William B Stoecker

Heavy lifting

November 14, 2007 |  1 comment
Image Credit: stockxpert Years ago, on some television documentary I watched a team of archaeologists at an ancient quarry on the impossibly remote and exotic Urubamba River in Peru. Just to show how easy it was for the ancients to erect their colossal megalithic structures, they dragged an uncut stone weighing two or three tons down to and across the shallow river, toward the ruins of Ollantaytambo. Years later, I flew to Peru and Bolivia and visited that and other sites. The village of Ollantaytambo is perhaps a hundred feet or more above the river, and steps extend from there hundreds of feet more to the truly bizarre structures above, some of them containing stones weighing up to seventy tons, and they are clearly not of the type of rock found on that slope but were quarried on the other side, where the archaeologists found their rock. By the way, to estimate the weight of a stone, you measure its dimensions, then calculate its volume, and then multiply that by the average density of that type of rock. Granite, for example, typically weighs about 180 pounds per cubic foot, and basalt and andesite are slightly heavier. Visiting a site without instruments, you can even roughly estimate dimensions if you know your own height, stride, and arm length. Across a side canyon from the main ruins, clinging to an almost vertical face hundreds of feet higher still is a structure believed to be a granary. Archaeologists attribute this and most other ruins in Peru to the Incas, a relatively recent empire, but they often do so on the basis of little or no evidence, and it is likely that many of these structures were built by much earlier peoples.

So the archaeologists' little stone dragging exercise fails to explain much of anything. Dragging a two or three ton stone down and across the river is one thing; carrying a seventy ton stone hundreds of feet up a steep slope is quite another matter. At Sacsahuaman I saw a hundred ton stone that had been transported about 25 miles from its quarry and lifted up about 700-800 feet to its present location on a ridge outside Cuzco. The ancient Egyptians and other people quite often placed stones weighing several hundred tons high up on walls and pyramids, a feat that would be difficult even with modern technology.

Patience and ingenuity, it must be admitted, can accomplish wonders, given enough manpower and time. We know that the Greeks and Romans, using workers, draft animals, and pulleys powered by men walking in wheels like hampster cages, lifted stones weighing several tons up to great heights to fit on pillars and walls and lintels. They left detailed descriptions and drawings showing just how it was done, and no gravity control was involved. I have seen for myself the obelisk in the Vatican, due east of the entrance to St. Peter's Cathedral, originally brought to Rome by the ancient Romans, and then moved again to its present location by Renaissance architect Domenico Fontana. It is 130 feet high and he used 800 men, 140 horses, and 40 pulleys.But the ancient Egyptians are believed not to have had pulleys, heavy draft horses, or that useful bit of Medieval technology, the horse collar. But the clue to how the Romans and later Italians did it is contained in its shape: 130 feet long and relatively slim. It is possible, therefore, to put a great many levers under it, or ropes, and fit a good many horses and men around it to do the lifting. With a more nearly cubical shape, or even a fairly long rectangular prism, this is not possible.

This is due to simple geometry. If you multiply all the dimensions of a stone, its surface area (under and around which you can fit levers and ropes and rollers) increases by the square of the increase, while its volume and weight increase by the cube.For example, if you double all of the dimensions, the area is now four times as great, but the weight is eight times as heavy. So you can put four times as many rollers under it to carry eight times the weight, so each roller (or rope, or lever) must now support, pull, or lift twice as much. Eventually, no matter how ingenious the engineers are, the rollers sink into soft ground or are crushed on hard ground, the ropes break, and the stone does not move. And this is just on level ground. To lift such stones involves yet another exponential increase in difficulty. Also, lifting heavy weight is difficult, achieving precision is difficult, but doing both together is vastly more difficult. Yet the ancients quarried immense stones, moved them for many miles, lifted them hundred of feet up hills, walls, and pyramids, and explaced them with unerring precision, and without even the pulleys of the Greeks and Romans, who never duplicated the feats of the Egyptians. The precision of Egyptian stonework is well known, and at Sacsahuaman I verified for myself that the twenty and thirty ton stones, shaped like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, do indeed fit so well that a sheet of paper cannot be slipped in anywhere.

The heaviest such stones yet found are at Baalbek, Lebanon, just up the geologic plate boundary from the Second Temple in Jerusalem (about all that remains is the Wailing Wall), which itself includes some massive stones. The stones at Baalbek, now occupied by Hezbollah terrorists, form a platform built by an unknown civilization atop which are set later Roman temples. The largest stones actually moved from the quarry and set in place weigh about 1,000 tones, or 2,000,000 pounds.Their dimensions are roughly 65 by 14 by 12 feet. Conventional archaeologists have suggested that they were moved by levers, and, given the fact that no great distances or elevations were involved that seems, at first glance, to be almost possible. If long levers were used, with teams of men, it would just barely be possible to fit 20 levers on each side, so that each lever would have to lift 50,000 pounds. Assuming a ten to one ratio where the men at one end pull down, say, ten feet to lift the stone at the other end one foot, each team would have to lift 5,000 pouns. With 50 men per team, each man could pull down 100 pounds each time. So far, so good, and given patience and time we can visualize them lifting, moving the stone forward a few feet, and then setting it down, over and over. But how do you fit 50 men in such a small space, with the teams so close together? And what material could they have used for the levers? Each has to support 50,000 pounds at its short end and yet be compact enough to fit under the stone. Even modern high grade steel would barely suffice.So the theories fail and we are left only with questions. Did the ancients indeed have the secret of gravity control or some equally esoteric technology? For the present, we have no answer.

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