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Originally posted by dgtempe
I saw the show on Discovery that said that it would have taken over the span of 20 years, 1 of those slabs had to be laid out with perfect presicion every 1.5 minutes.
There;s no way on earth.
Originally posted by ShadowXIX
Ive seen that same show and you should note he was using steel tools. Steel chisels and steel sledge hammers. The egyptians had nothing close to that strong in the tool department. That stone wasnt really even that big and they still had problems moving it, Only when they wet the path of the stone were they able to move the stone in any reasonable fashion.
They moved it what a few yards and gave up? Try doing that for miles with much bigger stones.
[edit on 26-3-2006 by ShadowXIX]
My emphasis (Source - The same PBS page you linked to. )
One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried 186 stones. Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron. But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet -- they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night out there -- if they can quarry 186 stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver 340 stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out somewhere between -- I've got this all written down -- but it comes out in the hundreds of men. Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like 400 men, 4 to 500 men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so that 12 men become 32. And now let's run the equation. Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all 340 stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1,200 men. And that's quarried locally at Giza. You see most of the stone is local stone.
Originally posted by ShadowXIXDo you have any links to more information on this Civil Engineering magazine article. 10 years timescale even on paper that I would really like to look into that more even though they left out some important aspects like you mentioned.
Originally posted by Harte
Well, it turns out that, according to the PBS.org site you linked, quarrying and transportation wouldn't have been the problem:
My emphasis (Source - The same PBS page you linked to. )
Why do we have to suppose that from the onset, every single step had to be taken after Khufu said "Build me a pyramid"?
Given the fact that stone was one of the major building materials at the time, isn't it just possible that there were people like stone merchants that kept a supply of these nicer, more exotic stone slabs from Aswan or wherever (the "500 miles away" source) on hand to sell to an aspiring Pharoah or some other rich guy for his tomb?
Originally posted by merka
If my googles skills are accurate, the Empire State Building was built in 1 year and 45 days (410 days).
It has 10 million bricks in it. That means they had to put down 24,390 bricks per day, 7 days a week, for 410 days.
[edit on 26-3-2006 by merka]