Velthuijsen wrote:the little online browsing (seeing that I'm not an historian for ancient Egypt) I've done seems to indicate that the Egyptians knew of the pulley before they got invaded by the Hyksos.
The chariot didn't appear until the Hyksos decided to pay a visit. That doesn't mean they didn't know the wheel. There are burial images of potters using a pottery wheel from around the time that those pyramids were build. Or the puppets (from the dynasties from before the chariot was introduced) that moved using a system of ropes and a pulley.
A valid point. And I do seem to remember that there were models of carts, so I take back what I said about the wheel.
That doesn't mean that they used pulleys to build pyramids. See, there's this little matter of engineering: stone blocks are heavy things, tens of tons each for a core block. Even sliding up a ramp, that's still around ten tons of force that the pulley's axel has to support. Pulleys good enough to do the job didn't exist in the bronze age. So you're back to mudded logs and ropes, and all the problems associated with them.
Velthuijsen wrote:There are multiple internal ramps on that picture, one in the main gallery, but also one on the other side. And even then regardless of if they used a pulley or the rope around a log there should be indications where those were supported in/by the surrounding stone. So at least the hypothesis is provable.
Except the hypothesis is wrong on its face. Misseur Houdin forgets a large sticking point about the limits of stone. Until the large burial chamber was complete and covered, the large, 60 ton granite beams couldn't support themselves over a span that large. They would require inthrust forces to squish them together and keep them from snapping under thier own weight. These inthrust forces wouldn't exist until they built up the pyramid high enough. Until then, they had to be supported by other means, and the only means availible to the Egyptians was to fill the main chamber with sand.
There are no stone shutters between the main chamber and the grand gallery, so in order to keep the main chamber filled with sand, they had to fill the grand gallery with sand as well. (All of the entry chambers to the pyramid would be filled with sand while the pyramid was being constructed.) They
couldn't use the grand gallery as a ramp, because it was filled with sand!
You have to remember, that without the arch, spanning large disances (as required for ceilings) is a bitch with stone. Hell, it's a bitch even
with the arch, but it's a bitch-on-wheels without. Therefore, Egyptian engineers would want to keep the number of internal tunnels to a bare minimum. Therefore, if they could build a pyramid without any internal ramps, they would've.
Look at the Giza pyramids today. Their outer casing stones have been stripped, leaving clearly-visible access tunnels where workers could breathe and escape after dropping stones in the grand gallery to plug up access. If they couldn't afford to fill these holes up all the way, what makes you think that they could fill up the great ramps where they dragged up multiton blocks of stone?
Even if the pyramid builders could afford to plug up the ramps with stone rather than simply covering them up cosmetically, then you win yourself a new problem. The stones will be skew to the rest of the pyramid blocks, and they wouldn't bother finishing them straight (they'd just put in a casing stone of the proper shape), which we don't see. Further, in order to drop stones in, you'd have to have them sitting on a platform outside, up on where they were intended to be, and dropped in. This requires a lot of platform space. But if they could build such a platform, why not build a wide ramp around the outside and simply drag them those stones up with brute muscle power?
Yes, it would take thousands of workers, but you're a great king; you GOT thousands of workers! And while the Nile was flooded, they couldn't farm anyway.
So, if the Egyptians could afford to fill their internal construction ramps with stone, then they don't need internal construction ramps. Therefore, they wouldn't use them.
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