Shiresy77 wrote:
I thought that the Egyptians built the pyramids?
Egyptians and/or their slaves. They used bronze cutting tools.
NOVA has an excellent
science-based article on
Who Built the Pyramids.
Excerpt from "NOVA: Who Built The Pyramids?"
Mark Lehner wrote:
In a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a one-and-a-half-ton block over a slick surface with great ease. One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the Eastern Desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried 186 stones. Now, they did it with an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand.
So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet - they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night, out there - if they can quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out to between 400 and 500 men. Now, I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in an additional team of 20 men, so that 12 men become 32, and now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at Giza - most of the stone is local stone.
Marl Lehner is an Archeologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and Harvard Semitic Museum. He is also an American archaeologist with more than 30 years of experience excavating in Egypt. His approach, as director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), is to conduct interdisciplinary archaeological investigation. Every excavated object is examined by specialists to create an overall picture of an archaeological site - from the buildings down to the pollen spores. His international team currently runs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, excavating and mapping the ancient city of the builders of the Giza pyramid complex, which dates to the fourth dynasty of Egypt. He discovered that Pyramid G1-a, one of the subsidiary pyramids of the Great Pyramid, belonged to Hetepheres I; it was originally thought to belong to Queen Meritites I.
An expert says that Egyptians built the pyramids. Anyone who says otherwise is certainly not an expert on the subject.
15 Jul 2013, 10:53 pm
