As a Stonemason, this shit always bothers me. Recent example was an article on stone henge. “Scientists still mystified as to how the stones were stood so that to caps were level!”
Mfr! Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level. Don’t want to lift the stone in and out multiple times to adjust the level? Get logs and cut them to the same length as the upright stones. It’s not fucking rocket surgery!
Drafting* class taught me that you can build any structure with just a T-square, a compass, a pencil, and some basic math.
*As in the precursor to Computer-Aided Drafting. My school was cheap and didn’t let us use AutoCAD till the 2nd semester.
But anyway, place the straight piece of wood across a gap. One end of the string goes around the middle of the wood, the other end hangs down where you tie the rock. You can visually tell with decent enough accuracy if the rock is hanging closer to one side (not level) or just straight down (level). If you can’t tell, get a longer string.
Think your school was cheap? My school only had CAD on 3 machines and you had to take 4 YEARS of drafting courses to be allowed to use it, I graduated in 2012… this shit wasn’t new tech at that time lol
Yeah dude, I took a drafting class way back in HS (really enjoyed it), yet have maybe seen three drafting tables since (and I’m in a field that would have previously had countless).
I know that stuff was basically immediately made obsolete by CAD and what not, but there was always something relaxing and meditative about sitting down at (or standing if you so choose) a drafting table, armed with nothing but a pencil, an eraser, a T-square, a protractor, and a couple plastic triangles, and coming up with some really impressive looking shit with perfect perspective.
If I had the room for one, I’d def get a drafting table… lol I’d probably end up using it to hang wet clothes on to dry.
The pyramids at gizeh predate most of that. They predate algebra by some 800 years.
Of course, despite Pythagoras not being born for some 2000 years, they DID have Rope stretchers to create square angles. They also had square levels and plumb bobs for making straight blocks and level surfaces.
“From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.”
The first “true” pyramids were not built until ~2613. Prior to that it was all step pyramids, which are much less complex - just put a bunch of consecutively smaller squares in a stack. Even then, Djoser was started in ~2670, several hundred years after the “introduction” of basic math. Just because we don’t have extant physical mathematical texts surviving from that time doesn’t mean they didn’t know how to do math.
An apple bob is a children’s party game where a bunch of apples are floating in a basin of water and you have to try to get one out only using your mouth.
It’s really gross as all the kids are just slobbering over all these apples together. Terrible for germ spread.
Anyway it’s not done with plums though, which are a kind of fruit and different from the word “plumb”, which means vertical. So it’s a play on words.
The thing is, its not about a single rock being precise. Its a 2 million ton monument that we are told is a tomb that was built in like 20 years. Thats about 1.7 million pounds per day, every day. It would take our trucks a fucking insane amount of time just dragging it into position, how did they have the time to cut it as well? For a tomb??? Somehow I feel we are not being told the whole story here…
Scientific dating techniques and painstaking archaeological research undertaken around the monument over the last few decades have brought the timeline of the site into focus. It is not possible to talk about ‘one’ Stonehenge – the monument was built, altered, and revered for over 1,500 years. That is equivalent to around 100 generations – it is worth pausing to let the sheer length of time sink in!
There is little or no direct evidence revealing the construction techniques used by the Stonehenge builders. Over the years, various authors have suggested that supernatural or anachronistic methods were used, usually asserting that the stones were impossible to move otherwise due to their massive size. However, conventional techniques, using Neolithic technology as basic as shear legs, have been demonstrably effective at moving and placing stones of a similar size.[48] The most common theory of how prehistoric people moved megaliths has them creating a track of logs which the large stones were rolled along.[49] Another megalith transport theory involves the use of a type of sleigh running on a track greased with animal fat.[49] Such an experiment with a sleigh carrying a 40-ton slab of stone was successfully conducted near Stonehenge in 1995. A team of more than 100 workers managed to push and pull the slab along the 18-mile (29 km) journey from the Marlborough Downs.[49]
Each stone weights around 25 tons and I found this helicopter that can carry 33 tons: en.wikipedia.org/…/Sikorsky_CH-53E_Super_Stallion…. So we could easily build this today. Probably wouldn’t take long at all.
What? First i am not arguing that we could not do it. Second stonehenge and the great pyramid are completely different levels of complexity. Third, i know machinery can lift heavy things, the point is even with machines its difficult to do this stuff. How’d they get by with zero machines? In the timeframe mentioned above? For what purpose
This fragment explains how they could have done it:
The most common theory of how prehistoric people moved megaliths has them creating a track of logs which the large stones were rolled along.[49] Another megalith transport theory involves the use of a type of sleigh running on a track greased with animal fat.[49] Such an experiment with a sleigh carrying a 40-ton slab of stone was successfully conducted near Stonehenge in 1995. A team of more than 100 workers managed to push and pull the slab along the 18-mile (29 km) journey from the Marlborough Downs.[49]
My point was that it’s not difficult with modern machines at all. But it can also be done with the methods described above. Especially if you work on it for 1500 years.
Maybe they did it to summon the aliens. Or maybe for the same reason we build expensive churches. Like this one that we have been building for 142 years and it’s still unfinished: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família
No, it’s totally about a single rock being precise. That’s the name of the game son. If you don’t get the first stone precise, you can’t get the second one in precise. And there’s loads of different ways to move stone without trucks. I work in a conservation setting, and we use modern machinery as little as possible. If these scholars would bother asking anyone with actual experience in the field they’d get some answers to their questions.
Also what’s with the Ancient Aliens bs at the end there?
Its a tomb that was built in 20 years by some guy? Its not ancient aliens, but i have a feeling that the pyramid had a use, not just as some big building. Don’t have to agree, but keep an open mind when looking at it
The great pyramid is “assumed” to have had a mummy by people in like 900ad no mummies, just more mysteries. Why is the only mummies we find in the three pyramids from a woman, and a man from 2000 years after they were built? The evidence for the royal tomb hypothesis is surpisingly thin. If you think about what we actually see when we look at the pyramids, they are feats of engineering on the scales of which were not seen again until the 1800s. It is insane to me that we think we have any idea how or why the pyramids came to be based on the very minimal amount of evidence we do have on their construction. Not to mention the mysteries of some of the design choices i.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Menkaure%27s_pyramid,_unfinished_stones.jpg
This one says 27 years, and gangs of 100k labourers. 2.3 million blocks, totalling 6 million tonnes. 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8k tonnes of granite, and 500k tonnes of mortar.
By this, density of some local limestone is between 2250kg/m and 2700kg/m, a tonnes is 1000kg. This is a difficult size to manage, but with log rollers, and 100k workers, 27 years is absolutely doable.
Plus, they lived in a desert where there wasn't much in terms of entertainment. It seems like an unbelievable amount of work for us as we have free distractions all over
Back then? The fuck else were you gonna do? Drink all day? Gamble? Both of which require money?
Speaking of drinking! Beer has historically been a part of a Mason’s wages! Not because everyone used to be an alcoholic, but because drinking straight water could kill you!
Yeah people simply can’t fathom that people in the past were just as intelligent as people are now. They just didn’t have quite as much technology as we do now. Also people tend to think of technology as being magic and don’t actually understand the underlying science that makes that technology work was the same in the past.
This results in weird ideas about how something isn’t possible without a laser level or whatever.
And people tend not to think about skill being a factor. Probably many of the skills you have as a stone mason aren’t too different from the skills people had in the past. Sure there’s some technology you have available to help you now, but a larger part of it is just skill gained from experience working with stone that’s completely independent of technology.
For instance, yes I use grinders and saws to cut big pieces of stone into smaller pieces so they fit where I need them, but I was taught how to do all that by hand as well. Sometimes you don’t have power or petrol, but the shit still needs to go up!
And the way we do things now is just a continuous evolution from how we did it then. I don’t have to sharpen my chisels every 30mins because we have better materials. I don’t have to break a giant billet of stone into manageable sizes(I can though) because a shop does it for me. And almost all of the old tech is still in use, albeit in a new form or in new materials.
Yeah a lot of technological improvements aren’t really changers, they just make people more productive at their jobs.
My brother is a plumber and his biggest annoyance is people that think “if I had your tools I’d be able to do your job.” Nope, that’s not how things work at all. Weird how some people think technology makes skill obsolete.
Exactly! I used to do solo jobs, and it’s shocking how many people balk at my (legit very reasonable) rates, and say things like: well you’re just piling up some rocks.
We don’t build pyramids anymore because we got better at building shit. Ramses II was out there commissioning shit that the pyramid builders couldn’t imagine being able to have built. And he could never imagine buildings of steel and glass built anywhere we feel like. Just try explaining Mexico City to these people. When we want massive monuments to hubris a pyramid is too simple for it usually unless we go with a glass and steel one. Also because it’s an inefficient use of space
My boyfriends grandmother loves to watch shows like ancient aliens and stuff. Normally I just ignore them as background noise, but sometimes I’ll catch something, shake my head and move on.
One time though she was watching the one with William Shatner, unexplained mysteries I think it’s called. And the person Shatner was talking too said “and there is no way we could build the pyramids today” and Shatner just said nodded and then said “why?” The guy mean mugged the shot outta him and they cut to a commercial. When it came back they were talking about something else. Really made me laugh.
But like fr though, bass pro shop built a pyramid, we build crazy skyscrapers and have hundreds of building styles all over the world, I’m sure we could build a pyramid today if we had too.
I mean they contradict themselves every week and the stuff never really have any evidence either way.
One week it’s like “since octopuses live in the ocean and they are Strang compared to us does that mean ancient aliens are living in the bottom of the ocean in the city of Atlantis? Our theorists say yes!” And then the next time they are like “Is Atlantis actually under this Mesopotamia city? Our theorists say absolutely 100% of course of course no doubt no doubt.”
Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology… ropes and wooden levers… by himself!
Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven’t figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.
The hilarious thing is when they do actually throw some critical thinking together it doesn’t matter anyway. Like the flat earthers who ran an experiment that proved the earth was round, and then immediately decided that they must have done something wrong and needed to come up with a new experiment.
From what i have learned the technology to build the pyramids was actuall extremely low tech, and i dont mean slaves and chisles, i mean strings, honey, and tuning forks for the cutting of stone. For transportation they used vibrations to move the stone along magnetic lines in the earth.
Its not ancient high tech, its simply forgotten or suppressed low tech.
Right, like people couldn’t figure out how to float shit down river on a raft or roll it on some logs and instead had to send out wizards to find leylines…
The ignorant BEG to be led. And because they’re not qualified at all to know if whoever ends up with the job is dumber than they are- they ultimately end up marching in lock-step behind them oblivious of the fact that they’re just marching in circles.
Led by someone who doesn’t make them feel stupid. Because being stupid is bad and they aren’t bad.
But they are stupid. And that isn’t bad. I don’t look down on stupid people for being stupid. I judge them because they do stupid shit, like following stupid people.
I’ve too well versed in history to ignore the threat of the stupid leading the stupid. Idiocracy is a utopian version of stupid people taking over. The reality is also bloody.
It’s worse than that, he knows exactly what he’s doing, he’s taking advantage of rubes for profit. He has decided that making the world a worse place is worth it if he gets rich, he’s just the latest in the Rush Limbaugh > Alex Jones cycle.
I wonder if this could be co-opted by other messaging, like could you start a podcast and end up with a fanatically devoted fanbase of pastry chefs? Or what about carpenters? With the right wardrobe, set design and rhetoric, could you build a fantical base of young men devoted to the concept that building a house is the ultimate expression of manliness?
It’s possible but I think part of the problem is that these men are targeting personal and cultural insecurities about manhood. As we move away from glorifying masculinity’s violent side these men sell the idea that that’s a problem. And beyond that they sell the idea that you can embody it. It’s why they can show up in varieties like pick up artists but never as like loving and involved dads no matter how much they lament the lack of prioritizing of fathers.
Nobody is criticizing men for woodworking or cooking pastries.
That said I do think that more could probably be done by men to appeal to young men and encourage such pursuits in a healthy and constructive way. I know a friend of mine growing up really appreciated Nick Offerman’s brand of masculinity.
Nobody is criticizing men for woodworking or cooking pastries.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the problem, young men aren’t sliding to the right because they’re being told “boys don’t bake.” The problem as I see it is, in general terms, there is no path to success for many young men, and they know it. Of the two major political voices you hear today, one of them says “You have no right to complain, you’re a man. You’ve got it made, you outright own society such that every single bad detail about society is personally your fault, and I will never stop hating you for it.” The other voice says “Hey, remember when you WOULD HAVE had a path to success?”
I know a guy who started going down the rabbit hole following the crazy MMA nuts like Tate and Rogan and his excuse was " they advocate for working on yourself and training" my question was aren’t there a million wholesome dudes with MMA/workout channels teaching the same life lessons? The answer is yes. Of course. He was able to find like 10 by the end of that work day. The issue is exactly what you say, these dudes,
With the right wardrobe, set design and rhetoric
just have to focus on marketing their bullshit because the groundwork has already been laid by other chauvinists, misogynists and chicken-hawks before them, they just have to fit it in and repeat.
While this is true, and there were definitely some people who suffered making the pyramids, many were just the most skilled artisans of their day. Egypt brain-drained the rest of the world for thousands of years by being the best of the best of the best.
It’s amazing what you can do when you spend all that time attracting and cultivating that much ingenuity. In the course of human history, it’s really only happened a handful of times. I read somewhere once that when you have that many intelligent people in a room you either build the pyramids or go to the Moon.
Yeah that’s another way of looking at it. Excessive productivity creates a class that can live in leisure and luxury and experiment with new ideas, and that can lead to useful advances. Just like it’s sometimes argued that war leads to technological advances.
And then God came and ruined it all just because of a little slavery!
True, the people that build the pyramids were paid and fed relatively well and probably believed they served their God-emperor. But they also had slavery which helped them create enough wealth to do this. So still the pyramids were only possible because of a lot of human suffering.
Modern globalized society is in the same boat, but yet at the very least it is the least-impoverished empire in human history.
When the gamer you play Call of Duty with could be a kid living in South Africa (and yes, I do mean an average black South African and not the kid of some wealthy expats/diplomats/colonial old money) or Nigeria (ditto) and the world’s largest country is a democracy (India, it recently surpassed China’s population) yet we’re still convinced the future is doomed to be The Hunger Games, I think it’s time to admit that the anger of 9/11 and the Great Recession not only led to hate led to suffering, it then led to cynicism, defeatism, nihilism and finally outright anti-humanitaianism.
You want something to be scared of? Even monsters like the Nazis had an ideal, you clearly just want the world to burn because it’s easier to sit in a chair reading social media and doing nothing to actually solve the problem until things get bad enough that you have a perfect excuse to go hurt whoever you disagree with. You know who was doing that during and leading up to WWII? The sheeple that let the Nazi party take power. Don’t be a fucking tool, especially not a tool of oppression. Careless realism costs souls, regardless of whether a soul is immortal or a scientifically-quantifiable finite mental construct, and even if you honestly came to the conclusion free will is an illusion it would mean our entire moral and legal case against slavery comes into question.
Seriously. Find an ideal, please, especially if its one that keeps you from hurting people instead of blindly hating anything that could be achieved. I don’t know you, but I know the internet and I’ve been seeing this pattern of existential anti-humanitarian (my best attempt at a philosophical label for it) behavior online since 2017 and I do not like what I’m seeing coming. If you don’t find something to live/die to protect, then someone seeking a mob to do their dirty work will, and if that happens the “ideal” you will be serving will be a lie and anything but ideal.
I’m convinced the whole “they couldn’t do this today” is subtle anti-modernity propaganda whether they are saying it about movies, or ancient megastructures. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human progress, wrapped up in weird conservative anger about how it will never be 40(00) years ago again.
What’s worse is, not only can we do it, so could the Egyptians.
Concrete. We build skyscrapers out of it. We make it from sand and various other common minerals. If you make it from Cretian volcanic ash, like the Romans, you get concrete that is even more stable if you use it with seawater, and can be used to construct submerged concrete structures in shallow coastal water without draining away any of the liquid.
And if you grind up Egyptian sandstone and add freshwater like from the Nile? You can make huge blocks as smooth as polished marble that a razor blade can’t fit between, transport it in more manable quantities and forms than giant stone blocks, and it will last tens of thousands of years (not including the ~5,000 it has already lasted) unless the humidity of the Sahara goes through the roof.
I’m not saying Egypt was or wasn’t advanced, just that they were sufficiently advanced to convincingly look to a more advanced civilization like magic. Or in this case, “aliens” or “ancient astronauts”.
The only reason I would not be surprised if hieroglyphs were found on the moon is because we did it before we could fake it. If faking the moon landing couldn’t be done without modern computer software or LED lightbulbs yet actually doing it is trivial enough that it was done 55 years ago, why resort to aliens to describe how that’s possible? For all we know you could get to the moon with a railgun built from hand-smithed iron and the lumber of California Redwoods, doesn’t mean its superhuman if you figure out how to actually do so.
I think people have a misunderstanding in their heads that’s distorted to the point of absurdity. My guess is he grew up like many Americans did hearing that “we don’t know how the Pyramids were built” and took that at its face, like it was magic or scifi.
The truth is we didn’t/don’t how they built them 7000 years ago with their shitty technology and shitty math and no wheel. I’m oversimplifying of course, but I think that’s appropriate.
I had a classmate that would tell me over and over how precisely the pyramids aligned with a set of stars at the time they were built, how we needed lasers to measure the imprecision, how we couldn’t do the same thing today.
Eventually I found out that the imprecision was… a little over a foot, roughly 35 centimeters. That’s the insane precision, the refined craftsmanship we can’t produce today, getting the walls of a place within a foot of where we meant to put them.
Everyone that says this is either blindly repeating a thing they heard once, or has never seen a skyscraper, or a shopping mall, or the average parking lot outside a Walmart with that one area where all the rain water stays a few extra days, because it’s 6 inches lower than the rest. THAT PARKING LOT IS STILL MORE PRECISE THAN THE PYRAMIDS, BRIAN.
You’ve forgotten that the sun rotates around the Milky Way the same way the Earth rotates around the sun. So the stars aren’t in the same place as they were thousands of years ago. Was this 1 foot off the ancient discrepancy or is that today?
It was off by a foot at the time they were built. They’re substantially more inconsistent with the stars now. I thought that was clear in my comment, sorry for the confusion.
He assumes everything is built only a foot high? I’ve built a few homes in my life and multiple barns and garages…you square the building to usually less than a 1/4"…not over a foot. Like the damn thing would fall down being that off.
I find it funny that the people that think that the pyramids were built by aliens are the sort of people who get out of breath walking up a staircase. Yeah of course you find it inconceivable that people worked hard.
There was a documentary I saw once where they used the best estimates for how long it took the Great Pyramid and how large the work force was and then scaled it down. Like if it took a work force of X people Y number of years to build the Great Pyramid, then a few dozen guys would be able to build a two storey tall pyramid in two months with the same technology.
So they did that. And despite being inexperienced with the ancient technology and having to figure out how to push these massive stone blocks on rollers and make the corners around a spiral ramp winding around the pyramid, they got their little pyramid done on time. The math all checks out on people being able to build the pyramids provided they had a large enough workforce and enough time to do it.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them. But it required no special technology. Just a lot of dudes pushing heavy blocks on rollers up a ramp over many years.
all true but just wanted to point out that a lot of people will say something like they don’t know exactly how they did it but they are not saying it’s alien technology or something. just that they don’t know.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them.
That’s the impressive thing. Their society had enough spare food that they could “waste” trillions of calories this way. It’s hundreds of thousands of people doing nothing productive (for the survival of themselves or for others) for years on end. And, it happened thousands of years BCE.
Until just a few hundred years ago, 90% of people worked in jobs related to farming. So, to support 100,000 people building pyramids, they would have needed something like 900k farmers. That’s a million people dedicated to this project for a full generation.
From my understanding it was due to the Nile flood cycles. It’s not so much that they had farmers supporting the workers building the pyramids, but that the farmers worked on the pyramids when it was flood season and there was no farming work that could be done.
There’s a school of thought that Egyptian monument building was somewhat analogous to the depression-era Works Progress Administration, in that it took advantage of an otherwise-idle workforce outside of the agricultural season, and provided them with an additional source of stable supplemental income
Interesting. That makes sense. Since all the farming there was centered around the Nile, probably all the farmers were affected when the Nile flooded. That means you’d otherwise have 90% of the population out of work, waiting for the flooding to subside. I’m sure many of them would have preferred to just relax while they waited, probably the Pharaoh would demand they continued work on his pyramid instead.
The Nile is an incredibly convenient river. Long, relatively straight, few rapids or falls, reliable wind to sail up river, reliable current to sail down river, and annual floods that make fertilizing and irrigating the river banks trivial by the standards of the day.
What kills me is the degree to which industrialization hadn’t been invented yet. I’ve seen excavations of the kitchens that were used to make bread to feed the workers on the pyramids, and it was the same setup as a household kitchen just dozens of them side by side. They didn’t scale that process, they just did it a lot in parallel.
The pyramids are an impressive feat that should not be ignored, but let’s not pretend like the luxury of modern technology doesn’t give us an insurmountable advantage.
We’re comparing a large skillfully built pile of big rocks to modern buildings that are several times taller and thinner while also being hollowed out for everyday use and filled with utilities and other infrastructure.
If the Steinway Tower or the Burj Khalifa were solid rock they would still be more impressive than the pyramids. But they have the equivalent of neighborhoods and towns inside them.
Also the bass pro shop pyramid and luxor pyramid exist, we are at the point where our direct equivelents to the ancient pyramids is a sporting goods place and a monument to mans decadence.
As someone who grew up in Memphis, I hate that the pyramid got bought by Bass Pro Shop. It used to be a multi use structure for basketball, concerts, and even art exhibits.
Add comment