[ETL]

This 4,500-year-old system used to pull alabaster stones up a steep slope was discovered at Hatnub, an ancient quarry in the
Eastern Desert of Egypt. Two staircases with numerous postholes are located next to this ramp. An alabaster block would have
been placed on a sled, which was tied by ropes to the wooden poles. Credit: Yannis Gourdon/Ifao

[ETL]

[ETL]

[seawolf101]

Interesting concept of weight and counter weight.

[NEMDF]

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

[Chad N. Freud]

As always, I’m missing something.

“’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.”

I clicked on the article, and there is no more information.

So:

The block is on a sled which has ropes.
The sled is on a ramp.
The ropes are tied to posts upslope.
Egyptians pull on the ropes.

In what way are the ropes “force multipliers”?

They didn’t say whether
(a) the posts were used as crude pulleys, or
(b) just as a way to keep the sled from backsliding in between pulls by the Egyptians.

[captain_dave]

the solutions archeologists come up with won’t work because they don’t understand engineering. Besides, the pyramids were possibly built 12,000 years ago.

[Ancesthntr]

Ok, SOMEONE has to do it:

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[Aliska]

I gave a speech once in one of my computer classes about how the Egyptians may have used knotted ropes to measure, particularly the bases of the pyramids, based on known mathematic principles at that time. I used a rope knotted about 12-inch intervals to demonstrate.

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.

[KamperKen]

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.