It is difficult to imagine that there was once a flat rocky plateau on the site of the famous Egyptian pyramids. But it was so. And there were people who decided to create artificial mountains. What were they thinking, dreaming, talking about, feeling? Why did the designers, builders and workers of Ancient Egypt gathered together and lifted up these amazing engineering structures? The answer seems to be clear from a school textbook: about five thousand years ago, the pharaohs Cheops, Chefren and Mikerin, appropriating the labor of thousands and thousands of people, built such grandiose tombs to please the gods and gain immortality. Yes, this is the main version shared by most scientists. But the pyramids could have been something else: say, a life-size project for a dam across the Nile. Or an astronomical observatory. Or maybe a bundle of knowledge was written in the pyramids,reached by the ancient world by that time? There are many questions, but today let's dwell on just one: how did the ancient builders lift huge stone blocks upward? In other words, what engineering solution was found by the ancient architects, who managed to lift and install millions of blocks in a relatively short period of time? This is not an exaggeration: the pyramid of Cheops alone contains two million three hundred thousand of them. Let us recall its dimensions: the initial height was 146.6 m, each side of the square base was approximately 230 m, the base area was 5 hectares. Stone blocks of limestone weighing two and a half tons (but there are up to 15 tons) are so tightly fitted one to the other that a knife blade cannot be inserted between them. The entire pyramid was faced with polished granite slabs. A little less the pyramid of Khafre,and even smaller is the pyramid of Mikerin, but they also amaze the imagination with their colossal size and verified proportions.
From ancient times to the present day, many have been looking for an answer to our question, since the builders of the pyramids did not leave us any explanations on this matter. The first among such seekers was the tireless Greek traveler and historian Herodotus, who in the middle of the 5th century. BC e. visited Egypt and suggested that the pyramids were built using wooden machines that lifted blocks from ledge to ledge. What these cars looked like was unknown, apparently, to himself. 400 years later, Diodorus of Siculus assumed the lifting of stone blocks along earthen embankments. Around 1719, Frenchman Paul Luca argued that the pyramids were lined with cement, not stone. The Englishman R. Pocock in 1745 suggests about the pyramids as mountains faced with stone slabs. Already in our time, just a few years ago,Chemical Engineer Joseph Davidowitz revived the cement lining hypothesis with scientific evidence supporting it. But the American engineer Bush again returned to the stone, but expressed the opinion that the stone blocks were equipped with segments on both sides and thus turned from rectangles into cylinders. Bush successfully tested his method by rolling a nearly three-ton cylinder down an inclined plane with the efforts of four people. In 1978, a group of Japanese enthusiasts tried to build as little as an 11-meter pyramid using an inclined embankment and scraps to lift stone blocks, but failed. The embankment turned out to be too steep to be dragged along with a load, and modern technology had to finish building the pyramid. But the American engineer Bush again returned to the stone, but expressed the opinion that the stone blocks were equipped with segments on both sides and thus turned from rectangles into cylinders. Bush successfully tested his method by rolling a nearly three-ton cylinder down an inclined plane with the efforts of four people. In 1978, a group of Japanese enthusiasts tried to build as little as an 11-meter pyramid using an inclined embankment and scraps to lift stone blocks, but failed. The embankment turned out to be too steep to be dragged along with a load, and modern technology had to finish building the pyramid. But the American engineer Bush again returned to the stone, but expressed the opinion that the stone blocks were equipped with segments on both sides and thus turned from rectangles into cylinders. Bush successfully tested his method by rolling a nearly three-ton cylinder down an inclined plane with the efforts of four people. In 1978, a group of Japanese enthusiasts tried to build as little as an 11-meter pyramid using an inclined embankment and scraps to lift stone blocks, but failed. The embankment turned out to be too steep to be dragged along with a load, and modern technology had to finish building the pyramid.rolling in an almost three-ton cylinder along an inclined plane with the efforts of four people. In 1978, a group of Japanese enthusiasts tried to build as little as an 11-meter pyramid using an inclined embankment and scraps to lift stone blocks, but failed. The embankment turned out to be too steep to be dragged along with a load, and modern technology had to finish building the pyramid.rolling in an almost three-ton cylinder along an inclined plane with the efforts of four people. In 1978, a group of Japanese enthusiasts tried to build as little as an 11-meter pyramid using an inclined embankment and scraps to lift stone blocks, but failed. The embankment turned out to be too steep to be dragged along with a load, and modern technology had to finish building the pyramid.
That's all of the methods known today. Moreover, any of them is questionable for another reason. Herodotus writes about 100 thousand people who worked for 20 years on the Cheops pyramid. How were they located on an area of only 5 hectares? After all, on the embankment and on the site itself, there should have been many people at the same time, pulling drags with blocks. This is evidenced by the data of another experiment conducted in 1954 by British archaeologists. Studying the gigantic ancient structure of Stonehenge in England, they reproduced the transportation of one and a half ton stone blocks. Tied to a simple wooden sled, a block of 32 strong young men was barely dragged up an inclined plane with a slope of 4 °.
Things improved when they began to put rollers under the sleds and only 24 people were needed. From this it was concluded that 16 people are needed for 1 ton of block weight. Consequently, the Egyptians needed 40 people to transport a block weighing 2.5 tons along an inclined plane. And if we also take into account the number of blocks laid, the drags had to continuously follow each other. In addition, to the labor intensity of transportation, one should add the labor intensity of making embankments, the volume of which could reach a quarter of the volume of the pyramid itself!
It is unlikely that other methods would have been easier: tens of thousands of builders had to either crush tens of thousands of tons of limestone to obtain cement, or roll millions of huge stone cylinders along an inclined plane, risking being crushed every second. And all this under the hot Egyptian sun.
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What else could they have come up with? Not aliens, in fact, built the great pyramids!
The hint appeared out of the blue. I am reading a newspaper article about the work of the remarkable Soviet Georgian writer Nodar Dumbadze. And among the discourses about the mysteries of literature, I suddenly find the following phrase: “When I look - in the movies - at the Egyptian pyramids, I have a feeling that the ancient masters had the magical ability to deprive objects of their weight. For some time. And as soon as the stone block lay in place, it could not be lifted or moved again …”Nodar Dumbadze probably wanted only to express the greatness of the ancient builders figuratively. But maybe he thereby unexpectedly approached the answer?
Cosmic weightlessness, of course, disappears. Then there remains … hydraulic weightlessness! Let us remember that astronauts imitate weightlessness in pools of water. Let us also recall that hydroelectricity occurs when the buoyant force of Archimedes is balanced by the weight of the body itself. However, equilibrium can occur either when a body is lighter than water - it will float above, or its weight is equal to the weight of water - then it will hang freely in the water column, not rising to the surface and not sinking to the bottom. This second case is hydraulic weightlessness. The specific gravity of the human body is approximately equal to the specific gravity of water, and with the help of special clothing it can be made absolutely equal.
However, the specific gravity of the stone is much higher! How could the Egyptians use hydraulic weightlessness?
Let's take the main idea for now - the use of the law, formulated later by Archimedes, for lifting stone blocks. And let's ask ourselves an additional question: what were the Egyptians able to do by the time the pyramids began to be built?
They managed to complete the construction of a network of irrigation canals and protective dams. They use irrigated agriculture, have learned to raise water with the help of water-drawing facilities, to pump it from one level to another. They have long used a shaduf - a lever water-lifting device: a bucket is attached to one arm of the lever on a long stick, and a stone is attached to the other shoulder as a counterweight. They knew water distribution structures such as shields and valves. They transported building materials along the Nile and the canals on oars and sailing vessels made of papyrus or wood. They knew how to calculate the carrying capacity of their ships.
So it can be assumed that the ancient Egyptians did not need to carry multi-ton stones, they could easily do with a system of water locks from the foot of the pyramid to the continuously rising construction site.
Yes, but what about the specific gravity of the stone? Let's resort to calculations. Considering that 2.5 tons of limestone occupy a little more than 1m3 and for simplicity, taking the dimensions of the stone block in the masonry of the Cheops pyramid at 2x2x2 Egyptian cubits (that is, 1.05x1.05x1.05 m), we find the volume of the block - it is equal to 1.16m3. A block completely submerged in water will displace 1.16 m3) of water and thus, roughly speaking, will become 1.16 tons lighter. What to do with the remaining weight? We attach to the block a well-tarred sealed wooden box weighing about 200 kg and measuring 1.05x1.05x1.4 m. A float of this size will displace 1.54 m3 of water, which will be equal to the residual weight of the block and the weight of the float itself. It will be possible to facilitate the work of connecting and disconnecting the block and the float by using copper hooks, which the Egyptians also used. The chain of water locks could be made in the form of square wells with a cross-section of 3x3 cubits (1.57x1.57 m) and a height of about five meters, tightly adjacent to each other. Having accepted the angle of inclination of the lateral plane of the Cheops pyramid as determined by archaeologists at 52 °, we find that with such a width of the well in each lifting cycle, the "block - float" system will move horizontally by 3 cubits (1.57 m), and vertically by 4 cubits (2.10 m). In order for the "block - float" system to float in the well and hang over the bottom at a height of 0.3 m (then the hooks will not hit the bottom), 3.3 m3 of water must be poured into it. But in order for the "block - float" to float up another 2 m, another 5 m3 of water should be poured into the well. The water levels in the neighboring sluices will become equal, it will be possible to raise the wall and move the "block - float" from the sluice to the sluice. After lowering the wall, the cycle is repeated.
What will be the workload for the workers? Calculations show: in order to build the Cheops pyramid in 19 years and 252 days, it is necessary to pump 5 m3 of water in 15 minutes without stopping for ten hours in a row every day. The water rising together with the cargo can be discharged along the nearby located the same chain of locks. There should be four double chains of locks on each side of the pyramid. Three to four people should work at each airlock, scooping from a well from 2 to 4 m deep with a 20-liter bucket, and the pace of work is one bucket in 7.2 seconds. Workers could change in case of fatigue, and their total number hardly exceeded 4,000. Is there any factual confirmation of our guesses?
Here is the tale "Pharaoh Cheops and the sorcerers." One of its storylines tells of the high priest, spellcaster, scribe Jajamankh, who lifted half of the lake's waters and put it on the other half. Then he returned the waters to their original place. Why, this is a description of the operation of a water lock!
Here is one of the paintings on the tomb at Thebes. A boat with oars, a strange stepped structure in the boat, all supported by a column of water. What is encrypted in the picture, what is the idea behind it? Maybe lifting a boat through a sluice system? In any case, this structure in the boat is very similar to the system of locks from the drawing of the 18th century. AD
Here is an ancient Egyptian drawing "The Sun-Ra goes from a day boat to a night boat." And again in the boats there is a strange structure that looks like a ladder. Or maybe this is not a staircase, but a schematic representation of a double line of water locks?
Here is a quote from the works on the history of the construction of the pyramids and their creators by an Arab writer of the late 12th century. Ibrahim ibn Wazif Shah:
"… Then the king ordered to build pyramids and dig ditches in them, into which the Nile will penetrate to a certain point, and then turn and flow into some western regions and towards Said …"
Of course, some vague memories have survived, and you need to look!
S. Artyukhov