Like the title says.
Why does people still go around asking how they possibly were build, like it’s so complex?
I don’t see why it’s so impressive. Yes it’s heavy stones, but it’s it really that complex?
In: 0
No, it is not actually that impressive. We have a number of various different techniques that work very well with the technology they had to cut and move these stones.
But there are many people out there who prefer to play make-believe.
There’s nothing crazy about pyramids, and in some sense you’re right not to be impressed. A lot of people being impressed is simply underestimating those who came before us. There were no aliens, just a lot of coordination and hard work, plus some fairly simple by well-implemented technology.
That said, you should still be impressed by the pyramids! Each one represents an enormous amount of effort, thousands of people working for several years to build a monument, some of which are over 4,000 years old. Cleopatra lived closer to you than to the oldest pyramids!
This amazing agglomeration of human effort requires a large, highly coordinated society, which is nothing to be taken for granted.
Beyond that, almost all the pyramids were built with high precision, being very square (or, in one case, 8 sides that look like 4 sides most of the time and are done with the utmost precision and symmetry) and usually aligned with the stars…again, to very high precision. The planning that must have gone into each of the pyramids is impressive, especially for people without modern surveying tools.
When I wrote this, I had the Egyptians in mind, but several other cultures made big pyramids (after all, it’s one of the simplest designs for a tall structure), and much of this applies to those as well.
The ones who want to believe that aliens or whatever were involved don’t want to believe that we, meaning humans, are capable of doing grandiose things.
The fact that many thousands of people worked for possibly decades to build those large stone structures is rather impressive I think.
Even millennia ago people were very much capable of building and thinking big, on top of that there is so much lost knowledge of the past that we will never know everything that happened.
It wasn’t just the pyramids that ancient humans built big, there’s several examples of large wooden ships that were built that would rival large modern billionaire pleasure yachts
not necessarily complex no, but the sheer volume of material required to build them is what makes them impressive. they’d take a long time to build even today with modern technology
a lot of the intrigue surrounding them, if you ignore the alien conspiracy nutjobs, is that we don’t know how the great pyramids were built. we know of a number of feasible ways that they could have been built but we don’t know for sure, largely due to institutional incompetence from the Egyptian government (they concreted over one of the more compelling pieces of evidence that suggests how they were built)
The biggest pyramid, the Great Pyramid at Giza, is said to have been built in 20 years from 4.3 million 3-tonne blocks. That’s laying one block every five minutes, day and night, for 20 years.
Cutting a block of granite, 560 miles away, would have taken four men four days.
The base of the pyramid is level to within 0.8 inches. It aligns North / South East / West to within a tenth of a degree.
===
So yes, we can understand how to cut and move one stone. But keeping that going, at such accuracy, at such a rate, for twenty years, is an astonishing feat.
Cutting giant granite blocks using primitive but clever tools is impressive. Like what did they use to cut with? You know if you look at where granite is on the Mohs scale.
They even seemed to be able to make round jars in granite. Like almost mass produce them. Did they have some sort of diamond tipped lathe? Diamond infused snd from meteor craters that theyfigured out ”Hey this shit rubs away stone REALLY well!”
Ant the core drilling they somehow did. Also seemed to be able to saw granite.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale
If you carve rock then you really start to be impressed by their work. Some stuff you would struggle doing with modern tools.
Today we also lift stuff straight up with cranes. But if all you got is logs, ropes and a bunch of hands then you really have to be clever using balance, wedges, leverage, rotation and such to waggle that block. Much like moving a fridge singlehandedly. You kinda have to ”walk” it along by using pivot points and leverage
You don’t need aliens to be impressed by it. But you need some technical knowhow to be impressed.
Otherwise you are just an ignorant dumbfuck who shrugs at everything ”It’s just big rocks, like what’s so impressive about that?” Idk maybe go to Disneyland instead?
The part that’s complicated isn’t really the structure. They’re huge chunks of almost solid ~~granite~~ limestone megaliths, with some secret passages and stuff hidden in them, and that alone is pretty interesting. But the real thing that fascinates people is how they were built.
Not like, “how” how. A bunch of people made a bunch of ~~granite~~ limestone slabs (often not particularly precisely) and stacked them up into a pyramid shape. Not crazy. But how in the sense of how do you organise *that many* people, digging, cutting, transporting, assembling, feeding them, housing them, paying (maybe?) them, feeding, housing the people feeding and housing them etc over almost 30 years. The *logistics* of the whole this is insane.
You seem to be conflating “impressive” with “complex”. They’re not the same thing. What’s generally considered impressive about the great pyramid is the scale compared to anything else from the ancient world, and how much earlier it was built than anything comparable.
Moving 2.5 tonne blocks over 500 miles without modern construction equipment and trucks is quite difficult. For context, the great pyramid at Giza is still the heaviest building ever made. The only competitors in its weight class were built in the last fifty years. It was the tallest building in the world for almost 4000 years (until Lincoln cathedral in the 1300s).
If the great pyramid had been built in the late middle ages it wouldn’t stand out as much. It stands out so much because it was built so early in the history of civilization. The majority of human history happened in between the great pyramid being built and civilization becoming capable of building on that scale again.
Think about how hard it is to cut and move stone blocks on that scale when you don’t even have iron tools.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel “History for Granite” which goes into depth about the pyramids and the most common misconceptions surrounding them. There are several fascinating theories on how they were built, none of which are too extraordinary.
A lot can be achieved when you throw enough human suffering at it in the span of several decades…
Latest Answers