I’m guessing almost anyone who knows anything about the pyramids in Egypt thinks they were built via masses of slave laborers, pulling huge blocks up ramps around the structure and dragging them in to place. However, this is an often contested theory of pyramid building. Recently, The Times Online put up an article with more about what we know (or think we know) and think about how the pyramids were built. Using X-Rays, a plasma torch (no, I don’t know how that figures in to the work) and electron microscopes, scientists at the French National Aerospace Research Agency have declared there are two kinds of blocks: natural cut quarry-stone and man-made cement blocks.
Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist.
The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time.
. . .
The pair [behind this study] believe that the concrete method was used only for the stones on the higher levels of the Pyramids. There are some 2.5 million stone blocks on the Cheops Pyramid. The 10-tonne granite blocks at their heart were also natural, they say. The professors agree with the “Davidovits theory” that soft limestone was quarried on the damp south side of the Giza Plateau. This was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry.
Unfortunately:
The concrete theorists say that they will be unable to prove their theory conclusively until the Egyptian authorities give them access to substantial samples.
I propose we have a dance-off to settle the controversy, winning dancers’ theory becomes fact!
An extra bit of interesting pyramid building trivia is available via a clickable pop-up. I really liked this theory:
A character called Seth is said to have communicated through a Ouija board that in Egypt, “people would visualise a pyramid in their imagination, then through their chanting, the use of certain vowels and picthes, they actually changed the air where that building was going to be”
Rawk 0n!!! Man, I wish I could learn the proper chants, vowels, and pitches necessary to cause air to change into a pyramid wherever I visualized it. That would sooooo help me score points with the chicks. And because this information comes from a Ouija board, you know it has to be true.
[tags]Pyramid building theories, How the pyramids were built, Ouija board and the building of the pyramids[/tags]