Playing devil’s advocate again: as far as I know, the really big stones aren’t all that far up. Building the lower levels, up to about the King’s chamber isn’t all that hard. Big stones can be dragged up ramps to that height. No need for a chute big enough for the biggest stones.
As per the link, they showed that it was possible with materials known and available at the time.
It reminds me of a pumpkin chucking contest, back when I was in grad school. I led a group of physics students in building a trebuchet design that was elegant, clever, and highly efficient. Meanwhile, the engineering students built a design that wasn’t as elegant, clever, or efficient as ours, but was so robust that it could have used our entire treb as a counterweight. And of course, they kicked our butt.
Brute force works.
It just isn’t that hard to lift things. A stone block is hard to lift. It takes a lot of work for a human being to lift a 25 kilo rock a meter, but they can do it. And to lift a rock that weighs a metric ton it just takes 40 guys doing the same amount of work. But one guy doing the same amount of work to lift a 25 kg rock one meter could also lift a 1000 kg rock 2.5 centimeters. With some leverage, it takes exactly the same amount of work to lift something 100 times the weight 1/100th the distance. Human beings can lift small rocks large distances easily. It’s therefore just as easy to lift large rocks short distances.
Does it take some tools? Yes, and if you’re trying to move one large rock by yourself building the tools and figuring out how to do it would be hard. But once you’ve got the tools and techniques to move 1 rock, moving another thousand of them takes the same tools and the same techniques, and you don’t have to figure them out because some overseer figured them out a couple dynasties ago and all you have to do is show up between planting season and harvest season and pull hard on the ropes when the boss tells you to pull, and let go when they tell you to let go.
This is not entirely accurate. There are a couple of passages from Cicero that may be describing mechanisms like the Antikythera device. He speaks of sphere made by Archimedes which showed the movement of the planets which was in the possession of the Roman general Marcellus who had taken it in the sack of Syracuse. He also speaks of a device created by Posidonius which demonstrated the movements of the heavens. These passages had been taken to be fanciful prior to the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism.
And while there is no direct documentation of the astronomy encapsulated in the device (aside from the inscriptions on the thing itself), it portrays the standard Babylonian and Greek astronomical thought of the day right up to the precession of the first lunar anomaly. The first lunar anomaly is the variation in angular speed of the moon in its orbit as it speeds up towards perigee and slows down towards apogee, though the Greeks described this via epicycles rather than via ellipses. The moon’s apogee/perigee precesses around its orbit with a period of about 18 years, which had only just been discovered by Hipparchus around the time the Antikythera mechanism was made.
That makes no sense. So they used ramps for the heaviest stones but then switched to a much more complicated system for the lighter stones? Color me skeptical.
One thing I’ve noticed about wacky how-they-built-the-pyramids hypotheses - they often seem to sort of assume that the pyramid was already there and could be used as a support for whatever mechanism they’re proposing.
Cladking’s soda-pop idea had fizzy water emerging from the top of the pyramid, filling counterweights which pulled the blocks up the side of the pyramid via a rope slung over the apex - quite an interesting way to get stone blocks to the top of an already-complete pyramid, but not so good for actually building it.
This one is similar - the best you could hope for with this method (I mean, barring all the problems with actually making it) is delivery of blocks to some point quite a way short of the level where you’re building - so you still have to use brute force, ramps and rollers to lift them the last 20 yards.
You misunderstand.
They used ramps to build the bottom one third. The heaviest stones are one third of the way up. They used other methods to build the top two thirds.
(again, just playing Devil’s advocate. Not claiming the theory is true)
No, I understood you just fine. It just doesn’t make sense from a practical stance. The higher you go the less volume a pyramid has. After having built a large portion of the building (volumewise) with ramps, why would they go through the monumental task of dismantling them only to then construct a much more complicated system to haul up the rest.
And by the way, the “smaller” blocks were still around 3 tons. Quite an engineering feat to float up in a tube.
The precicion of water management required would be limiting.
I’m reminded of the theory that the ancient Incas used balloons to view nazca lines. Julian Knott successfully built and flew a hot air ballon made out of local materials and methods that could view the lines in an attempt to prove the theory. But of course this theory presumes an understanding of flight the ancient Incas did not possess.
But the basic problem with a water column lift method is that PSI on the bottom of the column would be tremendous. As I said, for 165 feet the pressure at the bottom is 90psi; that means the weight on the column to prevent to “roof” from blowing off has to hold 90psi. If you cover the top of the water column with rock blocks (have a few lying around) then 1 square inch column or rock weighing 90lb is equivalent to a one third the equivalent column of water - (actually, 1/2.7). You would need a “lid” 50 feet high of limestone to stop the water from blowing the top off. Remember, this was over a thousand years before iron was in common use; their tools and construction processes were limited. the best they had was wood, stone, and copper. They did not build metal tubes able to withstand the pressure, certainly not giant ones holding rocks.
If you’re floating a block of limestone, it has a density of 2.7, so you need air bladders totaling 2.7 times the volume of the rock to float it. Plus safety, because if one leaks, you have to drain the water, find the dud float, replace it and start over. Besides, hauling all that water up the pyramid is not a trivial exercise either. I’m sure when floating across the Nile, they didn’t trust their work to air bladders, they used wooden barges. (Google “solar boat” to see the 4400 year old boats found “some assembly required” in pits around the great pyramid.)
The argument against ramps was simply that, given the angle of repose of rubble and sand and gravel, a straight ramp would need as much or more material than the pyramid. Build it a spiral road of mud brick off the stepped edge of the existing pyramid and the volume requirements drop dramatically. Plus, the finished pyramids had a nice smooth coating of shiny white limestone (and, they think, a golden pyramidal capstone… gold leaf?). You can see the remnants of this smooth siding on the middle Giza pyramid. A straight ramp does not help in the process of installing the finished coating, especially on the opposite sides. A spiral ramp makes it very easy - you have a working platform just below the area under construction all the way down; just disassemble it as you go down.
Nitpick: You only need add 1.7 units of volume to 1 unit of rock to achieve neutral buoyancy.
(I mean, that still doesn’t make the idea plausible)