Another theory, ping.
Slave labor. Most infants can construct a pyramid out of sand. Many will with no outside help. These people had backs to break, and I’m sure they broke them.
Looks like a pyramid scheme to me.
Were the Hebrew slaves illiterate?
The word 'pyramid' is a Greek word, the root part being the familiar 'pyr' (fire) which we also see in words like 'pyrotechnics', 'pyromaniac' etc. They originally had golden tips and acted like lightning rods, generating what you'd call St. Elmo's fire, which served for religious purposes.
It seems to me we still have no idea HOW they moved the blocks into place, or WHO built it. Christopher Dunn, in the “Giza Power Plant”, (Amazon) explained WHAT it is
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The blocks are concrete poured in place.
The book “The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved” by Joseph Davidovits was first published around 1989 and addressed the subject of the stone blocks of the pyramids being cast in place rather than being quarried. The author made some very interesting and compelling arguments in favor.
The author also addressed the monoliths of the temple at Baalbek in Lebanon, where one of the stones that forms the foundation of the temple is 1200 tons. The author argues that there was no possible mechanism in the ancient world to move an object of this size and weight and this is further confirmation that the cast-in-place method was in use in the Middle East at that time.
There are some problems with his theory, as would be expected, the details of which I won’t go into. The best overall discussion of a possible history of the pyramids that I’ve read so far is “Pyramid Quest” by Dr. Robert Schoch. Schoch is a geologist who was pilloried by the Egyptology community twenty years ago for making the obvious and simple observation that there is evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx. Schoch argues that the pyramids (and the Sphinx) greatly predate the Old Kingdom and were built in stages over a very long period of time, probably millenia. No supernatural agents, aliens or any other deus ex machina figure in Schoch’s theory.
One of the most interesting arguments about the age and building of the pyramids was made to me by an investment banker. He said that we should get an estimate of how much it would cost to build the pyramid today and then multiply that cost by the labor efficiency we have today versus that of third millennium BC Egypt. He speculated it would cost at least several billion dollars today and that the the economic output per person back then was probably one one hundredth of what it is today. The several hundred billion dollar effective cost of construction of the pyramid would have consumed a large multiple of the entire GDP of Egypt of that era for decades and possibly centuries, to the exclusion of all other economic activity, all for a project with no identifiable economic benefits.
The theory has been around forever that the pyramid workers were idle farmers in the off season. The problem is in a subsistence existence, there is no idle season. If the Egyptian farmers were not planting, weeding and irrigating or harvesting, then they were making or repairing their tools and domiciles, fishing, making pottery and baskets, etc. The same argument applies to slave laborers. Slaves have to be economically productive just like free men and all the time.
The conventional wisdom on a lot of things, including Egyptology, congealed about a century ago and have been largely immovable ever since. Since I developed an interest in these matters the thing I’ve found most interesting is how very thin the gruel is on which this conventional wisdom is founded, this just being one example. Part of that conventional wisdom that should be discarded is that the pyramids were built in a very limited time window with very limited resources during the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
ping
Saw the King Tut exhibit here recently. It's really spectacular. The quality and detail of the statuary and gold objects that were preserved in the tomb is incredible.
