For some reason people seem to think they’re fundamentally smarter than people were back then.
Yeah, you may have technically had a better education, but you’re not inherently more intelligent than the average person back then, and a genius from that time is still miles ahead of you.
Yeah, it's been linked to systemic racist thought patterns (which are often unintentional but should be acknowledged). I explain it to people like this: take a handful of sand and turn your fist so that your palm faces perpendicular to the ground. Now release the sand slowly... What shape does it form? It isn't rocket science.
Ancient aliens literally has Nazi origins. They didn't just have race-science, but race-history. I guess you could call their thinking ancient-Aryans because they believed that impressive structures built by brown people must have been led by a Northern European diaspora who eventually vanished because of race-mixing.
You can watch the History channel all you want, but nobody is going to question the Parthenon or the Colosseum. Stonehenge is the only one I can think of where Aliens had to help white people.
It's fair to imagine the challenges a building team would face 2k plus years ago.
Like in this example, building levers that are strong enough to lift the load. I bet they broke a bunch of stuff.
But eventually they figured it out, via trial and error. Levers, ramps, etc. They probably couldn't describe why those things were inherently the best way, but more approached from the "we tried 9 other ways and they suck. This is the best way."
Next, the phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is relevant here, but in a backwards way.
Since we struggle to imagine what it would take for an ancient society to master the techniques to build these things, we therefore begin to grasp for unrealistic conclusions (magic...read...aliens).
Same goes for Europeans building cathedrals and stuff, the trick is the history, the methods and the results were more documented and understood.
There are some racism concerns that I think go beyond and around what I've discussed, which is more abstract. I'm not discounting the other topics, just not covering them here.
But hey, aliens did it. They couldn't just land on Earth. Their ships were designed to land on a Pyramid because that's how intelligent race would build their spaceships. Don't question it, just trust the specialists (who wrote books!).
Anyway, for anyone interested in Ancient Egypt, the best thing out there (I think) are Bob Briers lectures also available on Audible.
I like the theories about them being ancient power stations or radio devices, using the water channels and gold cap stone to create enough pd to be useful in occult practices. It doesn't have to be aliens that helped make them but I think there's something the really resonates with the idea of aliens coming down and teaching ancient people how to make super complex and beautiful machines to synthesize small amounts of potent narcotics. Like none of the other reasons aliens would come make much sense but a tiktokable prank like that really does.
Imagine how fascinating it would be if we find loads of old alien stuff on Mars with like little model pyramids and pictures of them with the pharaoh. Or if when we meet aliens and have first contact they got us up with galactic tiktok and people are reposting all the old videos of pranks aliens have pulled on earth over the years.
Yeah they were probably just the biggest coolest looking thing that knew how to make so everyone wanted one, yeah they were probably just dragging rocks up sandy inclones and using water filled counter weights.. but we don't know aliens weren't there so I'm going to enjoy being open to that possibility.
The constant barrage of Joe Rogan clips of idiots claming it was impossible to move these huge stones over those distances with the tech at the time was what drove me to disable YouTube shorts.
Lifting it is like 1/100th of the challenge. Moving it across hundreds of miles, cutting it, getting it to the top of the pyramid, and setting it in place are all bigger problems than simply lifting the stone.
Cutting - They only had IIRC bronze, which is not enough on its own to cut through the granite. However using sand to add friction makes it cut significant faster/easier.
Moving miles - Boats are incredibly capable of carrying heavy loads with minimal energy expenditure to move said boat. Using logs and levers also goes far.
Getting to the too of the pyramid, that's a little more of a mystery. But there is evidence they included ramps within the structure as they built the bigger ones as they went. And IIRC the smaller ones had pulley systems going through the center.
It doesn't require fancy tech, just of patience and application of basic physics.
Here is a guy using some of the basic movement techniques in his backyard with multi ton stones:
If you take the heaviest stone and divide it by a reasonable weight to walk long distances- say 20lbs, you find you need a few thousand people to carry one stone. You need several thousand ropes for each worker, but again each rope only needs to lift 20 lbs of the whole.
Modern estimates put the number of workers at 10,000. So they just had to carry them.
It's no wonder they didn't document it. Lift stone and walk. What's the big deal?
Moving material gets done via cart, or rolling on top of logs. I had heard various theories for how they got the big bricks up, from rolling up a dirt pile (put into place by, you guessed it.) to building a waterproof chute with the bricks in it on a raft, and just filling the chute with water to make the raft go up.
The masonry had to have been done by professionals. The blocks fit together with such precision. Even today it would be an architectural feat to be able to cut and place 15+ ton blocks with millimeters-thick tolerances.
A couple years ago my chemistry teacher told my class that the Egyptians had really advanced technology (technology even more advanced than our own) thousands of years ago but it all got lost because they started a nuclear war
Edit: she told us that the evidence was that there were smartphone paintings
You see cats have powers similar to Telekinesis. Why do you think they choose rivers surrounded by deserts to start the first civilizations. Sandboxes everywhere they please.
But one dark day the Faraó Ramses forgot to refil the food pile because and I quote "but it still had food from yesterday".
This one mistake doomed humanity to the eternal silence treatment.
(and that's why his tomb sucked, his was the first that humans actually had to build)
Don't worry I got what you were putting down. People can be very reactionary with their downvotes here, if your joke is too subtle it can fly over their heads.
It made me smirk! For my reference, how many zeros is that (I'm shit at maths but want to try and imagine such a long lever protruding into deep space)?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say i don't think they found the pyramid whole and moved the entire thing. I think they took small pieces, possibly block shaped and moved those one at a time
The ancient Egyptians utilized neither wheels nor work animals for the majority of the pyramid-building era, so the giant blocks, weighing 2.5 tons on average, had to be moved through human muscle power alone. But until recently, nobody really knew how. The answer, it seems, is simply water. Evidence suggests that the blocks were first levered onto wooden sleds and then hauled up ramps made of sand. However, dry sand piles up in front of a moving sled, increasing friction until the sled is nearly impossible to pull. Wet sand reduces friction dramatically beneath the sled runners, eliminating the sand piles and making it possible for a team of people to move massive objects.
You're not going to find a thread strong enough to pull a few tonnes of stone, but you can easily pull it with a large number of ropes pulled by a few hundred people.
Similarly, a single 8x8 beam as a lever arm would just snap, but a dozen 8x8 beams as lever arms for a dozen levers probably wouldn't.
I'm not saying those are the exact techniques that were used to build the pyramids, but they demonstrate that massive stones can be easily lifted and accurately placed using only "primitive" resources and leverage.