Can we build the great pyramids of Giza with today technology and innovation?

[ocean size]

First of all, those cranes are awesome. Since they are custom rigs I'm sure getting an accurate accounting of what one costs is probably difficult. I'm sure it's a LOT. I would also be curious to know how they are made structurally if you have a link that is useful, very rudimentary aspects would be of interest, the composition of the metal, how the metal fits together. The math behind it and counterbalancing is formulaic but you needs the raw materials and tolerances of those materials to be well understood or the results can be bad. That's a lot of force and weight to control. When you watch how those cranes work, and how painstaking the process is, it has to at least give you a little pause about how it might have been done on such a massive scale 4600 or so years ago.

Regarding the "well, they probably just fucked up and bit off more than they could chew" regarding the stone still in the quarry at Baalbek, it sounds a lot like the lazy arguments made about the internal structure of The Great Pyramid at Giza that othordox Egyptology makes. IE, the builders of Khufu's pyramid were so haphazard and clumsy that they just fucked it up and made the "Queens Chamber" (totally arbitrary name btw) too low in the body of the structure, so they changed their minds to make another chamber for the body of the pharaoh, The "Kings Chamber" (another arbitrary name to fit a narrative). Suggesting anything about the The Great Pyramid wasn't planned to a tee in advance doesn't give the structure itself the credit it deserves. Nothing about it is haphazard. They didn't make mistakes.

Nah I don't think those are custom cranes, there's a website and brochure for that model in the video. Go to the youtube page the video is on and you'll see the company and model name.

You are making the assumption there were no accidents in the planning of megalithic structures. Ultimately the people that made them were just people, and just the fact we are talking about the Baal temple and Giza since they are superlative examples demonstrates that they weren't run of the mill things they'd done a zillion times. You can't be suggesting that they left the large blocks in the quarry for intentionally mysterious reasons and they were never carved with being used for the temple in mind. The blocks would have been the largest ever used. They couldn't have known exactly how successfully moving them would work as they had never done it, even if they moved 1000 ton blocks previously.

You are saying they had beaten a lot of welterweight and some middleweight blocks (300-700t blocks, 3 that were 1000t), so they knew exactly what they were doing and knew they could completely take a heavyweight (1650t) and if they lost it was because they wanted to lose.

Anyone building like this wasn't making incredible time wasting mistakes like this...your "several stone masons" comment about cutting away and removing the rock around the stone of the pregnant woman isn't worth addressing, and you know it's stupid.

I'm not suggesting they knew before they started quarrying it that it was a waste or they couldn't move it lol. You don't know until you try. I'll put it this way - if they were going to cut way oversized stones for a temple foundation for some reason that involves cutting them way bigger than they needed to be structurally, why wouldn't they push the envelope on what was possible? If they easily could have moved 1650t, why wouldn't they have cut it 1800t thinking that it may be possible?

Since we both agree none of this stuff is impossible for us to do today, even though we probably disagree on degrees of difficulty...how do you feel about the main narrative that governs the entire story of the Great Pyramid, IE that it was built in 20 years as a place of rest for the body of the Pharaoh Khufu? Are you familiar with the reasoning and evidence behind this narrative?

Yeah honestly I'm not that familar with the egyptologist consensus, but I will say 20 years doesn't gybe well to me with a supposed transient labour force of farmers that came 4 months a year when the fields flooded. That would require like 1-2 blocks a minute, every day sunrise to sunset for 20 years. So I'd say there was either more permanent (largely slave) labour force than they say or it took a lot longer.

edit:

and I don't think the evidence supports there being *no* errors. As I mentioned previously the indents on the sides are completely consistent with them using isosceles Pythagorean triplets when they measured out the pyramid with a wheel. It would give very close, but not perfect 90° angles and result in those indents. It would also correspond to them having a decent, but not perfect understanding of geometry and why the square root of 2 seems baked into the design.

 

[Drain Bamage]

Of course we could

A better question is - could they have built the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Empire State Building? No they couldn't have.

Stop glorifying primitive technology.

They had tens of thousands of workers with fuck-all to do. Hence the pyramids.

 

[andnowweknow]

Nah I don't think those are custom cranes, there's a website and brochure for that model in the video. Go to the youtube page the video is on and you'll see the company and model name.

Would be interesting to know how many they sell a year. Regardless of custom, sure it's huge money to buy something like that.

You are making the assumption there were no accidents in the planning of megalithic structures. Ultimately the people that made them were just people, and just the fact we are talking about the Baal temple and Giza since they are superlative examples demonstrates that they weren't run of the mill things they'd done a zillion times. You can't be suggesting that they left the large blocks in the quarry for intentionally mysterious reasons and they were never carved with being used for the temple in mind. The blocks would have been the largest ever used. They couldn't have known exactly how successfully moving them would work as they had never done it, even if they moved 1000 ton blocks previously.

Well, Baalbek and the Great Pryamid are not the only examples of this sort of difficult to understand (in context of when they are supposed to have been built) megalithic construction. But they are certainly extreme examples. To get it out of the way, I don't think it was the Romans who were moving the biggest blocks around at Baalbek, I think more likely it was people who had their hands in what happened in Old Kingdom Egypt. My guess is that the Romans never even knew those blocks beneath the famous one were even there as they were buried...and I also think it's more likely that work stopped on those giant blocks left in the quarry because whatever project was ongoing stopped for whatever reason. OR, they are blocks that were cut away and were intended to be sliced up and "parted out" and it never happened for whatever reason. There are several of those blocks in the quarry, not just the one, perhaps they were even to be part of another structure that was planned that never happened. It's not like the Romans tried to move them. I don't think you're making a bad point here, certainly could be as you say, either way it wouldn't require that it be the Romans or someone prior who was moving them, your point could still stand.

You are saying they had beaten a lot of welterweight and some middleweight blocks (300-700t blocks, 3 that were 1000t), so they knew exactly what they were doing and knew they could completely take a heavyweight (1650t) and if they lost it was because they wanted to lose.

same as above. You might be correct.

I'm not suggesting they knew before they started quarrying it that it was a waste or they couldn't move it lol. You don't know until you try. I'll put it this way - if they were going to cut way oversized stones for a temple foundation for some reason that involves cutting them way bigger than they needed to be structurally, why wouldn't they push the envelope on what was possible? If they easily could have moved 1650t, why wouldn't they have cut it 1800t thinking that it may be possible?

I think whoever moved these stones wasn't really stressing to do it. I am not going to get into to why this was but for some reason they felt like this was a good way to build, and again, humans don't do things in the most difficult way possible for no reason (for the most part). I think they used big blocks because it was easy for them to use them. It makes no sense to us to build this way, for some reason it made sense for them.

Yeah honestly I'm not that familar with the egyptologist consensus, but I will say 20 years doesn't gybe well to me with a supposed transient labour force of farmers that came 4 months a year when the fields flooded. That would require like 1-2 blocks a minute, every day sunrise to sunset for 20 years. So I'd say there was either more permanent (largely slave) labour force than they say or it took a lot longer.

It was clearly not done in 20 years. I'm glad you have that reasoned out. You should look into why they believe it was. Essentially, without getting into the evidence why they think Khufu is associated with the pyramid in depth (there certainly was a 'project' at Giza during the time of Khufu, no evidence the main construction occurred at that time), the othordox explanation would says it MUST have been done in 20 years, which is the lifetime of Khufu. It's really stupid reasoning, and the more you go down the ladder on the foundational understanding of a lot of this stuff, the more you realize it is extremely speculative and nowhere near as solid as it is made out to be (IE, that building over there was built by Khufu, thus this one over here must have been built by him as well). The people producing these narratives aren't lying, they just don't have much to go on...this all happened a long time ago, time erases pretty much everything on a long enough time scale.

edit:

and I don't think the evidence supports there being *no* errors. As I mentioned previously the indents on the sides are completely consistent with them using isosceles Pythagorean triplets when they measured out the pyramid with a wheel. It would give very close, but not perfect 90° angles and result in those indents. It would also correspond to them having a decent, but not perfect understanding of geometry and why the square root of 2 seems baked into the design.

You need to put down the skeptic mantra my brother lol, where'd you pick this point up...that they were math fuck ups? The people who built the great pyramid did not just invent the wheel shortly before building a construction like that...let that go They also weren't using copper chisels and dolorite ball hammers and sand to achieve this stuff. A lot of the problem with discussing this is that it bothers reductionist (which I see you as, a good modern scientist), rigid scientists because there are no tools in the historical record that give a sense of advancement to the match the level of the stone working and scale of the structures...but that doesn't mean those tools never existed.

Your assumption that they were making math mistakes, as if something like the Pythagorean theorem was invented by Pythagoras, is more than a little short sighted and slightly ridiculous. Why would you assume the 8 sided pyramid is a mistake and not a purposeful measure? They were doing everything with purpose and with expertise, not just "perfectly fucking up" math principles that somehow don't seem to be appearing in other pyramids that are FAR less advanced and FAR less well done. Give them a little credit, suggesting they made a mistake as a reasoning that it is eight sided in stead of four defies logic and reason.

As an aside, it is within both the earliest Greek and Roman commentaries on Egypt that the Egyptians colonized both the Greek and the Roman mind. The Greek and the Romans take credit in history for many things that the Egyptians were doing better them them at their peak...and several thousands of years earlier.

 

[andnowweknow]

Of course we could

A better question is - could they have built the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Empire State Building? No they couldn't have.

Stop glorifying primitive technology.

They had tens of thousands of workers with fuck-all to do. Hence the pyramids.

I will never understand where the "they had lots of time on their hands" argument comes from. As if without Amazon and Netflix humans have never found ways to occupy themselves and just decided to build gigantic monuments that defy explanation in our modern era, let alone what we believe to be true about theirs.

Humans have been anatomically the same for 180k years (at least). There is nothing new under the sun.

 

[Drain Bamage]

The Great Sphinx partially excavated, photo taken between 1867 and 1899:

 

[andnowweknow]

The Great Sphinx partially excavated, photo taken between 1867 and 1899:

1882 photo: it gets buried fast if not maintained, it's carved out of a limestone outcrop, and it sits essentially in a ditch...which makes the extreme water erosion on the body of the sphinx and the enclosure walls even more confusing. Egypt has been bone dry for about the last 7k years.

 

[lostdog000]

the dude who landed the shot on the sphinx nose... boy did he have a story to tell, forever

 

[andnowweknow]

the dude who landed the shot on the sphinx nose... boy did he have a story to tell, forever

it was supposedly done by hammer and chisel actually, sometime between the 3rd and 10th century AD...perhaps by a Muslim "scholar" who was irritated by the fact that the locals worshiped and prayed to Sphinx.

 

[minute bull]

the dude who landed the shot on the sphinx nose... boy did he have a story to tell, forever

"A little more. A liiiiiiittle more. A lliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle .... shit. Hey that looks great. Is that? I think I hear my phone ringing?"

-- Kenny Aliens

 

[Texan6533]

Um, yes.....yes we can. The stuff we can do now is way, way more impressive.

 

[Low Test With da Best]

Mate we don't even need to build a bigger crane. We have off the shelf cranes that can drop Giza's heaviest stone on the top of the pyramid.

Is this true?

4,500 lbs to a height of 450 feet at a length of 375 feet from the crane mount? I'd like to see this crane if you have deets.

Also are you and @oceansize the same person?

 

[NoStoneUnturned]

Is this true?

4,500 lbs to a height of 450 feet at a length of 375 feet from the crane mount? I'd like to see this crane if you have deets.

Also are you and @oceansize the same person?

No, we just saw each other on the forum the other day, even though we have both been members for over a decade, and had a good laugh.

 

[Low Test With da Best]

No, we just saw each other on the forum the other day, even though we have both been members for over a decade, and had a good laugh.

Oh too funny, I couldn't think of what the name is from back in those days, musta been something I missed.

But anyway, is that crane for real?

 

[Amerikuracana]

European and Japanese engineering of the last 125 years is laughing at this thread.

 

[drstrangelov]

Could we build one high enough to reach the upper atmosphere and serve as a launch platform for spacecraft? I’m sure there’s a substantial portion of northern Canada or Idaho or somewhere like that with room for it.