How were the Egyptian pyramids built?
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Of course no one was there to take a picture, but from archaeological and art within the pyramids themselves that depicted the construction process. The best theory is that each boulder was moved in teams of twenty and would roll them on logs. It took quiet a long time, so Pharaohs would start the process about 30 years before they died.
As for moving the stones on top of each other in perfect symmetry…well not perfect. Actually there are many flaws in the symmetry of the pyramids, however they’re difficult to notice. Again there are several theories about how the Egyptians managed to get these things to line up correctly, the sun worked as a guide and they had means of predicting the patterns to use the sun as a reference.
Later Egyptian pyramids, especially those of the Middle Kingdom were often constructed partially of mudbrick, rubble, gravel, and then faced with cut and dressed stone blocks, again, typically limestone with the inclusion of some other types of stone.
The stone brought from elsewhere was typically quarried into individual rough blocks, transported, and then finished in place, so one could estimate the number of trips to outside quarries based on the number of blocks in a given pyramid made of stone that was not local. For local stone, well, I suppose you could say one trip from the location of the quarry to the precise location of the pyramid per stone.
Royal pyramid construction usually began as soon as a king took the throne and continued until his death, often involving a construction effort spanning over a decade or several decades. It seems that royal construction projects in general, especially those related to the afterlife of the king were never really “finished” during the reign of a king but were constantly adapted, refined, added to, and expanded until his death.
It took 3 trips to bring the stone – the bottom, the middle, and the top stones.
Okay, maybe not, but anyway, they used a ramp system, I believe, to transport all the heavy stones from one level of the pyramid to another. Their technology, brainpower, and manpower combined is a lot more than he have today so we can’t really imagine it.
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