As a Stonemason, this shit always bothers me. Recent example was an article on stone henge. “Scientists still mystified as to how the stones were stood so that to caps were level!”
Mfr! Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level. Don’t want to lift the stone in and out multiple times to adjust the level? Get logs and cut them to the same length as the upright stones. It’s not fucking rocket surgery!
Yeah people simply can’t fathom that people in the past were just as intelligent as people are now. They just didn’t have quite as much technology as we do now. Also people tend to think of technology as being magic and don’t actually understand the underlying science that makes that technology work was the same in the past.
This results in weird ideas about how something isn’t possible without a laser level or whatever.
And people tend not to think about skill being a factor. Probably many of the skills you have as a stone mason aren’t too different from the skills people had in the past. Sure there’s some technology you have available to help you now, but a larger part of it is just skill gained from experience working with stone that’s completely independent of technology.
FUCKING THANK YOU!
For instance, yes I use grinders and saws to cut big pieces of stone into smaller pieces so they fit where I need them, but I was taught how to do all that by hand as well. Sometimes you don’t have power or petrol, but the shit still needs to go up!
And the way we do things now is just a continuous evolution from how we did it then. I don’t have to sharpen my chisels every 30mins because we have better materials. I don’t have to break a giant billet of stone into manageable sizes(I can though) because a shop does it for me. And almost all of the old tech is still in use, albeit in a new form or in new materials.
Wire/string friction sawing has been around for millenia…here’s an example of a new bit of kit.
Yeah a lot of technological improvements aren’t really changers, they just make people more productive at their jobs.
My brother is a plumber and his biggest annoyance is people that think “if I had your tools I’d be able to do your job.” Nope, that’s not how things work at all. Weird how some people think technology makes skill obsolete.
Trying to picture how you do this with those. Brain is stuck on hanging rock from wood with string which feels like I’m going the wrong way
I swallowed my rock, can I be excused?
No you have to act as the string now so start dangling.
Drafting* class taught me that you can build any structure with just a T-square, a compass, a pencil, and some basic math.
*As in the precursor to Computer-Aided Drafting. My school was cheap and didn’t let us use AutoCAD till the 2nd semester.
But anyway, place the straight piece of wood across a gap. One end of the string goes around the middle of the wood, the other end hangs down where you tie the rock. You can visually tell with decent enough accuracy if the rock is hanging closer to one side (not level) or just straight down (level). If you can’t tell, get a longer string.
some basic math.
The pyramids at gizeh predate most of that. They predate algebra by some 800 years.
Of course, despite Pythagoras not being born for some 2000 years, they DID have Rope stretchers to create square angles. They also had square levels and plumb bobs for making straight blocks and level surfaces.
You don’t even need maths, just rope and gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
“From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars.”
The first “true” pyramids were not built until ~2613. Prior to that it was all step pyramids, which are much less complex - just put a bunch of consecutively smaller squares in a stack. Even then, Djoser was started in ~2670, several hundred years after the “introduction” of basic math. Just because we don’t have extant physical mathematical texts surviving from that time doesn’t mean they didn’t know how to do math.
That’s actually all there is to it.
Out the stick where you want the thing to be level, and hang a rock off it with string.
The rock hangs straight down. Adjust what the stick is sitting on until the stick is perpendicular to the string.
It’s not the most accurate or easiest to use tool we have available today, but they’re still used for vertical alignment.
It’s one of the oldest tools we have. Hasn’t really changed since they were used during the building of the pyramids.
And Wikipedia says they were used in ancient Egypt, so it’s particularly relevant.
The rock and string, with help from gravity point down to the ground. If angle between the stick and string isn’t 90°, then it’s not level.
So I DID visualize it right, but forgot about angles
Hey, it was (I assume) Monday. You can be forgiven for forgetting about angles on a Monday.
Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level.
Well axshually that’s a plumb bob.
Right you are, but 99% of people would be all: don’t you Bob for apple? Why Bob for plum?
I don’t know, but why are we judging Bob for the fruit he likes?
Y’all seem to understand one another, but I’m lost
The thing is, its not about a single rock being precise. Its a 2 million ton monument that we are told is a tomb that was built in like 20 years. Thats about 1.7 million pounds per day, every day. It would take our trucks a fucking insane amount of time just dragging it into position, how did they have the time to cut it as well? For a tomb??? Somehow I feel we are not being told the whole story here…
No, it’s totally about a single rock being precise. That’s the name of the game son. If you don’t get the first stone precise, you can’t get the second one in precise. And there’s loads of different ways to move stone without trucks. I work in a conservation setting, and we use modern machinery as little as possible. If these scholars would bother asking anyone with actual experience in the field they’d get some answers to their questions.
Also what’s with the Ancient Aliens bs at the end there?
Its a tomb that was built in 20 years by some guy? Its not ancient aliens, but i have a feeling that the pyramid had a use, not just as some big building. Don’t have to agree, but keep an open mind when looking at it
Somehow I feel we are not being told the whole story here…
This shit.
Well, honestly i have no idea, just seems crazy for everyone to be like “we know what it was used for because some guy in the 1800s said so”
Or maybe the mummified remains that were found inside might have been an good indication?
The great pyramid is “assumed” to have had a mummy by people in like 900ad no mummies, just more mysteries. Why is the only mummies we find in the three pyramids from a woman, and a man from 2000 years after they were built? The evidence for the royal tomb hypothesis is surpisingly thin. If you think about what we actually see when we look at the pyramids, they are feats of engineering on the scales of which were not seen again until the 1800s. It is insane to me that we think we have any idea how or why the pyramids came to be based on the very minimal amount of evidence we do have on their construction. Not to mention the mysteries of some of the design choices i.e. menkaure casing stones
From britishmuseum.org:
Scientific dating techniques and painstaking archaeological research undertaken around the monument over the last few decades have brought the timeline of the site into focus. It is not possible to talk about ‘one’ Stonehenge – the monument was built, altered, and revered for over 1,500 years. That is equivalent to around 100 generations – it is worth pausing to let the sheer length of time sink in!
From Wikipedia:
There is little or no direct evidence revealing the construction techniques used by the Stonehenge builders. Over the years, various authors have suggested that supernatural or anachronistic methods were used, usually asserting that the stones were impossible to move otherwise due to their massive size. However, conventional techniques, using Neolithic technology as basic as shear legs, have been demonstrably effective at moving and placing stones of a similar size.[48] The most common theory of how prehistoric people moved megaliths has them creating a track of logs which the large stones were rolled along.[49] Another megalith transport theory involves the use of a type of sleigh running on a track greased with animal fat.[49] Such an experiment with a sleigh carrying a 40-ton slab of stone was successfully conducted near Stonehenge in 1995. A team of more than 100 workers managed to push and pull the slab along the 18-mile (29 km) journey from the Marlborough Downs.[49]
Each stone weights around 25 tons and I found this helicopter that can carry 33 tons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_CH-53E_Super_Stallion#Specifications_(CH-53E). So we could easily build this today. Probably wouldn’t take long at all.
What? First i am not arguing that we could not do it. Second stonehenge and the great pyramid are completely different levels of complexity. Third, i know machinery can lift heavy things, the point is even with machines its difficult to do this stuff. How’d they get by with zero machines? In the timeframe mentioned above? For what purpose
Ok he’s finally triggered me. As an engineer, no. We absolutely can build pyramids. At least technologically. Financing it isn’t happening. But we can build pyramids on the size of the great pyramid without modern technology even. It’s impressive sure, but it’s not like people of the past were idiots, they just had less tools at their disposal, and better tools are great for inventing even better tools.
Yeah I’m so tired of hearing that “We can’t build the pyramids even with the technology of today” because that’s just a bullshit statement with nothing supporting it. It is just to try to dismiss actual reality in order to prop up “It was aliens obviously” that has zero evidence.
Right wingers have nothing but bullshit statements with nothing supporting them. They operate on the principle that they can produce bullshit faster than reasonable people can debunk it.
Imho the only answer that needs is “prove it”.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed with the same. So, prove it.
I saw a documentary where they built a scaled down pyramid with a smaller workforce in a few months with ancient technology. The numbers scaled with the numbers that are the consensus of archaeologists for the size of the workforce and amount of time needed to built the Great Pyramid.
So not only could we do it with modern technology, we could do it with ancient technology. We just don’t want to spend the money on that because it makes more sense to build other things.
Less tools and more slave labor.
There’s actually a belief that the pyramids weren’t built by slaves, but rather paid workers during the seasons when fields couldn’t be worked.
In the modern era we’d call it a job program.
Government needs something done, unemployed workers need to be kept busy for social order, and fed so they’re ready when the fields are workable again.There is evidence of a levy based job program, with wages paid in food, not coin, for some pyramids.
So, you know, forced labor.
Also, they would still have used regular slaves, because that’s literally what slaves are for, and the fuckin things were built over a period of a thousand years.
Do you honestly think your “job program” looked the same that entire period?
No? Why so hostile? I’m literally referring to other people who know more than I do on the topic.
Do you have some particular attachment to it being slave labor? I just thought it was an interesting thing that the common conception of how they were built is believed to be incorrect by experts.
I have an aversion to the public whitewashing of history based on something someone once read on a trending r/History post.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html
Do you have a particular reason to have your beliefs that contradict “historians”? Or are you just invested in history feeling a particular way and you can’t imagine a society being layed out differently than you thought, or changing your belief?
You should consider actually reading that article, which among other things acknowledges that slaves certainly existed in Egypt, were probably involved in construction of the pyramids, and that the inhabitants of the pyramid city were most likely laborers who were most likely “obligated,” aka forced, labor, and then maybe think just a little critically about whether “The Hollywood version of an entirely enslaved workforce” not being true is the same thing as “slaves didn’t build the pyramids.”
The author even outright admits we don’t know if the workers were free or not, just states that they weren’t “slaves as we think of it,” because they “ate like royalty” on the basis of…
There being evidence of bread and cattle at this one dig site?
Interesting conclusion. I wonder what he thinks American chattel slaves ate.
But hey, what do you expect from the kind of person that tries to draw conclusions for a thousand years of history and at least 118 pyramids from one dig site?
It was a combination of the two. Though last I heard archaeological evidence was showing it wasn’t slave labor, but often paid labor for times when farming wasn’t needed. And a lot of craftsmen labor was definitely paid. You can’t build something like this without stonemasons.
My boyfriends grandmother loves to watch shows like ancient aliens and stuff. Normally I just ignore them as background noise, but sometimes I’ll catch something, shake my head and move on.
One time though she was watching the one with William Shatner, unexplained mysteries I think it’s called. And the person Shatner was talking too said “and there is no way we could build the pyramids today” and Shatner just said nodded and then said “why?” The guy mean mugged the shot outta him and they cut to a commercial. When it came back they were talking about something else. Really made me laugh.
But like fr though, bass pro shop built a pyramid, we build crazy skyscrapers and have hundreds of building styles all over the world, I’m sure we could build a pyramid today if we had too.
Ancient aliens are also like „they definitely used the pyramids as electricity generators/substations“ or some bullshit like that.
I mean they contradict themselves every week and the stuff never really have any evidence either way.
One week it’s like “since octopuses live in the ocean and they are Strang compared to us does that mean ancient aliens are living in the bottom of the ocean in the city of Atlantis? Our theorists say yes!” And then the next time they are like “Is Atlantis actually under this Mesopotamia city? Our theorists say absolutely 100% of course of course no doubt no doubt.”
Only idiots listen to Joe rogan
Before the move to Spoopify it was legitimately one of the best podcasts. Rogan has always been a moron and the juxtaposition of that against actual smart guests was so much fun. Then professionally offended fuckwits decided his opinion was worth … anything … and it all went downhill from there.
I never regarded him as very smart but he did have interesting guests and good banter, typically. A while before the Spotify buy I thought the quality worsened a lot and he would keep letting his politics shine through too much.
I liked when Bill Burr said he (Joe) couldn’t rollerskate because his knuckles would drag on the ground in regards to Joe speculating on Covid without any real qualifications.
Some episodes are good, the one with Dave Mustaine for example
If you want to run your fingers through liquid shit trying to find the scattered diamonds, I’m not gonna stop you - but is it really worth it?
As a Megadeth fan it was surprisingly good. I’m not a regular viewer. Joe isn’t smart but I think he can be a good interviewer
He establishes a good rapport with guests. But sometimes he uses that to lull people into agreeing with some of his fucked up shit.
He asked Coffeezilla (guy who does journalism about online scams) about trans rights. Coffeezilla rightly responded something like “I don’t know this isn’t something I’m an expert in.” The look on Rogan’s face was like, Eh I guess I didn’t get you on that one.
And it’s weird how he tries to create controversy. He’s already the #1 podcaster, why is he doing these underhanded tricks to stir up controversy to gain notoriety?
It was a better show when he was just a dumb guy talking to smart people. That was a lot of fun. Don’t know why he didn’t just stick with that.
Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology… ropes and wooden levers… by himself!
Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven’t figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.
The hilarious thing is when they do actually throw some critical thinking together it doesn’t matter anyway. Like the flat earthers who ran an experiment that proved the earth was round, and then immediately decided that they must have done something wrong and needed to come up with a new experiment.
Got a link? That sounds extremely interesting!
Checkmate.
There’s even more than one in the US.
There was a documentary I saw once where they used the best estimates for how long it took the Great Pyramid and how large the work force was and then scaled it down. Like if it took a work force of X people Y number of years to build the Great Pyramid, then a few dozen guys would be able to build a two storey tall pyramid in two months with the same technology.
So they did that. And despite being inexperienced with the ancient technology and having to figure out how to push these massive stone blocks on rollers and make the corners around a spiral ramp winding around the pyramid, they got their little pyramid done on time. The math all checks out on people being able to build the pyramids provided they had a large enough workforce and enough time to do it.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them. But it required no special technology. Just a lot of dudes pushing heavy blocks on rollers up a ramp over many years.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them.
That’s the impressive thing. Their society had enough spare food that they could “waste” trillions of calories this way. It’s hundreds of thousands of people doing nothing productive (for the survival of themselves or for others) for years on end. And, it happened thousands of years BCE.
Until just a few hundred years ago, 90% of people worked in jobs related to farming. So, to support 100,000 people building pyramids, they would have needed something like 900k farmers. That’s a million people dedicated to this project for a full generation.
I’m convinced the whole “they couldn’t do this today” is subtle anti-modernity propaganda whether they are saying it about movies, or ancient megastructures. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human progress, wrapped up in weird conservative anger about how it will never be 40(00) years ago again.
Yeah, but have you done DMT and then think about the pyramids?
Didn’t think so.
This is a prime example how mind altering substances are a bit double edged sword.
They will get results but towards the goal you’ve set. If you want to do some self exploration and learn about yourself, sure it will most often help in a way or another. If you on the otherhand want to brainwash yourself with dumb conspiracy theories then it will most likely help with that too, especially if you do them too often.
A friend of mine has absolutely fried his brains with ketamine and he believes to the weirdest shit and basically think that the universe has intended him to be untouchable and no bad can happen to him. I for the other hand just learned a lot about my behaviour patterns with ketamine and came out with clearer mind about my life and goals.
Is ketamine a psychedelic? It’s uncommon here so don’t know anyone who fried their brain with lucy or shrooms
Nah it’s dicossiative
Pyramids are the easiest structure to build. You stack rocks. Want them to look nice, cut the rocks into bricks.
And all you need is lots of money, lots of labor, and some clever engineers, which are all things the ancient Egyptians had in spades.
It’s really not that hard.
fr where does he get the idea that a simple triangle can’t be built with today’s technology
Same place he gets his COVID takes.
It’s like sending people to the moon. Can we do it? Yes. Do we have a reason to? No.
Technically we can’t send people to the moon anymore but that’s not really relevant to whether or not we can build a pyramid because one of them requires special technology and the other requires a general purpose crane
We could send people to the moon, we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed. It’s just that it’s no longer a priority. It was incredibly expensive the first time. Although it would be less expensive the second time, this is a case where there’s absolutely no justification for not working from home (i.e. using robots).
we haven’t lost the knowledge or resources needed
Yeah its not that simple. Knowledge is pretty much lost in terms that there is not any easy or practical way to reconstruct for example the computer that navigated the Apollo and assume that this will provide a flawless trip. This hardware is also outdated so it would had been dumb to attempt to reconstruct something so many decades old. Also the code that run there was coded for this specific hardware which makes it unsuitable for modern hardware. So yeah, the knowledge exists in archives but is not really usable as is
I don’t know why you’re talking about Apollo hardware and software. The programmers and engineers who wrote that stuff did it from well known scientific and engineering principles. They didn’t have to start with a previous moon mission. The scientific and engineering principles are even better known today, and we have much more experience for space flight.
The only advantage you’d have with Apollo era stuff is that it has been tested and the bugs are well known. But, so what? Any modern mission to the moon would start from first principles again, not by trying to extend the Apollo stuff.
Instruction unclear accidentally calculated the number phi and the diameter of the earth and moon in relation to Eachother.
https://www.sacred-geometry.es/?q=en/content/phi-great-pyramid
Believe what you will, ancient ruines are impossible to measure accurately. Its an interesting rabbithole just how far the numbers stretch though.
impossible to measure accurately
By some idiot hosting a conspiracy theorist website.
Actual physicists find it quite easy.
Distance of the Earth to the Moon? Easy as
Until the late 1950s all measurements of lunar distance were based on optical angular measurements: the earliest accurate measurement was by Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC.
Done with nothing the Egyptians didn’t have.
Oh btw once you work out the distance you can easily calculate Earths diameter.
Since you believe websites that look like the early 90’s shat them out I have some crypto to sell you, it was invented by the Lizard people in a joint venture with the Grey aliens.
I had a classmate that would tell me over and over how precisely the pyramids aligned with a set of stars at the time they were built, how we needed lasers to measure the imprecision, how we couldn’t do the same thing today.
Eventually I found out that the imprecision was… a little over a foot, roughly 35 centimeters. That’s the insane precision, the refined craftsmanship we can’t produce today, getting the walls of a place within a foot of where we meant to put them.
Everyone that says this is either blindly repeating a thing they heard once, or has never seen a skyscraper, or a shopping mall, or the average parking lot outside a Walmart with that one area where all the rain water stays a few extra days, because it’s 6 inches lower than the rest. THAT PARKING LOT IS STILL MORE PRECISE THAN THE PYRAMIDS, BRIAN.
You’ve forgotten that the sun rotates around the Milky Way the same way the Earth rotates around the sun. So the stars aren’t in the same place as they were thousands of years ago. Was this 1 foot off the ancient discrepancy or is that today?
It was off by a foot at the time they were built. They’re substantially more inconsistent with the stars now. I thought that was clear in my comment, sorry for the confusion.
How Roegan is so fucking stupid it blows my mind that people listen to a word that comes out of his stupid fucking mouth
It’s worse than that, he knows exactly what he’s doing, he’s taking advantage of rubes for profit. He has decided that making the world a worse place is worth it if he gets rich, he’s just the latest in the Rush Limbaugh > Alex Jones cycle.
I wonder if this could be co-opted by other messaging, like could you start a podcast and end up with a fanatically devoted fanbase of pastry chefs? Or what about carpenters? With the right wardrobe, set design and rhetoric, could you build a fantical base of young men devoted to the concept that building a house is the ultimate expression of manliness?
It’s possible but I think part of the problem is that these men are targeting personal and cultural insecurities about manhood. As we move away from glorifying masculinity’s violent side these men sell the idea that that’s a problem. And beyond that they sell the idea that you can embody it. It’s why they can show up in varieties like pick up artists but never as like loving and involved dads no matter how much they lament the lack of prioritizing of fathers.
Nobody is criticizing men for woodworking or cooking pastries.
That said I do think that more could probably be done by men to appeal to young men and encourage such pursuits in a healthy and constructive way. I know a friend of mine growing up really appreciated Nick Offerman’s brand of masculinity.
Nobody is criticizing men for woodworking or cooking pastries.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the problem, young men aren’t sliding to the right because they’re being told “boys don’t bake.” The problem as I see it is, in general terms, there is no path to success for many young men, and they know it. Of the two major political voices you hear today, one of them says “You have no right to complain, you’re a man. You’ve got it made, you outright own society such that every single bad detail about society is personally your fault, and I will never stop hating you for it.” The other voice says “Hey, remember when you WOULD HAVE had a path to success?”
Their advanced technology: slaves
From what archaeologists have discovered, the builders were paid laborers.
They found stone tax records from the workers
that, and wasn’t it also kind of a tax duty? “gotta work X days a year on the pyramids”.
Although, given how long the civilization was around, all of it might have been true at some point
It was the first ever pyramid scheme in recorded history
You had to recruit two friends to work on the pyramid and they had to each recruit two friends.
The pyramids are an impressive feat that should not be ignored, but let’s not pretend like the luxury of modern technology doesn’t give us an insurmountable advantage.
We’re comparing a large skillfully built pile of big rocks to modern buildings that are several times taller and thinner while also being hollowed out for everyday use and filled with utilities and other infrastructure.
If the Steinway Tower or the Burj Khalifa were solid rock they would still be more impressive than the pyramids. But they have the equivalent of neighborhoods and towns inside them.
Also the bass pro shop pyramid and luxor pyramid exist, we are at the point where our direct equivelents to the ancient pyramids is a sporting goods place and a monument to mans decadence.
From what i have learned the technology to build the pyramids was actuall extremely low tech, and i dont mean slaves and chisles, i mean strings, honey, and tuning forks for the cutting of stone. For transportation they used vibrations to move the stone along magnetic lines in the earth.
Its not ancient high tech, its simply forgotten or suppressed low tech.
Never heard the vibration thing. That’s pretty sick. I have heard of animal fat though.
Huh. I though they used basic stone-working tools and the simple machines we learn about in elementary school – just at a larger scale.
Weird.
Right, like people couldn’t figure out how to float shit down river on a raft or roll it on some logs and instead had to send out wizards to find leylines…
