As you may be aware, a 340-ton stone is slowly moving its way from a quarry in Riverside to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to become part of a new work known as Levitated Mass. (See www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/levitated-mass for more details.)
It’s quite a huge apparatus they have to move this rock, so naturally, I assumed that this rock was one of the largest ever moved. After some clicking on the internet, I have determined that it doesn’t even crack the top ten. And the largest stone ever moved, the Thunder Stone, weighed more than 3 and a half times as much as Levitated Mass and was moved by human muscle alone.
I’m know there are larger things that humans have moved around, but none of them are quite as much pure dead weight as are giant rocks. So, here’s to the people of the past. Damn, they could move some heavy shit.
you need to watch that amazing documentary about Ancient Man moving Rocks – 10,000 B.C.
You see, they got Wooly Mammoths to move them. They got the mammoths by sending raiding parties from Egypt (I think) to the frozen wastes of Whereveritisistan, which is across burning deserts and through swamps filled with giant flightless carnivorous birds. But it’s really worth it, believe me.
Curiously, it weighs about the same amount as the obelisk that Caligula moved from Alexandria and erected in Rome. This achievement was admired for 1600 years, when it was moved to the center of St. Peter’s square at the request of the Pope. This has been described as the greatest engineering feat of its time. It required 907 men, 75 horses, 40 cranes, and miles of rope to accomplish.
There’s a wonderful book about this feat, along with the 19th century tasks of moving the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needles” to London and New York, i n the book Moving the Obelisks by Bern Dibner:
Well, for one thing, we have been doing it for a very long time. Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, is the site of perhaps the worlds first religious temple, with monoliths weighing up to 16 tons. Not big by Thunder Stone standards, but when you consider Gobekli Tepe was built almost 12,000 years ago by neolithic hunter-gatherers with no metal tools, it is an astonishing feat. There is more time elapsed between Gobekli Tepe and the Great Pyramid than from the the Great Pyramid to today. I am amazed that the engineering necessary to cut, move and erect such monoliths existed shortly after the end of the last ice age.
