A Guide to Building the Pyramids- How Did They Do It?
In today's episode of The BrainFood Show, Daven Hiskey dives into how the pyramids were actually built.
A quick tour on popular online video sharing platforms may convince you that ancient Egyptian builders were either Completely useless, and had to rely on Alien help, or They were incredibly advanced, and used power tools and lasers. Because … Atlantis, Tom Cruise, and Ice Road Truckers…
These theories are a fairly recent trend, borne out of a modern mindset of people who don’t know what they are talking about and because they cannot comprehend how stuff could get built without the aid of sophisticated technology that they tend to also not really understand, and seemingly suffering from a false sense of superiority over our past human selves. Which, to be fair, that one is an almost universal idea despite it being objectively untrue. Our millenia past ancestors were just as smart as we are and in some ways far more capable at getting things done with a whole lot less.
But going back to making the pyramids, if we look at the writings from people who lived closer in time to when the Pyramids were built, we find no such sense of mystery. To them, building huge monuments was impressive, sure, but did not spark wild speculation.
Take Greek historian Herodotus, for example, writing in the 5th Century BC. According to his Egyptian guides, the Great Pyramid at Giza was built by 100,000 men, employed for three months a year, over a period of twenty years.
His colleague Diodorus Siculus, active in the 1st Century BC, recounted that: ‘The construction was undertaken with the help of ramps of earth, since at that time cranes had not yet been invented.’
As we shall see later, further studies by contemporaries Egyptologists have partially corrected the accounts of these titans of ancient historiography.
Nonetheless, they seem to have gotten the basics right.
Building a pyramid was a huge, daunting endeavour, sure, but one that could be achieved by employing resources which the Pharaohs had access to. Not too dissimilar to modern day marvels like humanity going from horse drawn carriages to walking on the moon in only a little over a half century. An immutable fact of humaning- when humans throw practically unlimited funds and large amounts of labor and expertise at a problem, we are extremely good at doing the formerly impossible. And countless examples throughout history prove this fact. Throw enough money and labor at a problem, we humans will figure that crap out right quick. Which kind of makes it a shame we don’t do just that at more problems we humans have today from tuberculosis to cancer to a sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, Galaxy Quest. Let’s make it happen no matter the monetary cost. The most important thing humans could ever create- Galaxy Quest 2- The Search for Grabthar’s Hammer.
But in a similar vein, the Pharaoh’s formula for building the pyramids was: loads of time, plenty of cash, building techniques which were state-of-the-art at the time, and tens of thousands of skilled labourers. Yes, skilled labourers, not slaves.
Time, money and skilled labour were the founding blocks for other ancient construction projects, which Diodorus and Herodotus might have experienced directly, such as great temples, amphitheatres, roads, aqueducts and public baths. Many of which, by the way, were architectural and engineering projects arguably significantly more sophisticated than the Pyramids, and yet no one calls down Aliens from the sky as being behind those projects. Or… at least, not yet. Never underestimate what the History Channel is capable of.
Author: Arnaldo Teodorani
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Caden Nielsen
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