This episode of The Infographics Show was made possible by The Great Courses Plus, an
on-demand video learning service where you’ll find lectures from top professors from around
the world.
Click on the link in the description for this video to get started with your free trial
today.
The pyramids are a true testament to the ingenuity of a people that lived long before any of
our precise, modern tools were invented.
Egyptologists are still in disagreement over exactly how the six million ton structure
was built, and when we look at The Great Pyramid it’s not just the millions of stones it
took to build it that makes it so mind boggling, but the almost unearthly precision it possesses.
This has become an enduring question - was it humanly possible to create these buildings,
or did something... otherworldly have a hand in constructing these awe-inspiring tombs?
There are over 100 pyramids in Egypt alone, not to mention the pyramids around the world
built by other civilizations, such as the Mayans.
That these two cultures on different sides of the globe were building such similar impressive
monoliths of the same shape has caused some to ask if the civilizations had any connection.
Perhaps there was something that brought them together whether it be that they both used
the same powerful hallucinogenic plants or maybe even something supernatural.
Speaking to Psychology Today one archeologist said quote, “The Maya and the Egyptians
had good architects, priests, technologists but, there is no proof for contact.”
No proof yet, but that hasn’t stopped people hypothesizing ways the Mayans and ancient
Egyptians might have had a connection.
However, we will stick with just Egypt today though, and show you just how magnificent
and strangely advanced these things were.
The structure we’re focusing on is the largest and most famous of all, The Great Pyramid
of Giza.
It was built over four thousand years ago and that’s far from the only mind-blowing
fact.
Just as impressive as the age, is that the tombs of the pyramid are aligned almost exactly
to true north, an astounding feat that seems almost impossible for the time.
Ancient manuscripts give no clue how the engineers managed this, although most experts have concluded
those industrious Egyptians must have used the stars.
Not everyone agrees on exactly how they did it, with some believing that the measurements
were too precise for humans of the time to have calculated.
But one down to Earth hypothesis is that they used a simple plumb bob, a tool that Egyptians
used in the construction of monuments for thousands of years to plot the perfect direction
between two stars.
Even more impressive though, is the hypothesis that the pyramid was built to the exact dimensions
of our planet.
This is too long and exhaustive of a theory to explain in detail, but the gist of the
idea is that the “height and perimeter of the Great Pyramid are in a ratio of 43,200
to the radius and circumference of the Earth.”
Pretty complex for a civilization working four thousand years before Columbus sailed
across the Atlantic.
But it goes even further than that, with some of the more far out pyramid theories saying
that the various dimensions of the pyramid relate to the mass of the sun, the speed of
light, the orbital velocity of the moon, and much, much more.
Skeptics state that if you play around with numbers enough, as is the case with most mystical
numerology, that you can get any result you want.
Nonetheless, there are still people who say the entire structure is an encoded message
from the past.
But how would the Egyptians understand these concepts long before the scientific revolution?
From a non-human source perhaps?
But, and this is a very big but, that hypothesis only makes sense if you believe that these
numbers are contained in the various ratios of the pyramid in the first place.
Let’s get down to brass tacks and the actual construction of the pyramid.
The most accepted and mainstream view in academia is that it took around 20 years to build with
construction finishing around 2560 BC.
And the result the Egyptians saw back then wasn’t anything like what we see today.
There’s lots of evidence that the Pyramid was originally encased in a breathtaking smooth,
polished limestone.
It would have looked almost futuristic at the time, a sleek man-made mountain rather
than the weathered pile of squared off blocks we see today.
The pyramid stands 481 feet (146.5 meters) and each side of the base is 755.9 feet (230.4
meters) long, and weighs an unfathomable 5.9 million tons.
Notwithstanding all the great brains behind the operation, there must have been an awful
lot of brawn put into the making the building.
For 20 years the work must have been non-stop, with its 2.3 million blocks being moved around
and hoisted up to great heists at the rate of about 12 blocks laid per hour around the
clock.
I hope those workers got overtime!
Joking aside, for a long time it was believed that it took 100,000 workers to do the job,
and that they were all virtually or literally slave labor.
It’s now believed by most historians that it only took around 20,000 men and that they
were more like skilled workers, with a mix more like a modern workforce with managers,
laborers, engineers, and support living and working at the site.
Believe it or not, evidence has also been found of a massive catering operation that
fed all those hungry workers who went on with life as normal as they built a wonder of the
world, with documents being found that state guys took days off for “having a fight with
the wife” or “working on my house.”
Now back to the possibility of a little help from alien friends.
Let’s imagine you were told to get a bunch of guys together and build a 481 foot pyramid
from stones you have to cut and drag from a quarry.
Oh, and by the way, all you have to work with are very basic tools like pickaxes and chisels.
You have no machinery to speak of and, get this, the largest stones you’ll be using
weigh up to 80 tons (72,575kg).
For reference, an adult African elephant only weighs around 7 tons, so just imagine pulling
about 11 elephants and you’ll have an idea of what it was like to move those larger stones.
And while most of the blocks were smaller, they still had to come from a quarry that’s
over 500 miles (800 km) away.
You are not only going to lay these stones with the utmost precision, but your workmanship
and end product has to be absolutely beautiful and fit for a god king.
Does this seem like something humans could have accomplished in 2,500 BC?
Or did they require some help from above?
What about you?
Are you up to the job?
Great, get started today and we’ll give you until 2039 to finish the job.
But how would humans accomplish a feat of engineering so grand?
Now it might sound impossible, but there’s evidence the ancient Egyptians used a kind
of algorithm to work out the best way to get those stones to the buildsite and then get
them placed.
Newsweek has written that experts believe a sled was pulled with ropes to move the heavy
stones.
But really?
Pulling that kind of weight on a sled?
Well, some experts now think that to pull the stones across the desert they used a trick
that was much simpler than asking aliens for help - adding a bit of water to the sand to
help them slide along.
A wall painting was found that looks to portray men using a sled to drag a huge stone with
someone else pouring the water.
As for the height, it’s now generally agreed that ta ramp system was used and that some
kind of grease or animal fat was used to ease the path of the stones.
So, in all, we have stones being mined and shaped in a quarry, loaded on boats, dragged
across sand, and then pulled up with ropes.
That all sounds pretty doable by humans to me.
So, we have an almost, but not completely impossible feat of precision and a job that’s
extremely labor intensive but possible for humans to accomplish on their own.
Now we still don’t really know exactly how they aligned the pyramid with true north,
or what the precise method of construction was.
And as we speak, the idea that there are secret codes hidden in the dimensions of the structure
is still being debated.
But does this mean aliens got in on the action, and then perhaps traveled over to the other
side of the world and had a word with the Mayans?
Not at all, in fact it just shows us that ancient people were very intelligent and perhaps
more advanced than we have given them credit for.
Maybe they had more sophisticated tools that we haven’t yet discovered, and perhaps their
mastery of math and astronomy were more advanced than we’ve considered.
But what if it wasn’t aliens?
But instead an advanced early civilization that inspired the Egyptians?
We might add that while the existence of an advanced early civilization on Earth is unlikely,
There is a theory called the “Silurian Hypothesis,” which poses the question of if there was a
super advanced civilization that existed, say, millions of years ago, would we even
be able to detect it today?
But the paper which first posed this question stated “While we strongly doubt that any
previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question...
raises its own useful questions.”
So let’s make it clear the document in no way proves such a civilization existed, it
only explores the potential for one.
There is clearly still a lot we don’t know about the pyramids and their construction,
but there’s a lot of evidence that they were built by supremely clever people and
a lot of hard work.
Those ancients might not have been given a hand from aliens, but what they did is mind-blowingly
spectacular in its own right.
If you’re like us, you’re probably wanting to know more about the Ancient Egyptians as
well as other ancient civilizations like the Sumerians and the Akkadians.
This is why we’ve been using The Great Courses Plus and have been loving the course “History
of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective.”
The Great Courses Plus is a subscription on demand video service with incredible lectures
from professors at top Ivy League Universities and experts from places like National Geographic
and The Smithsonian.
They have over 11,000 lectures on just about any subject from science, to literature, how
to get better at chess, or even how to cook.
So if you’re not in the mood to learn about Ancient Mesopotamia, and we don’t know why
you wouldn’t be, there’s guaranteed to be a course that you’ll love.
Best of all, The Great Courses Plus is giving viewers of The Infographics Show a FREE trial.
That’s right, just go to the great courses plus dot com slash infographics and get started
today.
Now we’d like to hear your opinion about this.
Tell us what you think in the comments.
Also, be sure to watch our other video What Killed People Who Opened King Tut’s Tomb?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.