KEYWORDS: bobbrier; giza; greatpyramid; jeanpierrehoudin
Posted on 11/01/2018 7:37:06 AM PDT by ETL
Archaeologists have long wondered exactly how the ancient Egyptians constructed the world's biggest pyramid, the Great Pyramid. Now, they may have discovered the system used to haul massive stone blocks into place some 4,500 years ago.
They discovered the remains of this system at the site of Hatnub, an ancient quarry in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The contraption would have been used to transport heavy alabaster stones up a steep ramp, according to the archaeologists working at the site, from the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (French Institute for Oriental Archaeology)in Cairo and from the University of Liverpool in England. And it was possibly how Egyptians built the Great Pyramid, in the name of the pharaoh Khufu.
"This system is composed of a central ramp flanked by two staircases with numerous post holes," Yannis Gourdon, co-director of the joint mission at Hatnub, told Live Science. "Using a sled which carried a stone block and was attached with ropes to these wooden posts, ancient Egyptians were able to pull up the alabaster blocks out of the quarry on very steep slopes of 20 percent or more."
The ropes attached to the sled acted as a "force multiplier," making it easier to pull the sled up the ramp, said Roland Enmarch, the other co-director of the Hatnub mission.
"This kind of system has never been discovered anywhere else," Gourdon said. "The study of the tool marks and the presence of two [of] Khufu's inscriptions led us to the conclusion that this system dates back at least to Khufu's reign, the builder of the Great Pyramid in Giza," he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
So, you’re telling me chariots pulled by teams of turkeys wouldn’t have been terrifying machines of war?
It would scare me!
I would think that the wheelbarrow could have been useful.
Agree!
But you got plenty of slaves (Thinking like an Aztec here!) and they’re edible!
The interior chambers of the Great Pyramid (and many others) are composed of granite blocks, some weighing up to seventy tons.
The dynastic Egyptians did not possess diamond tools, which were required to quarry, cut, and finish granite. It can't be done with copper tools and stone pounding balls.
The largest modern cranes can scarcely lift and move objects of that weight, yet we're led to believe that ancient people who didn't even know the wheel, somehow quarried, cut, and precisely finished granite blocks of that size and weight, then transported them 500 miles to Giza - then somehow lifted them 150 feet above grade, and fitted them with such precision, a human hair can't be inserted between them.
It's absurd.
My personal view is that the pyramids of Giza were built by some earlier, highly advanced culture, which has been lost to history.
You just know you are baiting the “Aliens” meme poster.
There are a lot of holes in that description. For one the Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinus) has been bio-luminescence dated to be older that the Great Pyramid; the Kings List which is still used to date structures is known to be a 19th century forgery; The Palermo Stone list which is real lists kings on the first line who are completely unknown, while kings that are known are not mentioned; the Pyramid of Djoser is far more recent than the ones on Giza by hundreds or thousands of years - in other words, there are no precursors to the Giza pyramids.
All of Old kingdom Egypt dates, king names, monuments are in complete chaos ... plus it does not help that kings would take older kings works as their own by erasing the old kings names or taking the old kings monuments and re-purposing the stone.
Then there is the conundrum of what tools exactly were used to cut all the granite and diorite used in all over Giza an in particular in the Great Pyramid. It is possible they used meteoric iron or a bronze amalgam which is harder than steel or diamond bladed circular saws - but none of these tools exist today - perhaps they were melted down later like the metal straps used to secure one block of a construction to another.
Hawass holds every one hostage to his hide bound thinking as does the Egyptian Government so heavily dependent on tourists and unwilling to allow the boat to be rocked.
Likely some generations will have to pass before anyone can get at the truth.
PS there is every indication that 5 or more unopened Old Kingdom king’s tombs lie beneath the Valley Temple, the Sphinx Temple (which to this day remains unexplored) and two of the funeral temples associated with the Pyramids.
Houdin locates the sled used to carry the counterweight in the Grand Gallery, propped up against a wall in the Cairo Museum -- during his explanation of how the internal ramp system worked.
The Great Pyramid Mystery Solved - National Geographic Documentary
Can't remember much else about it, but I read about it in some book or article. It's too bad I didn't know about the other tools.
http://www.surveyhistory.org/egyptian_surveying_tools1.htm
The print is pretty small but several other surveying instruments are shown and described.
Egyptology was not one of my favorite subjects to this day but I can't help but be fascinated with articles such as you posted. It sounds ingenuous and feasible.
Whoops, and thanks fieldmarshaldj!
Paleomagnetism Study Supports Pyramid Man-Made Stone
www.davidovits.info | Friday, February 1, 2013 | Joseph Davidovits
Posted on 02/19/2018 7:14:43 AM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3633359/posts
The Great Pyramid was built for Khufu, son of Sneferu, during the 4th Dynasty. One of Khufu’s cousins was the architect, his name was Hemiunu (hem-ee-en-new), and unlike Khufu, there’s a very nice colossal statue of him that survives. And NO, there is no evidence that the construction era or order of the three large Giza pyramids have been scrambled or falsified. Khufu was succeeded by his son, Djedjefre, who started building his pyramid a few miles from his father’s, at Abu Roash. His short reign was followed by that of his son, who was still a young child, and before the Djedjefre pyramid was anywhere near complete.
Khufu’s son Khafre supplanted Djedjefre’s son, or in some other way succeeded him, and started building his own pyramid at Giza, next to Khufu’s. Although it appears to be nearly as large, it was constructed on a rise in the ground and is not as tall. The causeway leading out to it from the Nile was built, probably in the time of the construction of Khufu’s pyramid, and on an angle in order to avoid the pit or enclosure around the Great Sphinx, which is much older than the Giza pyramids.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hemiunu&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&tbm=isch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiunu
People. At the time of construction, the region was wetter. It was not a desert. Stop thinking in terms of what Egypt looks like today, and instead imagine what it used to look like then.
The Sphinx enclosure, as well as the original blocks of the Sphinx temple, show unequivocally rain-induced erosion incompatible with the view that it happened during or even since the 4th dynasty. This isn't even controversial.
Like clockwork, we get yet another article saying that the mystery of the method of construction of the great pyramid has been solved. It hasn’t, of course, and not even close for reasons too numerous to mention, many of which are brought up in this thread. Entire books have been written on the subject.
Go to any search engine (I use DuckDuckGo) and do an image search on “Khufu”. Only one image of a presumably contemporaneous two or three inch tall ivory statue will show up. This is ironic (and revealing) for the person who supposedly built the greatest artificial structure in history till the large civil engineering projects of the 20th century.
I actually didn't read the text on that prior to posting. Saw the image of the supposed "interior ramp" with the article and assumed the text would cover that. I had several years ago watched a documentary regarding some guy's theory on an interior ramp. I think the doc may have been NOVA, so it apparently wasn't some totally off-the-wall nonsense. I believe they may have actually found portions of what may be an interior ramp.
I first read the interior ramp theory back in the 1970s. That one has been floating around for a while along with the exterior ramp that wound around the pyramid.
There are issues with both including how they raised and mounted 70+ ton granite slabs over the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid and in the case of the Khafre pyramid how they raised the pyramidion.
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Jean-Pierre Houdin; born June 26th 1951 in Paris),[citation needed] is a French architect. He developed a controversial theory detailing how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.[1][2][3] ...”
In 2005, Mehdi Tayoubi and Richard Breitner from Dassault Systèmes invited him to join a new sponsorship programme “Passion For Innovation”. Together, they decided to examine the theory in the light of Dassault Systèmes’s industrial and scientific 3D solutions.
Using software applications such as CATIA to reconstitute the site of this gigantic construction in three dimensions allowed them to test in real-time whether such an approach was plausible.
In order to explain and communicate it, Tayoubi and his team used 3D technology as a teaching medium and proposed an interactive voyage through time in three dimensions. This was presented both on the giant screen of La Géode (a famous hemispheric theater in Paris), and on the Internet.
Also in 2005, a project was initiated to analyse the cracks in the King’s Chamber of the pyramid. The group consisted of Houdin, the egyptologist Bob Brier, Tayoubi, Breitner, and a team of engineers from Dassault Systèmes. Their choice of software tools such as SIMULIA, are normally used by industrial corporations to simulate the behaviour of their products in operation, and to detect any structural weaknesses in order to solve problems as early as the products’ design phase.
Their scheme involves the use of a regular external ramp to build the first 30% of the pyramid, with an “internal ramp” taking stones up beyond that height.[4] The stones of the external ramp are re-cycled into the upper stories, thus explaining the otherwise puzzling lack of evidence for ramps.
After 4 years working alone, Houdin was joined by a team of engineers from the French 3D software company Dassault Systemes, who used the most modern computer-aided design technology available to further refine and test the hypothesis, making it (according to Houdin) the only one proven to be a viable technique.[5] In 2006 Houdin announced it in a book: Khufu: The Secrets Behind the Building of the Great Pyramid,[6] and in 2008 he and Egyptologist Bob Brier wrote a second one: The Secret of the Great Pyramid[7]
In Houdin’s method, each ramp inside the pyramid ended at an open space, a notch temporarily left open in the edge of the construction.(see diagram) This 10-square-meter clear space housed a crane that lifted and rotated each 2.5-ton block, to ready it for eight men to drag up the next internal ramp. There is a notch of sorts in one of the right places, and in 2008 Houdin’s co-author Bob Brier, with a National Geographic film crew, entered a previously unremarked chamber that could be the start of one of these internal ramps.[8]
In 1986 a member of the French team (see below) saw a desert fox at this notch, rather as if it had ascended internally.
Houdin’s thesis remains unproven and in 2007, UCL Egyptologist David Jeffreys described the internal spiral hypothesis as “far-fetched and horribly complicated”, while Oxford University’s John Baines, declared he was “suspicious of any theory that seeks to explain only how the Great Pyramid was built”.[9]
The team concluded that the pyramid’s architect, Hemiunu, concerned that the cracks imperiled the whole structure, had cut a tunnel into a sealed space above the burial chamber to assess the damage, and then had filled the cracks with plaster as a tell-tale that would indicate if they were widening. The beams held and the pyramid was completed.
Remarkable, IMO, that no artwork has (yet?) been found depicting how the pyramids were built.
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