What amazes me about so many of the myths about ancient civilizations and their erection of giant edifices is some sort of “lost technology” or “how amazingly smart the ancients were”, are most often given as the reasons they could do what they did.
The myths ignore the ancients’ ‘secret ingredient’ - unlimited slaves to yoke into their glory-seeking projects and no respect for human life, no matter how many had to do die to make their monuments possible.