There were also a lot of questions in other fields: The construction of the Great Pyramid was a series of complicated and arduous projects. Before the actual construction, it was necessary to carry out a highly precise design and field measurement plan, taking into account the structure, force, earthquake resistance, foundation bearing capacity, construction methods, and so on. This required a lot of complicated calculations. As for how the ancient Egyptians solved these cumbersome problems under primitive conditions? So far, there were many theories, but none of them made sense. He didn't care about these questions for now.
Secondly, they faced the problem of stone mining. How to mine it? When the Great Pyramid was built, ironware had not yet appeared. Even if it was bronze, it was still a valuable tool at that time and was unlikely to be widely used for quarrying. The Japanese scholar tested a method, which was to use a metal chisel to cut small holes in the stone surface, then drive a sharp wooden wedge, and then use a hammer to embed the metal fragments between the wooden wedge and the stone, so that the wooden wedge was not easily broken. After that, two people knocked the wooden wedge back and forth from both sides at the same time. When there was only 10 centimeters left on the top of the wooden wedge, he took off the wooden wedge and replaced it with a thicker and longer mallet until the rock cracked. Practice proved that this method was effective. So far, in the Aswan quarry, there were still traces of uncut stone with wooden wedging left, proving that this test method might be consistent with the facts.
It wasn't until 2000 B.C. that the Kizwenda tribe living in the mountainous region of Argentina invented an effective method of smelting iron, which began to spread after 1400 B.C. However, on May 26, 1837, when archaeologists used explosives to remove the two stone steps on the south side of the Great Pyramid, they found iron pieces in the stone cracks on the inner side of the tower wall near the southern star path. The place where the iron piece was found was not connected to any seams or openings. It was determined that the iron piece should have been left behind during the construction of the pyramid. The piece of iron is currently stored in the British Museum. However, the Egyptian scientists determined that the piece of metal was put in by a later person.
Since Giza did not produce boulders, the most pressing and realistic problem was the transportation of the boulders. Even if there was enough manpower, it was impossible to transport 2.6 million boulders weighing more than 50 tons to the construction site. Carried by a car? Use horses? No! There were no horses or carriages in Egypt at that time. Carriages and horses were only widely used in the 16th century B.C. during the New Dynasty, which was at least 1000 years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Some people thought that it was the method of using a round wooden stick to pry the board. However, this method required a lot of wood, but palm trees grew the most in the Nile River basin. Palm trees were an indispensable food for the Egyptians and the only shade material in the hot desert. The ancient Egyptians would never cut down a large number of them. Moreover, the number, growth speed, and hardness of the palm trees were far from enough to meet the needs of transportation. In addition, there were some willow trees, acacias, fig-trees, and shrubs in Egypt at that time. However, not only were these trees not pressure-resistant, but their quantity was also greatly insufficient. Pressure-resistant wood, such as cedar or ebony, which could withstand heavy pressure or could be used to transport 40-ton boulders, had to be imported. This kind of wood was imported from Lebanon, Syria, and Central Africa. The quantity was very small and far from enough! If the boulders were indeed transported from other places, then the pyramids on the west bank of the Nile had to be made of stone from the east bank of the Nile! In other words, the transportation of the boulders had to be done by water. In 1980, Hawass, the inspector of the Giza Monuments in Egypt, took a core sample. When he dug more than 100 feet deep, he found a rock wall at least 50 meters deep. This was probably a port excavated during the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt. Later, someone even discovered the waterway that connected to the port. However, there were no sheaves, winches, or sufficiently advanced lifting equipment. It was even more difficult to move such a heavy rock down the slope, onto the ship, and up the shore than to pry it on land. Moreover, there was a drop of at least 50 feet between the water and the rocky shore! What was even stranger was that archaeologists had yet to find the remains of the ships that transported the wood. This was truly a mystery. Some scholars believed that Giza produced a very special type of clay. If one sprinkled water on the clay pavement, heavy stones could slide on it. However, the control of the amount of water was very important. If the amount of water was not enough, it would be more laborious. However, this method also had various limitations. For example, it was very troublesome when it came to places that were not suitable for watering.
More than ten years after the construction of the Great Pyramid began, nine giant granite blocks were transported from the Aswan quarry 250 kilometers away. Each piece weighed more than 50 tons and required 200 people to move. When the Pharaoh's tomb was completed, five of the nine pieces of granite would be used to build the roof above the tomb.
On the other hand, the specific construction of the Great Pyramid was even more of a mystery. Egyptian scholars had come up with more than 30 theories. Most of them believed that before the pyramid was built, some form of inclined road must have been laid on the construction site. Professor I.E.S.Edwards, the former director of the Ancient Egypt Research Laboratory at the British Museum, said bluntly,""The ancient Egyptians only had one way to lift very heavy things, and that was to build a slope with mud and bricks from the ground or the starting point of lifting the weight.”Professor of Ancient Egyptian Studies at the University of Oxford, John? John Bains agreed with what Edwards said, and he further explained,""As the pyramid gets taller, the slope must gradually expand in both length and width to maintain a certain slope (about 1:10), otherwise it would collapse. At that time, the builders must have built several slopes from different angles.”However, laying a slope of 1: If the road was 10 feet long, it would be at least 4800 feet long to reach the top of the Great Pyramid, and the bricks and soil needed were three times more than the Great Pyramid itself. (The volume of the slope is 8 million cubic meters, while the volume of the pyramid is only 2.6 million cubic meters.)）If the slope was higher than 1:10, the road would be too steep to carry heavy objects up the slope. If it was 10, the amount of building materials needed to build the ramp would be even more ridiculous than the amount needed to build the pyramid. Moreover, a one-mile-long slope road that extended from the ground to a height of 480 feet was impossible to build with bricks and mud as suggested by ancient Egyptian scholars such as Edwards. On the contrary, modern architects and builders have confirmed that the inclined slope must be built with a material that is stronger and more noble than limestone, or it will definitely collapse. The slope theory was obviously not valid. (One more question: where did the eight million cubic meters of limestone used to build the slope go after the pyramid was built?）Later, some scholars came up with the theory of spiral slopes, claiming that people at that time used mud bricks to make spiral slopes on the four sides of the pyramid and attached them to the pyramid. Although the spiral slope required less materials, it could not extend to the top of the pyramid. Moreover, the higher the spiral slope was, the faster the angle of rotation became. When the masons moved such a large stone up the slope, they would encounter a narrower and narrower path until it was difficult to turn around. However, this was not the most unreasonable part of the spiral ramp. The most difficult thing for it to explain was: Because the spiral path had to be added to the pyramid, the architects could not check the precision and accuracy of the pyramid itself. However, the builders of the pyramid had to check the accuracy of the building at all times, so that the top of the tower was located at an equal distance from the four corners of the base. All the angles and corners were exactly the same, and each layer of stone was placed in the pre-designed position. Only then could the symmetrical building with the correct orientation and almost perfect shape be formed. Later, some scholars proposed to compromise the above two theories, but this theory could not be verified through rigorous reasoning. These theories all believed that the slope used to transport the stone was built on the outside of the pyramid. However, in actual archaeological activities, scholars had never found any ruins on the slope outside the pyramid. On March 31, 2007, French architect Jean? Pierre? Udan proposed the theory of "building from the inside out." He believed that an external slope would be built on the outer wall of the Great Pyramid, followed by the construction of an internal spiral tunnel. However, Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that experts from Egypt, the United States and Germany believed that Jean was a good candidate for the throne. Pierre? Udan's hypothesis that the pyramids were built from the inside out lacked scientific basis and practical basis.
How were the stones of the pyramid transported up one by one? There was no indication that they had used capstan (similar to the windlass used on the ship's side) or tools such as sheaves. Maybe they didn't have any lifting equipment. There were also people who proposed the "lever theory". However, bronze was the hardest metal that the ancient Egyptians could make. The wood produced in ancient Egypt could only be palm trees. Both were too soft to be used as leverage. In addition, as long as you studied mechanical engineering for a year, you would know that it was very inefficient to move heavy objects with a wooden lever due to friction and mobility problems. There was another problem with the wooden lever theory: Everyone thought that the stones were moved up the pyramid along the slope. The problem was that the slope could not be too big. Every 10 units, the stones would move up one unit. This slope of 1:10 would be very long, and it would be very impractical to drag the wooden lever on it. Therefore, the possibility of the "Wood Lever Stone Moving Method" was naturally ruled out. One had to know that under modern technological conditions, moving a 7-ton boulder required 350 horsepower. How did the ancient Egyptians transport so many huge stones under the conditions of underdeveloped technology? It wasn't until the end of the 20th century that the real answer began to emerge.
At the beginning of the 21st century, scientists discovered the first possible stone transportation method used by the ancient Egyptians: They unearthed a very mysterious cradle-shaped wooden model in an archaeological site, which provided clues to the method of building the pyramid. The Egyptian technology was indeed revolutionary. Tie four cradle-shaped wooden products to the stone that has been cut into cubes to form a circular roller. This way, two rollers can make the stone roll. This rolling stone method was not only suitable for slopes with a slope of 1:10, but it could also roll on steep slopes with a slope of 1:4. The scientist, Perry, collaborated with some engineers in Japan to carry out experiments. Rolling on a steep slope with a ratio of 1:4 required only a quarter of the manpower of the wooden pry method. The experiment also showed that a 2.5-ton rock could move 15 meters in a minute on such a steep slope.
The second possible method of transportation was: In 1983, Joseph, a French industrial pharmacist working at the Earth Polymers Institute in California, USA, was born in the United States. In his book, The Book of Stones, David Deweiss proposed an amazing insight. He believed that the stone used to build the pyramids was not natural, but artificially made by mixing broken limestone with a mineral binding agent. One of the reasons for this theory was that he found an inch-long human hair in a stone. Secondly, he discovered that there were minerals and air bubbles in the stone from a chemical and microscopic perspective. From the rock samples taken from the quarry, they found out: Natural stones would not contain these two substances. He said that his test results proved that the stone of the Great Pyramid was made of limestone, shell concrete, and man-made. Joseph? David Deweis speculated that the ancient Egyptians used the method of " breaking up the whole into parts " to build the pyramid. They put the mixed concrete into a basket and lifted or carried the pyramid under construction. In this way, as long as one had a certain level of skill, they could cast huge rocks one after another and raise the tower level by level. This method was both " effortless " and labor efficient. David Deweiss also emphasized that the five stones of the Great Pyramid of Giza he studied were given to him by scholars who studied ancient Egyptian artifacts. The origin and authenticity of these stones were beyond doubt. Of course, natural stones still accounted for a certain proportion. The most likely truth was that the stones of the Giza pyramids were both natural and man-made.
The Pyramid of Giza was built with a variety of stone materials, with a large amount of limestone being used. The coarse, low-grade limestone was generally used to build the core of the tower, while the good white limestone was used for the outer and inner walls, and some pink granite was often used as the inner wall decoration. During the chalk period, Egypt was still covered by seawater, and the calcareous secretions of corals living in the warm and vast shallow sea environment later formed limestone layers. In addition, magmatic rocks formed by magma activity, including granite and magma, also occupied a certain proportion in the stratum, and these two kinds of rocks also became the building materials of the pyramid.
Distinguishing natural limestone from man-made limestone has always been a problem for geologists. Gilles of the French National Aerospace Research Agency? Professor Hu Ge and Mike from Drexall University in Philadelphia, USA. Professor Basom said that the pyramid of Giza in Egypt was made up of two types of stone, one from the quarry and the other man-made. The two professors used X-rays, plasma torches, and electron microscopes to compare the fragments from the pyramid with the stones from nearby quarries. They found "traces of a rapid chemical reaction that did not produce natural crystallization... This chemical reaction does not prove that all the stones in the pyramid came from a quarry, but it is very convincing to say that they were cast like concrete." The two professors believed that the craftsmen only used the concrete method at the top of the pyramid. The Great Pyramid used a total of 2.6 million stones, of which the boulders weighing 10 tons or more were natural. Do they think Joseph? David Deweiss 'theory was correct. The soft limestone used to build the pyramids was collected from the humid area south of the Giza Plateau. Then, the water of the Nile River was introduced into a huge pool to dissolve it, and finally it became thin mud. The craftsmen mixed ash and salt into the mud, and after dehydration, what was left was a moist clay-like mixture. This " concrete " was transported to the construction site and placed into a wooden mold. After a few days, it completely hardened. The people who believed in " concrete theory " also pointed out that the density of the stones used in the pyramids also varied. The bottom was generally full and the top was hollow, which was very similar to the old-fashioned cement stones. If the Egyptian government allowed them to obtain more samples, they could finally prove whether the concrete theory was correct.
However, there were also people who doubted the man-made stone theory for three main reasons: 1. Since the Giza region produces stones locally, why waste time and effort to make so many artificial stones? The answer to this question was simple: Firstly, the size of the stones produced in the Giza region could not meet the requirements for the construction of the pyramid. Secondly, as mentioned above, it was much more labour-saving to transport the artificial stone raw materials to the tall pyramid under construction before making the stones. 2. Although this method solved the transportation problem, there was no material similar to steel bars found in the broken stones. How did this " concrete " stone solve the tension problem? 3. The stones used in the pyramid were of different shapes, which meant that no mold had been used at all. For the latter two questions, no one could give a satisfactory answer.
(This means that according to the production conditions of the ancient Egyptians, it is difficult for modern people to build the Great Pyramid. If we can't think of any good way, then how could the ancients 5000 years ago do it independently?）
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