Giza pyramids

[orogenicman]

I'm not sure if it's correct but I read that the pyramids were built in about 20 years.

We actually had a good discussion about this a while back so, in the interest of not repeating things go check this out ( but please reply in this thread, not the old one.) We want to keep the mods happy.


http://atheistforums.org/thread-8552-pos...#pid179703

I'll bite. I took a look at your post, and will re-post it here to more easily reference it in my response:

Egyptologists insist on this equation for the Great Pyramid.


4th Dynasty Egyptians + Bronze Age technology + 20 years = Pyramid.


Obviously any term of the equation can be attacked. The "Ancient Aliens" crowd invents spacemen to do the job!

I prefer to consider the time factor.

There are an estimated 2.5 million stones in the GP.

2.5 million divided by 20 years = 125,000 stones per year.

125,000 stones divided by 365 days per year = roughly 342.5 stones per day that need to be placed.

342 stones per day divided by 24 hours per day = 14.25 stones per hour or roughly one stone every 4 minutes or so. Such a schedule is preposterous but it gets worse.

That's working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year for 20 years. It never gets dark. There is never an accident. There is never a sandstorm. No one ever has to take a dump and the workers go around the clock without sleep or food. If you hypothesize multiple shifts of workers you merely increase the logistical problems involved in supporting such a workforce and you haven't done anything about the darkness.

Now, Rhythm as you correctly point out the general idea is that the bulk of the labor force was drawn from the peasant force during the flood which lasts, let's say half the year just for the sake of argument. The Egyptologists are willing to stipulate a force of perhaps 8,000 permanent workers, masons and such who work all year round producing stones for the peasants to move when they show up. Fine, that will help some but you are still moving one stone every 2 minutes because you are only working six months per year. Then, you do have to account for the darkness so half of your work day is lost which means 1 stone every minute.

And we haven't remotely discussed building some kind of ramp system to move the stones to the top which one engineer noted would have been a bigger project than the pyramid itself!

T'is a problem because the pyramid is there. It is not a figment of someone's imagination.

Let's look at a different appproach. Archaeological evidence suggests that the people who built the pyramids were not slaves, but highly skilled workers, most of whom were highly respected by Egyptian society, particularly the stone masons. That said, that same evidence shows unambiguously that most of these workers suffered horrendous injuries, both long-term and short term, indicating that they basically were working their asses off. So it is not unreasonable to assume that they were working long hours with little interruption (I do take the position that they did sleep at night, go to the bathroom when needed, ate ample amounts of food, and that most of the work was not done on a 24 hour schedule).

In addition, it has been determined unambiguously where the stones came from (they came from the quarry that is located behind the pyramids, a quarry that was not discovered until relatively recently because it had been infilled with the rubble that was used to make the ramps used to place the stones in their respective positions). Inside this quarry is ample evidence for how the stones were quarried and processed. So they know how the stones were made, and where they came from. From this information, it has been estimated that it took 2 masons to quarry one stone, and two additional masons to process each stone for use in the pyramids.

It has been suggested that the stones were moved using manual human labor, but others have shown that pack animals such as camels and possibly oxen, likely had a major hand in it as well.

Finally, the limestone that was used to make the pyramids was relatively soft and so wasn't as hard to process as some have suggested.

So taking these facts into account, I think you should try to refigure the math. If it took 20 years to build a pyramid, then you have to consider that they weren't working 24 hours per day to finish the task, that pack animals were involved in helping laborers move the stones, and that each stone was quarried and processed into finished form by no fewer that four people. This should help you figure out how many laborers were needed to complete the task, because I think the number of laborers is the real issue here, not how many stones were processed and emplaced each day. Keep in mind that there are thousands of burials in the vicinity of the pyramids, mostly likely containing many of the remains of those who built them.