
Engineer: Egyptians built pyramids by piling rubble and attaching bricks later - seferphier
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/how-were-pyramids-built-british-3010204
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jws
Not passing the sniff test for me. Three flaws at first glance…

At the end he describes lowering blocks into place by incrementally removing
bladders. This does not work. As soon as you are fully submerged and
displacing with bladders you are unstable. As your depth increases, pressure
increases, and your displacement goes down making you sink even faster. The
good news is if you get neutrally buoyant you could poke the blocks down into
place and they wouldn't weight much so you could move them around then remove
the bladders.

Also not covered was how the water gets to the top. Each lock load of blocks
and bladders requires at minimum the same mass of water to be lowered (to fill
the lower lock chamber). In practice it will be at least several times this in
order to keep the blocks from jamming in the chamber. So each ton of block
effortlessly floated to the top will take several to many tons of water
laboriously hauled to the top. Hauling water is probably lower friction than
stone, compared to the volume multiplier, I can't say who wins.

The inner lower lock door is also a problem. It has to contain water at
something like 10 atmospheres and be loose enough to move. Plus, if shaped
like the video, it needs to weigh 150lbs/in^2 to keep from being blown out
when raised. That makes it about 120 feet tall if made from limestone.

~~~
ithkuil
What if the channel was vertical an placed at the center of the pyramid?

    
    
         /| |\
        / | | \
       /  | |  \
      /===/ \   \
    

blocks surface at the center of the floor while it's being built.

The entering tunnel is gently sloped but doesn't have to reach the top of the
pyramid.

I guess it would be easier to build since the the walls of the channels are
kept in place by the weight of the whole structure.

I don't know about the bladders though.

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thearn4
Interesting idea, and maybe one worth investigating further. I've always liked
the internal ramp theory:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68)

In the end, lets all at least agree that it was human innovation and not alien
technology that built the pyramids.

~~~
skylan_q
1\. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has
progressed since then.

2\. We don't know how they built the pyramids.

Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.

~~~
jjoonathan
Hmm, Poe's law? I'll bite.

When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important
than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of
years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society
has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient
Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by
surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.

Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't
mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to
overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.

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MarcusBrutus
I am not convinced that the Egyptians could build watertight channels at this
scale, especially those shown climbing up the slope of the pyramid which would
have to be watertight at the top too, and under great pressure. Also one or
two packages could easily get stuck in the "pipe" jamming the whole thing.
Finally, the video likely downplays the number of floaters necessary to lift a
block of stone.

~~~
maxerickson
Density of limestone is about 2.5, so the volume of floats would be about 2.5
times the blocks.

~~~
yason
I'm tired but isn't that just 1.5 times?

Tied together, a 1m³ block of limestone and a volume of 1.5m³ of floats
displace 2.5m³ of water. Assuming the mass of the floats themselves isn't much
then already that would lift 2.5 tons off from the bottom of the water pool.

~~~
maxerickson
Yeah, I got it wrong.

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Someone
For the sake of the argument, let's accept _" The structural engineer reckons
that would be impossible as the ramps would have had to have been at least a
quarter of a mile long"_ and _" "If that happened, there would still be signs
that the ramps had been there, and there aren't any."_

This idea replaces that quarter mile ramp by a waterway with a difference in
water level of 150+ meter and thus with 150+ meter high watertight walls that
can withstand the pressure. Where are the signs that that waterway was there?

Also, how do you get the water up in that lock? Ships can move up through
locks, but water only flows down.

~~~
geuis
There's a second video that addresses this that's linked elsewhere in the
comments. Basically he outlines some evidence for a high pressure natural
spring underneath the pyramid, and that some of the branches off the main
burial chambers that have never been adequately explained were used to
fascilitate water movement. For the last few levels, he proposes a regular old
bucket line. Over all, not implausible. In some ways, more so than the
standard heave-ho theory.

~~~
Someone
A natural spring in the desert that fountains water up 100+ meters, and they
decide to put a huge pyramid-shaped stop on it, presumably to get rid of the
luscious oasis that must have been there? And that fountain somehow, in
thousands of years, didn't find a new way out through the limestone, which is
water soluble?

I think it is more likely to claim there was an oil well there.

Edit: it wasn't a desert at the time they built the pyramids, but blocking a
natural spring never was a good idea over there.

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memracom
Why not test this theory with a smaller pyramid replica. I think that a lot of
people would volunteer to spend a couple of weeks of their summer working on a
project like this.

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Freestyler_3
Good theorie, but now i wonder how they got the water up. There must be
evidence of pump or large amounts of buckets :D

~~~
seferphier
I was wondering too. This video explains in more detail how they used pressure
to move the water up

[http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s](http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s)

~~~
fblp
Archeologists would be able to find evidence of these water piping from
springs underneath the pyramid.

~~~
Freestyler_3
I agree, they say that they should have found evidence of ramps... well they
should have found evidence of this water structure if it was used.

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iamwil
Wouldn't the water ramp have immense pressure at the bottom?

~~~
marcosdumay
Not that much, 150m of water means about 15 atm of pressure.

Did the Egyptian know about water weels at that time?

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pepijndevos
My favorite theory is that the blocks where cast in place.

The part where they float the blocks up the side seems dubious to me.

~~~
darkhorn
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4)
?

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forgottenpaswrd
Interesting idea.

Romans used water for mining too.

Why do effort when nature does it for you?

Two problems people raise:

Water pressure from 150m+ water column is too much. In the video they talk
about dividing the hight slope channel into sections This way leaks will be
also smaller.

Putting water inside. This probably is the weaker point of all.

But overall it makes sense. It will be great for a kickstarter to try to
replicate it at a small scale.

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FrankenPC
OK. How about if they also built a large water tower on top of the pyramid?
The seasonal rains would be trapped in the basin(s) and used to refill
channels and replace water lost due to leakage?

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kylelibra
Questionable source imo.

~~~
seferphier
Check out the video first. It is a fascinating theory

Other sources:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-
pyramids-built-INSIDE-OUT-New-theory-suggests-ancient-Egyptians-built-
monuments-like-modern-builder-constructs-stone-wall.html)

~~~
eponeponepon
Well, the Mail's a cheap tabloid too...

I'm no Egyptologist, but I think I'm right in saying that this guy is arguing
against something (the whole long-ramp thing) that's been at least thought
unlikely, if not wholly disproven, for some decades now.

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andyidsinga
i love this - even if it turns out to be not fully correct in the end. one
thing i was wondering was if any evidence had been found about about the
balloon floatation devices, and, along similar lines, if they modeled the idea
that small barges atop the blocks might have worked instead of balloons.

~~~
andyidsinga
fwiw : someone else posted this more detailed youtube video ..which has a good
discussion of the rationale of the floats -- wood vs animal skin and papyrus.

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8)

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n1ghtmare_
This entire website looks like a cheap tabloid.

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Nursie
That would be because the mirror is a cheap tabloid.

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hydralist
What if a pre-human civilization made them and the egyptians just found them?

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moocowduckquack
What, like some really smart Gomphotheres in the Pliocene maybe?

