Hi
What is the most current and sensible theory of how the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids? I’ve read that ramps were used to transport, say a 5-ton block from a quarry and transported via canals to the construction site, and then using a windlass to pull the blocks into position. I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
An older thread which was recently updated:
it was aliens
Lube. lots of lube. This is a serious answer.
Thanks PastTense. Very helpful link.
davidmich
There are giant cliffs across the river in Cairo (Mokatan Hills) where limestone has been quarried for millennia.
If you visit the Karnak Temple in Luxor, the original mud ramp for raising the blocks on one of the main pylons (huge front walls) is still there, as is a few unfinished pillars. The work was abandoned when the Egyptians were invaded.
Construction techniques are no mystery. They cut the blocks by hand, hauled them up sand/mud ramps with ropes on rollers or more likely sleds, and finished the pyramid in smooth limestone on the way down as they removed the ramp. (The center of the three Giza pyramids still has its smoothed cover near the top.)
There are several examples that show the evolution of the technique - the step pyramid at Sakkara built of much smaller blocks, expanded in stages, from a rectangular mastaba (tomb) to multiple larger steps. The next few the steps filled in. The “bent” pyramid, in the same area as other collapsed piles of rubble, where they figured out you could only make a pyramid so steep before it threatened to collapse. Some later pyramids, as the oldkingdom declined, were smaller, built with rubble fill around a wall of blocks and eventually collapsed…
The middle and new kingdoms found from the lesson of the pyramids, that a giant signpost advertising the tomb was an billboard invitation to robbers. They went the tunnel-tomb router (think Valley of the Kings).
It’s not, as the aliens would have you believe, that the pyramids came from nowhere full-blown and mysteriously well-designed. The progressive lessons of how they were conceived and how the design was executed in progressively greater scope is still in Egypt, and certainly worth seeing!
Thanks Mid2000, but I’m curious which experts have this certain knowledge and why there are still so many contending theories out there(based on my random online searches) as to precisely how the pyramids were built? Can you tell me which authors/experts I should be reading? Are there any links that have cite definitively which techniques were used for which pyramids?
davidmich
I don’t know for sure… I was reading “The Complete Pyramids” by Mark Lehner, for a complete rundown on the list of pyramids, some details of construction, interior passages, chambers, timeline, etc. As I said, you can see the evolution and decline of pyramid structures and design over the course of the old kingdom. They obviously found that a giant block was more effiecient than a bunch of small blocks when every stone block was cut by had with chisels and wedged.
If you want to know - was it a spiral ramp or a big long ramp to get the blocks up? We’ll probably never know. Logically, there’s no giant sand pile so if it was a giant ramp they sure dispersed the sand (or it blew away). A straight run ramp would be massive, especially if it were sand or mud. There’s be more volume in that than the pyramid. A spiral ramp built out from the central pyramid would only be a bit extra volume alongside the pyramid. It also allows the workmen to lay and shape the outside smooth sloped pyramid cladding on all four sides (as I said, working their way down as the ramp is removed). But finding the actual ramp or a depiction of it on a document of the time? Not yet.
Similarly, did they pull on a sled or rollers? hard to say, maybe a bit of both. Sure as heck you wouldn’t roll over the sand, they’d lay down boards if they did. You sure wouldn’t roll up a ramp. Maybe they’d pour water on the sand to “harden” it for sleds - this shows the same trick with a giant statue on a sled. (and quotes Lehner)
So it’s all little pieces that have to be put into a giant puzzle to answer the questions.
md2000 laid it out well. There are a lot of details we’ll never be sure about. We know they had rope, logs, copper tools, and a lot of people. There’s some evidence ramps were used. We’ll have to guess at the rest, but however they did it, they used a lot of manpower. He also mentions the evidence of development over time in the construction techniques. Learning to build foundations was important before starting on the immense structures at Giza. Cutting the huge stones from cliffsides was pretty easy, but they must have used up an incredible amount of copper for their tools in finishing the shape of the stones.
No, no, no. I disagree completely. I saw a documentary a few years ago which IMHO blows the whole “ramps made of sand” hypothesis right out of the water.
I’ll try to hunt down a link later tonight. But long story short is that they built one layer at a time and each layer had a stone ramp located near one of the edges but INSIDE THE BOUNDARY. On the next layer, they build another stone ramp ninety degrees from the first one. The ramps became tunnels which make a spiral all the way up to the top, but it’s not attached to the outside, it’s part of the interior structure. Then after it was all done they started hauling up loose stones to fill the tunnels. This hypothesis was first verified by gravimetric density readings and later by finding remnants of the tunnels themselves inside the pyramids. The whole idea was only proved in the last ten years or so.
Of course, a better explanation may come along in the future but right now this one fits way better than anything we figured out in the past. AFAIK this is the most current and sensible theory.
oops accidentally posted twice
Except, Occam’s razor says this does not make sense. The pyramids are incredibly ancient. (2500BC) They don’t know arches, so all construction was post-and-lintel, or corbelled, the roof progressively moved in each row of stones. (Google interior, Red Pyramid). I’ve been in the Red, the big and middle Giza, and the small pile of rubble at Sakkarra that IIRC was of Pepi II. The passages in most of the pyramids are not much more than 4 feet square until they reach the open chamber - “roof” of the passage is only one block across. To span multiple blocks wide in the chambers, the roofs are incredibly high. Corbelling wide tunnels at the edge of the pyramids would seem to be somewhat unstable; the rocks would have to be pushed into position into tight spaces. Pushing a huge rock into a place above another in an enclosed tunnel seems like a helluva lot of work - those blocks are 4 feet high or more. Unless the tunnel roof and floor is sloped, not stepped, eventually you have to push a block straight upward into place and support it while you put the ones underneath in place.
Good luck building the peak from the inside.
Plus, if they don’t have an exterior (spiral) ramp, it makes the finishing of the exterior in smooth sloped limetone blocks very awkward. The bottom of the third pyramid is granite, some smooth, some still unfinished - apparently they gave up the job near the end - maybe the king died.
Finally, the smallest of the three Giza pyramids has a huge gouge down the east side, courtesy of a treasure-hunting son of Saladin in the middle ages. If there was an obvious that part of the construction was a filled-in tunnel, you would see it here. (Sand floor, open gap where roof block didn’t get pushed all the way up, etc.)
Giza, conveniently, is a limestone bedrock, a perfect platform for several pyramids - except for that pesky big outcropping - oh wait, we can carve it into the head of a sphinx, and then build the rest of the sphinx with brick.
Watch this video and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
The Great Pyramid Mystery Solved - National Geographic Documentary - YouTube
The ramps are internal.
The one thing I have never seen critically examined is the logistics of building these pyramids.
Based on the currently available information, (I don’t have the exact numbers at my finger tips, but bear with me) it is said that the great pyramid was built within a 25 year period; it also contained several million large blocks.
Extrapolating from generally accepted information, building the pyramid would have required that one block be placed about every three minutes.
But think about the long tail here: cutting the block, transporting it “X” miles over river and dale, dragging it into place, and finally placing it. Once every three minutes.
This would have required an immense army of workers, composed of both skilled stone cutters and general muscle laborers.
All of these workers would have been fed and housed. Where did the food come from to feed them? How many acres of farmland was devoted to growing the food required to feed all of them?
Who paid for this food? How was the revenue raised to pay for it? Was the population of Egypt large enough to support this army? Was their economy so huge that it could produce the revenue needed to pay and fed this army?
As you can see, the logistics of building these pyramids are inconsistent with what we “know” about ancient Egypt.
Also, how and when was this army trained and taught the skills needed to cut and fit the stone? The army of stone cutters didn’t just appear overnight. So how was this army produced?
There is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.
I’m convinced that Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory is correct. Quoting from the Wikipedia article about pyramid construction: “In Houdin’s method, each ramp inside the pyramid ended at an open space, a notch temporarily left open in the edge of the construction.(see diagram) This 10m square clear space housed a crane that lifted and rotated each 2.5 ton block, to ready it for eight men to drag up the next internal ramp.” The National Geographic video shows this rather well, 46 minutes long, but I must admit I haven’t read the book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin, ISBN 978-0-06-165552-4, Collins, 2008.
So it still appears the case isn’t closed. There is no consensus on exactly how the pyramids were constructed. There are some convincing theories but no consensus. Would that be correct?
C’mon, man, just tell us how you think it really happened.
I don’t know. It looks to me like there’s a scholarly consensus, along with a lot outsider ideas. The Internet isn’t a particularly good way of researching humanities scholarship. You still need a good library for that.
Ispolkom, would that scholarly consensus follow along the lines of Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory, as in “The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery” by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin?
Now look at the link to the (somewhat small) diagram. It shows an immensely high corbelled ceiling. No such tunnels have been found in any of the pyramids, despite than many have collapsed and the third pyramid at Giza, Menkaure’s, has been gouged deeply down the side.
Logically, once you’ve built the pyramid of giant blocks, Why fill in the tunnels? As I said earlier, getting the top blocks into place in the cramped space to fill in the corbel - pretty challenging. Simpler to leave the space unfilled… but there are no such open spaces. A space left open as a tunnel, with corbelling, would be pretty obvious.
Wikipedia states the space between blocks was filled with gypsum or other filler. The roof are obviously would not be filled in, and the blocks would not even be that tight. Similarly, look at the corbel construction of the ceilings. Each block overhangs the one below by less than half, or else the block would tip in during construction - hence the very high ceilings as found for example in the Red Pyramid. That break in regular brickwork spacing would be obvious.
Even that diagram shows an external ramp as part of the construction component. If you have the open ramp, why build complicated tunnels? Now that the covering has been removed over the centuries, the entraces to the tunnels should be obvious. They are not.
Clever except - how do you get those stones up there? The purpose of the ramps was so you would not have to use a crane to haul rocks up.
Then I have to question the “crane” idea. How does that crane move? What do you use for pulleys or bearings that can hold several tons? What sort of swivel plate- How do you rotate the crane? (Logically, some guys pull on a rope from the side, attached to the end of the crane) How many accidents using primitive ropes to haul and lift giant blocks? Google for the medieval cranes used to haul rock to the top of cathedrals under construction. That’s a fairly monstrous piece of equipment. There’s no indication the old kingdom had this sort of tech.
So, yes, many methods are possible. If we avoid the complicated means, one cheap and simple method stands out - spiral ramps.
