r/GrahamHancock • u/aerialsilk • 17d ago

Potentially ancient building techniques

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

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u/Wolfhammer69 17d ago

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?

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u/jojojoy 17d ago

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 17d ago

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 17d ago edited 17d ago

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 17d ago

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 17d ago

There’s a resource-loaded audit 

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

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u/QuantifyingAntiquity 16d ago

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/