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How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

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Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#101
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the workers had weekends either. Weekends didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution, which was ~4300 years after the pyramids were finished.

Isn't the sabbath a "weekend"?

One of the reasons for conflict between ancient Egyptians and Jews (as reported by the Bible, iirc) was that Jews had their Sabbath every 7 days, while Egyptians would get their free day every 10 days. That's part of the reason why Jews decided to leave under Moses's leadership. Of course that was almost 1000 years after the Great Pyramid was built, if it even happened at all.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#102
post #94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis is only about the effort to lift one cubic meter of stone to an arbitrary height a number of times until you reach the mathematical equivalent of a "pyramid's worth", and then divide this by the average human work capacity. That's it. No other theoretical or practical aspect was considered. No friction, no logistics, nothing else. The conclusion is that it took 900 men 20 years to lift one 2.6t cubic met…

Well, the graph in the article says 3600 men for 20 years. 900 to lift the stones 900 to place and finish them (horizontal movement?) 1500 to cut the stone 3300 design/support (logistics?) The details are below the fold.

I'm talking about the details of the real work. The details of his results are irrelevant since they're built from oversimplified assumptions. I mean the author didn't even include friction in his calculations. Or placing blocks with special shapes in exceptional positions. Or any setbacks, logistics, infrastructure, trial and error, design revisions, human inefficiency, illness, accidents, etc.

His calculations just say it probably couldn't have taken less. But more? Just add a few more of those variables that he completely overlooked and the effort easily increases by one order of magnitude. The worst project managers I've met made better assumptions that this author.

You make bad assumptions you get bad conclusions. And saying them "with certainty" just makes one sound even more ignorant. Imagine what his calculations would say about La Sagrada Familia. Certainly not 150 years.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#103

Ahem.. I'm just going to drop this link here on how the pyramids were _really_ built: https://youtu.be/TJcp13hAO3U

That's fun, personally I like the concrete and ramp theories.

https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/are-pyramids...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#104
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays we have video which can cover a large part of things that can't be written down. It doesn't cover all of it though, but it can get pretty close.

If you can manage to preserve access to the video. "Sorry, we lost all knowledge of how to build those during the great content-id wars of 2029."

Oh, that is entirely possible! Even worse is that in the future there's a chance video encoding will become complex enough that it'll be difficult to reverse engineer. If the algorithms get lost to time then even if you have the video itself it's meaningless.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#105
post #94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis is only about the effort to lift one cubic meter of stone to an arbitrary height a number of times until you reach the mathematical equivalent of a "pyramid's worth", and then divide this by the average human work capacity. That's it. No other theoretical or practical aspect was considered. No friction, no logistics, nothing else. The conclusion is that it took 900 men 20 years to lift one 2.6t cubic met…

Well, the graph in the article says 3600 men for 20 years. 900 to lift the stones 900 to place and finish them (horizontal movement?) 1500 to cut the stone 3300 design/support (logistics?) The details are below the fold.

Except everything besides the 900 estimate is made up out of thin air as far as the "details" go. The "appeal to simple physics" is useful as far as providing a reasonable lower bound ("it must by conservation of energy have been at least 900 workers"). But that's not the assertion of the author, the assertion is that all greater estimates are overestimates, but provides zero evidence for why.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They hadn't invented unions at that time.

Was Moses the first recorded union rep? A plague of frogs is one up on work-to-rule.

I don't think so. The pyramids were built between 2589 and 2504 BC, while Moses wasn't born until 1393 BC.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#107
post #60

If they built the Great Pyramid in the advertised 20 years, that means placing a 2.5-ton block every 4th minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If they stopped at sundown, it's every 2 minutes. If they broke half the year to farm, that's one each minute. But let's guess they had enough surplus to work year-round; so, 2 minutes. Suppose they took 600 years, instead; then it's one per hour. Which is harder to imagine…

As a cynic it wouldn’t surprise me but are you saying that Egyptologists as group have no interest in determining the truth scientifically? I could see the incentives you describe holding for the current “big dogs” but couldn’t a defector quietly perform the experiment and then gain notoriety and status by presenting the proof to the (presumably) more honest wider archaeological research community?

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#108
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a star trek episode where they encounter a civilization which has built a benevolent AI a long time ago and has since lost capabilities to do much more than give commands to the AI. Our society has managed to write down some things like math for example so our knowledge as species won't be lost if mathematicians suddenly died. But it's harder to find permanent storage for the more skills based human activiti…

With more information going to a cloud, and storage formats becoming obsolete faster, I wonder if we're actually better now. Certainly transitioning from hand-written and typewriter paper documents to digital has allowed for data to be copied easier than ever; however, I can still go to the library and read a book from 50 years ago or more. I can't do the same for digital data, at least not without specialized equipm…

Hell, pulp paperbacks, probably the worst books for longevity, from 70 years ago are usually fine as long as they've only been gently read a low-single-digits number of times and haven't gotten wet/mildewy. They're often past yellowing and into browning at the edges, but they're fine for reading.

Hardcovers from the 19th century are pretty common. Tons of low-value ones (textbooks, fiction by at-the-time very popular authors who've been forgotten) floating around at a couple dollars a piece in flea markets here in the US, and I bet even older books are somewhat common in Europe. Lots by famous authors but of course those are usually more expensive. Most of those weren't finely-printed on modern archival paper or anything like that, and haven't been kept in archival conditions, but often have a few years of hard-reading life left in them (and much more well-shelved), so 150-200 years is a fairly easy age to achieve for gently-read hardbacks using cheap (but not the very cheapest) materials. Maybe more if you re-bind them once or twice, or they're very rarely read.

That's without even getting into really nice material and binding, or very expensive non-paper for the pages if you're very serious about keeping a book in good shape for centuries. Not even tape comes close—we don't have a really good archival format for digital stuff yet, let alone one that normal people may have a bunch of in their houses (like books). Maybe one of the several long-lived storage formats under development will take off one of these days and our digital storage will get a bit less risky. Right now it's pretty bad, only saved by being extremely cheap compared to other options.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#109
post #60

If they built the Great Pyramid in the advertised 20 years, that means placing a 2.5-ton block every 4th minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If they stopped at sundown, it's every 2 minutes. If they broke half the year to farm, that's one each minute. But let's guess they had enough surplus to work year-round; so, 2 minutes. Suppose they took 600 years, instead; then it's one per hour. Which is harder to imagine…

As a cynic it wouldn’t surprise me but are you saying that Egyptologists as group have no interest in determining the truth scientifically? I could see the incentives you describe holding for the current “big dogs” but couldn’t a defector quietly perform the experiment and then gain notoriety and status by presenting the proof to the (presumably) more honest wider archaeological research community?

The dating technique is "surface luminescence" (I misrecalled the name). The only text I have found dating Giza stonework may be seen at " rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.culher.2014.05.007>, published in the peer-reviewed "Journal of Cultural Heritage 16 (2015) 134–150".

It includes a date from the Mykerinus (Menkaure) pyramid, the smallest on the Giza plateau, and presumed youngest, of 3450±950 BC, or 4400-2500 BC, compared to current estimates of 2613-2494 BC. A sample from the Valley Temple, presumed contemporaneous with the Great Pyramid, says 3060±470 BC, or 3530-2590 BC, with the same estimated age. One could interpret the measurements as corroborating the estimates, but only by squinting.

It just seems notable that more work hasn't been done on, e.g., the Great Pyramid itself.

Re: How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?

#110
post #60

If they built the Great Pyramid in the advertised 20 years, that means placing a 2.5-ton block every 4th minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If they stopped at sundown, it's every 2 minutes. If they broke half the year to farm, that's one each minute. But let's guess they had enough surplus to work year-round; so, 2 minutes. Suppose they took 600 years, instead; then it's one per hour. Which is harder to imagine…

Parallelization is not a concept that appears around 2010 when low-end computers gained multiple cores. Most of the blocks were at the bottom levels, where it was easy to put them in place. Teams moving hundreds of blocks simultaneously wouldn't be surprising. This addresses the first point, and I don't want to react to what follows, especially the theory that all archaeologists are in a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Nobody suggested "all archaeologists are in a conspiracy". Egyptologists represent a very small slice of the population of archaeologists, but that subfield is deeply political.
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