Giza

[Beagle]

Didn't we stipulate much earlier that the outer casing stones of the GP were pretty easily manageable?

For another day, my cable got knocked out by lightning for a few hrs. One of the hazards of living here I guess.

[Minimalist]

The ramp gets higher as the stones are piled higher until your at maximum height and the pyramid is over half finished. Then you start to bring them up and lower them down to complete the other half.

It seems that you would lose a lot of time rigging the ropes to lower the stone. Also, and I'm not an engineer, wouldn't you need a heavier stone going down to overcome the force of gravity acting on the stone moving up?

[Minimalist]

Didn't we stipulate much earlier that the outer casing stones of the GP were pretty easily manageable?

That seems pretty presumptuous of us if we did.

[Beagle]

I may be wrong here, and should go back and read it. I thought the issue began with the 20 year formula, which is seemingly impossible. Prior to that we were discussing how 40 ton stones could be moved. Which is a far cry from the 2.5 ton outer casing stones.

[Minimalist]

Nothing wrong with making assumptions, Beags. That's what this thread is all about.

Take a peak at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Pyramid_of_Giza

In contrast, a Great Pyramid feasibility study relating to the quarrying of the stone was performed in 1978 by Technical Director Merle Booker of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America. Consisting of 33 quarries, the Institute is considered by many architects to be one of the world’s leading authorities on limestone. Using modern equipment, the study concludes:

“Utilizing the entire Indiana Limestone industry’s facilities as they now stand [for 33 quarries], and figuring on tripling present average production, it would take approximately 27 years to quarry, fabricate and ship the total requirements.”
Booker points out the time study assumes sufficient quantities of railroad cars would be available without delay or downtime during this 27 year period and does not factor in the increasing costs of completing the work.[8]

These accepted values by Egyptologists bear out the following result:

2,400,000 stones used ÷ 20 years ÷ 365 days per year ÷ 10 work hours per day ÷ 60 minutes per hour = 0.55 stones laid per minute
Thus no matter how many workers were used or in what configuration, 1.1 blocks would have to be put in place every 2 minutes, ten hours a day, 365 days a year for twenty years to complete the Great Pyramid within this time frame. To use the same equation, but instead assuming the time of completion to be one hundred years instead of twenty, it would require 1.1 blocks to be set every ten minutes.

[Katherine Reece]

I may be wrong here, and should go back and read it. I thought the issue began with the 20 year formula, which is seemingly impossible. Prior to that we were discussing how 40 ton stones could be moved. Which is a far cry from the 2.5 ton outer casing stones.

Please read the information I posted earlier from Lehner. And the AE moved stones at 40 tons much in the same way ....

Seriously...and please don't get insulted ... but y'all need to do some research most of the things you're pondering have been answered.

Btw Beagle .. I'm in Alabama ... did you know there's an AE exhibit in Nashville? Hawass was there a week and a half ago .. unfortunately I found out the day of the lecture he was giving which was too late to get tickets and get up there.

[Minimalist]

I may be wrong here, and should go back and read it. I thought the issue began with the 20 year formula, which is seemingly impossible. Prior to that we were discussing how 40 ton stones could be moved. Which is a far cry from the 2.5 ton outer casing stones.

I've been hunting around for something on the casing stones...took a while but I finally found this:

High quality limestone was used for the outer casing, with some of the blocks weighing up to 15 tonnes. This limestone came from Tura, about 8 miles away on the other side of the Nile.

I don't know where the 2.5 ton weight for the outer casing came from.

[Minimalist]

As Kat is giving us orthodoxy, I figured I'd post some unorthodoxy.

I'd love to get this guy in a room with Lehner and Hawass and let them fight it out!


http://www.eridu.co.uk/Author/egypt/giza.html

In my book ‘The Phoenix Solution’ (1998), I noted that virtually all of the supposed evidence for 4th dynasty construction of the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx was, in fact, consistent with an adoption scenario. In other words, it seemed entirely plausible that the Egyptian kings Khufu and Khafre had adopted pre-existing structures in the form of the Great Pyramid, the Second Pyramid and the Sphinx, and merely added the causeways which ran between the mortuary and valley temples. It should be noted that the construction of each of these causeways was an absolutely stupendous task in its own right, and would more than justify the 4th dynasty workers’ villages which have recently been found at Giza. (As for the Third Pyramid, the much smaller pyramid of Menkaure, I did not include this in my adoption hypothesis).

[stan]

Katherine wrote:

http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/ahist/arnold/arnold.htm

There's another page for y'alls consideration.

I just read this. I feel somewhat vindicated because, as you know, I recommended the work of Petrie to you guys - Beagle and Minimalist -- a few days ago, before my computer logic board was blasted by lightning, too. (I feel your pain, Beagle). BTW Katherine, I am in NC, not so far away.
We say y'all over here, too.
I also agree with Katherine that a lot of these questions have been put to rest already, but it's just all too complicated and unsexy, and not like a "mystery" at all.
I agree with Frank, too.
Reading the above chapter posted by Katherine, and looking at the illustrations, you can see how laborious every single task was. I think it is almost beyond our abilities to imagine how slow, tedious, and difficult the work was. WOuld any of us last more than a day as a pyramid stone cutter? How fast can you go with a stone pounder to shape another stone?
This goes to the issue of time that Minimalist has raised, and I think he's right to do so. BUt what was time to an ancient Egyptian? THey didn't have clocks. Another thing that comes to me now is that they did use thousands of workers
and animals. Minimalist thinks they might have gotten in each other's way, but I have a feeling the overseers and planners had ways of dealing with that issue.
When you look at the image of the men pulling the colossus on a sledge, it is not a miracle of technology (too simple), it is a feat of organization, or coercion, if you will.
So to me It is not so much an issue of technology as it is of time and energy (workforce). Those ancient kingdoms seemed to have an enormous amount of both.

[Katherine Reece]

In my book ‘The Phoenix Solution’ (1998), I noted that virtually all of the supposed evidence for 4th dynasty construction of the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx was, in fact, consistent with an adoption scenario. In other words, it seemed entirely plausible that the Egyptian kings Khufu and Khafre had adopted pre-existing structures in the form of the Great Pyramid, the Second Pyramid and the Sphinx, and merely added the causeways which ran between the mortuary and valley temples. It should be noted that the construction of each of these causeways was an absolutely stupendous task in its own right, and would more than justify the 4th dynasty workers’ villages which have recently been found at Giza. (As for the Third Pyramid, the much smaller pyramid of Menkaure, I did not include this in my adoption hypothesis).

And does he explain how Khufu's name got on the pyramid in a place where it could only have been placed during construction?

[stan]

Katherine, I wonder if you could steer us to some detailed links about the construction of Stonehenge, like the things you posted on this thread.
If you have time, scan down page 4 of the thread called
Pre-Biblical Archaeology, and you see we were having similar arguments about Stonehenge.
My old pal Bob Minimalist says (paraphrasing here) that conventional archeologists say that it was impossible for the ancient Britons to have moved and lifted such stones. Because they weren't a "civilization.' like the Egyptians, maybe.
We had a pretty good discussion going, but it got hijacked by Von Daniken!

Thanks. Glad you are on this board.

[Minimalist]

And does he explain how Khufu's name got on the pyramid in a place where it could only have been placed during construction?

He stopped just short of calling Vyse a forger.

[Minimalist]

BUt what was time to an ancient Egyptian?

In one sense, nothing...in another sense, everything. Life was short and if they were really were building a pharaonic tomb they could never be sure when the Boss Hooter would drop dead.

Of course, if they weren't building a tomb they could take as long as they wished.

Nonetheless, it is the Egyptology crowd which puts out the 17-23 ( or 32 as Kat says) year time frame. All I did was the math and had them working around the clock for 20 years which in an age before flood lights is fairly absurd.

If, as some have suggested, they only worked when the Nile was in flood I have to think they'd still be building the goddamn thing.

[Minimalist]

Continued from above.

Therefore, there are many proposed ramps and there is a considerable amount of discrepancy regarding what type of ramp was used to build the pyramids [13]. One of the widely discredited ramping methods is the large straight ramp, and it is routinely discredited on functional grounds for its massive size, lack of archaeological evidence, huge labor cost, and other problems (Arnold 1991: 99, Lehner 1997: 215, Isler 2001: 213[14] However, the large straight ramp, seen in the picture above, is the only ramp design that can effectively build the entire monument. Other ramps serve to correct these problems of ramp size, yet either run into critiques of functionality, limited archaeological evidence, or the inability to construct the entire monument, mostly due to the limited space available at the top of the monument. There are zig-zagging ramps, Straight ramps utilizing the incomplete part of the superstructure (Arnold 1991), Spiraling ramps supported by the superstructure and spiraling ramps leaning on the monument as a large accretion, and spiraling ramps supported by the superstructure. Mark Lehner speculated that a spiraling ramp, beginning in the stone quarry to the southeast and continuing around the exterior of the pyramid, may have been used.[15] The stone blocks may have been drawn on sleds along the ramps lubricated by water or milk.[16] Yet each of these ramps are criticized for their inability to construct the entire monument. In other words, ramping methods work fine for most of the superstructure, but cannot create the top or the entire monument.

[Katherine Reece]

He stopped just short of calling Vyse a forger.

Oh please ... that argument was shown to be wrong years ago.