Historians proper get so caught up on the ramp, but by any metric they seem ridiculously unfeasible.<p>I don't know why they are so quick to throw out the Herodotus Machine, where you rock the block back and forth and place shims under it. They don't require lots or resource or technology, or a backbreaking amount of labor, and two people can move a single block - taking as many breaks as they need to. And you know, it's how the locals told Herodotus it was done!<p>As opposed to a ramp that's bigger than the pyramid itself, take an insane amount of uninterrupted work to haul up, and there is no archaeological evidence to support.<p><i>Edit</i>: Here's an example that seems to fit Herodotus's description: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLQoD3Cwag" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLQoD3Cwag</a>
I see no reason to believe that anyone sophisticated enough to design a pyramid wouldn't be sophisticated enough to stack shims.
I love to imagine the life during the construction of the pyramids. While Egyptologists can make pretty good guesses about the construction techniques, it's amusing when they speak to the motivation or 'religious practices' of the people.<p>Imagine how different the prejudices and outlook of someone 50 years ago look to us today. And consider that the modern Western worldview is about 500 years old. These things were built 4500 years ago. Cleopatra is closer in time to today, than to the construction of the Pyramids. They were built 2000 years before Plato. Maybe 10 or 20 generations before the Epic of Gilgamesh.
He doesn't say what happened to all the blocks that were dropped in the way of grave robbers. Did they just batter their way through them, and haul the pieces out? Maybe the archaeologists hauled them out?<p>I thought the "air holes" were supposed to be a way to fill the cavities with sand, after it was all sealed. Grave robbers would have had to shovel it all out before they could get anywhere.<p>I like the notion that they had wooden pieces shaped like the chord of a circle, four pairs strapped on four sides of a block, and then the whole block could be rolled. (Apparently there are pictures of the things on tomb walls, misinterpreted as boats.) That only gets them to the base of the pyramid.<p>Of course, the methods used could have changed radically even over the period of building a single pyramid. Doing something the hard way for a few years ought to motivate some cleverness. But other pyramids had been built, so methods were probably pretty mature.<p>I wonder how they got all those facing blocks off and hauled halfway across the city to build mosques out of. They probably split them into pieces on site and moved the pieces.
TL;DR<p>Pretty standard explanation of the construction of the great pyramid with the ever expanding ramp to push up the blocks.<p>(No explanation where did the ramp go, and that volume wise it would have to be bigger than the great pyramid itself)<p>The explanation for the many chambers in the great pyramid is that Khufu, was changing his mind several times after naming himself son of Ra (God of Sun), and wanted to be buried ever higher as apposed to previously accepted burials underground, so construction workers had to abandon already built chambers and architects had to design new chamber with ever higher elevation.<p>Pretty weak overall.
Nicely composed narrative but has no critique or original ideas.
It's a large ram pump ...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koHqPM_zxg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koHqPM_zxg</a>
"The builders may thus have been perversely thankful for every inch of the distance between quarry and construction site before all was said and done."<p>Or the pyramid was built at that exact distance from the quarry for precisely that reason.
Great show from Nova on this very topic...<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/decoding-the-great-pyramid/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/decoding-the-great-pyram...</a>
Reminds me of the shit pyramids of Pharaoh Sneferu<p><a href="http://swordsandsocialism.blogspot.com/2016/03/day-5-shit-pyramids-of-pharaoh-sneferu.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">http://swordsandsocialism.blogspot.com/2016/03/day-5-shit-py...</a>
I wonder if there‘s a market for modern day pyramids. They could be<p>- Mausoleums<p>- tourist attractions and even<p>- permanent disposal sites for nuclear waste<p>all at the same time.
The Egyptians used ramps to set the obelisks in place, and used fill & ramps to build the columns. It isn't a great stretch to think they would have used ramps for the pyramids. The size needed was huge, but they were building something monumental already, and it was certainly feasible.