It occurs to me that I did not tell you how they were built. For the record, people built them and they used simple tools and a lot of hands. The big thing that people forget in the modern world is that every job that we use machines for was once performed by people and no machines. The road that travels through Algonquin Park in Ontario, was built in the pre-WWII depression by people with very little machinery. My grandfather and his brothers were there. They drilled into the Precambrian Shield with simple drills, teams of three, two hitting the drill with sledgehammers and one turning the drill a quarter turn between strokes, switching off every once in a while. The hole was bored out and explosives were placed in it and the rock was shattered and then dug out. People using simple tools.
Modern machines are faster and they quicken most job sites with most jobs. But remember they still have wheelbarrows at job sites. A bobcat can fill two wheelbarrows in a few seconds, in the time at twenty people could fill a wheelbarrow with shovels, but a bobcat can only go twice as fast as a person with a wheelbarrow, so it makes good economic sense to used the bobcat to fill wheelbarrows. An excavator can dig clay and packed dirt faster than a team of diggers can do so by hand. What I am saying is that machines are faster, but people can still do those jobs—you just need more people to do the tasks.
So there was this guy named Pythagorus and he said a^2+b^2=c^2. But just because he is credited for the relationship does not mean that people did not know that the relationship existed before then. The Egyptian used rods that were 3,4, and 5 units long to do surveys. They would arrange them in the form of a triangle and they knew that the corner of the 3 and 4 unit rods was a right angle and you could make a square field with it. Great for tax assessment and building straight roads and the bases of square pyramids. I mean, like REALLY, part of the myth that the ancient Egyptians could not build the pyramids was that they are perfectly square. So that is one problem fixed.
But how did they build using those big stones and the stones were so square too. Square stones, they used the same methodology to bake square fields as square stones. As for size, they knew a few simple machines, machines that we don't even think of as machines anymore, but ones that are the basis of most of our society. They knew that if you wanted to take heavy loads and move them you put them on round things and they move easier and faster. We call them wheels, but for big heavy stones, rollers would work better. There are many structures all around the world where they moved large stones without machines in this way, Stone Henge and Easter Island to name two. The stones for Stone Henge are said to come from a quarry a hundred or more kilometers away, so people could move big stones far distances.
With no gas powered machines the job of a few people now would take thousands of people then. Ancient Egypt had thousands of people. It had millions. Most of them were farmers. It they had a number of advantages that others did not have. Egypt was and is a dry country made habitable by a huge river that floods its banks regularly once a year. The flood waters left fine silt and mud on the low lying fields which acted as a fertilizer. Low lying fields and a river means easy to make irrigation canals. Square fields means easier state taxation, which means wheat that was taken by the Pharaohs. Granaries in a dry country means less spoilage and cats, meant less losses to vermin which meant a large number of people that did not have to grow food and could do other things, like build Pyramids. In today's modern society as little as 2-4% of the people grow food for e rest of us. In the very poor nations today, 75% of people are farmers, but even then that means 1 in 4 people don't need to farm, in a nation of a million people that is a quarter of a million people. There is a lot that that many people could do if they were coordinated properly.
But how did they get the stone up the pyramid with out cranes or alien spacecraft? Simple, after the wheel the simplest tool is the inclined plane. Actually, it is even more simple than the wheel. Working together, you can climb mountains with an inclined plane and a wheel. Look outside. Roads are inclined planes. They are flat and they go up hills slowly, sometimes switching direction to get up a steep hill, or they circle the hill several times. The Ancient Egyptians used the inclined plane too. They built roads up the sides of the Pyramids, they started from far away and the slopes were slight and not steep at all and the roads wrapped around the structure. But that is a lot of dirt moved, they could not do that! One man can dig and barrow the load and dump it and create a small hill. A thousand workers could labour for a month and make a large hill. Ten thousand could labour for a year and make a very large hill. What is too difficult to imagine when you think like that. With rollers and kilometers of inclined plane, it would be easy to get rocks up high. It is like this, the energy required to raise something a certain height is constant, but if you can take longer to pay the cost, it is easier to do it. A 45° angle is about half the cost and 22.5° is a quarter on the cost. If you can get the grade down to almost flat, the cost of raising the object is almost negligible. That is why roads are rarely steep, so your car does not have to work hard to get you up it.
After the last stone has reached the summit and the work is done there the road is stripped away and the Pyramid is left standing alone by itself. If the Pyramids were built by aliens, why are they not completely hollow instead of primitive narrow holes? Why are they not made of Magical glass? Why are they so boring compared to our own skyscrapers? The original Pyramids were dressed with white Marble and capped in Gold, they were truly spectacular, before looters and conquerors stripped them bare.
If someone suggests that Aliens built the Pyramids again, I will tell them once and if they persist, I will ask them why they did not make them from advanced materials and instead used only simple building materials of stone aged builders. And possibly slap them silly.
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