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.
