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Engineer: Egyptians built pyramids by piling rubble and attaching bricks later
- FrankenPC 13y agoOK. How about if they also built a large water tower on top of the pyramid? The seasonal rains would be trapped in the basin(s) and used to refill channels and replace water lost due to leakage?
- Freestyler_3 13y agoGood theorie, but now i wonder how they got the water up. There must be evidence of pump or large amounts of buckets :D
- seferphier 13y agoI was wondering too. This video explains in more detail how they used pressure to move the water up http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s
- fblp 13y agoArcheologists would be able to find evidence of these water piping from springs underneath the pyramid.
- Freestyler_3 13y agoI agree, they say that they should have found evidence of ramps... well they should have found evidence of this water structure if it was used.
- gus_massa 13y agoThe video says that they toke the water from springs under the pyramid. If the spring has enough pressure to make the water climb to 150 m, then just opening a vertical hole you must get a 150 m water jet. (Really, the water in the jet moves faster, so it has more internal frictions with the spring wall.) In Yellowstone, Old Faithfull has 50 m water jets, but it’s a geyser, not a cold spring with a lot of water.
- ye 13y agoThey had thousands of slaves.
- jonnybgood 13y agoThe pyramids were actually not built by slaves. There's quite a bit of evidence that would suggest this.
- dhughes 13y agoWere they slaves? I've often seen reference that they were citizens working on the pyramid as payment of taxes in the form of manual labour, add to that your boss and the building were being built for, who to them was, a God. I'd say whatever the most simple explanation is the answer I could see either rubble or ramps.
- kamaal 13y agoThey were slaves. Calling them something else doesn't make them less exploited.
- kylelibra 13y agoQuestionable source imo.
- seferphier 13y agoCheck out the video first. It is a fascinating theory Other sources: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-pyramids-built-INSIDE-OUT-New-theory-suggests-ancient-Egyptians-built-monuments-like-modern-builder-constructs-stone-wall.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-...
- eponeponepon 13y agoWell, the Mail's a cheap tabloid too... I'm no Egyptologist, but I think I'm right in saying that this guy is arguing against something (the whole long-ramp thing) that's been at least thought unlikely, if not wholly disproven, for some decades now.
- herghost 13y agoneither the mirror, nor the dailymail are particularly reliable sources.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 13y agoWhy would an archaeologist be more qualified to guess how they built the pyramids than an engineer who studied the pyramids for years? Or are you saying we should just dismiss all of the content because you don't like the organization that published it? I question your belief that you can evaluate information based on the organization that provides it. Or at least that some popular or well-respected organization can be trusted to provide good information. In fact, oftentimes the most widely trusted organizations have the most invested in maintaining the status quo, which makes facts subservient to that core need to sustain the venerable order of things.
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- n1ghtmare_ 13y agoThis entire website looks like a cheap tabloid.
- thearn4 13y agoInteresting idea, and maybe one worth investigating further. I've always liked the internal ramp theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68 In the end, lets all at least agree that it was human innovation and not alien technology that built the pyramids.
- skylan_q 13y ago1. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then. 2. We don't know how they built the pyramids. Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.
- akjj 13y agoUmm, modern humans are perfectly capable of building pyramids or even much more complicated structures. You may have noticed that 21st century civil engineering is much more advanced than ancient Egyptian civil engineering. However, what we don't have is the level of experience with their tools that they had.
- saraid216 13y ago> 1. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then. All it really takes is one genius with influence in the right ears to achieve something remarkable.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoWe don't know what the architects of the pyramids discussed in the pub either, but that is not because we are worse at conversation.
- jjoonathan 13y agoHmm, Poe's law? I'll bite. When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered. Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.
- memracom 13y agoWhy not test this theory with a smaller pyramid replica. I think that a lot of people would volunteer to spend a couple of weeks of their summer working on a project like this.
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- iamwil 13y agoWouldn't the water ramp have immense pressure at the bottom?
- marcosdumay 13y agoNot that much, 150m of water means about 15 atm of pressure. Did the Egyptian know about water weels at that time?
- MarcusBrutus 13y agoI am not convinced that the Egyptians could build watertight channels at this scale, especially those shown climbing up the slope of the pyramid which would have to be watertight at the top too, and under great pressure. Also one or two packages could easily get stuck in the "pipe" jamming the whole thing. Finally, the video likely downplays the number of floaters necessary to lift a block of stone.
- allochthon 13y agoHow feasible is it to even float massive stone blocks by attaching animal skin balloons to them as is done in the video? I would have figured that you would need many more than are shown. Also, how would you protect the balloons from pushing out of their restraints as they rub against the upper diagonal wall of the near-vertical channels?
- FrankenPC 13y ago(I have no idea what I'm doing...) how much does 1 cu-foot of water weigh compared to 1 cu-foot of limestone? water is about 63Lbs / cu-foot. limestone is 163 Lb / cu-foot. So, 1cuf stone in water is 163-63=100Lb (it's already partially buoyant because it's IN water). Then you need to evacuate water using air bags that are ABOUT 1.5 times the blocks size. So, the whole payload would be 1 unit block with 1.5 units of air. or 2.5 units total. Much bigger than the video suggested. But not unreasonable.
- bradleyland 13y agoIt's much easier if you work in metric units (as usual). The density of water is 1,000 kg/m³. The density limestone is around 2,500 kg/m³ (it can actually go down to around 2,100 kb/m³). This means that you'd need to displace more than 2 to 2.5 times the volume of water in order to float a limestone block. Keep in mind that volume goes up (roughly) as a cube of the increase in linear dimension, so the difference won't be quite as dramatic as it first seems, but that's still a lot of flotation required. Certainly much larger than the floats shown in the video. The animal-skin bladder theory is particularly problematic, because the volumetric efficiency of spheroid animal-skin bladder floats isn't particularly good. Water would fill in the space between bladders, requiring much larger float assemblies than if they were able to construct larger, single-chamber bladders. The video depicts float assemblies that aren't even as large as the blocks they were transporting. I found that rather disappointing for an engineering-driven theory.
- pepijndevos 13y agoMy favorite theory is that the blocks where cast in place. The part where they float the blocks up the side seems dubious to me.
- darkhorn 13y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4 ?
- andyidsinga 13y agoi love this - even if it turns out to be not fully correct in the end. one thing i was wondering was if any evidence had been found about about the balloon floatation devices, and, along similar lines, if they modeled the idea that small barges atop the blocks might have worked instead of balloons.
- andyidsinga 13y agofwiw : someone else posted this more detailed youtube video ..which has a good discussion of the rationale of the floats -- wood vs animal skin and papyrus. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8
- jws 13y agoNot passing the sniff test for me. Three flaws at first glance… At the end he describes lowering blocks into place by incrementally removing bladders. This does not work. As soon as you are fully submerged and displacing with bladders you are unstable. As your depth increases, pressure increases, and your displacement goes down making you sink even faster. The good news is if you get neutrally buoyant you could poke the blocks down into place and they wouldn't weight much so you could move them around then remove the bladders. Also not covered was how the water gets to the top. Each lock load of blocks and bladders requires at minimum the same mass of water to be lowered (to fill the lower lock chamber). In practice it will be at least several times this in order to keep the blocks from jamming in the chamber. So each ton of block effortlessly floated to the top will take several to many tons of water laboriously hauled to the top. Hauling water is probably lower friction than stone, compared to the volume multiplier, I can't say who wins. The inner lower lock door is also a problem. It has to contain water at something like 10 atmospheres and be loose enough to move. Plus, if shaped like the video, it needs to weigh 150lbs/in^2 to keep from being blown out when raised. That makes it about 120 feet tall if made from limestone.
- ithkuil 13y agoWhat if the channel was vertical an placed at the center of the pyramid? /| |\ / | | \ / | | \ /===/ \ \ blocks surface at the center of the floor while it's being built. The entering tunnel is gently sloped but doesn't have to reach the top of the pyramid. I guess it would be easier to build since the the walls of the channels are kept in place by the weight of the whole structure. I don't know about the bladders though.
- geuis 13y agoYour sniff test doesn't matter. There was a recent episode of 99% Invisible talking about an architect in NYC who proposed building a skyscraper out of a steel internal skeleton but all the best engineers of the day scoffed at him. He built it, it still stands, and it changed out skyscrapers have been built since. Point is, I'm skeptical too but the fellow has made some more videos that go into more detail. They even directly answer some of your questions. Don't immediately write something off without doing some due diligence first. The more I'm learning about this, the more practical it seems.
- hydralist 13y agoWhat if a pre-human civilization made them and the egyptians just found them?
- moocowduckquack 13y agoWhat, like some really smart Gomphotheres in the Pliocene maybe?
- Someone 13y agoFor the sake of the argument, let's accept "The structural engineer reckons that would be impossible as the ramps would have had to have been at least a quarter of a mile long" and ""If that happened, there would still be signs that the ramps had been there, and there aren't any." This idea replaces that quarter mile ramp by a waterway with a difference in water level of 150+ meter and thus with 150+ meter high watertight walls that can withstand the pressure. Where are the signs that that waterway was there? Also, how do you get the water up in that lock? Ships can move up through locks, but water only flows down.
- moocowduckquack 13y agobuckets + donkeys
- geuis 13y agoThere's a second video that addresses this that's linked elsewhere in the comments. Basically he outlines some evidence for a high pressure natural spring underneath the pyramid, and that some of the branches off the main burial chambers that have never been adequately explained were used to fascilitate water movement. For the last few levels, he proposes a regular old bucket line. Over all, not implausible. In some ways, more so than the standard heave-ho theory.
- Someone 13y agoA natural spring in the desert that fountains water up 100+ meters, and they decide to put a huge pyramid-shaped stop on it, presumably to get rid of the luscious oasis that must have been there? And that fountain somehow, in thousands of years, didn't find a new way out through the limestone, which is water soluble? I think it is more likely to claim there was an oil well there. Edit: it wasn't a desert at the time they built the pyramids, but blocking a natural spring never was a good idea over there.
- Geee 13y agoThe spring theory is really the only theory that answers the 'why' part of the equation. I mean, in the presence of a high pressure spring, it would be natural for people to kind of just stumble upon a building technique like this. People would first make a pool by laying rocks to form walls, then they will start making the walls higher, then realize that they can use buoyancy to lift heavier rocks. Then engineer comes along and realizes that they can make a huge building, and thinks: 'why not?'
- forgottenpaswrd 13y agoInteresting idea. Romans used water for mining too. Why do effort when nature does it for you? Two problems people raise: Water pressure from 150m+ water column is too much. In the video they talk about dividing the hight slope channel into sections This way leaks will be also smaller. Putting water inside. This probably is the weaker point of all. But overall it makes sense. It will be great for a kickstarter to try to replicate it at a small scale.