As to record, I was thinking more about carvings, such as the great action scenes fromt he walls of the big ball court and the platform of the skulls. The jungle ate a hell of a lot of temples, crumbled the rock, and many of the carvings were lost.
I wasn’t thinking about the reasons for building El Castillo, though. Shame there isn’t a record of why construction of the monster was begun in the first place.
The Maya did keep written record, though? Like on paper, or what? I know there’s a modern written Mayan language, but I guess I just assumed it was a phonetic derivation, like Navajo . . .
Oh yes, the Maya kept written records. In fact yax is a Mayan word. To get some more information on Mayan glyphs, I would suggest going to http://www.halfmoon.org/
I’m not sure what you mean by “phonetic derivation”, but I believe I should clarify: ALL languages are oral languages. There is no such thing as a language whose writing system is an inherent part thereof. That’s why we acquire language instinctively but must be taught writing, and why practically everyone (the only exceptions being those with neurological or other disabilities) learns language, but not everyone (even those whose language is written) is literate.
Maya is no different from Navajo in this regard. That the Mayans had written language and the Navajo didn’t is linguistically irrelevant (although techno-historically interesting).
Me and my big mouth… I didn’t read your post right, Adam. I realize now you were referring to the writing system, not the language itself. :oops: My bad.
Especially cockney, which is a spoken form which bears a comparatively small amount of phonetic and lexical relation to what is purported to be its written form (written English).
“Researchers now suggest that the stones were dragged over wet sand. Their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters and titled “Sliding Friction on Wet and Dry Sand”, is based on a wall painting from the tomb of Djehutihotep, which depicts a person standing in front of a wooden sledge and wetting the sand.”
It still seems quite unbelievable they could build such massive structures with such limited technology.
IIRC, that is what they told us when we visited the pyramids just before the current unpleasantness.
I don’t know how it was in the ancient days of 2,000, but the crane used for the recent Bay Bridge retrofit could list over 1800 tons. I was just about to post a response when I noticed the date.
Obligatory joke: of course, the real answer is that the zombie mummies did it. zombie daddies also.
I never have understood why so many people think that ancient peoples couldn’t do stuff like this. Where is the big mystery? They were the exact same as us, hardware wise…just our software has been updated. Why is building the pyramids (or the stone heads on Easter Island, or the monuments at Gobekli Tepe, or the fitted stones of Puma Punku, etc etc) so hard for folks to grasp that humans could build???
How’d they do it? With lots of dedicated labor, a firm understanding of the technology they had, and a willingness to expend vast resources to get it done. The real trick was logistics, not the nuts and bolts of moving stones and piling them on top of each other…that’s just engineering.
Yea, the pyramids especially. Moving one of those big rocks is impressive, and no doubt took a lot of effort. But once you’ve done one, to build a pyramid you basically just repeat the process a couple million times.
And someone beat me to the video of the guy moving large blocks around with just simple machines and muscle power. It’s obviously a time-consuming project, but not really mysterious. And if you happen to have a million peasants who don’t have anything to do after the harvest, moving a few million blocks in a decade seems do-able.
We didn’t have youtube back in the Before Times, when this thread started.
So here’s a youtube video of a michigan guy whose hobby is moving and lifting multiton blocks by himself, with only stone and wood tools.
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The problem with this is that that guy uses prepared stone pads to demonstrate. Every. Single. Time. he demonstrates, it’s on concrete.
While I accept that force multipliers like pulleys and levers exist, doing it his way wouldn’t have been feasible. If he takes any of those attempts five feet left or right onto the grasses next to his prepared platforms, he may get a half turn out of them before the rock beaches and he has to dig it out to try it again.
As for the Egyptians, moving them would have just been a lot of manual labor. Pouring water over sand is ingenious, but I wonder how feasible it would have been. Most of these construction sites were next to the Nile when they were built, and the Nile floods like clockwork (it’s why they had so much resident labor - farmers would get flooded off their land and go to work for the gub).
The cuts and what not I see people making a big fuss about always confuses me. While it’s cool they were so exacting, it’s just rote manual labor to slowly scrape away rock surfaces. If you have, say, 1,000 or so people doing multiple shifts every day, you can probably bust that sort of thing out fairly quickly. I mean, all you need are a set of forms to match to and the people you use don’t even have to understand what they are doing. Someone sits down and makes 1,000 identical right angles or whatever and tell people to grind down that stone until that right angle fits perfectly and bingo. Stones du jour.
Honestly, the only things I’m curious about are the REALLY heavy stones. There are reports of stones at some magalithic sites weighing 3,000 tons. I know - workers and slaves and such. But, really? Four inches a year across a landscape with 10,000 people yanking for all they’re worth on ropes? Even on sleds, or wetted sand, or Aliens – that’s just mind boggling.
The heaviest* monolith on wikipedia’s is 1,000 tons and was transported by ship. The largest one moved via land seems to be 700 tons. Still impressive, but I don’t have trouble believing someone with a lot of patience and available labor could make it happen.
Which is what is really impressive about these monuments. Not the technical know how, but that some ancient civilizations were organized and wealthy enough to get thousands of guys toiling away at a big, non-practical project for decades. Of course, demonstrating that was probably much of the original purpose for the monuments.
*There’s a 3,000 ton entry, but it sounds like alien-artifact people trying to push the idea that a natural formation was man-made. I think we had a thread recently debunking the idea that the same site was man-made.
Work. Hard, back breaking work. Think of it this way. The pinnacle of achievement was to build a huge tomb for a king. It took a whole empire to build one at a time.
