Historians proper get so caught up on the ramp, but by any metric they seem ridiculously unfeasible.
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!
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.
Edit: Here's an example that seems to fit Herodotus's description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLQoD3Cwag
I see no reason to believe that anyone sophisticated enough to design a pyramid wouldn't be sophisticated enough to stack shims.
The first time I saw a compound bow, I assumed it was ancient, because it seemed like surely they would have figured it out given that crossbows were a thing. I was quite surprised that it was from the 60s.
People tend to make the mistake that ancient people were just primitives, but assuming they'd produce ideal solutions can also be a mistake.
Compound bow requires very precise metal work and advanced material. You can invent the compound bow earlier, but you can't craft it without required tech.
Other example is the ski. We have to wait until 1970s for modern ski, metal edge(good adhesive between wood and metal), polyethylene, modern wax, safe bindings... all requires various technologies and we had to wait until 1970s.
There are a lot of things ancient people could have made but didn't. People have made gliders with only primitive materials, but no one was gliding around the ancient world (except, very very quickly to the ground). It was not purely a lack of materials.
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.
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.
It's kind of sad how much nuance and meaning modern humans are able to crush down into words like "religious practices". It makes me wonder what parts of our present world will be compressed or misunderstood or glossed over by people in 1000+ years
"Religious practices" has always seemed like a coherent concept to me, the way anthropologists use it—but one that doesn't really fit the label we've given it. It's almost a diagnosis of exclusion: "religious practices" are everything about a culture, other than its economy (trade, productive marketable craft), and its politics (tribalism, war, game-theory).
Most art and music in modern culture would fit neatly under the "religious practices" anthropological aegis. Which isn't a bad or wrong thing, I don't think! The category is a correct and natural division, and anthropologists are right to group "all that stuff" together. The label on the grouping is what's silly.
No I think you are very right. It's just all too easy for us, who inhabit a mostly secular public sphere, to apply our own mental/linguistic concept of "religious || non-religious" when thinking about cultures that probably did not apply such a rigid sort of filter to the world around them.
I guess that is a challenge in any kind of historical context.
I find it tempting to try to come up with better labels for the concept, despite it being unlikely that the greater anthropology community will ever shift to using them.
Spiritual zeitgeist might fit, I think—it describes the motivation behind most art that’s not associated with a particular coherent artistic movement. It’s “what people were feeling—and wanting to commiserate about feeling—at the time.”
> They were built 2000 years before Plato. Maybe 10 or 20 generations before the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Seems more likely to be contemporaneous with the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to Wikipedia:
> The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BC).
It's true that 2100 BC is a few hundred years younger than the pyramids, but I find it unlikely that (1) the oldest written sources we have for Gilgamesh just happen to be the first ones ever written; and (2) Gilgamesh was invented out of whole cloth for those poems 2100 years ago.
For comparison, the Iliad is known to draw on an oral tradition about 400 years older than the written one.
Unlike most people, the Egyptions rather conveniently buried people with religious texts, so we have a fairly decent idea of those religious practices.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are a few problems with your conclusions which perfectly highlight why the pyramids are such a mystery.
> 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.
None of the pyramids on the Giza plateau were graves. It is a myth that any bodies were found in those pyramids.
> 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.
There are roughly 2,500,000 blocks in the Great Pyramid with the quarries being hundreds of miles away. That means to build it in 20 years you would have to cut, move, and place a block every 4 minutes day and night without stopping. So very unlikely they rolled the blocks around.
> 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.
The most impressive pyramids (by far) on the Giza plateau are also the oldest. The pyramids got worse as they developed more of them, not better.
The Granite that this article speaks about came from the Aswan stone quarry which was over 900km from Giza. Even with the distance of the limestone close, my point remains that cutting and placing a block every 4 minutes around the clock is impractical without sufficient technology. Technology which the Egyptians did not possess.
The reason the later pyramids had to be smaller, is that there isn’t enough space on the plateau for more, larger pyramids. They were constrained by the geology, and you cant build a pyramid on sand.
Pretty standard explanation of the construction of the great pyramid with the ever expanding ramp to push up the blocks.
(No explanation where did the ramp go, and that volume wise it would have to be bigger than the great pyramid itself)
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.
Pretty weak overall.
Nicely composed narrative but has no critique or original ideas.
"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."
Or the pyramid was built at that exact distance from the quarry for precisely that reason.
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.
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!
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.
Edit: Here's an example that seems to fit Herodotus's description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLQoD3Cwag I see no reason to believe that anyone sophisticated enough to design a pyramid wouldn't be sophisticated enough to stack shims.