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by ianburrell
5 days ago
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It is a weird argument because we totally could build a Great Pyramid replica. Ships and trains hauling stone and tower cranes plopping them into place. We are really good at moving things and lifting them. It would probably be the quarries that be the bottleneck. If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid). |
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As an example, you could read about the efforts to move a 250 ton obelisk from Egypt to France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Obelisks
It took $16M in 2020 dollars, a special boat built just for this transportation, and five years to complete the whole relocation process.
The mainstream argument is that ancient Egyptians were able to transport this same monument hundreds of miles from the quarry to Luxor with no wheels or cranes, just reed boats, sleds, and ropes. They did this hundreds or thousands of times, sometimes with granite blocks twice the size of this one.
> If wanted it in concrete, would be faster. Or could do it in steel or steel/concrete with some interior space (Luxor in Las Vegas is size of smaller pyramid).
There are a lot of ways the ancient Egyptians could have done this more easily as well. They didn’t have to transport granite from a quarry hundreds of miles away, they could have used softer stones from nearby quarries. They didn’t have to carve things from single-piece blocks, they could have broken it up into many smaller blocks or even bricks. They did everything the harder way, with the oldest constructions being the most difficult and precise, suggesting that there’s a lot we still don’t understand about their motivations, abilities, or the timeline.