Nobel Prize.
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Bozhe moy, you managed to pivot an article on ancient pyramids to arguments about the NFL! Well-played, comrade.
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They must have had help from white people.
It's a good thing, then, that Egyptians themselves are significantly Europoid, right?
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Re:Fake News (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever race they were, they were using slaves. We should hate the Egyptians solely because they used slavery.
Well, Yul Brunner notwithstanding, the currently accepted theory is that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but by paid labourers.
Re: Fake News (Score:2)
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You think Trump is a dangerous lunatic,
Yes.
in contrast to Obama,
Yes.
a sympathizer of Islam and communism.
No.
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Islam is not a threat. Extremist Islam is a threat, it's not the same thing. Extremist Christianity is a threat as well, like any extremist sect or ideology.
I have not seen Obama being a communist sympathizer, though that's a phrase seldom heard these days, invented by the anti-commie extremist of Joe McCarthy who I thought was still dead.
As for Trump, he's automatically dangerous because he's the president and is far more dangerous than any other single person in the US. He's also showing plenty of sign
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Re:Fake News (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually there is DNA evidence that the original founders of Egypt were Indo-European.
Since Indo-European is a language, part of a cultural complex that spread over many different populations, I find that hard to believe. Do you have any reliable sources? Of course there is European DNA in Egypt - it was very much part of the Greek and Roman worlds. However, I'm not aware of any linguistic evidence for PIE [wikipedia.org] ever playing a role in Egypt before Alexander's conquest.
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Of course there is European DNA in Egypt - it was very much part of the Greek and Roman worlds.
Given Cleopatra's relationship to Julius Caesar this statement is true in several ways.
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Aside from the off-color humor, Cleopatra was greek (ptolomy dynasty) and lived closer to our time than the time when those pyramids were built - they were already 3000 years old when she was alive, 2000 years ago.
Yes, the pyramids really are that old.
Yes Egypt has been invaded by many groups.
No, we don't know much about the ethnicity or culture of the time when they were built.
Yes, Subsaharan Africa had some extremely advanced cultures and kingdoms - and did so right up to about the 15th century when the P
Re:Fake News (Score:5, Informative)
There has been no historical or archeological evidence found that the Egyptians ever enslaved the Jews.
Re: Fake News (Score:2, Informative)
Is the Torah of so little historic value to you? You sound like an anti-semite.
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Dude, you don't want what he's having. You really don't.
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Did they make the A frame too narrow the first time, but got it right the second? I think I saw that one. It sticks because I thought "that A frame looks too narrow!"