this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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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.
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.
From my understanding it was due to the Nile flood cycles. It's not so much that they had farmers supporting the workers building the pyramids, but that the farmers worked on the pyramids when it was flood season and there was no farming work that could be done.
There's a school of thought that Egyptian monument building was somewhat analogous to the depression-era Works Progress Administration, in that it took advantage of an otherwise-idle workforce outside of the agricultural season, and provided them with an additional source of stable supplemental income
Interesting. That makes sense. Since all the farming there was centered around the Nile, probably all the farmers were affected when the Nile flooded. That means you'd otherwise have 90% of the population out of work, waiting for the flooding to subside. I'm sure many of them would have preferred to just relax while they waited, probably the Pharaoh would demand they continued work on his pyramid instead.
The Nile is an incredibly convenient river. Long, relatively straight, few rapids or falls, reliable wind to sail up river, reliable current to sail down river, and annual floods that make fertilizing and irrigating the river banks trivial by the standards of the day.
What kills me is the degree to which industrialization hadn't been invented yet. I've seen excavations of the kitchens that were used to make bread to feed the workers on the pyramids, and it was the same setup as a household kitchen just dozens of them side by side. They didn't scale that process, they just did it a lot in parallel.
all true but just wanted to point out that a lot of people will say something like they don't know exactly how they did it but they are not saying it's alien technology or something. just that they don't know.