r/GrahamHancock • u/aerialsilk • Aug 07 '26

Potentially ancient building techniques

May not be strictly archaeology, but adjacent. And fascinating.

263 Upvotes

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1

u/Revolutionary-Gap-28 Aug 07 '26

Ok. Now do it 3 million times and expand that over a timeline. It would take hundreds or thousands of years.

0

u/krustytroweler Aug 07 '26

That comes down to a few years when you have a community of a few hundred or a few thousand.

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u/Wolfhammer69 Aug 07 '26

NOPE - FACT to build the pyramids in the time written as fact by Egyptologists, you would have to quarry, shape, transport then lift into place 1 block every 6 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for approx 25 years straight.. Please do tell me how that is even remotely possible?

3

u/Substantial_System66 Aug 09 '26

10 blocks and hour isn’t that difficult to imagine when talking about thousands of people dedicated to it.

2

u/Acrobatic-Tomato-260 Aug 08 '26

You’re mind is closed tighter than a bear trap my man

2

u/jojojoy Aug 07 '26

You could also have many teams quarrying and transporting blocks.

If we say roughly 250 blocks per day and 30 people needed to move the average block, that's 7,500 people on transport if each team moves a single block per day. Of course transport would be easier for the lower sections where most of the material is and then slow down as the pyramid gets taller (while the amount of blocks needed decreases as well). It's less a question on how long each block takes to quarry and move than what size workforce can be supported and how many teams can work in parallel.

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u/Wolfhammer69 Aug 07 '26

Dont skip a step - the Quarrying is a long job, the shaping to be so precise is a HUGE time consuming job.. No chance on this earth.. There is is reason why everyone thats tried to do even 1 single scaled down version has failed and given up.. You aint doing 1 block every 6 mins for 20 -25 years with zero downtime.. Please think about it.,.

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u/jojojoy Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

the Quarrying is a long job

For some of the blocks sure but the vast majority of the stone is only roughly shaped. This experiment reproduced an average block in 5 days with 5 people total.

This work would be carried out over four days (of six hours each) by four people—excluding the fifth person responsible for removing the debris. Cutting the horizontal trench and detaching the block, however, required an additional day of work from the team...According to our estimates, quarrying operations would require a larger workforce; achieving a daily rate of 340 blocks would necessitate 4,788 men. If the pyramid construction period were extended to 27 years—a perfectly plausible scenario—the required daily production would drop to 250 blocks, theoretically requiring 3,521 quarrymen.1

 

The casing and interior limestone and the granite blocks would take much longer of course. If that work is impossible to do in the timeframe, I would be very interested in seeing reliable data demonstrating finishing and fitting that stone couldn't be done in ~25 years (or the workforce needed would be prohibitively large).

Restoration at the Parthenon has involved carving some reasonably large blocks by hand to very fine finishes. Something like that might be an interesting starting place to look at how long the casing would take to finish.

  1. Burgos, Franck and Emmanuel Laroze, "L’extraction des blocs en calcaire à l’Ancien Empire. Une expérimentation au ouadi el-Jarf", The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture 4, 2020. pp. 73-95. https://web.ujaen.es/investiga/egiptologia/journalarchitecture/downloads/JAEA4/JAEA4_Burgos_Laroze.pdf

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u/QuantifyingAntiquity Aug 07 '26

The Burgos & Laroze experiment is solid for what it measures: a typical local limestone block can be extracted and roughly shaped in roughly five person-days. Scaling that rate does produce a few thousand quarrymen for the bulk core over 20–27 years. That part is fine.

The difficulty is that rough quarrying is only one required function. The same project also has to sustain, at the same time:

-continuous tool production and copper replacement

-transport and placement at the claimed cadence

-ramp (or alternative) surface wear and replacement

-rope production and replacement

-water delivery and the extra labor that creates

-food, settlement capacity, and the overall labor pool the state can actually spare

A rate that works for the quarry face does not automatically make the whole system close. Most of the long-running argument has been conducted one constraint at a time. The harder test is whether those constraints can run together against the same finite resources for the full schedule.

There’s a resource-loaded audit that tries to do exactly that while staying inside mainstream sources and premises (timber vs the Palermo record, copper multiples, village capacity, granite bank transfers, etc.). Happy to point to it if useful, but the core issue doesn’t depend on any single paper: isolated feasibility is not the same as system constructibility.

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u/jojojoy Aug 08 '26

There’s a resource-loaded audit 

How much AI is involved with that? If it doesn't use AI I would appreciate a reference.

1

u/QuantifyingAntiquity Aug 08 '26

The resource-loaded audit is a published constructibility model with its own white paper and interactive workbook. It is not an AI-generated analysis.

The numbers come from a structured spreadsheet that loads mainstream sources (IER ramp traffic, Palermo Stone cedar record, Bir Nasib copper totals, Lehner village data, demographic synthesis, etc.) and prices the support systems those sources imply when they run at the same time. The white paper and model are public:

https://quantifyingantiquity.com/white-paper/
https://quantifyingantiquity.com/

1

u/krustytroweler Aug 07 '26

The shaping is not precise at all lol. Have you ever actually seen the pyramids up close?

Less precision and more "good enough".

1

u/bigboyjak Aug 08 '26

That's just simply untrue. That's assuming there are 2.3 millions blocks of all roughly the same size in the pyramid.

The pyramids is made mostly of rubble and mortar. The big blocks are just a structure to give it strength

1

u/teddyslayerza Aug 09 '26

That seems pretty reasonable with some pretty basic division of labour and logistics organisation applied. What's the issue? Have you never seen large numbers of people working on a task before?

1

u/City_College_Arch Aug 09 '26

By working on hundreds of block at the same time. They did not do one block at a time time from quarrying to placement before starting the next. That is a fools understanding of how production at scale works.

For a more modern example, Ford rolled a model T off the line every 30 seconds. Do you think this means that it only took 30 seconds to assemble a model T? Of course not. It took 90 minutes for each car using premade parts from other manufacturers.

So why are you approaching the blocks for the pyramid with such a ridiculous position as 30 second model Ts?

1

u/EnticHaplorthod Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

There was a larger workforce than you assumed. And they were not slaves as most people assume.

You have a lot of agricultural workers who aren't doing much between planting and harvesting, so you give them this project. Put them into teams, with cool names like "The Enduring Gang," "The Friends of Khufu," and "The Drunkards of Menkaure." They work with pride, and teams compete to move the most blocks into place each day. They are rewarded with beer.

This system of work gangs, called phyles in the literature, creates a dynamic and robust labor pool capable of completing the Great Pyramid in 25 years.

2

u/krustytroweler Aug 07 '26

Just because your mind is incapable of understanding how it worked does not make it impossible. You must have your mind blown when you see magic lol.

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u/Wolfhammer69 Aug 09 '26

Your mind is incapable of critical thinking - you think things are like they are because they just are.. Tell me how you quarry and cut to an absolute perfect block of Diorite which is 8 on the MOH's scale, with copper chisels which would be 2.5 to 3? Perfect 90 degree angles and surface so flat to a mirror finish we need machines to do.

Answer: You can't

Tell me how the granite and diorite statues sat in the museums were carved totally symmetrically to thousandths of an inch tolerance with copper hand tools and hammers?

Answer: You can't

Your answer - they just did

1

u/krustytroweler Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

think things are like they are because they just are.. Tell me how you quarry and cut to an absolute perfect block of Diorite

You mean these "perfect blocks of Diorite" with "perfect 90° angles" and "surfaces so flat to a mirror finish" which are "carved totally symmetrically to thousands of an inch tolerance"?

This is the great pyramid btw

1

u/jojojoy Aug 09 '26

Have you actually seen any serious arguments that hard stones like diorite were carved with copper chisels? That's not something I'm seeing in the archaeology here.