As one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the pyramids of Egypt have awed and inspired travelers, scholars, poets and artists for thousands of years. For architectural engineers, though, perhaps the most interesting thing is – how are they built?
Take the Great Pyramid of Khufu for example. It is 146 meters high, weighs 6 million tons, and consists of nearly 2.3 million rocks, each weighing 80 tons. The stones are placed so horizontally and squarely that not even a piece of paper can fit between the stones, making the whole structure almost perfect. It is extremely difficult to build such a project even in today's highly developed science and technology, let alone in the age of only bronze and stone tools.
Four basic puzzles that are difficult to solve
To solve the question of how the pyramids were built, four fundamental puzzles must be solved: how the blocks were mined and carved into shape; how the blocks were transported from the quarry to where they were built; how the blocks were carried to the upper level of the pyramid; how the whole structure remains square and level.
For the first enigma, it is thought to have been done by drilling a row of holes with a drill bit, inserting wooden wedges into the holes and filling them with water, and when the wedges expand, they crack the stone, and then use Bronze chisels chiseled it and polished it until it became what we see today.
The second mystery is how the stones were transported to the site of the pyramid, and there are two conventional views. One is towing with wooden sleds. A similar picture was found on the walls of the pyramid: hundreds of people used sleds to pull the huge stone statue forward, and the way forward was splashed with water or oil for lubrication. But whether this was ever the common practice of moving heavy objects is unknown. Another is to use trees as rollers. As the stone rolls, the rollers move forward continuously. Such a practice would cost a lot of trees, yet the Egyptian forests do not appear to have been destroyed to such a degree, which seems to negate this notion.
Imagining the construction of the pyramids
The third mystery is how to lift the stone to the upper level of the pyramid. The traditional explanation is that huge ramps are used, either straight or spirals that wrap around the tower. But there are obvious loopholes—a straight slope would require almost as many stones as the pyramid itself, while also taking twice as much time and materials to build, while a spiral slope would struggle to keep the shape of the pyramid accurate.
The final mystery is how the entire structure stays square and level. One theory is that the foundations of the pyramids were so level because of a method in which a trench was dug around the foundation, filled with water, and then leveled with that water as a reference. While this makes sense, it doesn't explain how all the stones were chiseled with such precision. Be aware that a little bit of error in a single stone, cumulatively, will be magnified, disrupting the alignment of the entire structure.
Pyramid stones are not lifted up?
Obviously, it is not easy to solve all four puzzles at the same time. But one archaeologist named David Waits seems to have done it. After an in-depth study of the pyramid stones, David Weitz was surprised to discover that the stones that make up the pyramids are not related to their "source" (they are thought to have come from a nearby quarry). match.
First of all, the content of the two components is different. The natural limestone in Egypt contains about 96% to 99% of calcite and 0.5% to 2.5% of quartz, dolomite, gypsum and iron-aluminosilicate, but the pyramid stones only contain 85% to 90% calcite plus additional minerals such as opal, hydroxyapatite and aluminosilicates. Second, the stone microstructure of the pyramids is unstructured or glass-like, with a large number of small air bubbles, which are not found in natural limestone. Even more bizarrely, many of the pyramid stones exhibit a strange layered structure: large fossil fragments are concentrated at the bottom and lighter grains are concentrated at the top, not in alternating bands like ordinary limestone.
Based on these findings, David Weitz believes that the stones of the pyramid were not lifted, but were cast directly with an ancient Egyptian concrete.
If that were the case, then the first three fundamental puzzles wouldn't exist. This explains why the pyramids were built with such precision, since the initial liquid state of the concrete causes the stones to automatically flatten and also makes the gaps between the stones very small. Also, this method works well in local settings, where there is an abundance of soft, brittle limestone.
To prove his point, David Weitz used four ingredients readily available to the ancient Egyptians—water, crushed limestone, quicklime, and caustic soda (a mixture of salt and sodium bicarbonate found on the banks of the Nile River) , widely used in mummies), successfully created a concrete with exactly the same composition as the pyramid stones.
So, the mystery of the ancient pyramid construction is solved like this?
Actually not. Like all theories, it has flaws. For example, the theory cannot account for the 8,000-ton stone used to build the pyramid's core, which is identical to the rock found in a nearby quarry, apparently cut and transported there. In other words, it was not poured with concrete. Taking a step back, if the pyramids were to be made of concrete, then the amount of concrete required would be quite staggering, and there would have to be enough supporting facilities to support its production. However, to date, there is no evidence of such a facility.
How were the pyramids built? Was it made of limestone, poured concrete, or some other unknown method? In short, this problem, which has plagued people for centuries, will continue to plague us today.
.jpeg)
