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Scientists may have solved the mystery behind transporting some of the materials to the pyramid site: a dried-up a river
Fixed the title for you.
The construction of the Giza pyramids is still baffling. Some of the stones are purported to weigh 80 tons. That's four or five times more weight than what modern trucks can pull on paved roads.
It's not so farfetched to presume that this ancient civilization employed technology that is lost to time. I'm not talking about aliens and laser beams, but good ol' fashioned mathematics. They could have exploited a principle of leverage and incline that we simply don't understand or recognize. Or perhaps something entirely different from our six simple machines...
The problem with this theory, of course, is that we like to believe that humanity is always progressing and that we are superior to our forebears by default. That is ultimately a subjective opinion.
For the record we do understand how they built it.
They used log rollers, ropes and lots and lots of people hauling. They brute forced it… which, the reason our trucks can’t haul that much has far more to do with the weight on the suspension and fuel efficiency. They said fuck-all to efficiency and literally threw bodies at it.
That said, We do sometimes need much heavier loads
It’s a fairly common solution- the Moai heads on Rapa Nui (easter island) and stone henge also come to mind. In the case of Egypt, they used a sled (or sled and rollers.)
For getting it up the face, they used packed earth ramps that they later removed. Actually, we still use this technique in construction today. (Specifically to get vehicle access up otherwise too-steep slopes)(and again, threw bodies at it. Lots and lots of bodies.)
There’s really only a few things that are impressive about the pyramids. The first is the sheer ego it took to order it built. Then there is the celestial alignment between all of them. And finally the sheer scale of the project and vast amounts of human labor that went into it.
What they determined is that the river allowed the blocks to be floated much closer than previously thought (even today barges are superior to trains, never mind trucking.)
Well, given that they didn't have trucks, that's a little unfair. Animals or people with ropes was the most efficient solution.
I swear that I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I have a lot of doubts.
What kind of ropes and wooden sleds, manufactured in 4000 BC, can move 80 ton stones? There are tensile limits...
So, each rope only needs to be too strong for the individual worker to snap. Obviously, that's pretty easy, even with the worst natural fiber cordage - fibers are strong. Then they meet in some way, and ultimately attach to the wooden sled. The exact math for that is not straightforward, and we don't really know how they tied it off, but it's not an unusual amount of load for a large wooden structure. Assuming the sled measured 100 meters^2^ (80 tons was a special block worthy of an oversize sled), that works out to less than a ton per square meter, and a tree with 1m^2^ cross section at the trunk can weigh several tons without even considering the wind load on the foliage, which will be larger yet for most species.
80 tons is a lot, but it's not a lot a lot. Thousands of tons are pretty common if you're talking about ships, for example. Even the wooden ones; honestly wood is an underrated material.
I don't know any specifics, but a bunch of ropes divides the force on each one. A bunch of ropes, plus people pushing from behind, would probably be enough force to overcome static friction without exceeding tensile limits on any one rope.
Yeah people really forget how recent an invention good rope is, It's not like they could just order a few hundred meters on ebay. Making all that rope would probably be more effort and expense than a lot of the stuff that people write of as too complex for them to have considered, like temporary canals or raise and drop sledding.
Rope braiding is pretty fast. Especially if you're an ancient Egyptian woman who's done it full time for decades. They had hemp, which is the same stuff that rigged up the giant sailing ships of later on in history.