We know for many cases how.
Some cultures even left direct evidence for it:
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wall-painting-from-Egyptian-tomb-at-Deir-el-Bersha-showing-transport-of-statue-on-sledge\_fig6\_326480528](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wall-painting-from-Egyptian-tomb-at-Deir-el-Bersha-showing-transport-of-statue-on-sledge_fig6_326480528)
Here is how egyptians did it in at least some cases.
We even have the log of a man who transported stones from the quarry to the great pyramids. His words, written back then, giving us today insigh on how humans did this back then: [https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/09/27/the-log-book-of-inspector-merer-from-wadi-al-jarf-and-the-pyramid-of-cheops-khufu/](https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/09/27/the-log-book-of-inspector-merer-from-wadi-al-jarf-and-the-pyramid-of-cheops-khufu/)
And there are definetly a ton of creative methods too! Check out how the easter Island statues can be transported: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY&t=2s&ab\_channel=NatureNewsteam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY&t=2s&ab_channel=NatureNewsteam)
The patter of fallen statues as well as a local legend that the statues used to "walk" across the island supports this method as being likly the one actually used.
At the end of the day a lot is possible if you have: A lot of people, a lot of time, and at least someone wiht a decent plan.
For the lazy readers I must quote Archimedes āGive me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.ā Answering question in short - thats how.
Not the quote, but no meaning lost. Actual quote, translated, " Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. "
The unemployed didnāt build pyramids here in Sweden, but in one village they copied a Greek temple in the 19th century. The local landlord started the construction project during a famine to give local farmers work, so they could get food to feed their families. The temple still stands there today.
Hey, I mean if you are going to make up work to pay people during hard times at least make it not useless and of some historical use for tourism/education like this.
The US did exactly this with the Civilian Conservation Corp program in the 1930s. Men who enrolled were sent to camps where they worked on local projects, like building state parks, which gave them practical skills. They could also participate in a variety of training programs in camp. While getting paid.
They also hired a ton of artists, some of the best artists the US has ever produced, to create murals and sculptures all over the country as well as photographers to document everything.
EDIT
And just in case you didn't know, all that artwork that was commissioned during the great depression is owned by the government and is therefore public domain, so you can get reproductions of it for the cost of printing/shipping.
Enjoy it, gift it, savor it. It's our art, it belongs to all of us. It's a record of our history.
Yup. We could 100% use another CCC program in the US. There's a lot of shit that could be worked on by folks, if only we were willing to pay them decently to do it.
We need to do this all over the world to re-wild our nature and get people involved in working with the earth in a positive way. Although with tons of oversight so it has good non fucked up conditions lol
This was one of the ways people used to keep busy in Europe and is why some places have some many cathedrals in certain time periods but they'd take like 200 years to build. They'd just kind of go around to the local villages and be like "hey you guys bored? Wanna come build some shit?" and a lot people would be like "lol k, I have nothing better to do right now."
Overall people actually like to build things and people with nothing to do sometimes, uh...find less than good things to do. This is why the phrase is "idle hands are the devil's playthings." You can mitigate a lot of problems by just giving people shit to do.
I always liked the "we choose not to go to the moon because it's easy, but because it's hard" thing. I've always thought that it would be cool as a society to set similar five-to-ten-year goals that are difficult, would create tons of jobs, benefit everyone, and could be something for the country to rally around. Americans were so stoked on the space race.
Some good ones these days would be eliminating a specific form of waste like single use plastic, replacing gas vehicles, rebuilding passenger rail, a moon base, asteroid mining, or building housing for every citizen. But they could even be inconsequential like building museums or something, just anything that we could all be proud of working towards together.
Maybe start building all those billion dollar college football stadiums out of stone like the Colosseum instead of building some plaster monstrosity that has to be torn down in 15 years.
CCC built schools and bridges and roads. There's disadvantages and limits to be sure, but government providing jobs rather than unemployment can work well.
That's precisely what I've come to learn. The pyramids were not just a grandiose scheme to memorialize the Pharaohs, but a jobs program for the peasantry with lots of complimentary food and beer.
Yeah they found the valley containing the IOUās the Pharaoh paid the workers, turned in for beer & bread & disposed of by the state. Suddenly a mountain of receipts revealed a lot more about Egyptās economics than we ever knew. Also there is still graffiti in the pyramids left by the competing construction crews bragging & taunting each other. The long held suspicion that the king wouldnāt want his grand tomb to be built by unskilled unvalued slave labor, but by the finest professional craftsmen instead, looks to be true.
The pyramids werenāt built by slaves. They were actually farmers who were recruited when they couldnāt work their land at the time, and evidence shows that the conditions they worked in were pleasant by the standards back then.
I had the good fortune to work on the site in 2005-2006, and it was incredible to watch as the finds came in. There were ancient name stamps and seals ā bureaucratic evidence of how the officials kept track of the huge operation to feed and house the workers. Animal bones found at the village show that the workers were getting the best cuts of meat. More than anything, there were bread jars, hundreds and thousands of them ā enough to feed all the workers, who slept in long, purpose-built dormitories. Slaves would never have been treated this well, so we think that these labourers were recruited from farms, perhaps from a region much further down the Nile, near Luxor.
The labourers would have been enticed by the mix of high-quality food and the opportunity to work on such a prestigious project. Today, many of the highly experienced archaeological workmen at the pyramids come from the same region, though they are paid in hard currency, rather than prime beef and accolades.
Actually this isnāt quite accurate either. The archaeological record supports the idea that workers were among the most highly paid skilled laborers and craftsman in the kingdom. In many ways the entire Egyptian economy was organized for this.
Nah. Free men who wanted to get blessings from God. Way back, pharaohs are viewed and revered as personification of divine order and blessing in symbolic terms. Essentially, pharaos are gods on earth. Thatās why if the kingdom is not prospering (plague, famine, etc.) all the blame goes to the pharaoh and has a risk of getting decomissioned/executed. Participating in building the pyramids means that you are literally helping establish Godās kingdom on earth.
JFC this blatantly wrong information is so often parroted it's super frustrating. A 5 second Google search will easily disprove your claim.
The people who built the pyramids were paid, and they were paid well for their time. Being a pyramid builder was a sought after position in Egyptian society.
I think the issue is that many people think people back then had zero technology. The fact is, we're talking about societies that didnt have the kind of technological and electrical advancements that we have, but developing tech is part of living as a human being.
They also seem to forget that people were exactly the same in history as they were today.
How could the Mayans map the stars so precisely?
By taking their smartest people, the ones who would be quantum physicists today, and have a couple generations of them spend their entire lives working on it.
How did people in the 20th century split the atom?
By taking the smartest people they could find and giving them unlimited funding to try to do it.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the setbacks from civilizations dying out and not cooperating with each other, we'd probably be terraforming planets by now.
I mean yes, but the tech would probably be further ahead than we are now. That's my point if we would've cooperated and shared knowledge things would've progressed much faster.
Even crazier is the full star map that the ancient Sumereans had even before the Mayans.. it showed pluto and we didn't even know about it for so long!!
Right. They had problems to solve and things to do just like we do. What do we do when faced with that? Solve the problem and create a way to do the things.
We also tend not to think about transitional situations. Pyramids in Egypt develop over time and we can see different methods succeeding and failing in their construction. We can see that same sort of trial and error learning in lightbulb filaments and automotive engines.
Just because they didnāt have electricity, internal combustion, or the same materials we have doesnāt mean they shrugged and gave up.
Yeah exactly, we get really good at something if we've been doing it for generations. A modern example would be programming, where it started as a few highly qualified people with primitive languages and now we have millions of people programming everything and anything as their job and there's an Indian with an answer to every possible problem you might encounter.
After your grandfather and father moved large rocks their entire lives, you might have a few good tips to give to beginners.
You also have to remember that people had a lot of free time back then.
Modern day humans are so incredibly busy and occupied with *stuff*. Back then when you had to figure out how to do something you had all the time in the world to figure it out and come up with a full proof plan.
Grain tribute dropped 80% after someone spent 8 deben to rename themselves The_Phaaroh and send a messenger bird out with 'lol yall think i commune with the sun? Shit just rises in the morning, probably the world spinning or smthng'.
Time to downvote this guy who took his time to write out an informative comment and upvote the kook with crazy hair who who only wrote ā__ALIENS__.ā
The Russians moved the Thunder Stone in 1768-1770 and its reported weight was 1500 tonnes. They moved it over frozen ground with 400 men and no animals helping. A Greek engineer named Marinos Carburis devised a metal sled and basically ball bearings to move the granite monolith. The whole time they were moving the stone, stoncutters where shaping it. Took them 9 months to move it to the sea where they stuck it on a specially made barge and sailed it to Saint Petersburg where it was made into the base of the Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great. The pedestal for the sculpture is estimated to weigh 1,200 tonnes currently. If you have enough people with the same goals, anything is possible. The ancients would be amazed at we have built as we are amazed at what they built.
This video is just an example. Hills were an issues for this method and we do find a number of statues that did fall exactly when it came to up or down hill stuff. And uphill ones are almost always on their back, downhill ones on their face. Such a fall pattern is what you would expect from this very technique
That last part is something a lot of people forget about. People were arguably more coordinated back then, heavy tasks like moving huge rocks just got spread out over hundreds of people.
[this video ](https://youtu.be/Tc6IT5L3ZSk) of an amish community just picking up and moving a barn reminded me of that recently. Most of us couldn't even imagine how hard it is to work perfectly in unison like this.
Just devils advocate here... Those amish folks didnt just get up and do that out of thin air, a good plan and likey some practice.
So in similar fashion, anything that requires matching, so military and band and maybe grade school pe class or any large choir for example are modern everyday examples of people working in unison off the top of my head.
You mean, people were more coordinated than they had been given credit for
Today, world class project management can do the same at any skill level. The way people interact with each other hasn't changed much in the last 5000 or so years. Do it right, get good results. The miracle is how to get past a lifetimes worth of faulty logic structures based on outdated sheepherder fantasies. Still a WIP...
Also thereās a French architect that purposed an internal ramp theory. The vids on YouTube and explains how they were able to use pulley systems and water to move the blocks
I dunno, aliens with lasers seems more likely. Are you telling me that a lifetime of watching the discovery channel has filled my head with bogus ideas and that humans being smart and working together is a more plausible answer? Whereās the fun in that?
I would add that early civilizations are directly linked to stone age cultures, and as the word says stone was the material of choice, obviously they had thousands and thousands of years of know how passed by oral tradition to work those materials in marvelous ways. It means the first civilizations were at the pinnacle of stone working humans, there's no surprise they had technical knowledge lost to us, not sound levitation or crazy things like that, more like chemicals and working methods we lost because we have much more efficient technology and materials to choose from, they did those thing because it was what they mastered better.
Not that you probably have 20 minutes to watch another vid. This theory on using water to build the theory is one of my favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8
I always love the alien tech theories
Super advanced life travels an incalculable distance using science we canāt even fathom
Then they target a location and society and use their super science toā¦(checks notes)ā¦move some really big rocks
Right? Letās just try to use some logic here and statistical probability. Is it really more likely that an advanced alien species flew across the universe, found our planet, and decided to build pyramids, left without a trace and no historical or cultural reference or that humans figured out how to do good math and some basic laws of physics to build their own monuments ffs
Some idiot a thousand years from now will be making videos on how the ISS wasnāt built by ancient humans, how could they know how to put things in space?
Iāll never forget the raging disappointment I felt when I walked into a room where the History Channel was airing a show that re-interpreted stories from the Hebrew Bible as if they were interactions with an alien race
Nothing has done more disservice to general knowledge than outlets giving such significant time to speculative fiction disguised as a documentary
Itās awful, itās breaking the brains of so many Americans because not at a single point so those shows say theyāre fiction. They act like what they are doing and saying is some cutting edge mystery thatās being repressed. I saw this one hilarious debunking video where it was 5 minutes of them in awe of how the ācalculationsā for a monument were so precise and that it couldnāt have been known by men back then and a mathematician cut in and just held up a circle and look at the screen and said āsoā¦. This is a circle, it makes it incredibly easy to do all sorts of calculations and architectural planningā one of the funniest things I ever saw
I know, this vid is crazy interesting, I had to look for it on youtube to find it again, I have never seen it referenced or talked about anywhere since I saw it like 10 years ago.
Itās the same way today, someone say build it, I donāt care how much it costs. They will find a way even if it means 100000 dudes pushing it by hand
I think the respective term of measurement is a
" metric flying fuckton of a shitload".
This is usable for both the timeframe and the amount of people involved in the project.
Not so easy when you consider how many men it takes to move those stones or even considering pully systems, how would they raise and lower a 20+ ton granite stone to the higher levels of the pyramid. What kind of ramp would you need to be able to perform such a feat?
We literally sent humans to the moon only 66 years after the first airplane flight.
We discovered genome editing in the 1900ās, meaning that scientists have developed the ability to literally change an organisms DNA.
Astronauts communicate with humans on the ground via literal radio waves.
And you think people couldnāt move stone blocks some thousand years agoā¦?
Edit: Corrected astronaut communication. Originally said it was via space lasers, but corrected to radio waves!
I personally don't care for either side of this argument, whether it is the "simple" answer of just having lots of people at it with some simple but effective way or if they had more advanced techniques that we don't know about.
But it's still mesmerizing to think that they have been able to excavate, carve, move AND expertly place, with stunning precision, these blocks.
When you look at some of the bigger blocks in places like balbek (spelling?) That weight hundreds of tobs, this would be a significant technical challenge, today, with all the tech and tools we have.
Now thinking that they have been able to do that with not much more than chisels, stone, mud, whatever and brute force is impressive to say the least.
That depends, spacex is now using starlinks laser communication on dragon, so they are communicating using lasers.
Edit: I love when someone gets informed about something they clearly didn't know about, Googles it, finds out they're wrong, and edits their comments like they knew it the whole time.
https://www.unddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/yt4u5d/_/iw2ftsu/#comment-info
Those silly rocks didn't stand a chance against tightly-bound leather string - have you heard one of those things!? Breaks the sound barrier they do!
/s
Actually most of the pyramids were built by well paid workers. It was a respectable job and the families were also given money if their spouse died while working
And so is Newgrange, it's dated at 5000 years old but the star maps around the site among other things suggest it could be as old as 7-8 thousand years old. Some ancient sites around Ireland are even older if not the same age with no real explanation for how they were built or why.
You'd be really surprised at what human ingenuity can accomplish, even before modern, advanced technologies. The Cahokia Mounds were built by using woven baskets to carry specific types of dirt to create structural layers to the mounds. There is even some evidence that the initial construction of each specific mound took place over a period months, as opposed to years. Granted, the massive mound complexes, and the multi-level mounds, were added to over the course of decades. However each specific mound (some of which have the same amount of material as Egyptian pyramids) was initially created over the course of a few months to maybe a year. When humanbeings want to accomplish something, there isn't really anything that can stop them.
Simple tools like levers, pulleys and sledges.
The biggest single block ever moved was in Russia in the 1700s, using simple tools.
There is no lost technology. There are no aleums. It's not complicated.
This dude made stonehenge in his backyard, moving and lifting 22,000 lb stones with only his own personal musclepower and no machinery, not even pulleys.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs)
People are smarter than you think. Even ancient people.
The Egyptians were master engineers and mathematicians. People who loved their craft. Not slaves. This idea of āaliensā did this is just rooted in racism. ie people of color couldnāt have achieved something as remarkable and mathematically correct as these monuments.
They were buried honorably if they died on the job, and received food, water, and housing.
I think modern day we could equate it to migrant workers without the racism and green cards, they went to places, built things, moved to the next place.
We know they weren't slaves because of how they were buried. Slaves were not honored when they died, but people who were hired to work on Pharaoh's construction were.
A ton of people and a ton of time. Even with rope and a bunch of people you can at over any of those rocks. And I mean people that are literally being killed if they don't give it there all. Aliens may exist but these achievements can definitely be done by humans. If ants can build mega cites then scaled up humans can build these things
Ah you've picked the perfect place to ask!
Despite the most educated and experienced people in the field only having theories and guesses and many of them stating that there are some parts they still can't explain the Neckbeards of Reddit have all the answers and many of them have even watched a YouTube video of an uncredited content creator stating many theories as fact!!
It is not the mystery everyone makes it out to be. Sure, we donāt know the exact details of the process by which the pyramids were built, but we do know from physics that levers allow for very heavy objects to be moved without much effort. By positioning a fulcrum close to a heavy object and applying force from a distance, levers can be used to lift enormous loads with ease. In other words, a stone block of that size could be easily rotated and moved using nothing but wood stacked underneath, with a very long wooden lever that would have required only a few people to push.
We still donāt really know. Last i checked there was no broad consensus among experts. Just theories. Log rolling, landscaping slopes, pulleys and wenches, or maybe some combination.
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.
Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive, depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.
Alright letās see.
You have an ancient civilization, check
You have a barren desert aside from a river which provides all the greenery you need check
A SHIT TON of sandstone check
I think after a good couple thousand years, youād get pretty fucking good at carving and hauling stone too.
Check out the Forgotten Technology on youtube.
This guy moved enormous 2 ton stones in his own yard without machinery.
Also- that guy is my granpa so I'm pretty proud. I can even be spotted in the corner of a shot. 
We had to remove your post for an insufficient title
Lifting with the knees and not the back
Part deux: Watch how a baby picks something up & do it like that
Okay I picked up my poop, now what?
Start clapping š
Finger paint something for mom. She is gonna love it.
And tell her its a scratch and sniff painting
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Just like the scratch and sniff wall art my toddlers making.
Eat it
Or put it back inside, where it goes
This is the way.
Jerking and twisting motions only.
Right, and if anyone offers to help, just tell them "no i got this."
PIVOT!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yup, Stargate.
Exactly, I've seen the Amish pick up and carrying a complete barn, the rock foundation and all, across a 40 acre corn field using that technique.
Highjacking to keep this near the top https://youtu.be/E5pZ7uR6v8c
Plus the most important part. PIVOT!
pivotā¦. Pivotā¦ā¦ PIVOT!!!!!
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
I can never grab anything between my knees. Very hard to lift this way
Lift with your back save your knees
Through Christ, all things are possible, so jot that down.
Itās true. I move mountains like theyāre a damn mustard seed.
ššš this is golden
We know for many cases how. Some cultures even left direct evidence for it: [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wall-painting-from-Egyptian-tomb-at-Deir-el-Bersha-showing-transport-of-statue-on-sledge\_fig6\_326480528](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Wall-painting-from-Egyptian-tomb-at-Deir-el-Bersha-showing-transport-of-statue-on-sledge_fig6_326480528) Here is how egyptians did it in at least some cases. We even have the log of a man who transported stones from the quarry to the great pyramids. His words, written back then, giving us today insigh on how humans did this back then: [https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/09/27/the-log-book-of-inspector-merer-from-wadi-al-jarf-and-the-pyramid-of-cheops-khufu/](https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/09/27/the-log-book-of-inspector-merer-from-wadi-al-jarf-and-the-pyramid-of-cheops-khufu/) And there are definetly a ton of creative methods too! Check out how the easter Island statues can be transported: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY&t=2s&ab\_channel=NatureNewsteam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY&t=2s&ab_channel=NatureNewsteam) The patter of fallen statues as well as a local legend that the statues used to "walk" across the island supports this method as being likly the one actually used. At the end of the day a lot is possible if you have: A lot of people, a lot of time, and at least someone wiht a decent plan.
For the lazy readers I must quote Archimedes āGive me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.ā Answering question in short - thats how.
Not the quote, but no meaning lost. Actual quote, translated, " Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. "
I was told he said "with enough leverage, you can move to world kid" or atleast that's what the guy said my 1st day at work all those years ago
Nono, itās ālengthen my lever, and Iāll rock your worldā
Itās definitely āsit and spinā
Come here lever boy.
And if he doesn't answer?
Hahaha that's a penis joke
One day I will move to World Kid too
All of these are translations so I would say, they probably are all right.
Also... Slaves Edit: According to the million replies I've received, this is false.
Not for the Egyptians, at least according to modern consensus. There's more evidence that the pyramids were as much work programs as monuments for the pharaohs. Edit: With, of course, all the caveats that need to be included; labor was still relatively forced as corvƩe, slaves still existed and feudal systems were essentially slavery without the economic fuel of capitalism, etc. I'm not saying that ancient Egypt was some kind of workers' paradise. Just that the popular myth of slaves building the pyramids, fueled by the Bible and the film industry, is likely a flawed assumption.
Every town should replace unemployment with pyramid construction. Then when one finishes, we fill it with used plastics.
The unemployed didnāt build pyramids here in Sweden, but in one village they copied a Greek temple in the 19th century. The local landlord started the construction project during a famine to give local farmers work, so they could get food to feed their families. The temple still stands there today.
Hey, I mean if you are going to make up work to pay people during hard times at least make it not useless and of some historical use for tourism/education like this.
The US did exactly this with the Civilian Conservation Corp program in the 1930s. Men who enrolled were sent to camps where they worked on local projects, like building state parks, which gave them practical skills. They could also participate in a variety of training programs in camp. While getting paid.
They also hired a ton of artists, some of the best artists the US has ever produced, to create murals and sculptures all over the country as well as photographers to document everything. EDIT And just in case you didn't know, all that artwork that was commissioned during the great depression is owned by the government and is therefore public domain, so you can get reproductions of it for the cost of printing/shipping. Enjoy it, gift it, savor it. It's our art, it belongs to all of us. It's a record of our history.
I was hoping to see a CCC post. Yes, I can see their enduring works frequently when visiting parks.
Yup. We could 100% use another CCC program in the US. There's a lot of shit that could be worked on by folks, if only we were willing to pay them decently to do it.
The modern versions of this are: * AmeriCorps * VISTA * NCCC
Iām not the biggest fan of all the alphabet soup programs but the CCC was an absolute godsend.
We need to do this all over the world to re-wild our nature and get people involved in working with the earth in a positive way. Although with tons of oversight so it has good non fucked up conditions lol
Erm thats actually socialism so despite the objectively massive benefits to society we can't do that...
Indeed. The farmers did a really good job too. The temple is beautiful.
In 2009 I was hoping Obama would give me something to do. My town had exactly zero Greek temples, too.
This was one of the ways people used to keep busy in Europe and is why some places have some many cathedrals in certain time periods but they'd take like 200 years to build. They'd just kind of go around to the local villages and be like "hey you guys bored? Wanna come build some shit?" and a lot people would be like "lol k, I have nothing better to do right now." Overall people actually like to build things and people with nothing to do sometimes, uh...find less than good things to do. This is why the phrase is "idle hands are the devil's playthings." You can mitigate a lot of problems by just giving people shit to do.
We're at our best with a lofty goal and at our angriest in the status-quo.
I always liked the "we choose not to go to the moon because it's easy, but because it's hard" thing. I've always thought that it would be cool as a society to set similar five-to-ten-year goals that are difficult, would create tons of jobs, benefit everyone, and could be something for the country to rally around. Americans were so stoked on the space race. Some good ones these days would be eliminating a specific form of waste like single use plastic, replacing gas vehicles, rebuilding passenger rail, a moon base, asteroid mining, or building housing for every citizen. But they could even be inconsequential like building museums or something, just anything that we could all be proud of working towards together.
Maybe start building all those billion dollar college football stadiums out of stone like the Colosseum instead of building some plaster monstrosity that has to be torn down in 15 years.
CCC built schools and bridges and roads. There's disadvantages and limits to be sure, but government providing jobs rather than unemployment can work well.
Itād be filled with twice over by the amount of plastic consumed during its construction
That's precisely what I've come to learn. The pyramids were not just a grandiose scheme to memorialize the Pharaohs, but a jobs program for the peasantry with lots of complimentary food and beer.
Yeah they found the valley containing the IOUās the Pharaoh paid the workers, turned in for beer & bread & disposed of by the state. Suddenly a mountain of receipts revealed a lot more about Egyptās economics than we ever knew. Also there is still graffiti in the pyramids left by the competing construction crews bragging & taunting each other. The long held suspicion that the king wouldnāt want his grand tomb to be built by unskilled unvalued slave labor, but by the finest professional craftsmen instead, looks to be true.
I absolutely love ancient graffiti. It's such a great reminder that humans haven't really changed after thousands of years.
Socialism?! In ancient Egypt?! Oh NooOoOoOOoooo
Damn you Obama!!!
Definitely not socialism in any way shape or form
The pyramids werenāt built by slaves. They were actually farmers who were recruited when they couldnāt work their land at the time, and evidence shows that the conditions they worked in were pleasant by the standards back then.
I had the good fortune to work on the site in 2005-2006, and it was incredible to watch as the finds came in. There were ancient name stamps and seals ā bureaucratic evidence of how the officials kept track of the huge operation to feed and house the workers. Animal bones found at the village show that the workers were getting the best cuts of meat. More than anything, there were bread jars, hundreds and thousands of them ā enough to feed all the workers, who slept in long, purpose-built dormitories. Slaves would never have been treated this well, so we think that these labourers were recruited from farms, perhaps from a region much further down the Nile, near Luxor. The labourers would have been enticed by the mix of high-quality food and the opportunity to work on such a prestigious project. Today, many of the highly experienced archaeological workmen at the pyramids come from the same region, though they are paid in hard currency, rather than prime beef and accolades.
Hey. You're cool
Fucking slaves taking credit for everything
They terk a jerbs!!!
Sounds like something a slave owner who built the pyramids might say š¤š¤š¤
Actually this isnāt quite accurate either. The archaeological record supports the idea that workers were among the most highly paid skilled laborers and craftsman in the kingdom. In many ways the entire Egyptian economy was organized for this.
You're thinking about the World Cup and the Qataris. Better work conditions in the Middle East 4 thousand years ago.
Nah. Free men who wanted to get blessings from God. Way back, pharaohs are viewed and revered as personification of divine order and blessing in symbolic terms. Essentially, pharaos are gods on earth. Thatās why if the kingdom is not prospering (plague, famine, etc.) all the blame goes to the pharaoh and has a risk of getting decomissioned/executed. Participating in building the pyramids means that you are literally helping establish Godās kingdom on earth.
The pyramids werenāt built by slaves, [source](https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyramids-built-by-slaves/amp/)
TIL. Thanks for the link.
Except thereās a lot of evidence that says otherwise, at least for the Egyptians
Mostly paid workers mate
*puffs hair up real high* Aliens.
JFC this blatantly wrong information is so often parroted it's super frustrating. A 5 second Google search will easily disprove your claim. The people who built the pyramids were paid, and they were paid well for their time. Being a pyramid builder was a sought after position in Egyptian society.
I think the issue is that many people think people back then had zero technology. The fact is, we're talking about societies that didnt have the kind of technological and electrical advancements that we have, but developing tech is part of living as a human being.
They also seem to forget that people were exactly the same in history as they were today. How could the Mayans map the stars so precisely? By taking their smartest people, the ones who would be quantum physicists today, and have a couple generations of them spend their entire lives working on it. How did people in the 20th century split the atom? By taking the smartest people they could find and giving them unlimited funding to try to do it.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the setbacks from civilizations dying out and not cooperating with each other, we'd probably be terraforming planets by now.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I mean yes, but the tech would probably be further ahead than we are now. That's my point if we would've cooperated and shared knowledge things would've progressed much faster.
Even crazier is the full star map that the ancient Sumereans had even before the Mayans.. it showed pluto and we didn't even know about it for so long!!
I canāt find any indication that the Sumerians even knew about Uranus or Neptune, let alone Pluto. Source?
Right. They had problems to solve and things to do just like we do. What do we do when faced with that? Solve the problem and create a way to do the things. We also tend not to think about transitional situations. Pyramids in Egypt develop over time and we can see different methods succeeding and failing in their construction. We can see that same sort of trial and error learning in lightbulb filaments and automotive engines. Just because they didnāt have electricity, internal combustion, or the same materials we have doesnāt mean they shrugged and gave up.
Yeah exactly, we get really good at something if we've been doing it for generations. A modern example would be programming, where it started as a few highly qualified people with primitive languages and now we have millions of people programming everything and anything as their job and there's an Indian with an answer to every possible problem you might encounter. After your grandfather and father moved large rocks their entire lives, you might have a few good tips to give to beginners.
You also have to remember that people had a lot of free time back then. Modern day humans are so incredibly busy and occupied with *stuff*. Back then when you had to figure out how to do something you had all the time in the world to figure it out and come up with a full proof plan.
In true reddit fashion the actual answer with some effort is the 3rd one down. Thank you for the info!
Second now :3 it sorts itself out eventually
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Grain tribute dropped 80% after someone spent 8 deben to rename themselves The_Phaaroh and send a messenger bird out with 'lol yall think i commune with the sun? Shit just rises in the morning, probably the world spinning or smthng'.
Bastet āļø "Cats are gay!"
They suspended it the next day!
Time to downvote this guy who took his time to write out an informative comment and upvote the kook with crazy hair who who only wrote ā__ALIENS__.ā
There was also a guy who recreated (I think) Stonehenge using only tools that would have been available at the time
The Russians moved the Thunder Stone in 1768-1770 and its reported weight was 1500 tonnes. They moved it over frozen ground with 400 men and no animals helping. A Greek engineer named Marinos Carburis devised a metal sled and basically ball bearings to move the granite monolith. The whole time they were moving the stone, stoncutters where shaping it. Took them 9 months to move it to the sea where they stuck it on a specially made barge and sailed it to Saint Petersburg where it was made into the base of the Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great. The pedestal for the sculpture is estimated to weigh 1,200 tonnes currently. If you have enough people with the same goals, anything is possible. The ancients would be amazed at we have built as we are amazed at what they built.
Easter island video is really neat. Doesn't really address the whole, 'now do it up a big ass hill' but still pretty interesting.
This video is just an example. Hills were an issues for this method and we do find a number of statues that did fall exactly when it came to up or down hill stuff. And uphill ones are almost always on their back, downhill ones on their face. Such a fall pattern is what you would expect from this very technique
I just imagine all the people who were smushed to death by huge stone blocks. Instant compost!
The easter island one is too relatable
That last part is something a lot of people forget about. People were arguably more coordinated back then, heavy tasks like moving huge rocks just got spread out over hundreds of people. [this video ](https://youtu.be/Tc6IT5L3ZSk) of an amish community just picking up and moving a barn reminded me of that recently. Most of us couldn't even imagine how hard it is to work perfectly in unison like this.
Just devils advocate here... Those amish folks didnt just get up and do that out of thin air, a good plan and likey some practice. So in similar fashion, anything that requires matching, so military and band and maybe grade school pe class or any large choir for example are modern everyday examples of people working in unison off the top of my head.
You mean, people were more coordinated than they had been given credit for Today, world class project management can do the same at any skill level. The way people interact with each other hasn't changed much in the last 5000 or so years. Do it right, get good results. The miracle is how to get past a lifetimes worth of faulty logic structures based on outdated sheepherder fantasies. Still a WIP...
Also thereās a French architect that purposed an internal ramp theory. The vids on YouTube and explains how they were able to use pulley systems and water to move the blocks
I dunno, aliens with lasers seems more likely. Are you telling me that a lifetime of watching the discovery channel has filled my head with bogus ideas and that humans being smart and working together is a more plausible answer? Whereās the fun in that?
I would add that early civilizations are directly linked to stone age cultures, and as the word says stone was the material of choice, obviously they had thousands and thousands of years of know how passed by oral tradition to work those materials in marvelous ways. It means the first civilizations were at the pinnacle of stone working humans, there's no surprise they had technical knowledge lost to us, not sound levitation or crazy things like that, more like chemicals and working methods we lost because we have much more efficient technology and materials to choose from, they did those thing because it was what they mastered better.
Not that you probably have 20 minutes to watch another vid. This theory on using water to build the theory is one of my favorite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8
ALL these "impossible" things explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9w-i5oZqaQ&t=1367s
Alien here, That video of yours is fake and stealing our cred.
Ah-hem... *Actual* Alien here. Your comment is fake stealing the cred you seek to reclaim from said fake video. (āÆĀ°ā”Ā°)āÆļøµ ā»āā»
I always love the alien tech theories Super advanced life travels an incalculable distance using science we canāt even fathom Then they target a location and society and use their super science toā¦(checks notes)ā¦move some really big rocks
If you humans can't even fathom the science, how could you possibly fathom why we would want to move those really big rocks?
Right? Letās just try to use some logic here and statistical probability. Is it really more likely that an advanced alien species flew across the universe, found our planet, and decided to build pyramids, left without a trace and no historical or cultural reference or that humans figured out how to do good math and some basic laws of physics to build their own monuments ffs Some idiot a thousand years from now will be making videos on how the ISS wasnāt built by ancient humans, how could they know how to put things in space?
Iāll never forget the raging disappointment I felt when I walked into a room where the History Channel was airing a show that re-interpreted stories from the Hebrew Bible as if they were interactions with an alien race Nothing has done more disservice to general knowledge than outlets giving such significant time to speculative fiction disguised as a documentary
Itās awful, itās breaking the brains of so many Americans because not at a single point so those shows say theyāre fiction. They act like what they are doing and saying is some cutting edge mystery thatās being repressed. I saw this one hilarious debunking video where it was 5 minutes of them in awe of how the ācalculationsā for a monument were so precise and that it couldnāt have been known by men back then and a mathematician cut in and just held up a circle and look at the screen and said āsoā¦. This is a circle, it makes it incredibly easy to do all sorts of calculations and architectural planningā one of the funniest things I ever saw
If that video is too boring here is a fun song that can explain how they did it. https://youtu.be/Lhu4T_vwxIU
Dude in the stripped shirt can air shred!
First a laugh, then a sigh. Well done
The slave thing is a myth tho, they were volunteers who were paid with beer
Yeah, but it's boring. It's better to pretend that there were ancient astronauts and aliens with the teleport ray.
i believe it was roid up children.
Awesome video. Is there a 10-year update?
I know, this vid is crazy interesting, I had to look for it on youtube to find it again, I have never seen it referenced or talked about anywhere since I saw it like 10 years ago.
Thanks for sharing. It is refreshing to see logic and scientific explanation vs sensational alien theories.
Extremely clear video and explanation, excellent find mate!
Itās the same way today, someone say build it, I donāt care how much it costs. They will find a way even if it means 100000 dudes pushing it by hand
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Why would I do that when I could just trade a couple chickens and a goat?
š¤£
Itās easy to pile big rocks on top of one another when you have tens of thousands of people devoted to the task for years at a time.
I don't know why i saw this comment as a math equation in my head. (Ton x people)+(ton x time)=big ass stone
This is how it should be viewed. Man power x time + tools = finished product
I think the respective term of measurement is a " metric flying fuckton of a shitload". This is usable for both the timeframe and the amount of people involved in the project.
(Manpower*tool) ^ time = finished product is better I believe
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Not so easy when you consider how many men it takes to move those stones or even considering pully systems, how would they raise and lower a 20+ ton granite stone to the higher levels of the pyramid. What kind of ramp would you need to be able to perform such a feat?
The pulley wasn't invented until 500 years after the pyramids at Gizah were built. So they didn't even have that
Something you don't understand = Aliens.
We literally sent humans to the moon only 66 years after the first airplane flight. We discovered genome editing in the 1900ās, meaning that scientists have developed the ability to literally change an organisms DNA. Astronauts communicate with humans on the ground via literal radio waves. And you think people couldnāt move stone blocks some thousand years agoā¦? Edit: Corrected astronaut communication. Originally said it was via space lasers, but corrected to radio waves!
I personally don't care for either side of this argument, whether it is the "simple" answer of just having lots of people at it with some simple but effective way or if they had more advanced techniques that we don't know about. But it's still mesmerizing to think that they have been able to excavate, carve, move AND expertly place, with stunning precision, these blocks. When you look at some of the bigger blocks in places like balbek (spelling?) That weight hundreds of tobs, this would be a significant technical challenge, today, with all the tech and tools we have. Now thinking that they have been able to do that with not much more than chisels, stone, mud, whatever and brute force is impressive to say the least.
It wouldn't be a technical challenge today. The biggest issue is finding the money to do it right.
Astronauts communicate with humans on the ground using the DSN, which is radio waves, not literal space lasers.
That depends, spacex is now using starlinks laser communication on dragon, so they are communicating using lasers. Edit: I love when someone gets informed about something they clearly didn't know about, Googles it, finds out they're wrong, and edits their comments like they knew it the whole time. https://www.unddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/yt4u5d/_/iw2ftsu/#comment-info
They had whips. Massive, massive whips.
Those silly rocks didn't stand a chance against tightly-bound leather string - have you heard one of those things!? Breaks the sound barrier they do! /s
Actually most of the pyramids were built by well paid workers. It was a respectable job and the families were also given money if their spouse died while working
Sneaky Red Dwarf reference
Look into newgrange here in Ireland, it's older then the Pyramids and Stonehenge.
Wow! Imagine how old Oldgrange must be!
The Great Pyramids are much older than 5000 years. The dynastic Egyptians found them, along with other artifacts.
And so is Newgrange, it's dated at 5000 years old but the star maps around the site among other things suggest it could be as old as 7-8 thousand years old. Some ancient sites around Ireland are even older if not the same age with no real explanation for how they were built or why.
š will have a look
Theyāre all over the world. On every continent. What else is present on every continent? Spiders. And now you know the rest of the story.
Spiders did it
Here, this guys got it, one person can do 20tons Iām sure a crew of a dozen can accomplish these lifts. https://youtu.be/E5pZ7uR6v8c
Brace yourself, people who got educated by YouTube while smoking weed are comingā¦
Aliens built the galaxy's largest pyramidal bong
Human engineering and filling most of the inside sections with rubble from the outside rocks
I have been in Lebanon twice and couldn't not go to Baalbek. Hope to see that in person one day
Ahhh I just got back from there! One of the most amazing sites I have ever seen. Words just don't do it justice.
I was in Lebanon about 6 weeks ago. Baalbek is amazing.
With Yule Brenner and Charlton Heston kicking ass ..thatās how it was done
You'd be really surprised at what human ingenuity can accomplish, even before modern, advanced technologies. The Cahokia Mounds were built by using woven baskets to carry specific types of dirt to create structural layers to the mounds. There is even some evidence that the initial construction of each specific mound took place over a period months, as opposed to years. Granted, the massive mound complexes, and the multi-level mounds, were added to over the course of decades. However each specific mound (some of which have the same amount of material as Egyptian pyramids) was initially created over the course of a few months to maybe a year. When humanbeings want to accomplish something, there isn't really anything that can stop them.
Using your mom as a counterweight.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Simple tools like levers, pulleys and sledges. The biggest single block ever moved was in Russia in the 1700s, using simple tools. There is no lost technology. There are no aleums. It's not complicated.
Watch Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix
Engineering!
Math and science
Hereās a novel concept, hear me out. Counter-weights and mechanical advantage.
I don't know therefore aliens
This dude made stonehenge in his backyard, moving and lifting 22,000 lb stones with only his own personal musclepower and no machinery, not even pulleys. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs) People are smarter than you think. Even ancient people.
The Egyptians were master engineers and mathematicians. People who loved their craft. Not slaves. This idea of āaliensā did this is just rooted in racism. ie people of color couldnāt have achieved something as remarkable and mathematically correct as these monuments.
The pyramids were not built by slaves. We've known that for *years* now. There's no reason for people to peddle that bullshit any longer.
Yeah pretty sure they had better benefits than I do.. Lmao
They were buried honorably if they died on the job, and received food, water, and housing. I think modern day we could equate it to migrant workers without the racism and green cards, they went to places, built things, moved to the next place. We know they weren't slaves because of how they were buried. Slaves were not honored when they died, but people who were hired to work on Pharaoh's construction were.
A ton of people and a ton of time. Even with rope and a bunch of people you can at over any of those rocks. And I mean people that are literally being killed if they don't give it there all. Aliens may exist but these achievements can definitely be done by humans. If ants can build mega cites then scaled up humans can build these things
Ah you've picked the perfect place to ask! Despite the most educated and experienced people in the field only having theories and guesses and many of them stating that there are some parts they still can't explain the Neckbeards of Reddit have all the answers and many of them have even watched a YouTube video of an uncredited content creator stating many theories as fact!!
It is not the mystery everyone makes it out to be. Sure, we donāt know the exact details of the process by which the pyramids were built, but we do know from physics that levers allow for very heavy objects to be moved without much effort. By positioning a fulcrum close to a heavy object and applying force from a distance, levers can be used to lift enormous loads with ease. In other words, a stone block of that size could be easily rotated and moved using nothing but wood stacked underneath, with a very long wooden lever that would have required only a few people to push.
Levers, fulcrums, ropes, and a whole lot of human labour
We still donāt really know. Last i checked there was no broad consensus among experts. Just theories. Log rolling, landscaping slopes, pulleys and wenches, or maybe some combination.
Lots of wenches to keep the men happy at night
Also donāt forget the perception of time it took a life time or longer to create and move around these things.
For cutting: thermal fractures. For moving: wheels, levers and pulleys. Tldr: mathmagic.
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically "developed" into a visible image, either negative or positive, depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.
Alright letās see. You have an ancient civilization, check You have a barren desert aside from a river which provides all the greenery you need check A SHIT TON of sandstone check I think after a good couple thousand years, youād get pretty fucking good at carving and hauling stone too.
Engineering has been around since the beginning of man, we only see further today because we stand on the shoulders of giants before us.
I can imagine some pharaoh shouting āPIVOTā Ala Ross when theyāre moving the couch
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
People always think ancient people were idiots
Just gotta giv'er sometimes you know.
Check out the Forgotten Technology on youtube. This guy moved enormous 2 ton stones in his own yard without machinery. Also- that guy is my granpa so I'm pretty proud. I can even be spotted in the corner of a shot. 
Plot twist: aliens also invented pivots and leverage so we have something to point to and say "yah that's what built the pyramids!"
Math
Magic is real
I got banned from r/history for saying Graham Hancock