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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.
The base of the Great Pyramid may have been designed as a water pump. Maybe it was part of the waterworks.
Why cannot use any modern technology to prove its feasability?
I mean we had a lot of people die during this process. You could prably measure the force of a thousand people to move a stone 1 meter. Then use heavy machinery to test the rest of the process.
They don’t need to make a whole structure. Just each of the tricky parts as a proof of concept.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's easy to suspect and hypothesize. It's quite another thing to prove it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Why would the aliens necessarily be ancient? Maybe they were just alien kids playing with blocks, and now that they've grown up they've moved on to other worlds.
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've got an old mule and her name is Nenet
Fifteen years on the Khufu Canal
She's as good an old worker as you're gonna get
Fifteen years on the Khufu Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
Filled with giant blocks and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Luxor to Khufu - Ho!
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Khufu Canal
#DeleteChrome
The workers were not slaves. There are payroll records to prove it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
Water locks and water channels are already proven technologies. Even ancient China had them.
Once the water is level, it doesn't take much energy to pull a vessel on a channel. For instance in France, I've seen a horse pull a multi-ton vessel with no working motor without much effort at all.
And once the vessel is inside the pyramid and assuming the pyramid acts like a giant water reservoir, then filling up that reservoir and raising the water level, and then pulling the vessel to the side where you need the blocks shouldn't take much energy either.
The only tricky part might be the ancient water pumping mechanism and how efficient it was before the water would evaporate or seep away.
In Egypt, there are still large obelisks, and large carved stones, including granite!
Your solution doesn't explain those.
My explanation does not have to. I'm not trying to explain the construction technique of every stone structure from ancient Egypt, only how some of the large stones came to be in the pyramids. Even the people that believe in the use of poured lime slurry blocks will agree that some of the stones were quarried far away and brought in with boats, sledges, and muscle. Perhaps they used the large stones as the forms, not wood. There was not a lot of wood in ancient Egypt.
Carving granite was done in ancient Egypt, I don't recall anyone disputing this. Those that do will likely think of fantastic explanations of aliens bringing them forges capable of forming granite into shapes. Then they'll explain how all of this technology was lost without a trace. It doesn't take aliens from a distant planet to explain these things, just more imagination and some understanding of physics, chemistry, and engineering.
People like to point to the 10 ton blocks of granite in the pyramids to "prove" that they had access to heavy machinery. I remember in high school the track team picking up the coach's truck (admittedly a small truck) and putting it sideways in its parking spot as a joke. That's 2 or 3 tons lifted by a bunch of teenagers on a whim. Get a much larger group of motivated adults, and with planning, they'll move 10 ton blocks great distances and to great heights. They'll do this with tools made of bronze and wood too.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Thanks to Obama and Hillary there is an abundance of illiterate undocumented laborers ready to be exploited for the task!
They're poor and desperate, so they're necessarily illiterate, and came here because of Hillary? You've already called them rapists and murderers, Mr. Trump, so you need not continue to insult and demonize them.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
I am aware of this, but they got the stone from near a river and they built the pyramids near the same river. It's impressive that they did it at all I grant and the technical details are interesting. But I'd really like to know how they built Stonehenge with Welsh stone. No river there.
No...."Prove what was said in the papyrus can be done" was the challenge. All it takes is showing that it is physically possible.....you are asking a different question "Prove they did it". OK....The papyrus said so....that's all you get from archaeology.
Whatever race they were, they were using slaves. We should hate the Egyptians solely because they used slavery.
Well, Yul Brunner notwithstanding, the currently accepted theory is that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but by paid labourers.
Stephan
Actually there is DNA evidence that the original founders of Egypt were Indo-European.
Since Indo-European is a language, part of a cultural complex that spread over many different populations, I find that hard to believe. Do you have any reliable sources? Of course there is European DNA in Egypt - it was very much part of the Greek and Roman worlds. However, I'm not aware of any linguistic evidence for PIE ever playing a role in Egypt before Alexander's conquest.
Stephan
Islam is not a threat. Extremist Islam is a threat, it's not the same thing. Extremist Christianity is a threat as well, like any extremist sect or ideology.
I have not seen Obama being a communist sympathizer, though that's a phrase seldom heard these days, invented by the anti-commie extremist of Joe McCarthy who I thought was still dead.
As for Trump, he's automatically dangerous because he's the president and is far more dangerous than any other single person in the US. He's also showing plenty of signs of being a lunatic; an out of control ego, and sees hallucinations of things that aren't there. Now putting his own personal foibles ahead of the good of the country isn't necessarily a sign of madness, it is more evidence of being dangerous. So, dangerous lunatic is not necessarily an incorrect description.
There has been no historical or archeological evidence found that the Egyptians ever enslaved the Jews.
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If they were poured, they wouldn't have chiseled tool marks on them. Duh.
Have you ever poured concrete? I have. Sometimes the forms move on you, things break, and now you have a very hard material that has gone beyond the bounds of where you want it to be and you have to do something about it. What do you do? You get out some chisels and hammers. Today we'd use power saws, jackhammers, and so forth but the problem and solution is much the same.
Again, as I recall the explanation on how the pyramids were built, is that it was a combination of quarried and poured blocks. Some of the stone was cut from a mine and moved to the site as a whole. The rest of the blocks were poured on site into forms. The material for the poured cement like material was likely from busted up pieces from the same mine that they got the whole stones. That means most any chemical, radiological, and such testing might not show which was poured and which was not. What would prove this theory is destructive testing, and that's not going to happen willingly. For that to happen we'd need something like an earthquake or meteor shower to hit the site and then someone look at the busted up pieces.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Water channels probably would work. However, there may be a bit of a problem. The Sphinx, pyramids, etc at Giza are built on top of a limestone plateau. It looks like the Giza Plateau is at least 30 meters (100feet) above the peak level of the Nile back in pre-Aswan Dam times. I would think that any system of engineering works capable of lifting boats, innumerable BIG rocks, and prodigious amounts of water up to the top of the plateau would have left some pretty obvious traces.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
The thing about ancient civilizations is that their collapse buried technology/knowledge that then get discovered again centuries or millennia later. Writing was discovered, lost, rediscovered... probably a few times. Most likely because reading and writing wasn't wide-spread in the society, but only in a specific class. If our civilization was to collapse tomorrow, I'm relatively confident that it wouldn't regress too much as literacy is more widespread in our civilization than in any before and we still have repositories of knowledge in printed form. The same thing happened with steam power (between Hero of Alexandria and 1606's Spain), mechanical computing devices (between the Antikythera device and the Pascaline in 1642) and even some simpler/humbler tools.
I'm going to use the woodworking hand-plane as an example... it's a simple family of tools that quickly adjust the size, flatten, shape or finish the surface of wood. A properly setup smoothing plane can adjust the dimensions by increments of a thousandth of an inch, scrub planes can take off chunks of an eighth of an inch. The hand plane is believed to have originated in ancient Egypt as a jig to hold either an adze blade or a chisel at a constant angle to the piece being worked. During medieval times, and up to the mid 19th century, they were a block of wood with a channel carved through it to hold the plane blade in the correct position (secured with a wedge). In the 19th century, 3 new designs of the tool were invented: metal-bodied planes, transitional planes (wood sole, metal holding/adjustment) and infill planes (wooden body, clad in metal). However, digs in Pompeii and other big Roman sites have brought up both metal-bodied and infill planes from the Roman era. So it's another relatively simple tech that was lost and rediscovered.
The only non-trivial change in woodworking tools between the Egyptians and now is that we have motorized most of the tools in order to speed up the process. If you remove the power tools from the equation, we're not even at the peak of the tool design. The peak in design happened between the 17th and the 19th centuries, and modern non-power tools are either copies of those designs (with better materials) or functionally inferior to those designs.
Is the Torah of so little historic value to you? You sound like an anti-semite.
Damn, so no aliens, huh? The Greek guy with the electric hair will be disappointed.
It is actually well known that they used a sand ramp circling around the pyramid, which had a center made of mud (here comes your water) and round logs.
The workers were mostly hydrated with beer, well,during work time probably more with water or thinned down beer.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Aside from the off-color humor, Cleopatra was greek (ptolomy dynasty) and lived closer to our time than the time when those pyramids were built - they were already 3000 years old when she was alive, 2000 years ago.
Yes, the pyramids really are that old.
Yes Egypt has been invaded by many groups.
No, we don't know much about the ethnicity or culture of the time when they were built.
Yes, Subsaharan Africa had some extremely advanced cultures and kingdoms - and did so right up to about the 15th century when the Portuguese systematically flattened just about every coastal city they could locate.
Nope, the Jews were never captives in Egypt. That's all myth.