Which country has migrated the most? Which country in Europe has the most refugees? What qualifies you for asylum? Previous Article What are the two most popular Thanksgiving pies? Next Article What technique is used to create an illusion of layers? Back To Top. But have I ever questioned whether they had divine or super-intelligent inspiration? I first went to Egypt in and ended up living there 13 years.
I was imbued with ideas of Atlantis and Edgar Cayce and so on. So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive.
And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very technologically sophisticated people who built these things; they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, and bakeries we actually find.
Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Every time I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it.
You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development. Rather than just copping out and saying, "There's no way they could have done this. Well, first of all, Herodotus just claims he was told that. He said, , men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess, if you read it in the original Greek, as to whether it's three shifts of , men each or whether you subdivide the , men.
But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid. Our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges; we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques, and operations, without testing the entire building project.
One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the Eastern Desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried stones.
Now, they did it with an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet—they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night, out there—if they can quarry stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years.
And it comes out to between and men. Now, I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in an additional team of 20 men, so that 12 men become 32, and now let's run the equation.
Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1, men.
And that's quarried locally at Giza—most of the stone is local stone. So, then, because of our mapping and because of our approach where we looked at what is the shape of the ground here, where is the quarry, where is the Pyramid, where would the ramp have run, we could come up with a figure of how many men it would take to schlep the stones up to the Pyramid. Now it's often said that the stones were delivered at a rate of one every two minutes or so. And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the Egyptians of Khufu's day.
But the stones didn't go in one after another, you see. And you can actually work out the coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to pull that.
And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a one-and-a-half-ton block over a slick surface with great ease. And then you could come up with very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an average-sized block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to the Pyramid.
And you could even factor in different configurations of the ramp, which would give you a different length. Well, working in such ways—and I challenge anybody to join in the challenge—it comes out that you can actually get the delivery that you need.
You need stones delivered every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten-hour day, right? Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something like 2,, somewhere in that area.
We can go over the exact figures. So now we've got 1, men in the quarry, which is a very generous estimate, 2, men delivering. So that's 3, Okay, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints.
So there's a difference there. But let's gloss over that for a moment. One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could is just how many men can get their hands a two- or three-ton block. You can't have 50 men working on one block; you can only get about four or five, six guys at most, working on a block—say, two on levers, cutters, and so on. You put pivots under it, and as few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it.
There are all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get too many men on a block. So then you figure out how many stones have to be set to keep up with this rate, to do it all in 20 years. It actually requires 5, or fewer men, including the stone-setters. Now, the stone-setting gets a bit complicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from each corner and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing and then the core.
And I'm going to gloss over that. Today Egyptologists, archaeologists who focus on this ancient civilization, have learned a great deal about the rulers, artifacts, and customs of ancient Egypt. Use these resources to teach your students about the ancient Egyptians. Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats are geographic neighbors and architectural cousins, both towering structures of stones that dominate their landscape; however, these two structures meant very different things to the people who built them.
Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Egyptian pyramids in sunset The Great Pyramids of Giza have been a part of the Egyptian landscape for thousands of years. Photograph by Thomas J. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom.
Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
Media If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. Text Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Interactives Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Related Resources. Ancient Egypt. View Collection. Pyramid of Khafre. Though some popular versions of history held that the pyramids were built by slaves or foreigners forced into labor, skeletons excavated from the area show that the workers were probably native Egyptian agricultural laborers who worked on the pyramids during the time of year when the Nile River flooded much of the land nearby.
Approximately 2. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that it took 20 years to build and required the labor of , men, but later archaeological evidence suggests that the workforce might actually have been around 20, Pyramids continued to be built throughout the fifth and sixth dynasties, but the general quality and scale of their construction declined over this period, along with the power and wealth of the kings themselves.
Known as pyramid texts, these are the earliest significant religious compositions known from ancient Egypt. The last of the great pyramid builders was Pepy II B. By the time of his rule, Old Kingdom prosperity was dwindling, and the pharaoh had lost some of his quasi-divine status as the power of non-royal administrative officials grew. Later kings, of the 12th dynasty, would return to pyramid building during the so-called Middle Kingdom phase, but it was never on the same scale as the Great Pyramids.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Civilizations like the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Inca all built pyramids to house their deities, as well as to bury their The Egyptian pyramids are some of the most incredible man-made structures in history. More than 4, years after their construction, the pyramids still stand as some of the most important and mysterious tombs in the world.
Their design remains a true testament The amazing works of art and architecture known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World serve as a testament to the ingenuity, imagination and sheer hard work of which human beings are capable.
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