They lock this stuff up behind heavy steel gates and they prosecute people (through UN treaty) who still manage to get samples. The first thing Zahi Hawass did after being led into a cave he said doesn’t exist is put a heavy gate on it and close it to further research or excavation. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.
I assume the “glacis” is the outer cladding of white limestone.
The outer cladding was still on, I believe, until medieval times - when they were removed and used to build stuff in Cairo.
To my mind, the main picture that the passage of Herodotus invokes is a strikingly modern one - of a knowledgable and curious foreign tourist wandering over the sights of Egypt with a guide/interpreter, asking about stuff - like “how was this built?” and “what does that writing say?”. What we read is what he was told.
My point is that the sight he was seeing was, in this particular case, already very, very ancient. I have no doubt he is more or less accurately giving us what he heard, but what he heard may simply be the spiel the guide was telling him - some info accurate, some not. Even today, how many people actually know what machinery was used to build the great Cathedrals of Europe? Yet there is much more continuity (and much less time, and much more literacy) between them and us, than between the great pyramid-builders and H.
This reinforces my notion that he was basically relating stories the local guides told him - some of them real whoppers. Like the story that Cheops prostituted his daughter to earn cash to build the pyramid (and as “tips” she took stones to build her own! That’s one hell of a lot of prostitution)
Note he is careful to say this is what he was told, not that it was necessarily true.
From his description there is little question he was referring to the causeways. He said they took ten years to make but I’m sure they also meant the huge water collection device under the pyramid and preforming the low hill already present. This would also include a small factory and port at the river and the Great Saw Palace on the east side of the pyramid. These latter were long gone by Herodotus’ day. Preparing the site with all the infrastucture from the “min” to the “stone flippers” and loading platforms was a huge job inb itself. You can still see the excavation for the water collection device on the north side of G2.
Yes, I agree that he is recounting what he was shown and told during his ‘tourist trip.’
My point is that there might have been more continuity than you give them credit for. The fact that we have more widespread literacy today only means that knowledge is more widespread.
Back then it would have been confined to the priests and their libraries.
Kind of how lots of our literature was confined to monastaries, for a long time.
What I take from the description could also be a canal. It’s some 15 meters high, ‘at its highest’.
I’m not familiar with the lay out of the causeways but it would make a lot of sense to bring the stones up to the pyramids using boats, instead of dragging them on sleds or rollers.
Doesn’t Herodotus say a link was made to the Nile?
He says it was for the making of an island.
Maybe a garbled description of the canals extending right up to the sides of the pyramid?
I’d say the evidence available in the passage itself is against this. As can be seen in the passage, a lot of what he was told was flat-out impossible or in the “urban legend” category - for example, I will categorically state it was flat-out impossible that Cheops prostituted his daughter to pay for his pyramid, and that his daughter built her own pyramid with her tips!
Now, it is entirely possible that there was 2,000+ year old, well-researched secret preistly wisdom carefully gleaned from surviving construction manual texts mixed in with the obvious urban legends about royal prostitutes and misinterpretations (like pyramids decorated with boasts about the cost of radishes) - but there is no evidence for it.
Indeed, you are right, there is no evidence that scribes would have been copying 2000 year old texts for…uhm…2000 years.
But I don’t consider it too far fetched, though. Like I said, Christian Monks have done the same thing for centuries.
No doubt a lot would not have been copied, but the Egyptians were proud of their long history and I would actually find it more strange if they hadn’t preserved a lot of texts.
I am not saying it’s impossible but there aren’t that many examples of 2000 year old library collections. I don’t think you can just assume that they had all these 2000 year old documents preserved and studied.
I have no doubt that they did preseve texts - I just think that what they chose to preserve is more likely to have been stuff like dynastic histories and ritual/magic texts. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of both that have survived to the present.
Things like construction techniques - I would not be surprised if they were passed down master-to-apprentice.
[QUOTE=cladking]
It was a dangerous time to waste vast resources building a tomb for a dead god who lived eternally.
[/quote]
Are you implying that the pyramids were not tombs, but rather served some other purpose?
Huh? Of course levers reduce the amount of work required, that’s what they are for: to amplify force, so that a given input creates a greater output than it otherwise would.
Cladking, I still don’t get what this water system you believe in actually did. Was water used as a counter weight? Did flowing water push something? Have I missed a post where you describe the method?
I think so too. There’s no reason the blocks had to be raised on the exterior. There are a lot of possible advantages to moving them through the interior.