You might be thinking, "Oh, come on now, how can they be imagined to have constructed watertight and airtight stone channels with gates running up 3/4 the height of a pyramid to float heavy blocks?" That's outrageous. But that possibility is covered in the video.
The pyramids themselves are outrageous. Everything they did was outrageous. It's why we love them so. But not so outrageous as us. We went to the moon. We sent robots to Mars. Probes to the outer planets. The Europeans landed on an asteroid. That's outrageous.
At the site of the Wenis pyramid the host shows us a causeway, previously imagined a "walkway" but with three-foot thick walls and an inexplicably large and heavy covering, all extravagantly well oversized for a simple walkway. Still extant. That's how fabulously sturdy it is.
Remember Wenis? You see the desert hare hieroglyph inside a cartouche and immediately think "Wen" for "Wenis and sure enough there's the redundant zig-zag "N" the frond "I" and the folded cloth "S," plain as day. The rabbit makes me happy just seeing it. (Also English for the wrinkly skin on the back of the elbow. Remember the schoolboy tugging his mother's elbow skin when she was driving and surprising her with a new word?)
Give it a chance. It is an excellent theory that is supported with new understanding drawn from various sites. The naysayers at YouTube comments are stuck in the mud, unwilling to release their established conceits. Beliefs. They are intellectually inflexible. Too rigid to synthesize new information.
Even if it's not your cup of tea. Just drink it anyway.
22 comments:
Outrageous, indeed.
The Pyramid Program is how the Ancient Egyptians invented Tang, Teflon and Velcro.
And the world became a better place!
But did they have chlorine?
Can we test the theory by using the technique to build the wall?
Chip what is the cartouche for #MAGA?
My scientific training screams "test it!"
Even a tabletop scale model would do, using tiny block (of the same density). That's the ticket for credibility.
I'm at a place having breakfast 🍳 where they don't remember the WiFi password. So I'm going to have to save it for later.
Chick, check out.
7:26
10:52
14:03
also, 18:02 is interesting Snefru then Unis (Wenis) the rabbit guy, my fave because … rabbit. You’ll notice they also invented Teddy bear that lasted a very long time without losing color in their fur material or red scarf.
Joke!
And another interesting item about high pressure springs and aquifer on Giza plain. at 19:38
The bosses (bulges in cut stone) mentioned at the end are not convincing for me because those could have been used for traditional mechanical lifting.
Brilliant theory.
The ancient Egyptians left many paintings and other representations showing workmen and craftsmen doing their jobs. It seems to me that if this water-shaft theory were true, we'd have at least some pictorial evidence supporting it.
One of the many drawbacks of slave labor is that there's really no incentive to come up with brilliant labor saving solutions to near impossible tasks like the building of the pyramids. Count me skeptical.
While there was certainly slavery in ancient Egypt, I doubt the great monuments of Egypt were built with slave labor (at least not predominately). I think they were public works projects that the citizens of that empire mostly supported contributing to.
I suspect there were all sorts of innovations that were adopted to allow those structures to be built. I am not sure if the water shaft theory is true or not, but it is worthy of testing to see if it is possible.
Mumpsimus, yeah, you're right. You'd think that. And they do have pictures of sleds, and at least one actual sled survived. So there's proof of that.
Even there, the supporters of the sled exclusively theory and long extended ramps, and spiraling construction around the pyramid, and even of internal spiral ramps, state flatly that wood like that was valuable as gold. There is no hardwood in Egypt. It's all Imported from Lebanon. So valuable that they were used to the maximum extent possible. It's not just age of wood that surviving examples show, it's the actual wear on them evidenced, until they are no longer useful for anything. Except firewood. But who's going to burn a substance valuable as gold?
And 2.3 million blocks of stone sure would take a lot of sleds. Hundreds of thousands of such sleds.
Animal skins are more plentiful. Floating the blocks under water makes more sense than transporting blocks on top of boats.
All the while exposing the freshly cut stone to hardening merely by being exposed to air and to the heat of the beating sun getting harder and harder to carve the longer the stone is exposed.
While there's still evidence of causeways, (why load them on boats when they can be floated along?) and causeways covered ridiculously with heavy flat stone cut to precision. For a walkway! (when all you need for a covering for shade is palm leaves), and clearer understanding of carving large blocks, the angles and their double use, and so forth, and doing that in shallow water while the stone is soft freshly cut, and evidence of salt concentrations around pyramids suggesting the presence of a good deal of water deposited at the site.
Or perhaps camping workmen who used a lot of salt in their food. Joke.
These pyramids were built at the very beginning of recorded Egyptian history. The first dynasty. They were all done by one family dynasty. This is immediately after their emergence from the stone age. And immediately after this one family at the very beginning of dynastic history there was chaos, foreign rule, and all that pyramid knowledge was forgotten immediately. It's actually quite awesome just thinking about that. Ancient Egyptians were a mystery even to ancient Egyptians. And mysterious right off the bat in their history. Outrageous! It's amazing there was any continuity at all in customs, gods, clergy, organization, and writing, all of that challenged right there at the very beginning.
Did you know that the Cheops (Kufu) pyramid is the single surviving wonder of the ancient world? All those other ancient wonders, (a travel log, actually) are gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. And we still don't know all that much about them. Just bits and pieces here and there by ancient writers. They're still largely a mystery to us.
Khufu: Now he had the cheops to lead.
Mumps makes a great point.
But maybe the sleds were used only for transporting the logs. Conversely, the need for a zillion logs doesn't seem problematic. If they had access to them, I doubt the amount needed would have been unobtainable.
@ chick: groaannn.
"When Antony and Cleopatra looked on them from their barge, the Pyramids were already two-and-a-half thousand years old."
I can't remember where I saw that.
Also: "Cleopatra was born 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid at Giza was built, yet only 2,000 years before the first lunar landing was achieved."
deborah said...
Mumps makes a great point.
But maybe the sleds were used only for transporting the logs. Conversely, the need for a zillion logs doesn't seem problematic. If they had access to them, I doubt the amount needed would have been unobtainable.
I like the idea, however, getting logs isn't or shouldn't have been a problem. They could have gotten them from importation or building huge reed logs themselves. Egyptians built plenty of Tri-Reem ships by tightly bundling reeds to form large virtual logs. They could have done the same here as well.
"I'm at a place having breakfast 🍳 where they don't remember the WiFi password."
I have really great luck at guessing passwords. I've opened a number of computers of ex-employees and have guessed a couple of my neighbors wifi passwords. Most of the time it's something obvious related to the person or business that you can guess in under a dozen attempts. Mine is "globalistcuck".
That is interesting, and I do find interesting things interesting, thank you very much.
Why haven't we found traces of the 'water walls', were they carted away? Why haven't we found traces of the materials used to make those waterwalls waterproof? The evidence about salt deposits... did I hear that right? Well, Nile is not salty. Duh. So I must have missed something. Concentration possibly.
I'd have to work out the math on artisan/spring fed wells having the pressure to fulfill the theory presented. That's a stretch, seems to me. 14.7 versus. Actually, I can't work out that math, too dumb for that particular endeavor. Chicklit to the rescue.......
I guess my first mystery question would be what the hell happened to/after that first dynasty, what culled all that knowledge to nothing.
I have a sense that we were once much smarter than we are now, as humanoids.
I'd have more to say but I have to go eat dinner.
Well, instead of diner I had a smoke, and thought. How could it be that every smidgen of knowledge on how to build those structures vanished, without a trace.
Everywhere and forever.
Why haven't we found traces of the 'water walls', were they carted away?
The blocks were reused internally. They're reused in temples in front of the pyramid. Every smidgeon is not lost. They're shown in the video, the ridiculously overly heavily covered causeway is clue. According to a diagram in the video there was one running up each side, much less blocks than would be used for ramps running up to the pyramid then spiraling around it.
Supporters of the outer spiral theory suggest their extra blocks were used inside the pyramid on the way down. This theory uses far less blocks.
There is another new theory, one proposed by an engineer, a non-Egyptoligist who had never been to Egypt and who suggests an additional internal spiraling ramp. It has some serious unanswered challenges.
Whatever theory you choose, your questions remain unanswered by solid graphic evidence such as tomb paintings.
I have a lot of books on tomb paintings starting with the earliest paintings pulled from mastabas around the pyramids, "the Geese of Meidum" for example, and the ones from the "tomb of the hairdressers," Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two homos who did the hair and the nails of the court. These guys. Hey! TNWWT, and all that was before our tender easily offended Christian-based moralizing.
Their pictures were mostly religious, magical spells derived from Book of the Dead aka The Book of Going Forth By Day aka the Book of Emerging Forth Into the Light, the journey through the Duat that includes the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts.
And then scenes of ordinary life, the life lived by the aristocrat tomb owners, the kind of life they hope to re-live in the afterlife, to pick up where they left off. Scenes of their hunting activities, of work on their own estates. There ARE scenes of industry, but all industry closer to home. If the tomb owner were involved in things like overseeing the works of constructing, moving, setting an obelisk then there would might be scenes of that. There are scenes of such activities in paintings. But precious few of the hundreds of thousands of lower class people involved in pyramid building would have such tombs. Only the 1%. And the pyramid owners have scenes that are religious in nature. Tut's tomb for example, the art is entirely religious. There just isn't any recorded history of pyramid building. None. None whatsoever. They are 100% mystery. The clues are the remnant pyramids themselves and their looted surroundings. Even that is so much mystery.
We're taught the pyramids purpose is as tomb for the pharaoh and that goes mostly without question.
Where in fact, that most likely is afterthought. There is too much evidence for other purposes such as planetariums, aligning on earth with the heavens, scaling to Orion's bet and the appearance of stars that coincide with Nile flood. For connecting their physical location on Earth with the stars, for uniting the heavens, their religion, with their land. For creating their magic. Their lives were a compound of practicality and magic.
Think about this. If you like. With rudimentary tools, primary among them leveling a vast area using water. How can you keep your corners straight as you build them by spiraling around them. We're taught the pyramids were built fist then faced with limestone, later pillaged for later buildings. Those stones are now in mosques.
Reverse that. place the outer stones first. Establish your base lines first, your initial angles first, and then build the insides from them.
We're taught that ground is leveled first. But why bother doing all that? Just to fill it in late with blocks. No. That didn't happen. A child making a pyramid knows that is not necessary. The perimeter is found first and leveled first by way of water trough. The outer facing blocks first. Leaving unhewn the rough rock rising inside the perimeter. A huge hump of raw mountain right in the middle. A savings of hundreds of thousands of blocks.
(Apologies for typos. Did not proofread because I'm lazy)
Lazy as sin!
I was thinking your nativity card would be easy to make up using clip art from the Net. Am I not brilliant?
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