Slashdot Mirror
Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt's 'Great Pyramid' Mystery (newsweek.com)
schwit1 was the first Slashdot reader to bring us the news. Newsweek reports:
Archaeologists believe they have found the key to unlocking a mystery almost as old as the Great Pyramid itself: Who built the structure and how were they able to transport two-ton blocks of stone to the ancient wonder more than 4,500 years ago...?
Experts had long established that the stones from the pyramid's chambers were transported from as far away as Luxor, more than 500 miles to the south of Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid, but had never agreed how they got there. However, the diary of an overseer, uncovered in the seaport of Wadi al-Jafr, appears to answer the age-old question, showing the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of the Nile to transport the giant blocks of stone.
According to a new British documentary Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.'s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer's team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid.
According to a new British documentary Egypt's Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.'s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer's team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid.
There's no way those people were smart enough to build the pyramids. They must have had help from white people.
#MAGA
This is a nice theory. Now they need to prove it's possible by actually using this method to excavate and move a stone as large as the largest one in the pyramids. Of course, they can't use any sort of modern technology to help them in any way.
Sometimes the simplest ways are the best ways.
Everyone knows the only way the pyramids could have been built was with the help of ancient aliens.
I always knew they used the tractor beams on their spaceships.
The mystery continues...
Aliens did it man. Everyone knows that. Flying saucers, tractor beams, glowing power crystals, the works.
Or they got enough pace on the waterways to pass the end of the last canal?
The base of the Great Pyramid may have been designed as a water pump. Maybe it was part of the waterworks.
Ramps, boats and good rope. I pretty much guessed that as a child but you know well done to those involved.
We wuz kangz en sheit.
Who is looking for the canals?
Foget Net neuatrality? These sites will kill internet as we know it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Those "archeologists" were not present there.
That "surveyer" was only part of a conspiracy to surpress the truth about our ancient overlords.
No ammount of "evidence" will change that.
I still can not conceive how that could be done by mere humans, therefore: Aliens!
Anything and everything else is all fake news.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
No need to get fancy about such ideas; levers, rollers, ramps, chisels, hammers, muscle. It's not only possible, it's obviously possible. They were metalworkers.
And that's not to say they didn't apply something, or several somethings, more clever to the problem, either - it's just that excavating such blocks can be done with those things and nothing more.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The comments section on this site has really gone downhill. Where did all of the intellectually brilliant and funny comments go? Could it be a new age of younger, less smart people due to frequent use of cell phones and Facebook? Has the NSA infested the community? Mass mind control?
I believe the correct answer is slaves. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a whip.
An old horror movie showed how the stone blocks were not stacked at first; that they were raised to allow human traffic to walk in between and access the pyramid's hidden chambers, until the 'slaves' arrived at the Pharaoh's final resting place. They pulled a switch that released these huge stone blocks that went through each floor and pulverized the supports and scaffolding while unleashing torrents of sand in the process, drowning and suffocating all the slaves, entombing them with their beloved ruler, and lowering the huge stone blocks until they were neatly stacked together, packed tightly even.
The real mystery is how they lifted these blocks up the structure. The descendant of the caste of temple builders in South India says they build a helical wall that spirals around the structure. The wall is filled with sand. Stones are rolled up the helical ramp and moved into place. Once the structure is complete, the scaffolding wall is broken, sand spills out, and the structure is reveled. How they build the Big Temple at Thanjavur
It is possible the Egyptians also used inclined planes, possibly even the same helical inclined plane. BTW the helical inclined plane is used day in day out by us, we call them the threads in nuts and bolts.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I thought it was well established a that the stones were poured in place using forms like concrete. A lot like how the Hoover Dam was constructed. The theory was supported with finding hairs sticking from the stones, as they likely fell from worker's heads into the slurry, and bubbles in the stones which are indicative of a pouring rather than a natural sedimentation.
These theories of having space aliens build them, or some lost advanced technology, were all very compelling when I was younger. I remember checking out books from the library on aliens building this and that, aliens visiting ancient civilizations and this being documented in cave paintings and such, and of "cryptozoologists" writing of animals that exist in out of focus photographs and wild imaginations. I've outgrown that. I just find it fascinating these theories of fantastic historical events persist as much as they do in this age of so many people having high definition cameras in their pockets and ready access to so much technical knowledge. I'm quite certain such fantasy will not go away, it's part of what makes us human.
Much more likely is that these pyramids were made with a limestone slurry poured into wooden forms built in place. The tightly fitted faces of the stones weren't from expertly carved blocks but from the cured blocks not adhering to the newly poured blocks. This would be difficult to prove without destructive evaluation of the blocks, which I can understand would be problematic logistically, politically, and for a lot of other reasons.
So, someone finds something that is supposedly from a person that worked on the pyramids. We've seen fakes before. We've misinterpreted ancient texts before. We've seen ancient fakes get misinterpreted before. This "mystery" has gone on for a very long time and nothing is going to rid us completely of it.
I just ponder on if someday in the future someone will find our modern construction and wonder how such a "primitive" culture could build something like the Hoover Dam.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This "great mystery" hasn't been such for a long time. Quarries carved rocks to make blocks, the blocks were moved onto barges and then the barges were sailed to places where they were required. Evidence for canals was established long before now. The only mystery is why anybody has such trouble understanding that ancient peoples weren't idiots.
Just watch out when the impatient/overworked/stressed out alien parents show up to pick after their kids.
Its not gonna be pretty.
That the primary witness has been dead for 4000 years.
...enough Jews in Egypt to do that?
Someone had to say it.
In Egypt, there are still large obelisks, and large carved stones, including granite!
Your solution doesn't explain those.
The pyramids were built by Christians as grain silos to store their wheat after the great flood. This is a proven fact that has been confirmed by high ranking members of the US government. Stories that you hear about them being made by "egyptians" for use as tombs are fake news promulgated by the liberal media who are trying to destroy Christian history.
Yah, those nut jobs in Ancient Aliens are gonna have a cow now.
Personally, I think the most obvious theory is likely to be the closest to the correct explanation: that the blocks WEREN'T quarried, but are some form of manmade cast stone made from ancient concrete.
If they were cast instead of directly quarried, the builders could have just built the whole thing like a modern freeway embankment... build the perimeter, backfill the inside with sifted & graded crushed rock & sand. Maybe put down an occasional layer of cloth to stabilize it horizontally (knowing the cloth will eventually decay, but only really NEEDING it for stabilization during construction). Cast the next row of stones, move them horizontally into place, and backfill the interior up to the next level. Stir, rinse, and repeat until you're done. Modern retained-earth construction obviously goes quite a bit further, (like using steel cables to pull the retaining walls inward so they can be vertical instead of sloped, and using precast wall segments instead of casting them on-site), but the basic idea is the same.
Moving big, heavy things HORIZONTALLY is fairly straightforward. So is moving crushed-rock cementious slurry up a hill in small buckets. If they're cast stone, the pyramids' construction basically just becomes a matter of having lots of money, immense HR management resources, and good supply-chain management.
From what I've read, Egypt's antiquities ministry is part of the reason why relatively little is known about the "nuts and bolts" construction details of the pyramids. It WANTS to preserve the aura of mystery, because the official narrative drives tourism and brings enormous amounts of money into Egypt. From their point of view, the absolute WORST thing that could happen is if someone were to demonstrate that the pyramids were no more special than a random freeway embankment.
The point is that indeed there must have been some pretty sophisticated tools at work, well beyond what is attributed the ancient peoples.
The mystery is NOT whether ancient peoples moved large blocks, but rather HOW they did so without sophisticated setups that they weren't supposed to have known about.
Even stranger is the fact that the oldest structures (some perhaps much older than has been attributed) seem to be the grandest and most perplexing.
The mystery is: What kinds of technology did the ancients actually have, and why did they seem to lose their knowledge of these things.
Especially important is the fact that Egypt did not use slaves for construction.
And at some point in the future it could well be revealed that this papyrus that was magically found, was produced by a dubious artifacts dealer, for a good profit. Most "artifacts" since the 1950's are fruit a very lucrative trade. The work of these forgers is so good that even the best experts are sometimes fooled, often for decades.
Shouldnt be marveled. Monuments to death and slavery.
I learned that almost five decades ago.
#DeleteFacebook
You've heard the expression "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Theoretical calculation can show why something is IMPOSSIBLE. It cannot show that there is no unforeseen, insurmountable impediment. Only actually doing it can prove that there is not anything that makes it impossible to actually do.
Having said that, accomplishing each part, separately, is strong evidence that the entire process can be done. If people build appropriately sized canals in similar geography using only tools and technologies available to the ancient Egyptians, and they can (separately) build appropriate barges, and another group can move the blocks to where the barges would have been, it's reasonable to think they probably could have combined each of these steps.
Dr. Daniel Jackson isn't posting here any more.
We all know they were built by aliens. Don't screw up a good story with facts.
I remember from about 15 years ago a documentary on putting up obelisks in which a number of archaeologists tried to do it as a practical demonstration. They tried elaborate schemes with sand running out of boxes and so on. The foreman of the team of hired help that constructed these things begged to be allowed to try his own method, and on the last day he was allowed to try. He built an A frame and a few other bits and with his team of men it took them half an hour once that was constructed. It shows the value of practical experience. So in this case it would be good to get some engineers skilled in hydrology, construction, shipping, etc., with good practical experience to look over the evidence in the diary and see if they could come up with a suitable way of implementing what it hints at (I imagine given the expense you'd have to simulate it in silico, though) to see if it makes sense. That sounds like it would be a really fun research project.
That's a very nice insight.
I read they were moved using an alien transportation system powered by the Sun's harmonics. The book had equations and everything.
Twice the the time back to the ancient Greek philosophers.
12 centuries before Moses and Ramses II.
Heiroglyphs 7 centuries old, but a mong first substantive documents.
Only a few cuneiform tablets as old as this.
Ancient Aliens.
Dunno why my idea never caught on :-) .
Ask any sculptor, and they'll say "take a block of wood/stone and remove everything that doesn't look like a [final object].
Clearly the Egyptians set up a gigantic block of stone and then carved away everything that didn't look like a stepped pyramid.
Waiting for my Nobel Prize..
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Everyone already knew that the Ancient Egyptians use barges to move the massive stone. They built barges as big as football fields to move obelisks. The mystery is not how they got the stones to the site of the great pyramid, it is how they got the stones to the top of the great pyramid.
First. Where are the remains of the "man made canals" ?
Second. They wouldn't even be able to build anything. They found the pyramids there. They tried to reproduce and failed.
Sans! I, the Great Papyrus, have discovered that the pyramids were built by HUMANS!
They answered the easy part about how they moved the bricks horizontally. So how did these cavemen move them vertically to build something that tall?