cross-posted from: https://mastodon.social/users/warandpeas/statuses/111874433235642097
Image transcription: 4 panel comic by War and Peas: 1. two pharaohs from ancient egypt are standing in front of a pyramid whose construction is nearing completion. One says to the other, "You've outdone yourself this time, Babuthep." 2. he continues, "You'll be remembered for this throughout history!" 3. "It's a testament to human ingenuity." 4. time jump to the present day. At an alien conference, someone speaks to an audience, "It was aliens!"
(Originally published earlier today on mastodon.social)
Cross-posted from [email protected], a Lemmy community that natively features Mastodon posts, still attributed to the original author.
The pyramids were mostly early cement.
"The stones also had a high water content--unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau--and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous."
As far as I can tell, that theory is quite fringe and does not have much support from peer reviewed tests.
The quarry is basically next to the pyramids, and the main issue with transportation was most likely space constraints: there's only so many people that can work at a given time on the pyramid itself, regardless of how much manpower the Pharoah could muster.
Carrying up millions of tons of powder sounds way less practical than carrying the solid stones to me, and making them off-site just to carry them up doesn't seem to make sense.