Spiral Stairway To Heaven

Creative Accounting In The Land Of The Pharaohs ?

 
Hemienu 
is not exactly a household word nowadays , like Cleopatra  or King Tut , but ancient Egypt revered Pharaoh Khufu's ingenious younger brother as the man who built the Great Pyramid.

It took him a generation- but how did he do it?

New deconvolution software has revealed a spiral structure in gravity  images of the Great Pyramid made using sensitive gradiometers in the 1980's

This has led a French engineer named Houdin to exposit the first seriously new theory of  how the stonepile was piled since  Roman historian Diodorus Siculus proposed  ramps two thousand years ago.

But  big ramps cost big money.

The Secret of the Pyramids may have been an accounting trick. To avoid wasting hundreds of thousands of  man-years of  stonemason's --and teamsters-- valuable time , Houdin proposes Hemienu cannibalized every ramp block hauled in to construct the pyramid's plaza-like lower third. By recycling the six ton stones upwards as work progressed , via a spiral gallery embedded in the outer edge of the rising pile ,they become its higher elevations.  The diagram shows corner platforms for turning  blocks on the integral ramp's  7-degree slope. As the pyramid rose , fewer blocks had to be raised  farther, keeping the rate of work- and taxation  to support it , relatively constant

Comments

[Ian]

To drag a 6 ton stone up a 7 degree incline would take a long line of men. So how did they turn the corners?

Answer: That's M. Houdin's point as to why they left the corners off.
I surmise Hemienu was also motivated to install slick posts or rollers to take hawser loads around the bend to the crews hauling the line from above.

[P.M.Lawrence]

There is a simpler way. The trick to moving blocks of masonry isn't rollers, but the stone wheel - make a large wheel around the block and roll the whole thing. The Romans used it, and the Egyptians may have (after all, they had the religious image of the sun as a ball being rolled by a scarab beetle).

Anyhow, it would have been straightforward enough to have steep ramps along the edges of the pyramid, using chocks and levers to get the blocks up, particularly if the balls had midline grooves to seat them on the pyramid edges; then the ramp would only have needed matting or something for footing. And Herodotus did record the native tradition that levers were used...

COMMENT by RS: I'm glad to see someone is still watching The Flintstones, but one can draw a fairly strong inference from the absence of depictions of used tire dealers in the canon of fourth dynasty epigraphy.

[P.M.Lawrence]

One could say the same about any suggested technique. It's the absence of evidence/evidence of absence thing; reductio ad absurdum would lead one to conclude that the pyramids were never built at all, or built by people from outer space, or something. But in any case I wasn't asserting that this was actually the technique usewd, but rather that it was available with the technology of the time. At most it raises an alternative hypothesis - I wouldn't be so rash as to assert more. (By the way, the idea comes from the Romans, as stated, not the Flintstones.)

RESPONSE; by RS
Sorry to be such a crocodile, but nary a wedge of tire-sized stone disc has outcropped amidst the vast tonnage of pounding stones and other masonic depotage and discards turned up by three centuries of archaeologists. More millstones than you can count, but zero wheelbarrowoid lithics makes for _ absurdo sine reductio_ No elephants either.

[P.M.Lawrence]

You misunderstand - the Roman Stone wheel wasn't a wheel of stone (I understand your Flinstones reference now). Rather, a huge wooden wheel was constructed around the block, from reusable pieces that were used on each block in turn. I imagine that the Egyptians - if they did it at all, a big if - used smaller pieces of the material they had conveniently available, like reeds. That would come out as balls rather than wheels, but either way the components would be reused.

I expect that if we did it, we would use the techniques we see in illustrations of building canal cuttings. There, teams of horses (read, peasants) hauled on ropes that assisted wheelbarrows of earth up duckwalk ramps.