Re: workforce required to build pyramids

From: Jiri Mr. (sure_at_sure.com)
Date: 06/30/04 

Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 09:32:29 GMT

Peter Jason wrote:
> "Jiri Mr." <sure@sure.com> wrote in message
> news:otmEc.906466$Pk3.280987@pd7tw1no...
>
>>Griffith wrote:
>>
>>>Herodotus apparently gives the figure of 100,000 as the workforce
>>>required to build one of the pyramids (the Great Pyramid I think). It
>>>seems that most modern experts give a much lower figure. One website I
>>>looked at gave a figure of 20,000. Is this a reasonable figure?
>>>
>>>Nadina
>>>
>>
>>20,000 slaves is what it took to build the great Mark Lehner's Pyramid.
>>But not having slaves, front-end loader was used instead. :)
>>Besides, do you know how many people lived in the world 5,000 years ago?
>>How many of that number were in Egypt, and of those how many could be
>>spared for the Great Pyramid Project? 5,000 -to 10,000?
>>So, it took relatively few workers - mostly front-end loader drivers,
>>and crane operators.
>>
>>Jiri
>>http://www.geocities.com/JiriMruzek/pyrbil.htm
>
>
> Quite so. And don't forget the hot-air balloons of inflated crocodile skins
> with which the Egyptians lifted all those blocks and placed them in
> position. There's simply no other explanation. Cranes would have been too
> cumbersome and with the balloons the workforce would have been quite small -
> only a few thou. This is why there are no crocodiles in the Nile today in
> northern Egypt; they were hunted out of existence.

It's a different story with cobras, though, whose skins were used as
hoses for air compressors. With the later declines, however, farmed
hosing cobras could be had for virtually a dime a basket.
Hey, do you still recall the Ice Theory? When Sahara froze over,
Egyptians put giant blocks on sleds and equipped those sleds with sails.
Those were magnificient vistas, fleets of blocks on giant sleds
ice-sailing right up to the pyramidion via the enormous straight ramp
covered by a gleaming *** of ice.
And how could one forget all those lever virtuosos boasting of record
times, if the work were entrusted to them and their long levers. I'd
like to see them lever a 70 ton block up an incline in a rather limited
working area.
I get downright nostalgic and misty eyed, when I remember the water
canals leading to the top of the Great Pyramid. The water runoff from
there was what had eroded the Sphinx, and thus fooled first Schwaller de
Lubicz, and later Schoch into thinking that the Sphinx had endured the
pluvial period thousands of years earlier, and so Han*** became rich.
As for Pi in the Pyramid, it too is nothing mysterious, because if you
use wheelbarrows, you borrow a barrow wheel to measure the pyramid with.
So many turns horizontally, and then so many turns of the wheel
vertically, and this guarantees you Pi. I believe this brilliant theory
became the foundation of the prevalent consensus in AEgyptology today.
There is even a wooden wheel from Egypt of the early dynastic period at
the Boston Museum. It is theorized that it once was on a barrow, and all
the peers, who had reviewed it, agreed that this was indeed possible.
Ice Theory then begat the Greased, and Wet Ramps Theory, The Taffla
ramps had been made extremely slippery by pouring cooking oil on them so
the laden sleds would slide easily to and fro. But, since the pullers
would slip as well, they were issued sandals with soles from crocodile
skins, whose scales were a natural substitute for cleats. Kewl, hey?

Jiri Mruzek
http://www.geocities.com/JiriMruzek/seat3.htm