The right image gets a impression of the smothness of the limestone casing blocks.
Lef image shows the missing blocks, the base-layer and the leveled rock. (from left to right)

Click to view attachment

This image shows something only very few know about.
The pyramid body is not a 4 sided thing , it is faceted. 12 faces.
If one knows what to look for....
Click to view attachment

nope nope nope. wasnt wondering that at all. i was asking, Why they didnt record any of it. the process. why didnt they hyrogliph it, show the stages they were in. i couldnt care less if they left blueprints or crap (which they didnt either).
and Any suggestion that aliens made/helped with the pyramids is Not a joke. but im interested to why youd think it is. what are All your reasons.

my reasons generally stem from looking at the evidence.
just because no depictions of the building process of the great pyramids have been found doesnt mean there werent any, or that some will never be found.
other depictions and descriptions do survive of the egyptians moving huge stone objects, blocks and collossal statues, even though some of them are separated from the pyramid building days by a few centuries its quite likely that the methods were the same......since they'd worked for ages.

with the varying theories of the actual details of part of the construction, i think that all of the credible theories at least agree that the constructors were human.

why do you think that 'aliens' might have had a hand in this?
why do you think that the egyptians were incapable of building the pyramids without alien help?

Why would they? They wouldn't have been interested in advertising the building techniques of the tombs of their kings. The pyramids and associated temples served to ensure the king's afterlife and, thus, the continuation of the cosmos. This is not something they would've recorded in stone.

However, it's very possible plans were written on papyrus or ostraca that have not survived or have yet to be found. From later periods we have the "blueprints" of a couple of kings' tombs on ostraca, and from Dynasty 5 we even have ample papyri evidence from one royal temple of the names and duties of the priests working there and what their specific functions were. Papyrus is delicate, however, so we'll never know how much we've lost to deterioration. The Pyramid Texts were almost certainly written on papyrus scrolls, for example, and from these scrolls the artisans inscribed the Dynasty 5 and Dynasty 6 pyramids with the spells. It explains the consistency in errors from monument to monument. It's just that the original papyrus scrolls are lost to us.

It would be nice to have schematics of pyramid building, but to understand building techniques there are many other avenues of science. It strikes me as decidedly odd whenever someone suggests aliens were involved. We would have to imagine an indescribably advanced race of beings traveling the vast expanse of the universe and coming upon earth, there to teach its Bronze Age people how to build with...stone. I think the little green men would be a bit more capable than that.

i have some theories, i think i mentioned this a few pages back, but they go more indepth about Earth and Humans with ET, not so much about the pyramids. but first off, i Never said egyptians Werent Capable. i was curious as to the absense of writing on their greatest achievment. or alot of the cultures that have them.
now, an ET force may have lended a hand, just do to the fact they are technologically advanced and it would be a breeze Showing us How its possible to build this. they could have been taught the math, or the tools for it to make this building possible (since apparently some have said the egyptians wouldnt have had the formulas for building something like this). just like we have been able to teach gorillas sign language. would they have found out on their own? i dunno. but we helped them, since its quite easy for us. and it also has struck me as odd, that ALL these cultures decided to build the Same thing. the same structures basically, without even meeting each other and sharing thier knowledge. some of the buildings served different purposes as well i think. but the fact that they All decided to do this was interesting, and didnt really record it, stating how. but left us to imagine. like i mentioned in another post, reminds me of 'close encouters' where theyre all building/making the same thing.
but, like i said, just a theory.

grey...their skin tone is grey
(having mulder in my name, i just felt that was nessesary )
and what i was saying was, why didnt they record things, like "day 124. we build bigger ramp. we drag blocks on wooden logs to pyramid"
thats what i meant. nothing about blueprints (which people think i mean). none of these culters apparently seemed to do this for some reason. after they all built the same structures.

Sorry, Agent Mulder. Don't send Scully after me. Damn, that was a good show.

What? Even a hard-core defender of orthodox history such as I can enjoy science fiction television. I also like Stargate.




I see what you mean. Thanks for explaining that. They may very well have done just such a thing. There was a class of royal scribes who kept journals for the state, and these records are what Egyptologists call "day books," if I remember correctly. They were usually written on papyrus and few examples have survived to the present time. All examples I can think of date to later periods, such as the exploits of the king and his army on military conquests. The Egyptians kept careful records of many of their activities and a vast body of this written material has survived, but probably a much greater amount is lost to us. So in my own judgement I would say scribes were keeping written records of building activities at Giza, but quite frankly "day books" of that nature have not been found, as far as I'm aware.

How many diaries do you know of the building of...say...the Washington monument?

In fact, even though there was enough press around in those days, how many reports exist of the building?

So why does this lack of information shock us in a society where a minority was capable of reading and writing but strikes us normal in one where the majority reads and writes?

ok i start to see where you are comming from.

the math, the science, the technology, the methods, everything that the egyptians needed to build the Great Pyramids at Giza they developed themselves.....without question.

its fine that you believe in aliens, but maybe if you read a bit more about the egyptians themselves you'd see that they had no need of outside help. We know plenty about the culture and society that produced such stunning monumental architecture, and we're learning more every season about the builders at Giza... the teams of highly skilled craftsmen and artisans that worked on the projects, the priests, their quarrying techniques, their methods of transporting heavy objects, it all points to a natural progression that doesnt need or show evidence of 'unnatural acceleration' of techniques or methods.

the evolution of the mastaba to the pyramid, the evolution of pyramids themselves, the continued use of the mastaba and other types of tombs are all there to see at various sites.
The construction of Temples and other great sites are being understood more, and there is no need to associate aliens with any of them....in any culture for that matter.

a pyramidal shape is strong, it doesnt easily fall over or collapse...if done right (and there is evidence that they made mistakes)....it is no surprise at all that people from various cultures stumbled upon this simple fact when wanting to build big.

The ancient greeks believed, in fancy, that Cyclopses built the great ancient buildings that they found around them....knowing little of the Mycenaeans and other big builders of their past.....belief that 'aliens must have done it' is just the same.
Now we know better.

damn. thats actually what id be interested in. either way, if it proved my theory wrong i wouldnt care. im just curious as to anyone keeping record on any of those buildings at the time. you think they would. or have things possibly showing what they had to use, or how many people involved in it. id really wish something like that could be found.

check these out mulder....they are a bit later than the Giza pyramids, but at least they show how heavy objects were likely transported on land...

well i havent looked for much on diaries of it. so i couldnt tell you. but with the monument we can tell some things about it, from history and records we have. so we are able to find things like: it was supposed to cost around 1million$, the architect was robert mills, private organizations donated stones to it, as well as money, and on july 4th 1848 they laid the first corner stone, then building was delayed for a while (lack of funds for one), then Lt col thomas casey who was mill successor continued it, trying to resemble an egyptian obelisk, then the corps of engineers of the war department was placed in charge of the final construction.
we also have pics of it being half complete
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Washing...Brady-Handy.jpg
some plans for it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Washing...nument-1885.png
and theres probably more too. thats just some i found now. this is more than we have on the pyramids. they are just there.
plus theres stories about it. like 'my great great grampa saw them building like this...'
and what not. the stories get passed down so we know how it was done i guess

nice find
but my only problems with those are: why didnt they show a picture of that while building their pyramids? and if they used that one method by using wooden logs underneath. they be using Alot of it. and they only really had those palm date trees. and that type of wood would get run down/worn out quickly. plus it was a source of food for them, i dont think they cut down so many of them to transport the blocks over.

right...now lets put this into perspective: We talk about a time where less than 1% of the population were capable of reading/writing, compared to about 72% in the USA at the time when the Washington monument was build.

It could be as simple as it was all written down. However, we are talking over 4500 years ago. Doesn't mean any accounts would survive.

Something else to take into account is that it's not just the pyramids but the temples as well that have no documentation of construction methods from back then.

cormac

hmmm....ok, thats a vali...wait. thats an irrelevant point. they Had people to do that job. they Had people who wrote the hieroglyphs on the walls. the egyptians Documented the their Whole Lives. Except this, and how they built it. why not show the building of your greatest achievment? i dont know

But we don't need to wonder so much how the temples were built. There
are many ways to accomplish it with primitive technology. What we need
to figure out is how they got such a massive number of stones high up in
the pyramid.

Moving stones on level ground is pretty easy unless you're trying to do it
with dog-sized oxen wearing choke chains pulling a stone that outweighs
the team by five to one.

Agent. Mulder wrote:


The pyramids and temples associated with them were not at all the context for showing such things as building techniques. These were royal tombs. The only important thing to show there was the king in the company of gods and the multitude of offerings, not to mention the plethora of correct spells and recitations--scenes and texts that would reflect his eternal afterlife, from where he could continue to look after his people in the living world.

The middle scene in lil gremlin's post is from a famous relief in the Deir el Bersha tomb of an official named Djehutihotep, who lived in the Middle Kingdom. This is a while after the Great Pyramid, of course, but it's a good example of what might be found in the decoration plan of a high official's tomb in the Old or Middle Kingdom. It's in the tombs of the nobles and other elite where we find the most evidence of how the Egyptians built things, and there is a tremendous body of evidence, although most of it comes much later than the Old Kingdom. Unfortunately for the folks who demand to see such scenes at Giza, the many officials and nobles buried in the cemeteries surrounding the pyramids there were interred in mastabas and other tombs that did not have a great deal of decoration. Most of what we see are the standard false doors with offering formulae and some simple scenes of daily life. The more time went on the more tombs tended to be elaborately decorated with relief scenes, but this was not the case with many Giza tombs in Dynasty 4 (aside from some tombs like that of Queen Meresankh, but here again is a royal who had greater, religious concerns than showing pyramid building).

Incidentally, that scene in Djehutihotep's tomb is a good example of an official proudly boasting of some of the things he accomplished for his king. Djehutihotep was the governor of his nome during the reigns of three different kings in Dynasty 12, but it's this scene of moving the colossal statue about which he seemed most proud. The depiction was found in the west wall of the inner room of his tomb chapel.

As for the presence of logs, you're right that the Egyptians had access only to native timber of limited quality and quantity. However, even from the start of the Early Dynastic Period long before the time of the Great Pyramid, the Egyptians imported vast quantities of cedar and spruce from Byblos, in ancient Lebanon. The people of Byblos supplied endless quantities of timber to many Near Eastern civilizations. A lot of the imported timber was used for building projects, and older or broken logs could be used for all manner of things--including as rollers for the sledges that held stone blocks. Numerous remains of ramps have been excavated at sites like Giza, Meidum, and Karnak, and within the fill and gravel that formed the ramps excavators have found the rotted remains of some of these logs.

LOL I don't know, cladking. Many of the state temples at sites like Karnak and Abydos are massive in scale. The pylons alone tower into the sky. Karnak is immense and in acreage is exceeded only by Angkor Wat. The quality of the inscribed decoration plans at Karnak is second to none and reflects many lifetimes of continuous artistic endeavor. One could easily make an argument that the temple complexes of Karnak exceed the Great Pyramid in complexity and skill.

What about the Mortuary Temple of Djoser, that's a pretty massive undertaking.

Or these:

Imitation Open Door

Ceiling of the Entrance Corridor

Another example of an imitation open door

These are from the Step Pyramid Complex of Netjerikhet, second king of the third dynasty, well before Khufu. Why wouldn't descriptions of these be extant. They are no less massive in their own right.

cormac

While all these things are highly impressive and required huge effort and artistry
it is not this which I find so incredible. There's a lot of fine art on the small scale
and the grand all through the Egyptian culture. While these can be impressive in
their own right one can at least imagine ways that they might be done.

Many of us look at the pyramid and have a gut reaction that it's impossible to do
with the means ascribed to them. Perhaps we're wrong; prove it. There are many
ways to attack this problem but mostly ignoring it isn't one of them. Show that it's
even possible doing it with ramps. Get as many men as you want and start drag-
ging stones up ramps. It's hard to pull something on an incline and there are phy-
sical limitations to how many men can be used. Such attempts have repeatedly
shown that each stone moved requires enormous amounts of effort and this is to
get it to only a few feet off the ground rather than nearly a tenth of a mile. How
long would it take to drag a million stones up a single ramp? It really doesn't mat-
ter if you have 50 men or fifty million, the fact remains that the stones have a set
rate at which they can move and at this rate they'd still be dragging them up.

Perhaps some of those who scoff at the conventional explanation might be a little
more receptive to these ideas if the authorities were investigating other theories.
But they aren't.

You have to take many things into consideration. What was being built before, during and after the Great Pyramid. The fact that the Egyptians said they built it. The Greeks said the Egyptians told them they built it. The quarry exists nearby where the material came from dating to the right period. Evidence of a ramp has been found. The workers village along with tools have been found nearby. And I've already shown earlier using the lowest estimate and highest estimate of blocks that it isn't such a staggering feat. It's not up to me or anyone else to prove you wrong. It's up to you to prove you are right. The fact is that the pyramid is there.

If you convince yourself that something can't be done, you're already defeated.

cormac

Temple of Djoser also: Poured material cast in molds. I know you're going to tell me they carved every stone exactly identical so they'd all fit right?

I'm sorry. I've debunked so many ramp theories that I can't keep them all straight.
If you'd refer me to the specific link I'd be happy to try to debunk it as well.

Many people use the existence of the pyramid as proof that they used ramps. This
is on par with using it as proof of aliens or geysers. The alien theory would actually
work pretty well once we rule out everything else.

Sorry cladking,

I linked it to you 3 days ago, not doing it again. From where I stand you haven't debunked anything, yet. You believe what you WANT to believe.

cormac

I'd be inclined to give it the benefit of a doubt if you could link me to a scientific analysis of the material in question. Sorry, been a long day.

cormac

Hi Cormac
When do you sleep?

Honestly, I don't know if anyone has analyzed any of this and if they have, I wouldn't have a clue who it was.

I sleep when you're not looking.

Looks too natural to be poured. Also, no evident substructure, just rock. I know, not scientific, but I'm running on fumes.

cormac

You must be very tired - LOOKS like natural rock? Of course it does - it was made from natural rock. If one goes deep enough they may find a substructure and it may be built on bedrock, like the HP. Why pour a cement floor when you have a natural rock one? Those stones are like our gardening blocks today, that interlock and all seem to look the same as in (almost) identical. Even poured blocks are not absolutely identical altho close.

Not what I meant. If you look carefully enough you can see the difference between something like concrete, that is poured, and natural rock. There is a different pattern to concrete, one that isn't evident in these pictures.
Also, no evidence of any kind of reinforcement in the rounded sections. Poured concrete wouldn't be able to hold itself together for that long without reinforcement.

cormac

It's not exactly Portland cement you know. It's too late right now, but I have Prof. Davidovits' work somewhere as I was in contact with his assistant for a time, and I seem to recall they had something that would equal what we call a "hardener". Also, they're interlocking blocks - they re-inforce each other.
Strength also depends on the recipe.

Its exactly that sort of 'sizeist' comment that keeps leprechauns out of basketball.....
i think you greatly underestimate the awesome pulling power of the dog-sized oxen.

They had accountants accounting for the food, the materials passed out and so on.

But lets go a little further in history, about 2500 years later the Pantheon was build in Rome... we don't have any plans either. Was it also build by little green man?

All anyone has on this planet to seek truth are logic and reason. We use these
tools to seek facts and to string facts together into concepts and theories. It's
true that these are very weak tools because nature is so extremely complicated
and, in this case, that time erases so very many clues, but there are no other
tools. We dig and scrape and look with our eyes. This has always been and al-
ways will be the human condition.

There are many things we each believe we know. Indeed, on some level almost
everything we think we know is really merely opinion. Some opinions are widely
shared and deeply held and some are mostly a matter of taste and change with the
wind and over time. Some are founded on the shifting bedrock of true science and
some are founded on on imaginary sand on a cloud.

It is only with logic and facts that anything can be analyzed and put into its proper
perspective. This has always been true but it's more true in this modern era when
more things seem built on sand and fewer built on rock.

Most of the ramp theories don't really solve the basic problem with bringing man-
power to bear. This implies that these methods simply could not work. (barring the
usage of an alien time vortex. ) There are a couple of these theories which might
work but, to my mind, they would require more effort than people are normally will-
ing to expend for such things.

It always gets down to the same thing; ramps are claimed as the only possible means
for them to have been built so it is taken as a given. Relatively little effort has been
put into gathering facts about construction because the issue is considered solved. You
can point at he pyramid and say they must have used ramps and someone else will
point and say ramps won't work they must have been built by aliens. Frankly, I consid-
er the ideas have equal validity since neither is supported by much evidence. This
doesn't necessarily mean that it's more likely aliens built it just that the quality of the
theory is as good.

If I take the time and effort to go through some link that is posted and dismantle it
then I'd appreciate you taking the time to let me know where I went astray. Otherwise
I'm going to consider that you find all my points valid. Please don't expect me to au-
tomatically open every link people post. These sometimes give my computer a hard
time and I've seen most of them before anyway. If you want me to open a link then
please direct my attention to it.

grey...theyre skin tone is grey. and since thats singular or w/e, you need it to be 'built', and an 'a' is required.
but since you didnt find the need to really answer to my post, ill bring it up again. with All the cultures building the same structres in different times or places, i still found it Odd that the Egyptians, people who documented their Whole lives, left out the building of the pyramids on the hieroglyphics. they dont show the people labouring away, building it. or How they did. theres no drawings of people pulling stones on top of rolling logs, or showing a ramp with a block being pulled up onto it. and in my humble opinion, youd think they would.

All cultures did not built the same structures, that is plain crap. The differences between pyramidal forms are enormous...only somebody who has never seen any of them can claim they are the same.

And, why did the little green men need over 3000 years to get all pyramids built, if it is so?

its not crap. look at them! i dont give a s*** about the interior design of the place, of the types of stones they used, or the size, or that one has steps and the other doesnt or that they were used for different reason. only someone whos never looked at all of them would say theyre not similar.
i never said ETs Built them, but could have lended a hand. as in: this is a mathamatical formula to use, to calculate this. and if you build a structre like this, you can lift something like this, tools like this work better for this...blah blah.
see what i mean? i never said ET's stuck around and built them.
we can teach a couple gorrillas sign language. and then maybe, Maybe theyll teach the others. we dont nessesarily have too stick around and teach the whole pack/group w/e

The easiest building is an earth mound or a pyramid... and from the archaeological evidence we have they did not come up with the pyramid formula overnight but it was a long process of trial and error.

But hey, we can ignore all precedents, all cultural achievements before the deed and just claim that some green jokers had a hand in the game...if that turns you on fine with me ... but it does not make it factual.

GREY QM!!! NOT green!!!

How many times he gots to tell you???

Harte

Thank You!
someone else knows too lol

well, if somebody takes the liberty to call the pyramids work of ETs I can take the liberty to say same are green....

Well, I wonder why the Greys had to be the ones.

Why not credit one of the other "races" of aliens like the "Tall Whites?"

Or maybe the short fat whites?

Nah, they built Chicago.

Harte

I thought it was because they were too close to the floor to dribble.



Orange is an unusual color for dog sized oxen and the wrong one to be the aliens.

cladking wrote:


Perhaps you've debunked ramp theories to your own certainty but that doesn't envelope everyone. LOL I hate to beat a very dead and decimated horse but I don't think I personally have ever asked you how you view the remains of ramps at sites like Giza, Meidum, Saqqara, and Sinki. I'm leaving out here the ramp still found quite intact at an abandoned wall at Karnak because I know you're more interested in the pyramids. The remains of these ramps from the Old Kingdom have been found of course by the pyramids (e.g., the Great Pyramid at Giza, the unfinished step pyramid of Sekhemkhet at Saqqara) but also by mastabas, many of which certainly required ramps for placing the higher courses of stones.

Really, I'm not trying to start a heated argument here! I'm just curious about your take on why these ramps are there if they were not part of the construction.

Harte wrote:


Hey, I resent that! Short fat white aliens didn't build Chicago.

Crooked politicians did. And they're still here.

There's very little solid science to verify this type of use of concrete in ancient Egypt. Plenty of people have tried to prove it, including legitimate scientists, but their arguments aren't terribly compelling. Sometimes the evidence is presented in such a way as to sound very convincing--a flakey fellow by the name of Moustafa Gadalla is particularly adept at doing this.

However, plenty of science verifies the geological evidence for quarried stone masonry. You can read this article which examines the presence of fossils in an analysis conducted by the University of Athens. It pertains to the Great Pyramid and not to Djoser's older complex in Qoais's photos, but the same argument applies.

Many people simply cannot accept that a civilization of the Early Bronze Age could've carved stones so precisely. I don't know why, considering most of the stones quarried all the way into the New Kingdom were limestone, which is very easy to work, even with simple tools. The Egyptians did use tons of mortar, which is similar to concrete, but it was mostly for lubricating purposes when fitting large stone blocks together. There was a vast quantity of the stuff used at the Great Pyramid.

And the dead ones still vote.

The pyramids were massive projects which required a significant percentage
of the GDP. There were many thousands employed for many years. They
were most probably essentially state of the art for most bronze age technology.
It would be most surprising if they didn't also use the most ancient technology
of levers, ramps, and brute force for some aspects of the project. For instane,
a ramp for the counterweight boat would extend the distance it travels and
hence the distance traveled by the stones pulled up from the quarry. Keep in
mind that the low stones on the structure would require far less work to lift into
position. Filling and resetting the counterweight and maintenance even while
making short lifts could easily exceed the effort of just dragging the stones up
a short ramp. The higher the stones are, the fewer jumps they have to make
using the main lifter and the faster it can be reset. Corner casing stones near
the bottom would be extremely difficult to place.

They would lever stones in many cases as well as use ramps to make the job
easier. But building a ramp that required several times the volume of the py-
ramid itself is most improbable. It would still be in evidence and it is not. If
you figure a one lane ramp snaking up along the side then you run into deliv-
ery rate problems and the difficulty of going around corners.

Most people scoff at this last reason that I believe ramps are improbable but the
fact is that it's a valid question; why doesn't it explain any of the known facts.
Why are there grooves and bifurcations in the pyramid and why does the Pyramid
Texts clearly state that "the inundation comes to the uplands as Osiris"? If it were
only one line in the PT's then we could just blow it off but there are hundreds. If
it were just a groove on the side of the pyramid we could blow it off but there is
much more physical and circumstantial evidence.

Why would the Pyramid Texts be consistent with the idea that there was water
shooting into the sky?

There is such a thing as coincidence but this is on the order of a monkey typing
out "War and Peace" on the first try.

cladking,
i see your theory involves transporting high volumes of water to the top of the pyramid under construction so that it can be used to weigh down a boat, which would raise another boat, which carries the stone to the level under construction.

how would this be achieved? I realise that you have explained this a number of times on various threads....it just seems complicated and a lot of hassle. how would the water get to the top?

why not just weigh the counterweight with descending workers?

what system do you propose they used? would the counterweight become the next transporter for a block and its counterpart the ballast? if not they'd have to haul the counterweight back up...again uneccessary hassle.

please keep it brief without links, my attention span is notoriously short.

im quite sure that ramps were used, whether a straight ramp went all the way to the top or not im not sure, the spiral ramp seems a reasonable theory but also may have run into problems in the upper layers.
If we give any credance to the Greek accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus it may be that they used a combination of methods.

P.S. Oxen curry is very very tasty.