Once upon a time I had a whole conversation with a guy about whether the pyramids were made by aliens. He had an issue with the size of the blocks, so I explained how it was likely done-
- Local quarry chips the blocks out of the rock, wedging them to fall directly onto rollers (logs).
- Workers move rollers from the back of the block to the front while oxen pull the block itself slowly to the pyramid.
- Block is slowly driven up a very long, gradual ramp to the work site, where it is wedged into place.
His gotcha response - where did they get the rope? So I had to explain that ropes have existed much longer than nylon.
Someone who thinks rope is a recent invention needs to, in the most literal sense, go touch some tall grass. If he can't figure it out from there, it's time to book an appointment at the neurologist's.
Maybe he could even try beating and twisting the tall grass.
I was under the impression that they put the blocks on boats and floated them down the Nile to the correct location. If that's not what they did, that's what they should have done. Would be way easier than manually pulling the blocks
Yeah actually just last year some researchers found an ancient branch of the Nile running through the giza plateau which explains the location of a lot of monuments:
That seems likely, now that I think about it. Although those barges must have been absolutely fucking massive.
Divide the heaviest block by the number of workers. Give each worker a rope made of ancient materials. It turns out that if you have thousands of workers, each individual only needs to lift 20 lbs. They could walk it in.
Two people can lift more than one? Did aliens bring the advanced mathematics of division to the Egyptians? The secret math only 19th century white men understood.
Block is slowly driven up a very long, gradual ramp to the work site, where it is wedged into place.
Sometimes they like to complain about the length of such a ramp being unreasonable, but then they don't think about it, even for a second:
They got the rope from aliens from another galaxy, and did everything else themselves.
This reminds me of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about pets. A woman was rescued from drowning by her dog, and they went on to interview a bunch of fakers like psychics and such and spent a bunch of time theorizing that maybe the dog was some reincarnated family member or that it had some amazing magical mental connection to her.
Then they had a biologist on for like 20 seconds who was like, there's no magic here, the dog (a Neufoundland) did exactly what it was bred to do - pull people out of the water. Which IMO is just as fucking interesting as Fluffy being psychic but that's just me.
Of course they quickly made sure to have Bob jump in and cast doubt on all that sciency BS before signing off on that segment. And while typing this it occurred to me that this sort of preying on superstition and ignorance explains a lot about why we are in the mess we're in right now.
Neat! My mom's golden retriever used to try to "save" people from swimming in a pool by jumping directly on top of them, we had to train her to stop.
Never understood the whole conspiracy angle on the pyramids. When I was in school we always learned that the fascination with the pyramids wasn't just with the labor, engineering and man power required but with the division of labor, the social command and the economic planning required.
Remember that the pyramids have no direct tangible return on investment and were multi generation endeavors. So the question encroaching a contemporary observer is: ¿What must the structure of a society look like that produces such monuments?
Never understood the whole conspiracy angle on the pyramids.
Racism. Every stupid conspiracy involving ancient civilizations is always rooted in some sort of racism. "Egyptians aren't white, so they clearly couldn't have done something so big by themselves!!!" - "The Mayan nobility is depicted as having weird shaped heads, thus it was aliens that taught them how to make those great pyramids!"
Fascinating article
tiered looking palaeontologist
Suspicious at best. Pyramids are in on the conspiracy.
This ancient aliens nuttery has been around since the 1950s, with books by Erich Von Daniken and Immanuel Velikovsky. Much of their "proof" can be easily refuted by anyone with a basic understanding of science.
Carl Sagan did an amazing point-by-point counter of Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" in his book "Brocas Brain"
Also, there's some sources of Erich Von Daniken book that is just nazi propaganda masked as "research".
Pi is just kinda like that. It pops up everywhere if you look hard enough for it.
How hard I gotta look? Kinda hungy rn.
If ancient aliens types had paid attention to math past middle school, they’d shit themselves with how much e shows up.
Divisible by pi in what units? Surely not meters, they weren't in use back then.
probably that one of the sides was a * n * pi long and the other was b * n * pi where a and b are integers and n is whatever unit they were using
It is a pyramid. The sides are supposed to be of the same length.
And then you can always define an arbitrary unit of measurement that will get you an integer number when multiplied by pi.
Historical measurement units were all over the place, so it is really easy to find a plausible value that gives you whole numbers.
Anything is divisible by pi if you approximate hard enough
But everyone knows the pyramid was invented before the wheel, duh.
/s
Native americans built pyramids yet never invented the wheel!
/s?
But just in case: Indigenous Americans had wheels pre-1490s, just not wheels on vehicles... Toys had wheels, and probably some measuring devices.
Why /s?
The Dynastic egyptians didn't know about the wheel...
What's way more interesting, imo, are the theories about lost civilizations.
Allegedly, some advanced civilization(s) existed before recorded history. I heard they found some artifacts in Egypt, seemingly made with tooling and techniques too advanced for the old Egyptians. Moreover there appear to be records suggesting some pyramids where there before the Egyptians build their own.
Very cool stuff, definitely more plausible than aliens, but I never looked into it any deeper.
More advanced than Egypt but not enough to have surviving art/writing/or any stone artifacts. Seems unlikely, without any more information I would guess that they were either wrongly dated or the Egyptians were at the time more advanced than we knew
Entirely possible, or they existed so long ago there's not much of anything left. What's the possible time span since humans spread over the world? Thousands of years?
Edit: I just realised that it's probably tens of thousands.
Any word on which tools or techniques were "too advanced" and, more importantly, why they were considered so? I understand that the tech that gets developed natively will vary greatly from region to region, but any group that has active trade with outside groups could get access to tools and knowledge they wouldn't have developed themselves.
I think it was something along the line of their stonework seeming almost too good to be true. Historians apparently dismissed the idea, but some engineers insisted that it seems near impossible to shape (some specific types of) rock as perfect as they supposedly did without precision tooling. There are explanations historians came up with, but apparently these were dismissed by the engineers and no one replicated and mastered the proposed methods.
But maybe the Egyptians were just amazing craftsmen that invested crazy amounts of ressources/time into a very intricate manufacturing process. I'm no expert on these things. I just like the idea that they found a random Pyramid in Egypt and spend the rest of their days building geometric shapes in the desert, because they thought it was pretty neat 😄
I love to think of an ancient Egyptian stone mason who has spent the last 40 years of his life honing and perfecting his craft, until one day he puts his efforts into making a supreme piece of work.
Then some chucklefuck who has never handled a hammer and chisel in their life tries to replicate it. Gives up after a week and is all: "The technology used was way too advanced!"
everyone forgot about circles.
Holy crop! Ancient egyptians would never have had the tools to produce something like this.
Relevant Philomena Cunk
Is the flat earth round or a triangle?
I thought it was banana shaped?
The show was a good entertainment with some amount of exposition to historic artifacts and construction and cultural remains still present..
Also the host's hair was nice.
That Occam guy may have been on to something...
He only was selling shaving supplies.
Not with that attitude
So that it matches the circumference of the earth almost exactly?
Lucky guess.
