Archaeologists Uncover How Egyptians Built the Great Pyramid of Giza | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists Uncover How Egyptians Built the Great Pyramid of Giza

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46 pointscypherpunks0126 comments

And they used that same water canal to stack those huge blocks too?

Seems like only half the “secret” revealed.

Yeah, I was really interested in the pyramids when I was a kid, I remember there was a general consensus that the blocks were shipped via water. The real mystery was how were the blocks lifted and stacked.

Large ramps kms in length. Similar to how Indians built most of their giant temples where btw worship happens to this day. Its easy to build large things on the backs of slaves but keeping culture alive for thousands of years....not just the monuments, takes much more than engineering thought.

Well, the Egyptians managed to keep their culture alive for 3000+ years until the Muslim conquest.

> Source? All the sources I look at say that Egyptian culture survived more or less intact until the Muslim conquest in the 300s.

You should recheck your sources if they're telling you about Muslim conquests in the 300s.

The Egyptians didn't use slaves to build the pyramids

http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...

Great article, thank you!

The article does not say that. They seem to have implied this by mainly the evidence the builders ate a lot of meat, but their own assessing that the lodging was absurdly dense says otherwise. Sounds quite a bit like cherry picking to me, which is not uncommon for people working on the same subject for decades. At some point you are just too willing to accept your own confirmation bias, no matter how trained you are.

And this is just me guessing from the article, there are other reasons to think twice before reaching such conclusions. The concept of "slave" is not as set in stone as we think, it's a generalization of a broader concept.

And cattle is not necessarily for the rich: livestock is a pretty good way to store energy. In hot places like the tropics, vegetables go ripe very quickly so the logistics of feeding an army of builders with crops might have been difficult enough that it was just easier to feed the crops to cattle then move the cattle to the people.

> Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard's Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Idk man, seems like the article does claim that the builders weren't slaves.

Also, given the way trophic pyramids work, feeding crops to a cow and feeding the cow to people results in a loss of energy compared to feeding the people plants. By that, I mean it's more expensive to raise a cow and use it to feed 10 people than it would be to give those 10 people crops.

I'm not sure you can use 'energy conservation' to determine ideal diet patterns. Everyone should be drinking kerosene otherwise.

Cattle can digest fiber and can eat tons of fodder to extract sufficient protein - both of which humans are incapable of. Eating meat is then consuming refined and concentrated version of that fodder.

The canals have been well understood, and known, for quite a while now. They shipped the larger stones down during the flood season. They quarried with dolomite (spelling) pounding stones, loaded them up on reed boats, and shipped when the flood waters were high and they had a surplus of labor.

It's probably a good idea to remember how many times they have 'known' how this was done. We have 'known' how it was done a number of different times - and ways. I remain skeptical until I've seen more about it and the idea has withstood scrutiny.

As for the construction, that's still a mystery. One of the more interesting theories is from a French architect. He supposes that there was actually a ramp, but that it was built inside the pyramid. He hasn't had much luck, as far as I know, investigating this. They did climb up the side and found a previously unknown chamber behind an area exposed by a missing stone. I'm unqualified to opine about the viability.

Err... I watch documentaries, to the exclusion of almost everything else. There are a whole lot of documentaries about egyptology.

what happened to the great theory of the French architect? it sounded really promising back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Houdin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs

I don't know. I saw him in two documentaries and then he disappeared. His idea sounded reasonable to my layman's ears. His mockup looked convincing.

JP Houdin seems to be involved in the Scan Pyramids project (www.scanpyramids.org). In his 2010 documentary, he was waiting to be able to do that in order to confirm that infrared anomalies he discovered are really linked to the internal corridor.

Interesting! I don't think most laypeople are aware of this.

The French architect you mention is Jean-Pierre Houdin, he claims that a long straight ramp was used for the bottom 1/3 of the pyramid, then an interior spiral for the remaining. There is a large notch 2/3 up the pyramid and other evidence of some spiraling features that lends some weight to this one.

Another interesting theory is that water from these canals were used in a series of locks and temporary "ponds" elevated as each layer of the pyramid was built.

I pretty much only watch documentaries and American football. That is it. I'm almost sixty. I've watched a lot of documentaries.

The Netflix equivalent would be binge watching, I think. I binge watch subjects. Over the years, Egypt has been a recurring subject.

It should be noted that it is purely for entertainment. I watch documentaries because that is what I enjoy. It is absolutely not a scholastic activity and I make no effort to learn anything from it.

I just really enjoy documentaries. If I learn something, that was incidental and not my goal. Very, very seldom do I take it to the point where I'll do additional research on a topic, contact a person from the documentary, or do a more detailed study of something in the docs.

It's just what I do, I like them.

I had read an interesting theory stating that the building blocks were cast in place, similar to pouring concrete.

Here a video explaining the theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4

Funny, it's fancy enough to be "stuff for kings" yet simple enough not to write it down.

Not sure I understand your point here? Do you mean it's peculiar that the casting technique (if true) was not documented by the builders? Maybe we simply haven't found the evidence (yet).

Please clarify.

I meant if it was a huge amazing feat of gigantic tech, there would be lots of traces and people would have carried out the technique I suppose. But here it's nothing special but casting blocks. So no need to make a fuss about it.

But maybe you're right, there might be traces somewhere.

What's it take to make the concrete mix? I agree that it's a lot easier to move concrete mix and water, mix on site and pour, than it is to move blocks cut from a quarry. But it's important to look at the whole picture. If it is sufficiently easier to cut and move blocks than to make concrete, then that's the more likely method.

But the stones used weren't just limestone but also granite with marbling.

another brainfart about what happened. incomplete at best.

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