Shut your mouth!
*I climbed a pyramid tonight, of Ramses
Do you know where? Do you know where?
Up to the top where Pharoah cannot reach me
With inclined ramps! With inclined ramps!
Where the stones should go, but if you read right
The magic glyphs! The magic glyphs!
They’ll fly, up to the top and then they rest there
Just by a brook. A secret brook.
(Chorus) Come on, come on! To the top we’ll haul!
Come on, come on! We will have a ball!
Funiculi, funicula, funiculi, funicula!
Lots of heavy stones, funiculi, funicula!
It’s climbed aloft, how nice, you see it climbed now,
Right to the top! Right to the top!
Oh oh! It went, and turned, and came back down now,
It squished some slaves! It squished some slaves!
The whole damn pyramid is falling down now,
Around your head! Around your head!
I should have listened to the engineers now
We will be dead! We will be dead!
(Chorus) Run now! Run now! This is truly vile!
Run nowl Run now! Dive into the Nile!
Funiculi, funicula, funiculi, funicula!
Never mind mummies, funiculi, funicula!
*
With abject apologies to Peppino Turco
Regards,
Shodan
But I’m talking about Ramps
Here’s how they used funiculars:
First, the Egyptologists are wrong. They insist that stinky footed bumpkins hauled these giant rocks up ramps, but logically and factually that is obviously incorrect because Egyptologists are always incorrect, except for the ones that agree with cladking. Secondly it’s clear that metaphysics and natural language show that the ancient Egyptians were more technologically advance than we are and wouldn’t bother dragging stones across sand because that can’t possibly work. Then there were also giant pools of water and geysers at the pyramids even though they didn’t have any water. And obviously they had no such things as ramps because they were debunked in post 152. It’s all very obvious if you just stop listening to stinky footed Egyptologists and use your visceral knowledge to understand it.
Makes sense.
You know who else used ramps?!?!?! :eek:
I loves me some ramps, especially sauteed and served with eggs.
Sadly, since ramps have been debunked and since the Egyptians had no word for ramp you will not be able to eat them anymore. 
Ahem. I would like to point out that many of the finest engineering breakthroughs have been conceived by and for the lazy and shiftless! It’s what they do and why they do it. Any chimp can keep doing things the hard way. Engineers are a better breed of chimp.
cladking, please explain to this chimp how the geysers lifted the stones. I’ve lost track, but I have my suspicions.
Suspicion A: Did the Egyptians place the blocks on a platform/piston at the base of a cylinder, open a valve, and let the force of the geyser push the the piston up; or did the geyser fill the cylinder, pushing the piston up?
- How much pressure does a geyser provide? Remember that existing natural geysers top out at about 200 feet high and the water that makes it that far is (quick calculation) not much. A man-made geyser, like a busted fire hydrant, only goes as high as the water tower feeding it, and as the pressure of an open hydrant is barely enough to send a kid sliding down the street we again can conclude that the pressure is “not much.”
- Is this enough to counteract the mass of the piston and a multi-ton block of stone?
- Or will the mass of the platform and block be enough to keep the geyser from erupting, the same as the overlying stone prevented it from erupting before a hole was drilled?
- What was the valve made from? Make sure the material was available to the ancients.
Suspicion B: The geyser pumped water to the top layer being built, it was collected there, and filled the bucket of a sort of reverse-shadoof.
- Stone is far denser than water, so how large was the bucket and how long was arm? Again, make sure the material was available to the ancients, and is strong enough to support a multi-ton block.
- If the geyser you envision tops out at–what was it?–81’-3", how do you get water higher than that?
[QUOTE=dropzone]
Suspicion B: The geyser pumped water to the top layer being built, it was collected there, and filled the bucket of a sort of reverse-shadoof.
[/QUOTE]
It’s something more along this line, though he hasn’t been all that specific. I was trying to get him to be more specific for the reasons I suspect you are, but he went off into flights of mysticism.
Ramps most likely. 
Though I suspect he has some sort of ingenuous piping and pumping system that gets it up there using water pressure from the geyser and the native can do spirit of the sweet foot smelling Egyptians. He doesn’t usually bother with the details, since it’s so obviously (to him) that this was the (only) way they did it and details are for the stinky footed PEDestrian types, obviously.
Wow!
That’s like culture.
Thanks.
Quick summary of the mechanism as I understand it:
A geyser provides enough pressure to get water to 81’ 3". It’s collected at or about that level in a giant bucket.
A rope goes from the giant bucket across the pyramid and down the other side. Actually the middle part of the span uses a chain, not a rope.
The other end of the rope connects to a load of stone at ground level. When there’s enough water collected, some guy relaxing in the shade puts down his Perrier long enough to release the bucket. It goes down and the stones go up.
Stones are somehow unloaded and used to build level 2 of the pyramid, as we’re taking level 1 for granted.
Once level 2 is built, the rope is lengthened so it can continue to run across the top of the pyramid. The bucket remains at the top of Level 1 and is used to pull stones from ground to level 1. Then the rope is shortened and the stones make a second trip up from level 1 to level 2. There they’re used to build level 3.
Taking the stones up one step at a time, the bucket never needs to come higher than the magic 81’3".
What I don’t understand is how the rope runs without friction (did they have pulleys? I thought pulleys came later), how reliable and strong the rope is given available materials (per others’ comments), and where did the extremely predictable and reliable geyser come from in the first place.
There’s also something about a cliff that also had a bucket counterweight system on it. And I don’t see any explanation of how the stones got to the site in the first place or how they’re moved (and lifted!) around the site when they’re not being raised by the water counterweight.
[QUOTE=Redshirt]
Quick summary of the mechanism as I understand it:
[/QUOTE]
Only the King o’ Clad can really answer this, but your summary is pretty much what my white board of what I THINK he was getting at says.
AFAIK the answer is no. From what I recall pulleys were about a thousand years later, at least the first examples found. I suppose they could have had some sort of guard made but it wouldn’t be close to frictionless, and the ropes would get torn up pretty regularly (leaving aside the loads we are talking about and the fibers used…old Claddy claims that spliced natural fibers of short length, which is what we are talking about, are as strong as long length fibers…the splicing, she no matter).
I used a tensile strength around 10 times less than modern materials…I was being generous, to my mind, but Claddy doesn’t say. You’d need a pretty big ass rope (well, lots and lots of ropes really)…I am not at work, but I seem to recall my own calculations put a usable diameter at something like 5-6 inches for the lengths and load he was talking about. Of course, there is the problem of belaying this thing and the lack of a ratchet system, so I don’t think that even if we handwave aside all the other objections and assume it was real that folks would be flipping a lever while sipping bottled water and watching as it just worked.
Magic…the gods…deus ex…the mind of Clad. Take your pick. There is no evidence of it today, so I guess we just have to assume it was there and push on.
He handwaved this away earlier by saying he doesn’t care how the lower level was built or how the stones got there…they just did. Then he talked about a funicular system (despite the fact that Egyptians don’t have a word for ‘ramp’…he also seems strangely obsessed with stinky feet for some reason, but best not to go there), so maybe that’s how the stones got from the ports (though he denies there WERE ports in some posts) or from the local quarries (he hasn’t talked about throwing anyone down one at least). Perhaps they had some sort of pneumatic jack hammers/hydraulic lift system to quarry the stones then lift them onto the funicular that took them to the steam powered rail road system and transported them to the site (they also wore shoes and used a lot of foot powder obviously…these were NOT run of the mill genius ancient bumpkins, after all) where a crane would move the blocks from the flat bed rail car to a position under the mystical water machine and, using advanced levitation and natural fiber composite nano-tube ropes they whisked the stones up to each level using frictionless, um, non-ramp things on the sides and nearly zero labor, perspiration or stink. Something like that anyway. They really were amazing, these ancient Egyptians.
Then, when it was all finished they used dark matter to plug the hole of the geyser, erasing all traces (until we catch up to them and figure out how to see dark matter), and further erased all knowledge and traces of all of this, making it LOOK like they used ramps, ropes and stinky feet to do it, bumpkin style, to trick us and make our Egyptologists look like the running dog tools they really are. Sort of like God and evolution…just put those fossils out there to trick all those gullible archeologists and geologists and such. And finally, they wrote cryptic messages for someone from our time who would be the King of Clad perhaps to discover and reveal unto us how it was really done.
To all that missing information from cladking regarding improbable ropes and chains, lack of info on how stones were put in place or being taken to their final locations, I think one has to point more to the bit about the soda water geyser; one can not leave that silliness behind.
Besides not having any evidence for there being that kind of cold geyser in Egypt, the water composition of a cold geyser is also high in acid content (carbonic acid). A preliminary search I made is pointing at this item as a big problem*, limestone walls and stones would not remain complete after continuous exposure to water with that acidic content.
Well, it will not fizz as spectacularly as some Mentos, but one should get that this is not a good idea when you are moving limestone or using limestone in your structure, in a typical cold water geyser the water is rich with carbonic acid that easily dissolves large amounts of lime along its way.
Instead of picturing ancient Egyptian workers enjoying soda on a break, most likely the sides of the channels of the funicular would fizz away in a few days (yes, in other discussions elsewhere our geyser guy is talking about a water based funicular too), and similar erosion in a pyramid would make stones dissolve enough to cause distortions if not collapses, and now we can picture even Tefnut telling the other gods how dumb they were for thinking that the soda geyser plan would work.
- (Like if another reason was needed to show how silly this idea is). Since limestone was the most used material I still wonder if it would go off like a titanic Mentos vs Coke demonstration.
http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/diet-coke-and-mentos-minimyth/
Even on lower concentrations, it does take several hours, but acid rain shows how limestone is not made to last under streams of water with a bit of carbonic acid.
Yes. This is it. The steps are 81’ 3" each so stones above this level have to be raised step by step.
Ropes have very little friction. They generate a little heat where they bend but it is insignificant. They also have to rub against something unless they are in a straight line. In this case they are turned 70 degrees to follow the step sides by what the ancients called “dm-sceptres”. I believe these were probably pulleys since the wheel was a 1000 years old when the great pyramids were built but they could have been rollers or even curved greased stones.
There were also two similar systems on the cliff face that could pull stones up from the quarries 300’ at a time exactly as described in ancient reports.
Please link to these “ancient reports”.
Their ropes were apparently configured as slings (loops at each end). These fit over the “tie of isis” which connected it to the counterweight. They used a “cartouche” to belay it at other points. I calculate the main ropes at about 5 1/4" but a little thicker is possible.
There were two ports for this worrk. The primary port was the so-called valley temple where Merrer and the other sailors brought the cladding and other specialty stones. Some 1/2 million tons of supplies and equipment were off loaded here for shipment up to the pyramid base by (linear) funicular. There was a secondary port known as the builders village. This one recieved primarily food and other necessities for the workmen. Some small valuable tools were probably shipped here for closer control and accounting and then carried to the job site. It is simply absurd to believe they built the cadillac of ramps and then dragged stones over wet sand. Sometimes it’s hard to even take this stuff seriously and it seems to be in the realm of joking.
Vyse’s “Operations” pg 325.
It appears in legends as well. One has it that a piece of paper was attached to the stone and then it flew to the pyramid. This would have been the paper attached by the “Weigher/ Reckoner” who had adjudged its size and shape for transport and fitting in the structure. This worker was the go-between for the “Overseer of Sculptors” who removed it from tayet (the quarry) and the “Overseer of the Boats of Neith” who loaded it for shipment up the side. These men all worked under the “anubis scientist” who oversaw all operations from atop the pyramid.
The reports simply say the stones moved to the pyramid 300’ at a time and this is the lateral distance down the cliff face. This is where the ramps pointed.
Even the Pyramid Texts refers to stones flying like the “fledglings of swallows” which take their first flight following the contours of the ground. This is the evidence but mnodern people choose not to see it.
I’ve seemed to have misplaced my autographed first edition copy-so sorry. Would you mind quoting or linking to the appropriate text?