<HTML>I ask you again: Is Mrs. Morris your mother in law? You definitvely have the same "civilised manners".
> 1. Ask any limestone geologist and he or she will say it's normal for 1 in 4 blocks to break when quarrying with modern methods. That's beside the point because some blocks can be salvaged to make smaller bricks and slabs.
I asked you to give SOURCES for this. You know what sources are? No, I don't think so. Therefore this is an unsupported claim made by you. So much for this matter.
And, as I told you: Just take a look at the pyramids. They used a jumble of totally un-uniform blocks, therefore breaking does not even matter (aside from the fact that you could not produce any proof for this during the last 2 weeks)
> 2. Ask anyone who runs a limestone quarry. Before blocks are quarried about 30 feet of waste rock is removed from the top level of the quarry. THIS FACT MUST BE CONSIDERED RELATIVE TO THE SIZE OF THE GIZA QUARRIES. I WRITE THIS IN CAPITALS BECAUSE IT IS VERY IMPORTANT.
This ist one of the silliest remarks you ever made. The thicknes of waste rock is individual for each quarry. I have a quarry only 5 minutes away, they are quarrying all stones just below the soil (which is about 1 m deep). In countries where there is no soil layer (eg. Egypt) you even only have to clear away a little rubble. When you base your ideas on such stupid suggestions I see where you have your funny thoughts from.
BTW: In another post you meant, that these 30 feet (9 meters) were used for polymer. Well, for 6 Mio. cubic meters you would need a layer of 888 meters squared for all the pyramids - which has vanished completely because not a single bit of it can found anywhere in or around giza (and neither in the surrounding regions).
>Here's the real point. You keep avoiding the waste factor. It's critically important because the size of the quarries are measured and have been roughly compared to the size of the GP. They are each roughly the same volume! You don't have the liberty of assuming that waste is not critical to this issue so stop avoiding the problem.
I do not avoid any problems, unfortunately you are constantly evading or bending facts.
Let's examine "wastage". Let us assume, that the material for more than 1 block was broken in one turn (the trenches in the Kaphere-quarry on the northwest-corner are about 5 m long, so 5 blocks a time were obviously broken there). The trenches were about 20 cm wide and 1 m deep, that's about 1.4 cubic meters waste from the trencehs for one 5 x 1 m block. The block can then be seperated by chisels as can be seen on the unfinished stones in Meidum (see photo on my home page).
Compared with the volume of the whole block of 5 cubic meters the waste from the trenches is about 28%. So we have to add about 1.6 Mio. cubic meters to the whole volume of the Giza pyramids, we have ti look for quarries which hold about 7,68 cubic meters.
At the moment identified are 4 large areas (see Klemm, p. 54):
- main quarry was he plateau itself, about 3 m rock from the region around Chufu and about 7 m from Kaphere (remains to be found on Kaphere's northwest side) were used for the lower layers). Thats about 440 x 400 x 7 m for Kaphere (= 1,232 Mio m^3) and 250 x 600 x 3 m for Chufu (= 450 000 m^3)
- East of the eastern sanctuary, qarried about 360 x 60 x 40 m = 864 000 m^3
- South of the eastern sanctuary, 240 x 40 x 50 m = 480 000 m^3
- south of Kaphere's causeway, 200 x 160 x 20 m = 640 000 m^3
plus 250 x 250 x 40 m = 2.5 Mio m^3
- South of Menkaure 240 x 200 x 40 m = 1.92 Mio m^3
It's a total volume of about 8 Mio m^3 - although one of the quarries used for Chufu and Kaphere is not found yet and smaller quarries like the Sphinx enclosure or Hitan el Gurob are not included.
BTW: Klemm states on p. 54-57, that one speciality of the smaller Kaphere and the large menkaure quarries is, that there are many prepares but not yet llosened blocks, that marka aout OK work especcialy loosening blocks with levers can betraced through the whole region and that lare areas of these quarry regions have been "pre-trenched" in OK times. The time horizont is clear, because som Menkaure-priests built their graves over the trenching of the ground, so these traces cannot be younger than Menkautre or even Kaphere.
And Klemm states thet the whole Giza region has useable stone just up to the surface (that's the reason why surface stone was used in so large amounts in the pyramids)
Case closed, fotrget your artificial stone fantasies. I will not waste another minute for this folly.
FD</HTML>
