What technology did not exist until hundreds of years later? Clearly not any technology needed to build this place, because THREE THOUSANDS YEARS EARLIER the Great Pyramid of Giza had a mean joint size of 0.5 mm on its north eastern casing stones. A #12 razor blade is 0.3 mm thick.
Yeah you're right. Simply human elbow grease was able to dig, cut, size, move, place, and build over 2,000,000 stones within a few decades. Even if each stone only took an hour for that entire process start ti finish, it'd still take 228 years.
But Herodotus and other Egyptian scholars estimated it only took 20 years. Crazy. I'm not sure if we gathered all the Egyptians in egypt today that we could force labor that into existence using "primitive tools".
The math works out a lot more realistically than I think you expect:
20 years times 300 working days a year = 6,000 working days
2,000,000 stones / 6,000 working days = 333 stones a day.
The biggest base layer stones were 3 ft x 8 ft x 4.5 ft. which amounts to 12+32+18 = 62 linear feet of cuts needed.
Then realize estimates of the work force range from 20,000 to as many as 100,000. If we assume just 20,000 and said half worked cutting stones and the rest worked moving them that means 10,000 men / 333.3 stones a day = 30 men worked on a stone in a day. So we have 62 linear feet of cuts on the biggest stones / 30 workers ~ 2 linear feet of cuts per man. Does that sound unrealistic at all?
1.) how did they move 2.3 million 2.5-15 ton stones... 500 miles away?
2.) What stone or bronze tools can cut that much stone that quickly? Have you ever chiseled something? Especially limestone, where a diamond blade is recommended?
3.) How did they stack 2.3 million stones?
The logistics to make all this happen in a matter of decades by peasants with stone tools and wooden scaffolding seems a little far fetched.
The simple answer would be they actually used a type of limestone concrete and cast the blocks in place. This would explain why we didn't have massive amounts of chipped off limestone block and copper chisels all over the site.
What technology did not exist until hundreds of years later? Clearly not any technology needed to build this place, because THREE THOUSANDS YEARS EARLIER the Great Pyramid of Giza had a mean joint size of 0.5 mm on its north eastern casing stones. A #12 razor blade is 0.3 mm thick.
https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-020-0356-9
Yeah you're right. Simply human elbow grease was able to dig, cut, size, move, place, and build over 2,000,000 stones within a few decades. Even if each stone only took an hour for that entire process start ti finish, it'd still take 228 years.
But Herodotus and other Egyptian scholars estimated it only took 20 years. Crazy. I'm not sure if we gathered all the Egyptians in egypt today that we could force labor that into existence using "primitive tools".
The math works out a lot more realistically than I think you expect:
20 years times 300 working days a year = 6,000 working days
2,000,000 stones / 6,000 working days = 333 stones a day.
The biggest base layer stones were 3 ft x 8 ft x 4.5 ft. which amounts to 12+32+18 = 62 linear feet of cuts needed.
Then realize estimates of the work force range from 20,000 to as many as 100,000. If we assume just 20,000 and said half worked cutting stones and the rest worked moving them that means 10,000 men / 333.3 stones a day = 30 men worked on a stone in a day. So we have 62 linear feet of cuts on the biggest stones / 30 workers ~ 2 linear feet of cuts per man. Does that sound unrealistic at all?
Okay,
1.) how did they move 2.3 million 2.5-15 ton stones... 500 miles away?
2.) What stone or bronze tools can cut that much stone that quickly? Have you ever chiseled something? Especially limestone, where a diamond blade is recommended?
3.) How did they stack 2.3 million stones?
The logistics to make all this happen in a matter of decades by peasants with stone tools and wooden scaffolding seems a little far fetched.
The simple answer would be they actually used a type of limestone concrete and cast the blocks in place. This would explain why we didn't have massive amounts of chipped off limestone block and copper chisels all over the site.
https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/are-pyramids-made-out-of-concrete-1/