[AlexMuir]

"[A team of eight researchers led by Daniel Bonn] placed a laboratory version of an Egyptian sledge in a bin of sand that had been dried in the oven. Then they threw down some water, and measured the grains’ stiffness."

Surely the way to test this theory isn't to make a model of a sledge, and bake some wet sand in an oven in your lab in Amsterdam! Go to Cairo, build a wooden sledge, get some water and fifty men for an hour and see whether one can sledge two tons across wet sand. I quite fancy testing it out myself. Perhaps I could run a Kickstarter to build a pyramid.

[DanBC]

But doing the lab experiment is a useful first step, before you get on a plane and travel a few thousand miles!

Egypt today is probably quite different to the Egypt of 4,500 years ago. Would that influence the experiement at all?

[waps]

I wonder what achaeologists think about this theory :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8

[Wingman4l7]

NOVA on PBS pulled a "Mythbusters" in the 1990s and made attempts to raise an obelisk using only technology & techniques conceivably available at the time:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/egypt/raising/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/raises.html

[afarrell]

Why Cairo? Why not Fort Mohave, Arizona?

[Nzen]

Sand in Cairo may be different from Arizona sand https://www.flickr.com/photos/bunnyfrogs/galleries/721576275...

[stronglikedan]

Cairo may be more accessible from Amsterdam.

[noonespecial]

I'm not sure I wouldn't rather explain to Egyptian vs American immigration officials that I wanted to go out into the desert with a bunch of people and "build an experimental..."

[untog]

I'm not sure you'd want to be a Westerner in the deserts of Egypt right now, either. It's not exactly a safe place.