Posted on 04/23/2008 1:23:56 PM PDT by blam
Scientists say pyramids could be concrete
April 23, 2008
Scientists are taking a new look at Egypt's pyramids to see if some of the blocks could have been made from concrete.
Linn W. Hobbs, a materials science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Boston Globe there is a chance ancient Egyptians could have cast the blocks from synthetic material instead of carving them from quarries. Scientists have long believed Romans were the first to use structural concrete.
Undergraduates in MIT's Materials in Human Experience class are building a scale-model pyramid made of quarried limestone and blocks cast from crushed limestone sludge fortified with clay, silica and natural desert salts.
Archaeologists say there is no evidence the pyramids are built of any synthetic material, the newspaper said. Hobbs said the concrete theory, advanced in the 1980s by French chemical engineer Joseph Davidovits, is fascinating because it would mean the ancient Egyptians were great materials scientists as well as great civil engineers.
I remember seeing a clipping about 20 years ago on our department’s Trivia bulletin board stating that the pyramids were made of cast concrete blocks. The proof? The grain pattern of the plywood used for the molds.
And still couldn't make drawings depicting people in 3D.
Not a new theory as Davidowitz said in his book, and as another poster has said. Story I heard from some German R&D people was that the blocks are synthetic zeolite castings. Story is when Napolean was stranded in Egypt, he had some of his engineers take a look at ancient Egyptian artifacts. They found a finely made hollow quarzite vase, which by any then known (18th century) technology couldn’t be fabricated because the material was too hard.
They took it back to France and gave it to Lavoisier who pronounced that it had been cast not cut by some unknown technique.
Smart folks those ancients. The natural ores used for the zeolite were supposedly mined to exhaustion, and they didn’t know how to make more.
Lavoisier also lost his head because he supported freedom of thought. Would have been a freeper for sure.
But that doesn't stop the scientists from putting forth any theories to the contrary.
“plywood”?
Wood, maybe, but not plywood. You’re joking, of course...
That’s called a sedimentary petrologist.
From Jersey. They got a good price. Capice?
Limestone is easy to identify. It’s the igneous rock that could be mistaken for a synthetic polymict breccia, so my original comment stands.
“Where would the aliens who built the pyramids get the concrete?”
Or a mixer and a pump truck?
I remember thinking at the time that this was seriously proposed by some crackpot who did not realize how ridiculous it sounded.
I’m surprised that the Egyptians would not want to re-cover the pyramids with smooth limestone, as they were originally built.
This is all well and good, but when are they going to start looking at SOYLENT GREEN?????
The world has been waiting with bated breath for the answer to this one, I, personally, think they were made from camel dung.
Yeah, but is Hoffa buried in one of those blocks?
Yeah this is an old idea.
Elvis built the pyramids.
Ask Mojo Nixon
Rather....
You see, their religion prohibited them from depicting images of living things, especially the gods and birds and such. So, they depicted dead thing instead.
Now, the majority of the dead things during the busy building times were -as you would expect-those that died as a matter of being crushed under the weight of the heavy stones.
Therefore, when depicted in their now defunct state, they were already two dimensional, having been flattened by the stones or the rollers used to move them.
If you look closely, you will see many of the human forms depicted were actually in the act of getting out of the way of the rollers, with one arm up in front and the other down in back, like an "exit, stage left" stance.
But alas, they were slow, hence they got squashed, and depicted in the correct anatomical configuration.
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