Comment on aLiEnS!!1
Anticorp@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Lifting it is like 1/100th of the challenge. Moving it across hundreds of miles, cutting it, getting it to the top of the pyramid, and setting it in place are all bigger problems than simply lifting the stone.
Slavery: It get shits done.
Moving material gets done via cart, or rolling on top of logs. I had heard various theories for how they got the big bricks up, from rolling up a dirt pile (put into place by, you guessed it.) to building a waterproof chute with the bricks in it on a raft, and just filling the chute with water to make the raft go up.
The masonry had to have been done by professionals. The blocks fit together with such precision. Even today it would be an architectural feat to be able to cut and place 15+ ton blocks with millimeters-thick tolerances.
If you take the heaviest stone and divide it by a reasonable weight to walk long distances- say 20lbs, you find you need a few thousand people to carry one stone. You need several thousand ropes for each worker, but again each rope only needs to lift 20 lbs of the whole.
Modern estimates put the number of workers at 10,000. So they just had to carry them.
Lifting is the hard part, you can move blocks short distances on rollers, long distances on barges, really short distances by a dozen men pushing
Nobody has so far given you a serious answer, so:
Cutting - They only had IIRC bronze, which is not enough on its own to cut through the granite. However using sand to add friction makes it cut significant faster/easier.
Moving miles - Boats are incredibly capable of carrying heavy loads with minimal energy expenditure to move said boat. Using logs and levers also goes far.
Getting to the too of the pyramid, that’s a little more of a mystery. But there is evidence they included ramps within the structure as they built the bigger ones as they went. And IIRC the smaller ones had pulley systems going through the center.
It doesn’t require fancy tech, just of patience and application of basic physics.
He who cast the first stone built the pyramid
HerrBeter@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think they started at the top and then built down
1847953620@lemmy.world 10 months ago
they were just trying to find the upper block limit after hitting bedrock