They are stacking rice-straw bales - not building pyramids!
Piles of straw bales do not have casing stones precision fitted on the outside, and its the placing and dressing down of the casing stones that is a major problem.
I just wonder how reinvented Herodotus machines or internal ramps cope with this problem.
The casing stones were precisely positioned with hardly a discernable gap between them as each level of the pyramid was built. They were probably trimmed down and polished from the top of the pyramid down. The masons needed a firm safe platform to work on, as the top of the pyramid rose to 146.6 m (480 ft or the modern day equivalent of a 45 storey building). A rubble encasement incorporating a ramp that wound its way around the structure, provided the necessary temporary working platform for the dozens of workers needed to pull and lever a casing stone into position. Grooves or notches can be seen on the undersides of casing blocks that would have facilitated the use of levers for maneuvering the stones.
One alternative would have been to construct vast timber scaffolding covering the faces of the pyramid, but where would all this timber have come from? One thing Egypt does not have are forests, but it does have an abundance of material needed to construct ramps - limestone chippings, stones, sand, and tafla clay. To give some idea of the work involved, it would take 5000 people about 7 - 8 months to transport all the material needed (approx. 1,000,000 m3) to encase the entire pyramid with rubble 20 m (66 ft) wide at ground level and tapering as it rose. (the encasement was built up gradually however, with the superstructure of the pyramid)
The casing stones were put in place as each level was completed, and encasing the pyramid with rubble as it rises makes this possible. The rubble encasement is dismantled from the top, as the casing stones are dressed and polished and the material dumped into the quarries that supplied the core masonry.
CT
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2008 05:19PM by Chris Tedder.
