![]() In 2015 Tallet was demurring on calls to make a bold pronouncement on the larger significance of his discoveries. (Boats may have been stored during the months when the Red Sea was turbulent, then retrieved in calmer seasons). Tallet had discovered the ancient rolls in the remains of a massive yet orderly boat-storage facility. It describes a team of 200 workers filling their boat with limestone in Tura, and then transporting it up the Nile river to the Great Pyramid’s building site. Photo by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (public domain)īut Tallet’s newly-discovered papyrus filled in some crucial details. There are even paintings on the wall of the tomb of a later Egyptian nomarch showing workers (and not aliens) hauling a statue weighing 58 metric tons on an enormous hand-drawn sled. It’s a task so daunting, Forbes notes, that “Some authors argued that ancient aliens helped in the construction.” Specifically, hotel manager Erich von Daniken, who in 1968 popularized this theory in his book “Chariots of the Gods.” (A 1970 movie adaptation of the book was ultimately nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.) The Australian Broadcasting Corporation tackles the claim on its pseudoscience-debunking page, pointing out that it’s perfectly possible to build a pyramid using a carefully orchestrated team of humans.ĭoctor Christiana Kohler, Egyptologist at Macquarie University, explained that by putting rollers under the stones (and by using some oxen), “a gang of eight men can actually handle a two and a half tonnes heavy block.” Great Pyramid of Giza from a 19th-century stereopticon card photo (public domain)Īnd though the inner core of limestone blocks came from a nearby quarry, the decorative higher-quality white limestone on the outside had to be transported from across the Nile, while 374,785,846 pounds of pinkish granite was procured from over 500 miles away, according to Forbes. ![]() The finished pyramid weighs 5.9 million metric tons - or over 13 billion pounds. That’s 1,764,000 pounds of stone being laid every day for 20 years. The problem? Each block weighs at least 2 tons. The Great Pyramid of Giza contains 2.3 million individual blocks of stone, meaning one block would have to be laid every five minutes of every hour, 24 hours a day, for the entire 20 years. It’s a question which has long baffled historians. ![]() They tell the story of Merer, a forgotten overseer for a crew of 200 workers whose job it was to gather supplies. They were the oldest papyrus rolls ever discovered.Īnd amazingly, the mysterious ancient records were clearly written by the builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza. ![]() He re-visited the site for several digs, and in his third year discovered rolls of papyrus, some of which were several feet long. Aided by a modern-day GPS system, he found himself far from any known city and dated the caves around 2600 BC. Two recent archaeological finds reveal the awe-inspiring logistics involved in the 20-year construction project.įollowing a British explorer’s notes from 1823, plus more records from two French pilots in the 1950s, archaeologist Pierre Tallet located 30 different man-made caves in some remote Egyptian hills in 2011 - all of them sealed up (and thus hidden from view). If you thought your projects had impossible constraints and difficult timelines, imagine trying to build the Great Pyramid.
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