Did the ancient Egyptians travel to South America and build the Inca pyamids?

Factual Questions
21

Well yeah - the distinction is that the original Step Pyramid was built as a series of steps - each step was constructed of fairly small stone blocks, maybe a foot on a side. In fact, it was a work in progress. It started as a single, rectangular mastaba (block tomb) then was expanded several times and successive square step layers added, each lesser in size about 30 feet high with vertical sides… One major advance was, to support such a structure, this was built of limestone blocks rather than mud brick.

Later pyramids were purpose built as smooth-sided. The Egyptians realized, as things got taller, if they didn’t tilt the wall back it would soon crumble, and the first failure caused the rest to collapse.

The great pyramids at Giza, the peak of pyramid building, look stepped because the blocks are 5 feet high. I guess they realized the bigger the blocks, the less stonework to fill the same volume. Once the flat facing came off, these “steps” are exposed. Later, lazier locals determined that it was easier to steal the side blocks from the pyramids than to cut new ones from fresh rock, so the smooth cladding got “recycled” into local projects over millennia. The Giza pyramids main blocks mainly survived because with the brickwork-like construction, to free up a block you’d have to work from the top down, you couldn’t easily pry one loose. .Plus, those blocks were HUGE.

But even the Red Pyramid, build with much smaller bricks - it’s crumbling today, there’s an interesting path climbing up the side, only the main chambers seem to be big blocks - but it’s not step, it’s an actual pyramid construction.

As you can see from the list, there’s only two “step” pyramids between the original and the Bent Pyramid - and both seem to have been designed with the successive steps much like Imhotep’s plan, but each step the walls are inclined back from vertical, allowing a greater height for each step with les risk of collapse. Note it’s the 4th (or one of the 4th) pyramid that was designed as a real pyramid - the Bent Pyramid - but then they figured out their angle was too steep, too risky and changed the angle halfway up. So it didn’t take long to figure out the pattern.

Medhum seems to have started being planned almost like a smooth sided needle tower, being one of the early ones - then they progressively altered it to have more inclined sides, as they realized how unstable a steep rock wall could be. The outer, more hastily built flatter parts have collapsed, leaving the inner core standing to the point where they realized their folly.

As for the aliens… ha ha. The process of rectangular tomb evolving to pyramid is on display in Egypt. the evolution of plaza platforms to pyramid, similarly, can be seen in Central and South America. Even Easter Island, the quarry and some half-finished heads are available for visitors to see. The ancients were not stupid.

(Who was it- Herodotus? Who describes the various groups being put to work to built a canal across a narrow isthmus for a Greek fleet - and mentions one group was well aware of the angle of repose. Instead of digging a square trench and having the sides continually fall in, they started twice the needed width, their section of the trench had angled sides so that the walls did not cave in as they got deeper. The angle of repose is why most large piles are pyramids. They last longer and are less likely to collapse than straight vertical walls. )

22

Fun fact - there’s an absolutely amazing place, the Cave Church, in the cliffs southeast of Cairo. This is where the stone from the pyramids (and stone for a lot of other stuff) allegedly came from. When the Nile annual flood came along, they could float barges of giant blocks from there almost to the foot of the Giza pyramids, making the transport much easier.

But to get to the Cave Church you must go through Garbage City.

23

Surely large piles would want to be cones, not pyramids, by default…why didn’t that catch on?

24

Not quite a cone, but they tried

25

Presumably the aesthetics of having four sides oriented north, south, east and west was desired.

26

I’ve seen that mentioned before and also thought about it when reading this thread, so I consulted Google for more information. According to the article below, traces of THC, cocaine, and nicotine, which are generally thought of as New World products, were found in some Egyptian mummies, but their presence is explainable. Sources for these drugs do and did exist in Africa and Asia, so assuming Egyptians got them from the Americas is an unnecessary reach.

I thought it was interesting that higher concentrations of the drugs were found in mummies of people who died at a younger age presumably due to illness, while mummies of apparently healthy people who lived longer were less likely to show traces of THC, cocaine, or nicotine, which is considered evidence that they were being used medicinally. I think that what I read previously implied they may have been used ritually as part of the embalming/mummification process.

27

No, not a chance. For one thing, while they are all pyramids, they are designed and constructed completely differently and even had different purposes. The Easter Island thingy is really weird, as it has zero to do with anything Egyptian, as would trying to travel to Australia from Egypt via that route.

Basically, the folks who think that the monumental construction in the Americas had to be done by either aliens or some old-world culture is both an insult to the various native American civilizations AND shows vast ignorance of the vast amount of data (such as the fact that in the case of, say, the Mayan culture they have their own distinct language that is incorporated into their architecture, just as one example). In addition, there would be the fact that IF the ancient Egyptians (i.e. the Old Kingdom types who actually made pyramids) went to the New World to instruct the ignorant native peoples on the finer points of pyramid building, it sure was a long time for it to take off…or they were time-traveling super Egyptians. Because the time frame doesn’t make sense by at least 2000 years or so.

28

A wikilist of places with pyramids. Man, someone must have been busy. Pyramid - Wikipedia

29

As for Easter Island - carvings of humans, realistic or stylized, are what we would describe as “very common”. Many are significantly oversized. It’s not like the idea wouldn’t occur to people anywhere in the world at any time. (Venus of Willendorf statuette, for example, is 25,000 years old) A few thousand people on an island 25 miles across probably had lots of time on their hands and nowhere else to go… so they carved big statues. They certainly didn’t lack the manpower to move them.

30

Really, the style difference alone pretty much precludes any sort of ridiculous Egyptian influence. We know after all that Polynesian peoples have crafted similar things to those on Easter Island using native materials and labor. Hell, there is an entire city built of volcanic stone logs. Unless someone wants to say all of this came from Egypt it really holds no water. It’s on par with the wild-haired Ancient Aliens dude saying everything came from aliens.

31

Come on people, you know it was all the Atlanteans.

Yeah, Heyerdahl was a glorious revisit of the age of the adventurer-explorer, and the kind of guy for whom you raised a glass (or whole bottle) to "look at what this mad ***ker is doing now! Go, you magnificent Northman!" But just because you prove something is even possible, doesn’t mean it was likely. Yes, he raised in public consciousness the plausibility that the far flung continents were not completely isolated from one another pre-1492 (probably harkening to his own Norse heritage) but the specific trips he experimented, Kon-Tiki and Ra, were not backed up by any other good evidence of actual travel.

Ra was based on similarities between reed boats from Egypt and reed boats of the Andean peoples but really, you got large navigable waterways AND a helluva lot of reeds, you will end up with reed boats. The Egyptians had access to perfectly cromulent proper wooden vessels to set out to sea if they wanted.

Another sign of how everyone did it different – though this one’s footprint is quite interesting, not close to conical but more like a racetrack shape. That kind of shape and finish looks like a heap lot more work, seems someone at Uxmal was flexing on the neighboring architects and builders.

(And oh yeah, another thing about mesoamerican pyramid temples: they’d often build them up over and around a previous one (as was the pictured one). If they felt limited by the original perimeter footprint of the temple grounds, that would explain the ogdamn steep stairs of some of the final versions.)

32

At the age of seven, I discovered that Uxmal’s pyramid had the wonderful property of terrifying ones parents if you ran up and down it fast enough.

33

It hadn’t been found yet when Heyerdahl was doing the Kon-Tiki thing, but there is a fair amount of evidence today that there was pre-Columbian contact between South America and Polynesia. Most people assume the seafarers were Polynesian, since they had the expertise of long distance sea travel, but there seems to be a few people who think it may have gone the other way.

34

And because they brought and left behind chickens pre-Colombus

35

Not THC, that’s Old World.

Also, that article messes up where Punt was located (East Africa, not West)

36

Of course, simply adding onto an existing structure means that half the work is already done. It amazes me the amount of manpower that would have gone into building a huge pyramid - particularly in the Americas, without draft animals.

But then, I wonder how those huge Mesoamerican cities were supplied if all the food and supplies had to be brought in from the distant countryside by human labor. Recall that in Rome during its heyday the streets were clogged with carts. When one emperor decreed that the supplies should be brought in at night to relieve congestion, the noise all night was even worse - and a wheeled cart can carry far far more than a human could in a society without wheeled vehicles.

37

I don’t think there is any real doubt that Egyptians could have made the trip if they were so inclined. They simply weren’t and had no reason to make such a trip…and also no idea what was out there to find, if anything. But, yeah, seems kind of silly to try and make this trip in one of their reed boats when they had decent wooden vessels, and we actually have examples of at least a few to use as a template to build a decent replica.

Absolutely. :wink:

38

There is a ton of new archeology being done today, especially using lidar. Basically, they are finding that there were vast agricultural structures around all of these really big mesoamerican cities…much more extensive than they used to think when they had to basically go out, pick a promising site and start digging to find anything. In the jungle that all looks the same. Today, with things like lidar it’s painting a whole new picture of things and showing stuff that even folks who have excavated in an area for decades didn’t know where there.

39

It is now.

It was originally in West Africa, but the aliens relocated it.

40

They didn’t have to bring food to the cities from a distance.

Mayan cities were low density, and the houses were interspersed with a variety of small fields and orchards.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416514000749