You see a lot of speculation about how such large stones were moved to build the pyramids - but what I wonder is: *why *did they use stones that were so large?
Is there any serious archeological evidence or theories? I’m not looking for your own speculation - I’m more interested in whether or not there are accepted theories.
The usual explanation is twofold: it makes it more durable and it saves on cutting.
Joins are weak points so the fewer joins in a structure, the longer it lasts. The great pyramids lasted in large part because they were made of large stones. Both earlier and later pyramids were made of smaller stones, and today they are mostly rubble. The fact that large stones are too big to be carried away also helps, though I doubt the makers considered that possibility.
Secondly it saves on preparation time. Every block you use will need to be individually drafted quarried, cut, and finished. A block 10’ cube requires 6 cuts and 6 faces need finishing. Make the same block out of stones 1’ cube and you have 6, 000 cuts and 6, 000 faces to finish (roughly). Cutting stone with bronze tools was a real bitch and every time a stone was split there was a chance it would break wrong and be rendered useless. That alone is an impetus to reduce the number of cuts.
More important though was efficient use of labour. The masons and engineers that were needed to draft, cut and polish stone were skilled labourers and that was there full time job. As a result there was a very limited number of them. In contrast the blocks were moved by farmers during the off season, so there was an endless supply of muscle. Since cutting and finishing is time consuming, you need to get a balance between the time to prepare a block and the time to move it into place. If it takes a day to cut and finish a block that could be handled into place by four men in a day, then stonemasons and engineers will have to make up 1/4 of the population, which is silly. If it takes 10 days to prepare a block that takes 1, 000, men to move into place in a day, then specialists only need to make up 1% of the population.
In reality the masons and engineers probably prepared blocks all year round, and the final haulage was done only during the flood season, so there would need to be fewer of the specialists, but the optimum use of the skills was still achieved by using larger blocks.
Thank you for a very detailed answer.
Discount the premise that there was any want/desire to increase the speed of construction. Imagine if speed were somewhat a non-issue. Imagine if the only thing that mattered was the scale/magnificence and the absolute culture of life… wherein building the pyramids was life. It defined their lives. Locked into the Western mind/culture of how things are done (turn times), it’s hard to imagine this.
Yeah but you’d like your really important monument and the attending logistical costs to be done with as soon as possible and preferably before you die.
Shouldn’t only the first stone quarried require six cuts? Couldn’t five out of the six first cuts also be cuts on the next blocks quarried?
I can tell you from first-hand observation that this is true of the Black Pyramid.
I think that large blocks are more efficient (from the labor of cutting and finishing).
I am constantly amazed at the capabilities of the ancient engineers-the Romans used 22 ton blocks (Temple of Jupiter, Baalback, Lebanon)-all cut, moved and placed by human muscle.
Why din’t the Egyptians build the pyramids like we would build an earth-fill dam? A solid core, surrounded by fill, then with a stone facing.
Of course, the ancient Ethiopians were the ultimate in “big block” construction-they carved whole churches out of solid rock!
You know they’re tombs, right? A solid core might make that whole tomb thing … problematic.
There’s been an idea gaining ground since the 70’s that they were poured like concrete. It’s supposedly based on a chemical difference in the blocks.
IIRC, the Egyptians of the third dynasty didn’t have the technology to make chisels that could cut hard granite. They either pounded the blocks using balls of diorite or they used wooden shims and pounded them in and then soaked them in water, so when they swelled up, they would split the stone.
I don’t think the large stones had much esthetic’s appeal, since when they went from step pyramids to true pyramids the large stones were covered with facing stones anyway.
I suspect a large part of it was simple prestige, which applies even today in building skyscrapers. The other part was theft protection, since larger stones are harder to move. Of course, the thieves up ended tunneling through the blocks, but it must have worked for a long time.
Maybe the spaceships couldn’t carry smaller blocks?
This isn’t true now and it wasn’t true 3, 000 years ago. Time is always a factor. Egypt had needs for infrastructure, defence etc just the same as the modern world does. The idea that it was irrelevant if 50% of the population was perpetually tied up in building pyramids, and being fed by the other 50%, makes no sense at all.
I’ve always thought that theory seemed quite credible. The formula for concrete has been lost and re-discovered several times, and I don’t see any reason to not believe the Pyramid builders could have not also discovered it. The technology proposed by Davidovits seems more probable than the traditional idea of slaves hauling huge stones.
Two HUUUGE problems with that idea.
The blocks contain huge numbers of fossils. Something like half the mass of the blocks is actually intact fossil material, and those fossils are anything up to 10cm across. Davidovits has never been able to explain how large, intact, 50 million year old fossils found their way into cement powder created 3, 000 years ago.
We have numerous examples of huge stones blocks that were abandoned in situ within their quarries. It is therefore impossible to dispute that the ancient Egyptians *did *cut and move huge stone blocks, some much bigger than those used in the pyramids. Since we know that they *did *do it, it seems a bit foolish to invent ways they could have *avoided *doing it.
Ockham’s razor: Accept the simplest explanation that fits the known facts. We know the ancient Egyptians could and did cut and move stone blocks of the size use din the pyramids. We know that fossils couldn’t survive any known process of creating cement. Therefore the blocks were cut and carried.
Now maybe the Egyptians used massive cut stone blocks for a few hundred years, then later discovered some still unknown way to produce cement without heating or grinding the original rock, and then used that for a period of several hundred years, and then lost the technology after a few hundred years and resumed using cut stone blocks again. That is possible, but it is both terribly complicated and totally unnecessary. The simplest explanation is that they started out cutting and moving big blocks and they never stopped.
I am still a bit skeptical of the “cement” hypothesis, but you seem to have excluded a middle, here.
The proponents of the “cement” thesis acknowledge that many of the blocks were cut. They have only proposed that the blocks on the higher levels may have been reconstituted. When we say that there are fossils in the stones, have we identified which stones bore fossils? Is there no possible chance that the fossils all occur in stones of the lower tiers? Is there a web site that provides information regarding which fossils were found in which stones along with the location of each fossil-bearing stone in each pyramid?
The petrology says no way (warning: PDF) : http://www.cmc-concrete.com/CMC%20Publications/2007,%20The%20Great%20Pyramid%20Debate,%2029th%20ICMA.pdf
The above paper compared some of the casing stones (including one that was the “smoking gun” of the poured camp), the limestone found today at the presumed quarry and a poured block provided by the main poured advocate.
Though some of the casing stones (which are a finer grained limestone than the core blocks) sort of look like they could be poured cement in hand sample, the microtextures under a petrographic microscope and SEM show pretty definitively that the stones are natural limestone (and are essentially identical to the quarry samples), and are not at all consistent with a poured material. The compositional analysis also shows the casing blocks near identical to the quarry material and lacking the key chemical characteristics of a poured cement.
The poured method could very well have been practical, but the evidence is pretty severely stacked against it having actually been what occurred.
The biggest practical objection to this theory (after all of the scientific objections) is, if they had that technology why not apply it to everthing you build? Why not pour house walls and roofs, tables and chairs, etc?
I don’t have that information to hand, and I’m not real inclined to look for it. While I accept most of what you are saying, it seems like a “God of Gaps” argument.
The whole point of the cement hypothesis was to explain how such massive stones were moved. To quote from this thread it is “more probable than the traditional idea of slaves hauling huge stones”. Davidovits has said several times that the strength of his theory is that it explains how large blocks could be obtained without cutting or carting, which he believed would be difficult, if not impossible, with the technology of the time. Other proponents of the theory have said the same thing.
If we accept that people cutting and hauling large stones is not just plausible, but indisputably happened, then there is no need for the concrete hypothesis. It explains nothing. If people can move 200t blocks 15km from the quarry site to Giza, then it would be odd if they lacked the technology to move them 200m up a ramp to the top of the structure. The cutting and movement was the hard part. If you have the technology to do that then you certainly have the technology to build a ramp.
Once again, Ockham’s razor. The cement theory explains no additional facts and just adds another entity. It may be potentially possible, but it’s totally unnecessary in explaining how the pyramids were built.
I’m also unaware of any cement proponents acknowledging that *any *large outer stones were cut. They acknowledge that the smaller core stones were cut because they have obvious toolmarks. If you can provide a reference to a proponent acknowledging that 100t+ blocks on the lower levels were cut I would be interested in seeing it.
The way I read it, is that they didn’t work on the pyramids year round. A lot of the work was done after the peasants were done getting the crops in and they didn’t have much work to do until after the spring flooding of the Nile when they would plant their crops.
There was a small crew of skilled labor that worked year round, but the heavy working of moving the stones from the quarry to work site was done using seasonal labor.