What exactly is "missing" in understanding how the Egyptians built the pyramids? Why is it so hard to understand how a population of millions with a ton of unused labor during flood season built a bunch of scaffolding and moved a bunch of rocks around?
My daughter is an archeologist and this is one of her bugbears, the idea that the Egyptians couldn't possibly have built something so huge on their own. Even though we're pretty clear on it, the originally racist idea that they were too primitive has survived long enough to just become "common knowledge" with the explicit racism receding.
Gotta love the casual "anything I don't like must be rooted in racism" attitude.
Ancient civilizations had fairly thin survive or starve margins. Civilizations that sit atop the best agricultural land and build vanity projects instead of armies and practical infrastructure don't tend to sit atop that land for long. While we don't have precise records nobody is perplexed about how they moved stones nor how they mobilized the population, we have many well understood examples of ancient civilizations doing these things. It's largely a question of what other special circumstances let them engage in these projects so prolifically when Baybylon and China built <checks notes> walls.
It isn't complicated, it's leverage, ramps, muscles, and patience.
It is likely that the entire construction program was planned around the 10-20 years it took to move the 80-ton weight-relieving stones much like how today I plan engineering and manufacturing efforts around the components with the longest lead times.
There were very few 80t blocks and those only had to go halfway up. Most were 2.5t.
Sacsayhuamán in Peru has 100t+ stones that were quarried 35km from the fortress location and transported up a steep incline. It took 6,000 men to move the stones.
19th century archaeology and anthropology was thoroughly racist. It was a time where explorers could rediscover something like Great Zimbabwe and go "We found the Lost Tribe of Israel" because there's no way that the native inhabitants living among the site could possibly have built such an exquisite structure. It was a time where racism wasn't "dark-skinned people are bad" but rather "let me give you a lecture on how the physiology proves that these savages are incapable of reaching the higher thought patterns that are necessary for civilization to exist." It was also a time where Americans were the cultural backwater of the world, and the forefront of scientific racism were Europeans wandering around their empires, seeking greater justification for why they had to be the ones to rule over the lesser peoples.
It's only in the latter half of the 20th century that the field stops presupposing that Europeans are better than everybody else and they start trying to more objectively and holistically evaluate life in other societies and compare them. There's still a large contingent of popular anthropology that hasn't caught up to that memo yet, and the general field of pseudoarchaeology absolutely thrives on it.
There's a reason that people treat the methods of construction of the Pyramids as some unsolved mystery but not, say, the Colosseum. And it's not because we don't have the evidence for the Pyramids--we have the written records that discuss pyramid construction, we have the letters from the Pharoah complaining about his workforce!
But there are some progressions. For instance, Egyptian architecture is more "primative" than roman. Most everything in egypt is a gravity structure, big blocks piled atop each other. They didnt do connectors or mortar, let alone concrete. They did not progress along the tech tree the way that rome did. That doesnt mean that egyptian people are less smart, just that the ancient culture in egypt did not evolve new technology as quickly as others.
>They didnt do connectors or mortar, let alone concrete.
I personally chalk that sort of stuff up to living where the climate is set to easy mode.
Compare construction that predates building code in wealthy coastal California to poor rural Maine and you'll find the latter is routinely within spitting distance of compliant with modern code because that's just what you need if you want your project to resist nature for a "worth the effort of building it" amount of time.
You are right, there is nothing really mysterious about building big piles of rough-hewn limestone, or scraping out soft alabaster jars.
Some of the columns, obelisks and statues are very large and heavy. Moving them would be a serious challenge, but not impossible. Some weigh 100 tons, one or two are much heavier again. The unfinished obelisk in the Aswan quarry is 1,000 tons, which begins to stretch credulity.
Consider that many columns and obelisks were stolen by the Romans: most squares in Rome seem to have an Egyptian obelisk; the Pantheon has single-piece granite columns from Egypt (topped with Roman capitals). However, the Romans did have iron, capstans and pulleys.
But there are several unexplained aspects of ancient Egyptian artifacts:
- Lower casing stones, facing on nearby 'temples' and internal chambers (often below the actual pyramid or mastaba), are built of precise megalithic granite. The granite blocks often fit together with surprising precision, and have features such as 'turning the corner' which require extra, strictly unnecessary, work (interestingly, also seen in Andean megalithic building).
- Granite boxes in lower chambers are large, heavy and precisely machined to high tolerances (flatness, parallelism).
- Vases found in lower tunnels and chambers (esp. under Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara) are very precisely machined granite (circles, curves, symmetry, thinness) often to a few 1/1000 inch. They usually have two handles, meaning they cannot be simply lathed - and dynastic Egyptians did not even have the lathe.
- There are many single-piece statues and columns made from granite, with precisely machined curved surfaces and remarkably accurate symmetry.
- There are no known tools from dynastic Egypt which can reproduce precise curved surfaces in granite. Copper chisels and sand-lubricated copper saws or tube drills can work cylindrical holes and planar cuts in granite - but they take a very long time, and consume huge quantities of valuable copper. They cannot cut precise curved surfaces, or hollow out vases. Tube drill cores from ancient Egypt show spiral grooves, which cannot be made by copper+sand tools. The dynastic Egyptians did not have the wheel, the lathe, the potter's wheel, pulleys, capstans or any iron tools.
- No lower-level granite chambers, granite boxes or granite vases, have any decoration or writing. No bodies or mummies have been found in pristine boxes, although one or two have been found in chambers known to be opened in later periods. There are no hieroglyphics. Some perfect granite statues do have hieroglyphics carved into them, but these are clearly later and lower quality than the original work (the hieroglyphics are usually just a royal cartouche 'claiming' the artifact).
- It is strange that the most perfect granite artifacts are presumed to be the oldest artifacts. Later dynastic Egyptian periods did not reproduce that level of technique and precision. They worked in softer limestone, and their jars are all soft alabaster. However the oldest artifacts were created, the skills to make them were somehow lost.
- There is no solid dating of the oldest chambers, boxes, vases, obelisks or statues. There is no organic material for carbon dating. The lower chambers are often subterranean, and could have existed before the pyramids. Most archaeological timelines assume that a rough scratched royal cartouche means the whole artifact or building was created by that pharaoh. There is no doubt that dynastic Egyptians used, repaired and extended older structures, but there's no evidence they originated all of them.
- Finally, I tentatively mention the most famous controversy: weathering on exposed limestone surfaces, esp. Sphinx enclosure, but also pyramid temple complexes; and astronomical alignments that make most sense for prehistoric configuration of the equinoxes.
* [Here the word 'granite' means usually red granite, but also quartz, dolerite, andesite, basalt or other very hard igneous rocks.]
** [There is one caveat about their copper, sourced from Sinai and Red Sea coast, which had high impurities of arsenic and nickel that may have made it harder than pure copper, but not as hard as later copper-tin bronze.]
The final 'modern mystery' is why simple questions about known sites are not answered by non-intrusive scanning and excavation. Two of many examples:
- Chambers under the Sphinx and tunnels under the causeway from the Sphinx. There are openings of shafts clearly visible. A drill was put down in front of the Sphinx, it hit red granite, but nothing was done to investigate.
- The labyrinth at Hawara, which has several Greek/Roman eyewitness accounts, and even an old GPR survey validating the story, but it has not been excavated.
The result is that recent surveys are attempted using satellite sensing or other remote techniques that do not require sanctioned presence on the sites themselves. The results are somewhere between fanciful and ridiculous, but a simple GPR/seismic survey would be an obvious corrective to any misinformation.
It's also not a question of money. Firstly, plenty of rich donors and crowd-sourcing would sponsor such work, and secondly, any uncovered sites and artifacts would generate tourist revenue.
So are you saying aliens or some unknown advanced civilization built Amazon? No, just like the Pyramids it was built by huge number of ordinary humans with ordinary technology.
Actually the opposite is true. YOU must be unfamiliar with the architecture and large projects in general if you
Think there’s more to it than well understood ancient technology.
The idea that it’s a mystery how the ancients built large projects like this and Easter island is simply modern chauvinism.
The error often consists more of unfounded amazement at ancient accomplishments (stones are heavy!) and projected ignorance (even with the advantages of widespread science and capital I don't know how to build pyramids, so a fortiori ancient Egyptians didn't know how to build pyramids) than true chauvinism (ancient ragheads cannot have been smart enough to know how to build pyramids nor wealthy enough to greenlight and finish them).
Many people simply don't have any grasp of how complex technology is and how quickly and easily it is lost when unneeded and possibly but rarely redeveloped when needed again.
Even in the face of the new evidence of structures miles below the pyramids, we have to have this debate?
Or the chamber that was “theorized” by crackpots, included into Assassins Creed based on said “crackpots”, and then revealed to actually exist by sonography?
I think it’s far more sycophantic to insist that the ancient Egyptians were “primitive” rather than “advanced” when it was built, but hey, I’m against the grain and thus a crackpot.
I am quite familiar because I keep reading about it everytime someone insists its too hard, falling all over references demonstrating just how easy it was.
Heck I believe it was on this very website someone posted a study by a group of students who went to the actual quarry the stone was from, and actually carved out a stone using period techniques.
As far as I am concerned, pyramid denial is dead save a few absolute moronic hold outs who seem to believe copper tools cant cut stone.
