Originally published at: How to build a pyramid | Boing Boing
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“What is this, a pyramid for ANTS!?”
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Are we gonna do Stonehenge tomorrow?
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No one can prove OR disprove the existence of aliens, therefor all these theories are valid.
Just like aliens … took mah pickup truck and they droved it into my neighbors fence Friday night after I got home from the bar.
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They don’t exist. Someone is gaslighting you.
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What’s funny is that there’s still some people, not archeologists, who remember some of the techniques used in the construction to this day. I believe Zahi Hawass showed one example of breaking sandstone blocks which was done with three people, one to eye ball the sweet spot and two to do the hammering. It’s really funny how people think you need extra-terrestrials to produce what brawn and brain could do with bronze age tools.
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What always impressed me about pyramid construction is the level of precision that was achieved in terms of minimizing gaps between the outer layer of facing stones; and in terms of not having a lot of shims and oddball special case blocks to compensate for accumulated error on the internal stones.
The fact that you can move alarmingly large rocks with clever use of wedges, rollers, levers, ropes; and a fairly large workforce certainly suggests ingenuity and coordination; but it’s the sort of problem where persistence and a large labor force seem like they could be plausible substitutes for heavy equipment.
Getting precision and repeatability, though, seems a little spooky(especially when dealing with stone types hard enough that the available metallurgy was on the low end of being adequate for fine dimensional adjustments. Quarrying granite by arduously gouging out little holes and then using expanding wedges to crack pieces off is ingenious; but the fact that you’d do it that way suggests that making fine adjustments after the fact would be arduous and just chew through your tools. That’s the kind of thing that’s not a whole lot of fun even with tungsten carbide cutting tools; and they were going in with copper.) I assume that’s why they leaned so heavily on limestone when they had the option; but they didn’t always have the option.
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i still think it’s funny they did all that work just for a bunch of grain silos. dig a hole people!
( eta: because this is the internet, i must defer to noted archaeologist ben carson for details )
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It is… they focus on the replication of specific forms in places where people weren’t in communication (pyramids in Egypt and in Latin America for example) as “evidence”… But as you say, brains and brawn get the job done. And I’d guess that certain forms are reproduced, because they work… At least some of that “it’s aliens” has a tinge of racism, as it often focuses on locations in the global south, which were assumed to be places “without history”…
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Of course aliens from outer space didn’t build the pyramids. That’s silly. Obviously, it was inter-dimensional beings visiting our space and time. /snark
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I watched a video the other day that tried to present as a Great Mystery how the Egyptians managed to get their stone blocks to fit together so precisely. I’ve personally seen equally good examples from stone-age Skara Brae, Mexico, and my own back yard, when I got curious and tried a method some textbook spent a sentence on once. Most rock will fracture square if it hit it right, and you can get any two mostly flat surfaces to mate just by rubbing them against each other. For more irregular shapes, smoke it to cover it with soot or other marking substance and then put it where you want it. The soot will rub off where it doesn’t quite match yet, remove that and try again. Amazingly accurate fits can be achieve this way, and before CNC and computerized sensing it was still the ultimate method of achieving a flat surface.
What still amazes and somewhat confounds me is how the Egyptians carved those basalt and granite sarcophagi. Creating a flat-bottomed and sided rectangular hole using stone and copper tools – the mind boggles.
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I built them in the future after I invented my time machine to go back to 2,500 BC.
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Aliens may not have built Stonehenge, but one did knock it down.
