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Moving megaliths by Will Hart. |
Anonymous
User not Registered |  Posted 12-02-2005 at 22:00
Generations of explorers, archaeologists, historians, engineers and tourists have puzzled over one the great mysteries of ancient prehistory. At its core this incredible anomaly is quite simple. How did ancient cultures move 70, 100, 200 and even 400-ton blocks of stone using primitive tools and methods? Not only move them also accurately position them to tight tolerances. The question is simple; the problem is complex.
I think we need to look at the issues with a modern perspective in the context of what our heavy equipment is capable of today to really get a grip on what kind of challenge we are discussing. Too often I read descriptions of how the Great Pyramid was built or how the ancient builders managed the megalithic stones in Peru that gloss right over the magnitude of these accomplishments.
Cutting right to the chase, a modern locomotive engine weighs 200 tons. Take that steel leviathan off the track and give a large team of men some ropes and let's see how far they can pull it or if they can lift it up at all. The average 18-wheel tractor-trailer is rated to about a 20-ton capacity. Our highways have a legal load-limit of 40 tons, anything over that has to get special permits. I have come to realize,after doing years of study of the ancient megalithic sites and modern technological capabilities, that most people that write on these topics have not done their homework.
Many archaeologists and historians either skip over these problems or they dance around the real issues and simply give some unsupported scenario of how these massive blocks of stone were transported and lifted. There is an unavoidable physical problem that engineers are very aware of and that is the density and relative compactness of stone versus the manpower needed to exert enough force to move or lift the compact, heavy mass. The two simply do not go together. Even if we scale things way down the problem does not go away.
Let's take the average 2.5-ton limestone building block that was used to construct the core of the Great Pyramid. The block would be about four-foot long three high and three feet deep. How many men can be positioned around it? I would say no more than eight. Unfortunately, eight men cannot lift up and maneuver 4,500 lbs. Pulleys and hoists were unknown in the pyramid building era. This poses a very simple and practical construction problem. It only grows worse as we raise the tonnage and the vertical lift.
How did the Egyptians lift 100-ton blocks up forty feet in the air to position them in the Sphinx temple? In addition, how did the Incas so carefully lift up and position the massive, polygonal blocks at Sacsayhauman that fit tightly together like a jigsaw puzzle without mortar?
There is an equally serious difficulty that precedes the transport and lifting of megaliths that takes place in the quarry. The only tools the ancient Egyptians had were very small copper chisels and rounded hammer-stones. The inflexible and insurmountable problem that the Great Pyramid presents is the fact that 43 blocks of granite weighing from 30 to 70 tons were quarried, lifted out of the bedrock, transported 500 miles and raised 150 vertical feet to the King's Chamber.
Several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a hammer-stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. The granite blocks in the King's Chamber are 17' long and the trench that had to be dug around to them was about 8' deep. No one has ever shown how these megaliths were undercut and lifted out of the quarry. To solve the problem you have to start with these granite blocks and get them out of the bedrock and up on level ground.
This problem has not been solved and the author is certain that muscle-power alone cannot do the job. You cannot use levers to pry the blocks up since there is no way to get a wooden beam under the blocks since there is not enough clearance between their edge and the edge of the quarry wall they were dug out of.
These were relatively small blocks compared to the great obelisks that were quarried, transported and then raised up thousands of years ago, many of which still stand. They weigh from 100 to 350 tons. There isn't an archaeologist or engineer that has the slightest idea how this was done. Our largest modern day, heavy-duty cranes are rated from 100 to 300 tons. We have custom-built specialty cranes that can lift up to 500 tons. Anyone that believes manpower alone could have moved a 300-ton block using ropes and manpower is living in a fantasy world.
The fiber ropes the Egyptians had would not have the tensile strength to endure the incredible stress they would have been subjected to.
In fact, Mr. Lehner set up an experiment to see if it was possible to quarry, move and lift an obelisk weighing one-tenth of what the largest Egyptian obelisks weighed. It was filmed by NOVA and was an utter failure. The team's master stonemason could not quarry the 35-ton obelisk so a bulldozer was called in. They could not move it using the methods they claimed the ancients used so a truck was called in. These failures represent a turning a point in the long-standing debate. Lehner actually confirmed what a Japanese team, funded by Nissan had already learned in 1979, it is not possible to duplicate what the ancients did using primitive tools and methods.
Team Nissan was trying to prove something and they were very confident. The Egyptian government gave their blessings to the project, which involved building a scale model of the Great Pyramid near the complex. But they ran into one intractable nightmare after another as they tried to quarry the blocks, move and position them. They could not begin to excavate the blocks of stone they planned on using for their small scale-model of the Great Pyramid with ancient tools- they turned to jackhammers. When they tried to ferry the blocks across the river on a primitive barge, they called in a modern ferry after their barge sank. Then they loaded the blocks onto wooden sledges and discovered they quickly became bogged down in the sand. They called trucks in to move the blocks to the site. Once at the site they could not manipulate the blocks into place and found, to their ultimate embarrassment, that they could not bring the four walls together into an apex despite the deployment of helicopters.
This was a serious effort made during Japan's golden decade. It was blessed by Egyptologists and sanctioned by the Egyptian government. All true believers had confidence in the well-financed team, which they felt assured would succeed in building a 60' scale model. They were proven wrong. Every phase of the challenge was shown to be impossibly difficult using the primitive tools and methods Egyptologist's still claim the ancient Egyptians employed.
This debate has matured and moved along. Yet many people remain unaware that these theories have been subjected to real world experiments and each has failed to pass the tests. It is time for those that believe they have the solution and can prove that the ancients used primitive tools and methods to admit defeat or step up to the plate. We need to dispose of this obsolete thinking and move on to more scientific solutions! I have am offering a standing, open invitation to archaeologists, engineers or anyone with the proper bona fides to engage in a public forum debate about this topic and/or participate in a final, definite battery of tests.
Unfortunately, in recent year's orthodox Egyptologists, historians, and others in the social sciences have descended into bitter diatribes, personal attacks and long-winded pronouncements aimed at disposing of dissenters, tactics historically used by the Mediaeval Church and/or failing political regimes…
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Jimit
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|  Posted 13-02-2005 at 09:48
This site may suggest a way that large stones were moved in antiquity. Practical experiments are due to start in the summer. http://stonehengineers.co.uk/
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Anonymous
User not Registered | Posted 13-02-2005 at 10:30
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On 2005-02-13 09:48, Jimit wrote:
This site may suggest a way that large stones were moved in antiquity. Practical experiments are due to start in the summer. http://stonehengineers.co.uk/
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Seen this sort of thing before. No doubt it'll be on Discovery channel. 
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sem
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| Posted 16-02-2005 at 21:39
Anon. I've been pondering this for 30yrs & I think you answer the question yourself when you talk about putting it into perspective.We are talking about structures that took many years to build,with the backing of a possibly all-powerful leader.Compare this to our biggest structures.
1.They are built with small,very moveable blocks.
2.They are built in a very short period of time (comparably).
3.Money is a prime motive (penalty clauses V money gained)
4.If money is not a motive then influence of some form is eg Millenium Dome.
The people who built these monuements did not think like us.They spent years building them and had time to rectify mistakes and reaffirm their beliefs.
Sorry if I appear to be lecturing but please think about it.
SEM
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Anonymous
User not Registered | Posted 17-02-2005 at 18:09
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On 2005-02-16 21:39, sem wrote:
2.They are built in a very short period of time SEM
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Sem, I am lead to believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in 20 years, by 20,000 men. Penalty clause or not, it can't be done today!
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sem
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| Posted 17-02-2005 at 22:21
Anon you've got it again.Where today can you employ 20,000 people for 20yrs? They did !!!!!
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Anonymous
User not Registered |  Posted 18-02-2005 at 17:52
Sem,
I am also lead to believe that the granite blocks were all quarried using copper chisels! Can't do that today either!
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Thorgrim
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| Posted 18-02-2005 at 18:15
Granite is not cut or carved with metal chisels. You pound granite with granite - it crumbles and you pound some more, gradually forming shapes and hollows.
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Anonymous
User not Registered |  Posted 18-02-2005 at 19:35
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On 2005-02-18 18:15, Thorgrim wrote:
Granite is not cut or carved with metal chisels. You pound granite with granite - it crumbles and you pound some more, gradually forming shapes and hollows.
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Well, that's not what they're saying on Discovery channel is it ? 20 years, 20,000 men with copper chisels is the official story according to all the experts. Thorgrim, There's an obelisk in Egypt still in the ground with a trench cut around it about 10 feet deep, solid granite. How did they cut it away from the base and lift it out? The experts say it weighs around 450 tons!
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Thorgrim
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| Posted 18-02-2005 at 20:34
The answer is that they didn't cut it out and lift it from the ground - its still there! You can cut limestone easily with copper chisels, but not granite. I don't have the answers at all - I saw the so-called granite sarcophagus when I went into the pyramids. It is not only shaped to perfection on the outside but hollowed to perfection on the inside with uniformly thin walls. I don't believe in magic or spacemen or gods but I do believe that the ancient people had their own technologies and methods of working. When we try to replicate them using out mindset and our tools - we just make ourselves look stupid. We are in too much of a hurry - look at the recently announced nonsense in New Zealand. They took all of 18 months to make their stonehenge, not out of stone, but with chicken wire, boards and spray on cement. One puff of wind and it'll be down in a heap.
For a look at stone tools used to work granite in ancient Egypt - go to http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/tools/stone.html
[ This message was edited by: Thorgrim on 2005-02-18 21:39 ]
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Anonymous
User not Registered |  Posted 18-02-2005 at 22:45
Thorgrim, I think we only look stupid when we are not prepared to consider alternative ideas like spacemen, magic and Gods. Surelly we should consider the many thousands of texts available that speak of such things of days gone by rather than just consider them to be simple myth, legend and Prophecy? The Magic of prophecy is there to be seen if your looking for it.
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sem
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| Posted 24-02-2005 at 19:12
Anon. here I agree with you,but what we must consider is what these people meant when they wrote of magic,gods and spacemen.The meaning and concepts we place on these words cannot be theirs and in addition the same can be said of our concept of the translaters of their words.eg wicked and gay now have totally different connotations than they did 20yrs ago.
Maybe that's the magic of the stones?
Sem
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Anonymous
User not Registered | Posted 25-02-2005 at 13:18
Sem. The Ancients put it all in pictures/symbols so we didn't need words to understand the messages they conveyed. Their sites, even today mystify us all, constantly provoking us to question. All the answers are within. To ask a question immediately infers that an answer already exists!
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wayland
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| Posted 26-02-2005 at 17:37
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law) English physicist & science fiction author (1917 - )
To a culture unable to imagine the means to raise a stone, a man with the creativity to do so would seem like a magician, a prophet or even a god.
It is remarkable though that as modern humans some of us wish to look upon him as a spaceman.
As someone who makes a living recreating the achievements of our ancestors the one quality of our forbears that is constantly underestimated is their patience and ingenuity.
Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.
Archimedes, 300 B.C.
Greek inventor, mathematician, & physicist (287 BC - 212 BC)
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Thorgrim
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| Posted 26-02-2005 at 22:39
I'm with you Wayland! The incoming Saxons thought that Roman buildings had been built by giants simply because they couldn't build in stone themselves and so the stone temples, baths, villas etc were "magic". As late as 1950, Tibetans told Europeans that the Dalai Lama's palace had been built by the gods "men couldn't build that!" This was simply because they had lost the skills and techniques of their ancestors.
When I was in Egypt, there was one persistant guy who argued that the Sphinx and the pyramids etc were built by aliens. He really annoyed our Egyptian friends as that concept demeaned the achievements of their ancestors. I feel the same way when it is claimed that gods, spacemen or even Ancient Greeks built Stonehenge and Silbury Hill - they were built by my ancestors - the Ancient Britons!
I've always found it pretty useless to argue with people who need to believe in superior beings - gods, giants or spacemen - all one to me - tosh.
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sem
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| Posted 26-02-2005 at 22:51
What happened to the cranes the Egyptians built the pyramids with ?...............?
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wayland
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| Posted 26-02-2005 at 23:54
They're called piles of sand.
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Anonymous
User not Registered |  Posted 27-02-2005 at 08:39
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On 2005-02-26 22:39, Thorgrim wrote:
I've always found it pretty useless to argue with people who need to believe in superior beings - gods, giants or spacemen - all one to me - tosh.
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Discovery channel mentality Mr Thorgrim. Ignorance is bliss they say. You must have smiled your way around Giza.
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Thorgrim
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| Posted 27-02-2005 at 08:44
No - not at all! I was incredibly impressed and soon gave up trying to figure out how things were built. But I did not cop out and simply say that the locals were too dumb and needed extra-terrestrial engineers to do the job. Thought that nonsese went out with Von Daniken - still if that's what you want to believe...
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wayland
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| Posted 27-02-2005 at 12:48
Most people I meet don't have a clue how to make fire without modern tools, yet it is one of the oldest skills known to man.
Sure, lots of people say you rub sticks or bang rocks together but without some knowledge that is just a safe way to keep a bunch of boy scouts busy all night.
I have demonstrated the technique and then watched people fail to copy me. Many say it is impossible after just watching me do it! Some even say it's a magic trick!
It is far easier for modern people to believe that something is impossible without divine, magical or extraterrestrial assistance than to believe that they cannot do today what someone in the past could do.
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