Slashdot Mirror
Pyramid Stones Were Poured, Not Quarried
brian0918 writes "Times Online is reporting that French and American researchers have discovered that the stones on the higher levels of the great pyramids of Egypt were built with concrete. From the article: 'Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.' They found 'traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystallization. The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.'"
"They found traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystallization. "
That is what I call concrete evidence!
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
wouldn't the aliens have just created them out of random molecules in the air using some sort of crazy technology?
Living With a Nerd
How are we supposed to believe that an advanced alien race would still be using something so mundane as concrete?
So aliens poured the pyramids? That explains it.
My dad always used to tell me that when Alexandria was burned, all the publications holding the Roman recipe for concrete went with it. That, he claimed, was why all concrete poured was inferior to the Roman Aqueducts. And why it wasn't until 1948 that the right combination of limestone & other minerals was discovered to be able to resist water and hold that high a level of precision. Cement/concrete are by nature porous surfaces and so often sap water which causes structural problems. The fact that the some of the aqueducts still hold their accuracy within inches of their architectural specifications after 2000 years is nothing to overlook.
If Egyptians (for thousands of years prior to the Romans) had experimented with or refined this process and if an Aristotelean (such as Demetrius of Phaleron) had moved this information to Alexandria, that would explain how the structures like the aqueducts were constructed with such high quality mixtures.
I have one tiny problem with the summary as the article states: While summary uses the word cast: I would like to point out that this is known as forming concrete and not casting concrete. The difference is like the difference between pouring concrete for a foundation of a house and laying brick. Laying brick is casting while pouring concrete (like the article alludes to) is called 'forming.'
This might sound like a small matter but laying brick & forming concrete walls are two entirely different professions.
In all honesty, if you were to ask me to construct a pyramid today--knowing what I know, I would build the core of the pyramid out of laid brick. And then I would, starting from the bottom, form up the angled sides and fill in those areas. If you're wondering why I would take this route, try it with paper. Cut out blocks of paper from a notebook without making marks and try to make a perfect angled edge between them. Pretty difficult. Now try it in three dimensions with 2000 year old tools.
It makes sense that they would have both technologies (like the article states), one quarried for huge bricks and the other formed up ash, salt & lime. It would also explain a lot of technologies the Romans had.
My work here is dung.
That's way - way too old news!
... b.b.b.but what about the evidence we've found throughout the years about the workers in the area? And what about the timelines?
I would think that this will throw a bone in some of their theories, so I'm surprised that the two researchers were even allowed on to the site... At any rate, this explains why the separation between the "stones" is so tight in certain places.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Incidently, von Daeniken claimed exactly that some thirty years ago (?) in his book 'Erinnerungen an die Zukunft' (Memories of the Future), and claimed further that LoneStar were using the pyramid recipe. I didn't expect it would ever come to that, but now I have to say: Daeniken was right in this case (and was proven a rotten liar in dozens of other cases, like that of the 6000 year old battery).
Question 2: Is there evidence that the Egyptians used this technology elsewhere? I find it difficult to believe that they would've evolved this kind of technology (concrete) and used it exclusively for the task of pyramid-building.
The pyramids weren't built. They *landed*.
They told those history shows that they lugged those stones up ramps and whatnot!
-Those who know do not say, Those who say do not know
Strange if true, the romans did use concrete to create lots of forms in buildings.
Why if they had a kind of concrete would they be building blocks??
It's not logic those people in that time where handy.
Probaply more handy then a lot of 'modern' people who only know how to right click...
Just explain logix would be create walls of this stuf (not even besed on blocks) then fill it up with concrete.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Dr Daniel Jackson knows the truth
In an era before the invention of the wheel, it wouldn't have been any easier to drag a 20-ton concrete mixer truck chassis up the pyramid than to just drag up a 20-ton block of stone.
The first time was when a researcher about 10 years ago (give or take 10) claimed they were poured because he found a human hair embedded in one.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It explains all the pottery found around the pyramids. They formed long passing lines to send water to fill the concrete mixing troughs. And they built casts with lumber, also found around the pyramids...it all makes sense now.
Or, aliens from mars mixed the concrete on their spaceships and poured the casts while hovering over each apex...
There's no mention of aggregate, the sand and gravel that cement glues together to make concrete.
I can only imagine archeologist's reactions when our society is kaput.
"The Americans had slaves that carried concrete slabs to form long unending structures. We also have evidence that these were called "free-ways". We think these "free-ways" were in worship to some sort of God and the metal heaps on these "free-ways" offerings for this God."
If the Egyptians knew how to form and pour concrete, why on Earth would they drag huge blocks of limestone and granite around to build the rest of the structure? (Maybe Union rules negotiated by the Lower Nile chapter of the Amalgamated Pyramid Craftsmen?) Why not make the whole structure out of concrete? And where are the form marks -- the marks from the boards or whatever that were used to make the form for each block? Granted they'd probably be weathered off from the exposed surfaces, but they should still be there on protected surfaces.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I've heard this theory before but from what I know the mix they are talking about it isn't nearly as strong as regular limestone. The slower crytalization pattern of natural limestone gives it the strength. I question that artifical limestone would be strong enough for even the top layers of a structure that big. Pure limestone isn't concrete. They aren't talking about concrete, that would be obvious if used, they are talking about reclaimed limestone. There are a lot of problems with that theory. Not the least of which is how would the eygptians make that much lime for the stone? You have to heat the lime dust to a very high temperature to break the chemical bonds. It wouldn't be a small undertaking on it's own and would take huge amounts of energy, charcoal essentially. Wood was scarce. There is no other evidence that they made lime concrete so I have serious doubts.
... just can't get the slaves these days, can you? I remember when we used to use real stones, hewn out of quarries many miles away...
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
For once I actually RTFA. The article claims that the rocks used at the top of the pyramids react differently than rocks used at the bottom of the pyramids when poked with some new fangled methodology. I'm actually surprised that it's possible to make limestone that is so similar to naturally formed rock that it took until 2006 for this to be figured out.
The majority of the pyramid material was still quarried.
Go look at a concrete highway sometime, and check whether the concrete is continuous (like asphalt*) or whether it has regular seams. There's a reason for the seams: namely, that concrete expands and contracts with temperature. If we poured roads as once continuous chunk they'd expand in the heat and buckle, or contract in the cold and crack. The seams are there to relieve the temperature-induced strain.
Now, consider the fact that the Egyptions lived in the middle of the desert. One particular feature of such a climate is that there are wide extremes of temperature: it gets really hot during the day, and really cold at night. Once you realize that the Egyptions probably had prior experience with the materials before trying to build the biggest structure in the world out of them, you might expect that they'd realize the same thing current civil engineers do, and put in releases to prevent cracking. In 3D, this would mean pouring the concrete in blocks.
(*note: asphalt can be laid in continuous strips because it's much less brittle than concrete, at least at normal service temperatures.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think it's plausable that the stones at the top were built at a later time than the rest of the pyramid -- perhaps even as repair work. Naturally, those structures take a long time to build, and perhaps they just changed their minds and switched to pouring the blocks at the top (on location so to speak). Or, perhaps a later dynasty decided to repair the tops (which if we look at the pyramids today, appear to be the most fragile), and used a different method.
I always thought that the mortar used was more amazing than the blocks themselves. I had this book named the great pyramid decoded which explained that there were blocks held together with sheets of mortar that were in some places as thin as a sheet of aluminum foil. I have read elsewhere on the web that the chemical composition of the mortar is known but that it can't be reproduced today. I may be easily fascinated by this stuff, and there may be an better mortar now, but I just think that is really cool.
Yes. It goes like this:
Bird's eye bird's eye, dancing guy, two chicks looking at each other, bird's eye, chicks again, that dog faced god looking to the heavens, some women throwing wheat into the air, guys picking ground, bird's eye, god of something, mound of cement.
There you go!
As a student at Drexel, I have had the privilege of hearing about this research firsthand - it is more than convincing. There is no doubt in my mind that he is 100% correct. For those of you in doubt - he is not claiming that all stones were "cast" or "molded" into places. Only the ones at the top and on the outside of most of the "newer" pyramids. The older pyramids do not use this technology. It is believed the egyptians discovered this technology as they were building and their pyramids became more sofisticated as a result. You can just look at the pictures:
r /BentPyramid/EgyptianPoliceman.jpg
r /AllPyramids/StaircaseInsideRedPyramid.jpg
i d.html?ref=science
The Bent Pyramid (an older pyramid), its obvious blocks put into place from a quarry up until where it bends.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/Egypt/Dahshu
Now, look inside the Red Pyramid (a newer pyramid), tell me they carved 26 million bricks with such perfect precision. They carved Limestone, using copper tools (ahem, softer than limestone), so perfectly together that you can't even fit a playing card between them? I don't think so.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/Egypt/Dahshu
This article can also be found on the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/science/01pyram
In all honesty, if you were to ask me to construct a pyramid today--knowing what I know, I would build the core of the pyramid out of laid brick.
A lot of the later pyramids actually were built with a core of laid brick, and cased in stone. These didn't hold up as well as the older, all stone pyramids, like the Great Pyramid, because the bricks were made out of mud and eventually turned to dust. Today, a lot of the brick pyramids basically resemble mounds of dirt and rock, with the original pyramid shape just barely distinguishable.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
the aliens gave them cement trucks?
...the archaeologists were trying to cement their relationship with the aliens, who were stealing all the limelight.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A book I have - published back in 1988 proposed the same idea. It's a good read. Here's the Amazon link if anyone wants to try and pick up a copy:
The Pryamids
"Nothing is so important that you cannot make fun of it." -Clarke
is building his own Stonehege - BY HAND, ALONE.
http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/
The latest Slashdot meme.
I wish I hadn't of posted so I could have modded you instead. MOD PARENT UP
Sorry but it's not like these results are written in stone, so take them with a grain of sand. Other scientists can slowly chip away at his new theory.
It seems that if you haul enough blocks to the pyramid, you might just come up with a better way to get the job done!
As the GP said, you can't prove scientific theories like you can prove mathematical theorems. You find supporting evidence for it, and at some point, you accept the theory as a pretty darn good descriptor of what's actually going on.
As for the entire law vs hypothesis thing - complete claptrap as well. There's no rhyme or reason why something is a law versus a theory. Generally, laws of physics come from the time when science was still lumped together with ethics and neurology under philosophy (with science called natural philosophy, if I remember correctly). It came from the idea that the universe is ordered, and that there are laws that govern it. All we had to do was find out what those laws were. Now we know (a little) better.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I know you were kidding .. but just in case .. What they may have done, you can see in India today when their building buildings and even roads. That is, a long of queue of literally hundreds of people passing buckets of cement all the way up to the top of the pyramid. They can choose to mix the concrete up there (passing up dry cement mix and water buckets) .. or the mixed cement itself. Either way .. with the bucket brigade system.. you don't need a cement truck to be hauled up there.
According to Wikipedia the workforce on the Great pyramid of Giza was "an average workforce of 14,567 people and a peak workforce of 40,000". Also mentioned is that it's reckoned didn't have the use of pulleys, wheels or iron tools. It may have taken them 10 to 20 years to build.
I wonder how long the pyramid would take to build today?
One thing's for sure it'll be mad expensive.
I have a lot of trouble believing these findings. It's well known that the ancient Egyptians were a very 'slow on the uptake' sort of people. This is reasonably apparent with their crazy style of writing. The Egyptians had some notion that rhyming appeased the gods or something to that effect. So naturally all their writings rhymed. Take this classic example: 'Man with a snake, boat on a lake. Bird in the sky, weird curly eye'. If you could say the Egyptians contributed ANYTHING to modern society that would have to be rhyming. Before the Egyptians came along no society had developed an actual working rhyming system. The ancient Greeks came closest. Homer's Odyssey was the closest the Greeks ever came to an actual rhyming system, though, in its native Latin the Odyssey will cause a sane man to go mad.
One might wonder what this has to do with the ancient Egyptians capacity to mix concrete. Well it has a LOT to do with it. You have to remember the ancient Egyptians were very keen on rhyming. The entire mummification process rhymed, as well as all the names of all the pharaohs. So it's only logical that all their building materials should rhyme as well. Concrete doesn't rhyme with anything. Therefore the ancient Egyptians didn't use it.
This if you will, is the cornerstone of Egyptology.
I don't own a snook, and if I did I wouldn't leave it cocked.
"Oy! The sand gets in EVERYWHERE!"
Very likely the Romans did not invent this technique. Their written language was bought from the Etruscans and much of their science and philosophy was forcibly taken from the Greeks. Much of their religion was bought or stolen from other cultures. Original, they were not. As such, it seems extraordinarily likely that something as imaginative as exploiting chemistry to develop high-grade concrete was not Roman in origin but was extracted from elsewhere. As a rule, Greeks were more theoretical than practical and there's no obvious sign that they had much in the way of advanced material science. The Egyptians were much better on material science, so the idea that the Romans could have obtained concrete from them is very reasonable.
It would be better if we had some text in Egyptian that noted a technological exchange or even how they developed concrete - we could then compare the product of their recipe with the Roman product. However, the current view is that there's far more to discover, so this is entirely possible.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
the stones on the higher levels of the great pyramids of Egypt were built with concrete
Whoa, that's heavy!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Whatever method they used had to be a sensible method. It is human nature to device techniques that minimize effort. Whether it was poured concrete, a method involving hydraulic power which was plentiful with the pyramids being next to the longest river in the world or some here-to-fore yet unknown technology, there had to be a relatively easy way to do it. For example, in Easter Island, the latest belief is that natives built woden "railways" or "railtracks" over which the stones could slide with rather minimal effort.
Personally I've always favored a mixture of poured concrete and water powered elevators.
The limestones they are talking about used to cover the pyramid to give it flat sides, and the only remains left at Giza can be seen at the very top of the middle pyramid in this photo. (FWIW, this is the pyramid of Khafre (Chepren) - next the the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), which has had all of its limestone block cladding removed.)
The third large pyramid at Giza (Menkare/Mycerinus, foreground in the group photo) was intended to be covered in granite cladding. ed
FOAMHENGE!!!
http://www.naturalbridgeva.com/foamhenge.html
Duh, Didn't anyone see the move The 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston? Those were obviously synthesized bricks not quarried. EEEdiots
The tendency to disparage the Roman Empire of the East is mostly an artifact of the early modern historians that wanted to demonize everything that happened between the glory days of Rome and Greece and the modern era. This tendency culminates in Gibbon's Decline and Fall in which he has almost nothing good to say about the Byzantines.
Also, the bronze technology of the time was more advanced than anything known to Victorian civilization - Burton writes about the bronze chisel (found inside a pyramid or temple, I forget) that was harder than wrought iron when he's discussing the switch from bronze weapons to iron weapons in The Book of the Sword.
We know that the ancient Egyptians had bronze tools hard enough to work limestone. We have at least one example.
Read the summary again. Note the mention of "higher levels".
It really is too bad Alexandria was burned. If I could undo one thing in history, I would be tempted to pick that one.
Don't worry with electronic storage and innumerable backups and copies of information we won't face this problem again. Of course with DRM we won't need to burn all of human knowledge, we can just lose the keys to decrypt it.
This is a quote from this page:p hp?showtopic=81834
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.
"The Great Pyramid was built by the people of Atlantis after the fall of Atlantis by the Egyptian God Thoth. It is an impossibility for people to build without extremely advanced technology and this is proven by the fact that we today with our best equipment could not even come close to the Great Pyramids perfection, not even on a scale model 1/25th the size of the original."
"It was built with anti-gravity technology which utilizes magnetic electricity to pick things up and since is so much more powerful than gravity it can literally pick up several ton blocks and suspend them in mid air with almost no effort at all. This is a proven fact as the stones used to build the Great Pyramid came from quite far away and the only trees that could have been used as rollers were infact trees that were farmed for food. Even the Egyptians themselves specifically say they were taught by beings they called Gods but were infact just much more advanced versions of ourselves from another world that came here and built Atlantis."
To give credit, the name I believe to be first associated with this theory is Joseph Davidovits. He's been claiming poured ("geopolymerized") pyramids for a long time.
There's some more info here, about 15% down the page.
Davidovits referred to the concrete as "geopolymeric", which is surely what inspired the title to the editor. As far as I remember, his approach was still far from Von-Danikenesque and deserved serious consideration.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
> The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were ...or if one accepts that aliens did it.
> quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts
> that they were cast like concrete.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No FSCKING DUH!!!!!!!!
:P
And to think... damnit, I was laughed out of school when I was little for saying it.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Just an idea, but there might be very few unexposed surfaces that might have form marks, assuming a full wooden form was used for the first formed block and then the neighboring blocks were used for all but the exposed external surface.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
If they used concrete, they wouldn't have needed all the slaves. The head guy would have given the contract to his brother-in-law, who then got 40 of his friends (who take turns taking breaks) to do all the concrete work. Budget for a "refresh" every 10 years or so due to cracks. See...couldn't have happened.
Tau'ri! You shall die for your insolence!
Was that the entire block, or some sort of 'casing' material?
its also possble that several techniques were used. And dont forget its missing part of the structure due to thivery and time, so who is to say what really is going on here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
is building his own Cathedral - with RECYCLED materials and tools, ALONE
3 %ADnez
3 /Cathedral_of_Justo_Gallego.JPG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2
exp(i*pi)+1=0
"It speaks to some basic human needs, that there is a tomorrow - it's not all going to be over in a big flash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids - human beings built them because they're clever and they work hard. And 'Star Trek' is about those things." ~Gene Roddenberry
People often make the incorrect assumption that people in the past were somehow not as intelligent as present day people, so we concoct these crazy conclusions that aliens built the pyramids and stone henge. Seriously, if we ever are able to travel to other planets that are inhabited with intelligent life, would we build shit and then leave without a trace?
Concrete is not really THAT different from technology we knew they had: plastering.
The pyramids were originally covered in a limestone plaster veneer which would have given them smooth sides rather than the jaggies we know today. It can still be seen on small areas on some pyramids but most of that smooth plaster layer has been eroded over time by the sand and wind and rain. Or low-res game graphics. Take your pick.
The point is that the plaster was installed using the exact same set of ingredients, tools and technologies that could also have been used to produce the concrete. If they knew how to do one, they might know how to do the other.
Modern analogy: we know how to build Intel PCs. Using many of the same parts, you can build an AMD PC. That's sort of the difference between plaster and concrete. Kinda.
Either way, there's not a quantum jump from one to the other.
Kudos to the builders for coming up with a concrete mix that has managed to fool scientists for hundreds of years. To some future civilization, our modern freeway interchanges will look like water-eroded structures or something created by aliens.
Sig for hire.
Wow, dude.
I told them not to subcontract. Can't have done that bad of a job if we are only figuring this out now.
The evidence was pretty conclusive even back then. IIRC, what tipped them off was the fact that there were organic inclusions in some of the blocks (not fossils, but actual bits of grass and wood) that they were able to date w. carbon dating techniques. I don't see how "modern analysis techniques" can add much to that.
--MarkusQ
If you're wondering why I would take this route, try it with paper. Cut out blocks of paper from a notebook without making marks and try to make a perfect angled edge between them. Pretty difficult. Now try it in three dimensions with 2000 year old tools.
The tools weren't 2000 years old when they were using them, wise guy.
He was found stoned?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The US government was patterned after deviants!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But Sam was Serious, its about aliens!!
A tamper is a device designed to make sand nice and flat for placing those cute interlocking blocks people sometimes use instead of tarmac on their driveways.
.
.
Anyway, the tamper is basically a big heavy object with a flat bottom and a two stroke gasoline engine mounted to it. When sitting dead, the thing weighs enough to make moving it a hefty undertaking. (I used to work in a machine rental shop, so I know this directly.) But when you set it running, the thing vibrates. When it's vibrating, it's suddenly like pushing an air-hockey puck. Not weightless, but the next best thing, since the tamper is essentially air-bourn by millimeters many times per second. You barely have to apply any pressure to make it drift.
Okay. Next thought. .
Sympathetic vibration. Every object in the world has a natural frequency to which it is tuned. The 'C' string on a guitar vibrates at 'C'. Your house and car also have their own native frequencies. This is why your car rattles when you hit a certain speed, but stops when you pass that speed. (Actually, I know a music student who told me that one of the more clever auto-company innovations was to make the patterns in car tires irregularly shaped so that they would create dissonant rhythms and thus avoid the creation of big standing waves as their rubber textures repeated struck the pavement while rolling. This cuts down on the noise cars make as they drive. I don't know if this helps make cars shake less, but it's a neat bit of info, eh?) Anyway, Tesla was excited by the fact that all objects had a specific tuning, and demonstrated that if you put energy into an object at its natural frequency, it would start to vibrate, and if you put energy in faster than the energy could dissipate, the object would eventually shake itself apart. Oh, that's so cool!
Now. . , back to Egypt.
If you were to use the right harmonics to put enough energy into a big block of stone and get it vibrating on its natural frequency, and if you could get it vibrating enough so that it was actually leaving the ground in microscopic amounts as it shook, then you could move it in exactly the same manner you can move a sand tamper. There is evidence that ancient cultures understood these principals, though it is the type of evidence which your run of the mill scientist would probably risk losing his funding over if s/he was seen paying too much interest in it. It's a funny old world.
--Interestingly, the same knowledge could also potentially be used to grind blocks to perfect fits with other blocks once they are in place. You just vibrate the stone and move it back and forth upon the stone you've just placed it on top of until the surfaces where the two contact are ground to the kind of perfect fits observed in many monolithic structures, where you cannot even push a playing card between the stones. Nobody has really offered a more elegant explanation, but again, there's that loss of funding issue. So it's chisels, throat-clearing and the-other-way-looking among the orthodox thinkers of our day.
Though, I suppose when you're done you can pour some concrete over the structure and smooth that out so you get a nice triangle-y finish.
Okay. Warning: Tin-Foil Hat stuff coming up. Forbidden thinking generally leads in that direction for a reason, and you may begin to see why. .
The problem with discussing this stuff openly, and the reason it is not, is that the technology of harmonic resonance is a very powerful concept which leads to all manner of different kinds of thinking. When absolutely everything has a wavelength, you can start to come up with some very powerful technologies and ask some interesting questions. Like, what happens when you find the vibrational wavelength of a given brain wave pattern and broadcast that? Can you inflict emotions or other nervous functions? Well, yes, actually, you can.
Here's a neat little article which mentions casually, (and rather beside the point), that they were using an
I've been aware of this 'concrete pyramid' theory for years, but one still nags me. The pharao wanted to be encased for all eternity and at the time they were already aware of the thomb robbers. So instead of building fake chambers and maze entrance, why didn't they just pour concrete through the entire entrance corridor ? That would have solved the problem.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
So aliens gave us the secret to concrete. This explains everything!
OK, I give up my moderation rights to share with you a 2002 video (in French) about an experiment on the "egyptian" concrete casting.
Enjoy.
This post is displayed with recycled electrons
Anyone who has ever made soap would tell you that fireplace ashes are a good source of lye, but I'm not sure what you would have to burn to find lime in the ashes. Unless, of course that paragraph was trying to describe how to make slaked lime, which is an ingredient in mortar.
To make slaked lime you start with ground or powdered limestone, which is then baked in a kiln. Primitive lime kilns were nothing more than a pile of pulverized limestone covered in brush and branches which was then covered with a thick coating of mud. The branches were then set on fire, baking the limestone and then mud acting quite a bit like a brick oven or kiln. After the fires have cooled, you would have quicklime (calcium oxide), some really caustic stuff, but when water is added or it is left exposed to the air, you get slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), which although not as good as portland cement, does make a good mortar, and so I'm guessing could be used in this cement/concrete.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is the article is wrong, but how exactly it is wrong I'm not sure.
And blamed Christianity in all its forms for the not only the devestation of western Europe (the thirty years war) but also the dark ages of western europe. See Diderot's claim that humanity would not be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
If it's poured then why is is separate blocks? Why not just one big piece?
Makes no sense to me...
And, um, wouldn't they need an awful lot of wood to make that many molds? Where would they get that much wood from?
I think it's much more likely that they had some nice rollers/wheels which we don't know about.
No sig today...
"I'm assuming that the separation between the blocks is close to the same throughout the pyramid."
It isn't, it's only the outer stones which are well fitted.
No sig today...
The facing stones were made of marble, not limestone...that's why they were stolen while the rest of the pyramid was left intact.
This whole story sounds wrong to me. It fails to add up on so many levels, the chief of which is that making concrete needs more resources than chiseling stone (wood!). Doing it with concrete would be actually be more expensive..
No sig today...
The reason this whole article is rubbish is simple - concrete would be more expensive to produce than stone - it needs lots of wood and other stuff which is in very short supply in Egypt.
Most of the pyramid theorists need to get off their asses and actually put in a few days hard labor - find out what's really possible when you put your back into something. The "mystery" of how the pyramids were built would soon disappear.
No sig today...
That sounds more like Robert Nathan's DIGGING THE WEANS (ca. 1956).
To paraquote (being too lazy to excavate my own copy from the ruins of my library): "They called themselves US, but we prefer to refer to them as the Weans."
One chapter went on about the morning ablutions (shaving etc.) to the Weans' presumed god.
The book is a brilliant jab at archeologists' desire to pigeonhole every ancient activity or artifact into some known category, preferably religious.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Egypt has had a long history, but not completely unbroken. Assyrians conquered Egypt in 670 BC, and of course Alexander did again in 332 BC. But long before that, technologies had good chances of being lost. They had plenty of opportunities to lose everything in civil wars around 2400's BC, the First Intermediate Period around 2200's BC, or if it lasted that long, when the Hyksos invaded in 1600's BC.
3,500 years is a loooong time for even one series of dynasties to rule. The Great Pyramid was from the 4th dynasty, and Alexander conquered the 31st dynasty. Almost certainly, this knowledge was destroyed before Alexandria was founded.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Personally, i prefer the Bible's account, which makes the straw man's argument.
Have you read my journal today?
You have a point there, because there IS a sort of smooth layer on the pyramids which is wearing away. If you go onsite you can see that one of the pyramids only has a sort of cap left at the top, the rest is eroded.
:-).
:-).
..
It's been an absolute *shocking* amount of work to build those things. I remember doing the tourist thing and walking out of the bus with a camera. I was slightly distracted by the heat, it's so hot there it's like walking into a wall, and 2 secs later your sweat glands spontaneously combust into steam
Then I looked ahead, up, and then up some more because the darn things are so high you need to look up quite a bit to see the top. They are absolutely friggin' HUGE, and I don't think we could even do this today even if we had unlimited resources and no laws/greens/labour shortages to get in the way. I really can't comprehend know how they did manage it unless they had help from from some heavy haulage UFOs..
In contrast, the Sphinx was actually a lot smaller, but as my only reference for its size came from Asterix and Obelix cartoons I guess that was to be expected
Even if they built with 'poured concrete' it still an insane amount of work to transport the material, and that heat would progress the chemical reaction so much quicker that I have trouble believing it to be actually doable. However, the silly things are there, thumbing their noses at my assertion that it can't be done either way so there's a lesson in there somewhere
It's a must-see sight IMHO - it's almost impossible to tell you how large and massive they are until you stand at the edge of one and crane your neck to see the top.
Insert
And as we all know, they were used as landing sites for spaceships.
Art, is that you?
I think we might have found Hoffa.