© Richard Randall

Caribbean

Sundries

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza (29ƒ58′41″N, 31ƒ07′53″E) is the oldest and last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the World. Egyptologists generally agree the pyramid was constructed over a 20 year period concluding around 2560 BC. It is generally believed the Great Pyramid was built as the tomb of Fourth dynasty Egyptian pharoh Khufu (Cheops), after whom it is sometimes called Khufu's Pyramid or the Pyramid of Khufu. Khufu's vizier, Hemiunu, is credited as the architect of the Great Pyramid.

Historical context

Believed by mainstream egyptologists to have been constructed in approximately 20 years, the most widely accepted estimate for its date of completion is c. 2560 BC.[1] This date is loosely supported by archeological findings which have yet to reveal a civilization (of sufficient population size or technical ability) older than the fourth dynasty in the area.

The Great Pyramid is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now Cairo, Egypt in Africa. It is the main part of a complex setting of buildings that included a special walkway, two temples, three small pyramids (called the queens' pyramids), boat pits (with boats buried inside) and mastabas for the nobles. One of these small pyramids contains the tomb of queen Hetepheres (discovered in 1925), sister and wife of Sneferu and the mother of Khufu. There was a town for the workers, including a cemetery, bakeries, a beer factory and a copper smelting complex. More buildings and complexes are being discovered by The Giza Mapping Project.

A few hundred metres south-west of the Great Pyramid lies the slightly smaller Pyramid of Khafre, one of Khufu's successors who is believed to have built the Great Sphinx, and a few hundred metres further south-west is the Pyramid of Menkaure, Khafre's successor, which is about half as tall. Khafre's pyramid appears the tallest in some photographs as it is somewhat steeper and built on higher terrain.

Construction

Materials and labor

Many varied estimates have been made regarding the labor force needed to construct the Great Pyramid. Herodotus, the Greek historian in the 5th century BC, estimated that construction may have required the labor of 100,000 workers for 20 years. Recent evidence has been found that suggests the workforce was in fact paid, which would require accounting and bureaucratic skills of a high order. Polish architect Wieslaw Kozinski believed that it took as many as 25 men to transport a 1.5-ton stone block; based on this, he estimated the workforce to be 300,000 men on the construction site, with an additional 60,000 off-site. 19th century Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie proposed that the labor force was largely composed not of slaves but of the rural Egyptian population, working during periods when the Nile river was flooded and agricultural activity suspended.

Egyptologist Miroslav Verner posited that the labor was organized into a hierarchy, consisting of two gangs of 1000 men, divided into five zaa or phyle of 200 men each, which may have been further divided according to the skills of the workers. Some research suggests alternate estimates to the aforementioned labor size. For instance, mathematician Kurt Mendelssohn calculated that the labor force may have been 50,000 men at most, while Ludwig Borchardt and Louis Croon placed the number at 36,000. According to Verner, a labor force of no more than 30,000 was needed in the Great Pyramid's construction.

A construction management study carried out by the firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall in association with Mark Lehner and other egyptologists, estimates that the total project required an average workforce of 13,200 people and a peak workforce of 40,000. Without the use of pulleys, wheels, or iron tools, they surmise the Great Pyramid was completed from start to finish in approximately 10 years.[6] The study estimates the number of blocks used in construction was between 2-2.8 million (an average of 2.4 million), but settles on a much reduced finished total of 2 million subtracting the estimated area of the hollow spaces of the chambers and galleries.[6] Most sources agree on this number of blocks somewhere above 2 million.[7] The egyptologists' calculations suggest the workforce could have sustained a rate of 180 blocks per hour (3 stones/minute) with ten hour work days for putting each individual block in place. They derived these estimates from contruction projects in the third world that did not use modern machinery.[6] This study fails to take into account however, especially when compared to modern third world construction projects, the logistics and craftsmanship time inherent in constructing a building of nearly unparalleled magnitude with such precision, or among other things, the use of up to 60-80 tonne stones being quarried and transported a distance of over 500 miles.

In contrast, a Great Pyramid feasibility study relating to the quarrying of the stone was performed in 1978 by Technical Director Merle Booker of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America. Consisting of 33 quarries, the Institute is considered by many architects to be one of the world’s leading authorities on lime stone. Using modern equipment, the study concludes:

“Utilizing the entire Indiana Limestone industry’s facilities as they now stand [for 33 quarries], and figuring on tripling present average production, it would take approximately 27 years to quarry, fabricate and ship the total requirements.”

Mr. Booker points out the time study assumes sufficient quantities of railroad cars would be available without delay or downtime during this 27 year period and does not factor in the increasing costs of completing the work.

These accepted values by egyptologists bear out the following result:

2,400,000 stones used — 20 years — 365 days per year — 10 work hours per day — 60 minutes per hour = 0.55 stones laid per minute

Thus no matter how many workers were used or in what configuration, 1.1 blocks would have to be put in place every 2 minutes, ten hours a day, 365 days a year for twenty years to complete the Great Pyramid within this time frame. To use the same equation, but instead assuming the time of completion to be one hundred years instead of twenty, it would require 1.1 blocks to be set every ten minutes.

This equation, however, does not include the time and labor required to design, plan, survey, and level the 13 acre site the Great Pyramid sits on. Nor does it include the construction time for the two other main pyramids on the site, the Sphinx, the temples, networks of causeways, several square miles of paving stones, the leveling of the entire Giza plateau, the 35 boat pits carved out of solid bedrock, or several other highly laborious features. When considering the time it would have taken to build the Great Pyramid alone, it is worth noting that the entire Giza plateau was constructed over the reign of four pharohs in less than a hundred years starting with Khufu and ending when Djedefra chose a new location for his pyramid. This feat is even more impessive, given that beginning with king Snefru who ruled from 2630-2606 BC (leaving a span of 100 years between the beginning of his reign and the end of Menkaure's in 2530 BC), three other massive pyramids were built - the Step pyramid of Saqqara (believed to be the first Egyptian pyramid), the Bent Pyramid, and the Red Pyramid. Also during this time period (between 2686 and 2498 BC) the Wadi Al-Garawi dam which used an estimated 100,000 cubic metres of rock and rubble was built. Beginning with Saqqara, Egyptologist Barbara Mertz estimates nearly 700 pyramids were constructed in Egypt during a roughly 500 year period .

Construction method theories

Herodotus speculated that the stone blocks used in the Great Pyramid's construction were maneuvered into place by raising them up a succession of short wooden scaffolds. Another possibility proposed by the ancient scholar Diodorus Siculus was that the giant blocks were dragged along a system of ramps to the necessary height. More recently, Mark Lehner speculated that a spiralling ramp, beginning in the stone quarry to the southeast and continuing around the exterior of the pyramid, may have been used. The stone blocks may have been drawn on sleds along the ramps lubricated by water or milk. Some also believe blocks were moved by rollers, logs that were kept constantly under the blocks so they could roll along the ground.

If a ramp were used to push the top-most blocks of the pyramid into place it would likely grow thinner as the top of the pyramid shrunk. Nonetheless, the ramp's construction would also take a massive amount of resources, slightly more than half the resources used in building the pyramid itself. Excavation on the area south of the Great Pyramid revealed evidence of the remains of a ramp consisting of two walls built of stone rubble and mixed with Tafla. The area in between was filled with sand and gypsum forming the bulk of the ramp.They were discovered during the work of relocating the Sound and Light Show cables at Giza. Given the mass required to build a ramp of such magnitude to contruct the Great Pyramid as ramp theories suggest, it is unknown what purpose this much smaller newly discovered ramp may have served.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oceania