Especially for Hatsheput about the enigma of the building of the pyramids. During my lifetime I read about all kind of theories and since the BBC board and also on the French Passion Histoire all kind of wild theories...one I found a bit credible and one could perhaps test that. The inner side between the surfaces and the tombs filled with rubble and tangled and fixed together with "something"...
The last years there seems to be new theories, which are much more plausible than the old ones...

The massive heavy blocs would be transported by moistering the sand before the sledge with the bloc
https://www.livescience.com/45285-how-egyptians-moved-pyramid-stones.html
Also, and that I had read already several times, the builders, free men working in honour of the pharao or because it was a top job well paid and with excellent food, even beef on the menu...
And then in that time the water was near the pyramids and they made harbours and canals to bring the stones near the to built pyramids...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/how-the-pyramids-were-built

Kind regards from Paul.

What?  It wasn't the dinosaurs?  You've got me all disappointed now.  No seriously (well obviously not seriously because it was a silly theory) I have read something to the effect that some people believed homo sapiens co-existed with the dinosaurs at one stage and the dinosaurs helped build the pyramids.

Paul, I haven't time at the moment to study the new ideas about the building of the pyramids but I remember enjoying Land of the Pharaohs when it was on TV when I was youngish.  The ending scared me - when the priests were (voluntarily) and another character (involuntarily) sealed up in the tomb with the dead Pharaoh though.  Joan Collins was enjoyable in a hammy sort of way (I don't usually like hammy acting) as the wicked princess.  I know I'm being jokey here but I will try and return to say something more serious when I have the time.

There have been various TV programmes over the years on this subject. The best one showed the building of a mini pyramid, using materials and techniques thought to be used at the time. 

What I found revealing is that a team of men, who know each other, trust each other, have worked together many months, can get a real rhythm going when moving large objects. They would have had log rollers, grease, some suggest milk as a lubricant also. Whatever, it wasn't aliens and it wasn't with the help of dinosaurs 

Lady and Hatsheput,

wanted this evening to do some search about "Land of the Pharaos", but the whole afternoon busy with all kind of "work"...
First this afternoon "réunion" of the lady friends of the partner this time at our home...I had prepared the table for the "taarten" (tarts, cakes?) and the coffee, champaign for the start...inside because it was too hot outside and they predicted rain...when the guests arrived they wanted to sit outside...but they helped to move...
At six o'clock in the evening appointement at an appartment for hire with a girl accompagnied with the parents...showing the place and they asked for some 20 minutes conference in the car, while they came from far and wanted to decide as I too...finally agreed on the contract...together driving to our home and making the contract...they left I think a quarter pas nine...we had still to eat for the day as I suppose that family too...I prepared a quick meal for me and the partner: "spagetti bolognaise" with sauce from the deep fryer and fromage râpé (raped cheese?) also from the deep fryer...then watering the flowers outside in the near dark...then happy hour at ten o'clock with strawberries and "crème fraiche" and then for me a coffee to degustate while sweating at this board...

I guess MM with his bed and breakfest is not better off than me...and perhaps Vizzer still having to work and perhaps with an exigating family or partner as overhere...

Kind regards to both from Paul.

Well, Paul, I tend to keep "fromage râpé" or as we would refer to it "grated cheese" in the freezer. If you freeze it in the block it tends to fall apart when thawed and put your knuckles in peril if you try to grate it. Not sure about having it in the deep fryer (as I'm only about 1/8th Scots)

The best method of building a pyramid is - a core of sun baked brick, and a fairing of burned (preferably coloured) brick, and three staircases - a bit like Tevye's in "If I were a rich man". One going up, one comiing down and one just for show. (well, two usually don't get built to the top). Very useful in times of flood, your basic ziggurat.

Green George wrote:

Well, Paul, I tend to keep "fromage râpé" or as we would refer to it "grated cheese" in the freezer. If you freeze it in the block it tends to fall apart when thawed and put your knuckles in peril if you try to grate it. Not sure about having it in the deep fryer (as I'm only about 1/8th Scots)

Gil,

yes "grated cheese" "fromage râpé" "raped cheese"
I know I had to check it quickly in a translator
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/yoursay/false_friends/french/raped_cheese_englishfrench.shtml
yes and deep fryer is a "friteuse" to bake French fries...
And Gil, you haven't to believe it, but this evening I took a ("sachet" (oops checked now and...)) small plastic rectangle bag of some 14 by 10 centimeter, filled with some 150 gr. (ounce? or is taht 125) grated cheese out of the deepfreezer and lay it on the table...no damaged "kneukels"...only with the thumb dividing some hard cores in the bag and then with the (again a difficult word: if you look at your right handpalm (palm of the hand?), the other side of the part that goes to the tumb (I don't even find it in Dutch) sigh) enfin that part that I described on the bag, you can evenly and smootly divide all the cheese "grains"! even one minute after leaving the freezer. I guess, but I think that your grated cheese is more in longer threads than our "grained"? cheese???

In any case, Gil, kind regards for this evening to you from Paul.

Paul, the word sachet has been adopted into English with its French pronunciation (well pretty close to anyway).  Nothing to do with sashay (I know you didn't say it was). https://www.thefreedictionary.com/sashay which is a way of walking or can also be a dance step.

The video I have linked despite its title is sensible and the answer given in the video is "No".  According to this video the "theory" seems to have first appeared in an Israeli magazine that was/is something akin to The Daily Mash and The Daily Squib, i.e. satirical.  The video mentions that the quarry for the great pyramid was close at hand to the site of the pyramid and that the papyri which referenced beasts resembling dinosaurs in fact dealt with the transport of some building materials from a site some 8 miles different.

Well, of course, we do have convincing evidence of the role of dinosaurs in building the pyramids.



Paul : oz/gm - 100 grams is about 3.5 oz.

Gilgamesh, I probably didn't explain very clearly - the video said that the papyri which were said to refer to strange creatures (there were some real papyri discovered) in fact said nothing of the sort.  The contents were more mundane and described the moving of some of the materials used in building the pyramids (though I know you were joking).

Yes, I got that. You could, I suppose, also claim that the Ishtar Gate reveals the presence in Sumerian times of dinosaurs - what else could the mushussu / sirrush be? Certainly nothing we know to have been extant at that date. And, for further "proof" (for the unduly credulous), how about Draig Goch? Must still exist, people are still putting on flags, after all!

Gil,

great that Ischtar Tor on the Museuminsel. I saw it once and want to see it a second time in my life...perhaps next year again as Stockholm now, then Berlin...


"Nondedju" (Flemish dialect from de French injure: "Nom de Dieu"
and now I see in French it is not une injure mais un juron
https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/3171/pourquoi-nom-de-dieu-est-il-une-injure

Yes I have forgotten to check "Draig Goch" and as I know our Gil you have always to pay attention to the small interjections...

Kind regards from Paul.

Gil, of course....



Your friend Paul.

Gilgamesh, when I logged in before the picture of Barney Rubble and Dino (of the Flintstones) didn't show up - I only saw the wording so I didn't get the joke but now it has become clear to me.

There's a huge difference between when genuine Egyptologists/Historians and when "Th'interweb"/woo woo merchants/Pseudo-"historians" discuss "how were the pyramids built" or "who built them"?

The latter rarely look beyond three extant examples of the craft familiar to everyone from postcards and other such impeccable scientific sources - the former are obliged to acknowledge the pesky inconvenience of a fact that Northern Africa includes several hundred examples of the craft spread over an area far beyond the Giza site, over a millennium (or two) either side of the Giza constructions (themselves built over several hundred years during the relatively stable and affluent Fourth Dynasty), and that the earlier "mastaba" design from which the Giza complex constructions are known to have evolved are now, thanks to lidar and other methods of identifying structural remains otherwise hidden from view above ground, now thought to have extended as a favoured mausoleum style further south even than the Sudanese pyramids and possibly deep into the African continental interior.

Modern climate modelling techniques, as well as core analysis from several Saharan and sub-Saharan locations which repeatedly corroborate these models, also point to a very long temperate predominance (circa 20,000 years) which seems to have dramatically ended within a century or two about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago - or to put it another way, long after the cultures and civilisations which developed the proto-pyramid forms would have settled these vast regions of fertile land that are now complete desert, and organised themselves according to the opportunities and capabilities that living in such a region afforded with regard to resource utilisation and development of infrastructure and agriculture. In other words the social model required to harness labour and exploit surpluses, by the time it was employed in the Fourth Dynasty, had already enjoyed a considerably longer and practically unbroken existence on the continent, even if the huge fertile areas that had been its crucible had, even by the Fourth Dynasty time, turned to sand.

So when one asks oneself "how were the pyramids built" one really has to first ask oneself "which pyramids?", "in which location?", "in which culture?", "at what point in the long evolution of the building technique?", and "in which prevailing climate?" - and then, at no matter which exact point in this long evolution one has chosen to concentrate one's analysis, "what needed to be learnt and what was was already long known?". Throw in the other rather inconvenient factor of expanding and shrinking populations adapting to dramatic local climate changes, as well as the migrations this would have occasioned (some of which are known), and one then not only has to attempt to answer all the above questions but do so in the knowledge that previous assumptions regarding how homogeneous a culture was Egypt's Fourth Dynasty (or any dynasty for that matter) might well have been completely incorrect.

The expertise required to design and build impressively substantial and complex mausoleic structures may not only have been considerably more established and available than generally assumed previously, but its transmission and occasional flowering in large projects such as Giza or later in Kushite Sudan was as fluid as the dramatic social movements and interactions would infer, and of course this expertise included far more than simply how to place one large cut stone upon another, but also how the complex social infrastructure and organisation required to conceive and execute a project on that scale could itself be achieved.

Far too much to think about for the average woo woo merchant, I admit, but I would hope a history discussion site like ours at least might allow some credit for people's intelligence to the extent that these factors also receive a little consideration in any "debate".

Do we have to be in deadly earnest all the time, nordmann?  For the avoidance of doubt I don't think dinosaurs (or for that matter "ancient aliens") built the pyramids.  The video I linked was actually one debunking the theory of dinosaurs building the pyramids and mentioned that no record could be foundof the "professor" who had put forward the "theory" ever having existed and that the tale originated in a satirical Israeli magazine.  If it seemed that I was suggesting dinosaurs did engage in building the pyramids then I obviously failed somewhere in expressing myself.

It's true that Egypt was a trading nation and would have access to materials from far and wide. There was the "dhow" trade after all. I saw something on TV a while ago which said that the Saharan desert didn't always spread as far as it does now though the spreading of the desert was very gradual (and of course nordmann mentioned the desertification in his comment above).  Might it have been possible to bring elephants to help with the heavy dragging (not necessarily the heavy dragging) though I imagine there must have been some sorts of scaffolding and cranes.  Then, that's just me thinking and the idea of elephants assisting may be as untrue as that of dinosaurs helping.

I know there are pyramid-like structures in South America but would have to either read up on them or look on the internet.  I occasionally look at a YouTube channel by the writer Michael Jecks and he mentioned once that he had learned the hard way that one couldn't always rely on YouTube research - it's best to back anything up by also consulting reputable hard copy books.  I'm not sure if the mistake was ironed out at the editing stage.  I hope so.

Not sure about being earnest, but being a bit more specific might help. For example, when you bring elephants into it are you suggesting they were employed throughout two millennia or perhaps only in some few of the building projects that you may have in mind but haven't actually specified?

An elephant as a draft animal equates roughly in traction terms to 70,000 foot pounds of work per minute (roughly just over twice that of a larger breed of draft horse), though this has been calculated based on Indian elephants employed in logging and not on African elephants (which have never been employed as draft animals that we know of). Outside of their own natural habitat they are also incredibly hard and expensive to train, maintain, feed and keep in good health, so one really has to look at the economics and logistics involved in using them, especially if a well trained and fit team of humans can do the same draft function for a fraction of the cost and with greater efficiency and accuracy.

There is however yet another "earnest" point that has to be made. Much of the hypothesising that substitutes for intelligent discussion regarding large building construction in ancient times stems from an unwarranted incredulity regarding how "primitive" societies could organise themselves, develop required technology and techniques, and generally perform through mass cooperation feats that even today would pose technological and logistical challenges beyond the ability of most people not trained in the required disciplines to fully comprehend. This partially excuses the incredulity, but in no way excuses the implicit dismissal of our ancestors' abilities, and certainly can never excuse when the hypotheses suggested to circumvent their own cognitive deficiencies are then expanded by the hypothesisers to include fanciful "deductions" related to "solutions" involving abnormal, paranormal, or any other element not substantiated by even the most basic archaeological assessment of the known data. The same hypotheses also tend to underestimate the scope of the data to be assessed anyway, so even a modicum of common sense should inform their authors that any "solution" they arrive at, no matter how personally "plausible" it may sound to them, is essentially unfalsifiable as a proposition anyway.

I'm all for being silly for the sake of it, though in some discussions (as with in some societies which will remain nameless at the moment) there is a rather self-defeating and even dangerous outcome at times if this is pursued to the detriment of intelligent debate and common sense reason.

I also have a problem sometimes between true wit and silly - and surely this topic had been well explored as to the maths, logistics, equipment. method and  manpower used and covered enough in research easily to hand and t which the  finds of well ordered settlements for workmen is a more recent addition.

However, I did wonder about putting elephants to work -African elephants for instance have they ever been used to labour? Did Hannibal use them or did he have the more tractable kind as the Asian sort seem to be? Passing and whimsical interest only, folk, not riveting, I Know so not expecting earnest reply. (Albeit that riveting and focused interest in too many boring posts is lacking here these days.

My post clashed with nord's - whose admirable constraint about mention of a peoples who use humour to mask inner conflicts and alarm is appreciated at the moment. And I agree with him - see above - which only goes to show a most serious current mind-state.

Deleted copy= jittery hands at the thought of agreeing with nordmann?  Dear God, am I getting booooring too?

African elephants have never, at least to anyone's knowledge, been regarded as useful draft animals. A lot of that is probably down to their natural habitat and social organisation when in the wild.

They have been trained to walk in straight lines, and even canter on instruction along a set trajectory. Which is about all they needed to do when dressed up and thrown in to a battle formation (though even then their inability to hold that line once battle started was a well known drawback to this "shock and awe" tactic). Hannibal may have had some success getting them to go on a long tour with him, but the same histories (probably not so curiously) then seem to drop the animals from accounts of his subsequent Italian campaign.

But all this deflects from the actual logistical challenge that gave rise to them being suggested in the construction context anyway - namely how to transport and manoeuvre items weighing many times one person's weight over large distances and then position them with accuracy. This was not a challenge faced by Egyptians alone. In fact it is one that has been met in almost every civilisation we know of throughout known history, and seems always to have been resolved best using variations of the same solution, which included human brawn and human brain, intelligent use of inanimate secondary constructional elements, and a lot of agreement.

PS: "Boring?". Heaven forbid that one should sacrifice entertainment for such trivialities as accuracy and intelligence. After all, what would the British press, politicians and people do?

Couldn't there be a harmony* between entertainment and logic and credibility/accuracy though?  I know it was built a LOT later than the Egyptian pyramids but considerable engineering skills were needed to build the terraces of the city of Machu Picchu.  I think some of the awe I feel when regarding Machu Picchu is because of its high altitude.  It's true there has been musing over the years about how the stones for Stone Henge were conveyed to the site from elsewhere (I suppose that could be said about henges and similar constructions in continental Europe as well).

There may have been times I have "tried for humour" but merely ended up being "trying".  One matter on which my  "conflicts and alarm" are focused presently is Brexit and how Mr B Johnson is going to handle it.  I wouldn't say they are, in my case at least, particularly mulled over internally in the real (i.e. not the internet) world though I'm careful what I say on that subject on this site - not because of fellow Res Historians but because nordmann mentioned receiving something very unpleasant emails "off-list" about the subject.

As for my mention of the elephants - I was speculating and did say that my thought "may be as untrue as that of dinosaurs helping".  "Boring" and "riveting" are subjective.  What I find intriguing sometimes may (and obviously does) lack fascination for other Res Historians.

There have been some threads which have sparked my interest (some of the military history ones for example) but I don't feel know enough about military history to contribute to such threads though I "lurk" and read them.

Well, my comments about ziggurat building were intended to remind people on here that the Giza trio aren't the only "artificial mountains" in existence. Not sure if it was here or on the old BBC board that I speculated that perhaps building them might be indicative of an upland origin for the builders.

Re Hannibal's elephants - I've seen speculation that they were a smaller (8') race of African elephants, now extinct, from the Atlas mountains. Now I know there were dwarf elephants on Malta and Cyprus, but since they became extinct c. 8000 BCE, they can't be the ones used.

Green George wrote:

Well, my comments about ziggurat building were intended to remind people on here that the Giza trio aren't the only "artificial mountains" in existence. Not sure if it was here or on the old BBC board that I speculated that perhaps building them might be indicative of an upland origin for the builders.

Re Hannibal's elephants - I've seen speculation that they were a smaller (8') race of African elephants, now extinct, from the Atlas mountains. Now I know there were dwarf elephants on Malta and Cyprus, but since they became extinct c. 8000 BCE, they can't be the ones used.

 
Gil, I remember the discussions on the BBC but even here...
And found it back:
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t884-ancients-starting-with-gods-and-kingships?highlight=kings++%2Bgods
And
https://www.academia.edu/24786947/The_sacred_Pyramids_Ziggurats_and_Mountains-their_purposes_and_why_they_were_built
Not sure if you can read the link. I subscribed freely to Academia edu with a password.
I will comment further tomorrow...

Kind regards from Paul.