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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?

#61

Post by Mirioron »

est31 wrote: post #9
burlesona wrote: post #2

This is very cool to see. The main takeaways for me were: 1. It's easy to underestimate what is possible when you limit thinking to a short timescale. I think of the cathedrals, temples, mosques, etc. that have been built all over the world, where the people who started the work knew they wouldn't live to see it finished, but that didn't dissuade them. Or conversely, it's easy to overestimate the difficulty of someth…

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…

This is an example of institutional knowledge. It's part of the reason why you want to have some military production even if you have enough gear already. You might need people with this kind of expertise in the future.

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

#62

Post by Mirioron »

ssivark wrote: post #43
necubi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is echoed in a fascinating r/AskHistorians comment I read recently [0]. The question was about how the Romans forgot how to make concrete in the late empire. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the gist is: as the empire became poorer, demand for huge building projects (typically funded by the state) declined. Eventually, after a couple hundreds years, the tradition was lost entirely. Losing knowledg…

> Losing knowledge like this was much easier in earlier eras when fewer people were literate. The thing is, there are many aspects to doing things which can’t be written down. So even today, the one generation concept is meaningful. There is a deep “use it or lose it” spirit in biological systems. We might think of ourselves in primarily literate/rational terms, but that’s far from the truth.

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.

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

#63

Post by ncmncm »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #39
8bitsrule wrote: post #10

I'd be interested in seeing whether some of the new dating methods could be used to scientifically date the Pyramids. Because there's more than one reason to think it might be -a lot- older than 4,600 years ... an anecdotal number. For one easy reason, you don't just build one from scratch without a lot of experience. A lot of artifacts of that period are -way- too impressive for the same reason. Where's the evidence…

> For one easy reason, you don't just build one from scratch without a lot of experience. A lot of artifacts of that period are -way- too impressive for the same reason. Where's the evidence for prior art of that calibre? Snefru, who was the Pharoah before Khufu (which is the one that build the Great Pyramid) provides a nice example of failure and progression. He first started with the Meidum Pyramid. This pyramid co…

It is plausible that these projects were done first. It is equally plausible that they were clumsy attempts to copy the big guys, a thousand years after.

The closer you look at the evidence, that far back, the more slippery it gets. Tour groups want a nice, simple story, and the pros are happy to provide one, but the support is very limited, subject to interpretation, opinion, out-and-out guessing, and fraud.

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

#64

Post by lorthemar »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #21

> If a work year consists of 300 days, that would mean almost 18,000 man-years, which, spread over 20 years, implies a workforce of about 900 men. While the analysis is interesting, I think the 300 working days a year is too long. Likely, work on these types of public projects was mostly done during the flood season, which was around 4 months (120 days [0]) so maybe 100 work days at best, so the calculations for requ…

Totally agree. I was searching for this comment. It's extremely unlikely that a work year was 300 days thousands of years ago. But I don't think the workers had weekends either. So, might be more than 100 days but still should be roughly 3 times than the article shows.

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

#65

Post by Mirioron »

onion-soup wrote: post #58

Now divide total number of blocks by 30 years and you get 1 multi ton block being laid every 9 minutes. The current theories are joke, this numbers don’t add up. Don’t be afraid to challenge the “academic” theories, as you see, there is no math behind them.

I hear you!

Combining your results with the scientists' we can only conclude that the Ancient Egyptians had some technology available to them that has been lost to time. Even modern cranes can't do that. Therefore the only other option is aliens!

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

#66

Post by onion2k »

lorthemar wrote: post #64
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #21

> If a work year consists of 300 days, that would mean almost 18,000 man-years, which, spread over 20 years, implies a workforce of about 900 men. While the analysis is interesting, I think the 300 working days a year is too long. Likely, work on these types of public projects was mostly done during the flood season, which was around 4 months (120 days [0]) so maybe 100 work days at best, so the calculations for requ…

Totally agree. I was searching for this comment. It's extremely unlikely that a work year was 300 days thousands of years ago. But I don't think the workers had weekends either. So, might be more than 100 days but still should be roughly 3 times than the article shows.

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.

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

#67

Post by nullc »

Mirioron wrote: post #62
ssivark wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Losing knowledge like this was much easier in earlier eras when fewer people were literate. The thing is, there are many aspects to doing things which can’t be written down. So even today, the one generation concept is meaningful. There is a deep “use it or lose it” spirit in biological systems. We might think of ourselves in primarily literate/rational terms, but that’s far from the truth.

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."

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

#68

Post by idoubtit »

ncmncm wrote: 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.

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

#69

Post by idoubtit »

Areading314 wrote: post #38

This analysis ignores friction in the calculations for energy/manpower needed to construct the pyramid. I wouldn't put much stock into these results

This analysis ignores many physical constraints and archaeological facts. It's an amusing exercise with little connection to the real world.

Archaeologists are accustomed to this "pyramidomania" that almost always forgets to examine the facts before building up theories.

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

#70

Post by partyboat1586 »

mysterydip wrote: post #26
est31 wrote: 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…

Lots of documents are going 'paperless' these days to save the trees. Given what I've witnessed working in tech I'm worried that many of those systems will be backed by a single server with no backups. We are lucky that many of our documents are stored in email which is a little more robust but still it's no stone tablet.
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