Khazar-khum Wrote:
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> What do you mean? We have the barracks, mess hall,
> administration & graves of thousands of people
> who worked at Giza. There is such a thing as
> around-the-clock labor.
If you make a huge ramp (never mind that you can't see what you're building) you'll need a phenomenal number of men on to maintain the delivery rate and horsepoweer required to build. If none of your men ever needed any relief and could just drag stones then you'd need in the neighborhood of 2500 men on the ramp. Plus you need enough men to build the ramp on it. A single straight on ramp would mean another 20,000 men or so. Then you need men in the quarry and more to get the stones to the pyramid. Toss in the men necessary to relieve these people in the extreme heat of the Sahara summer and an army to feed and take care of them. Just the number of men necessary to haul water up from the valley for drinking would be remarkable.
If this number isn't sufficient it won't do any good to provide more labor because only a finite number of men can fit on the ramp. You can't pencil whip more labor into confined areas. A mile long ramp with 2500 menm on it means one man every two feet and you still need to squeeze in the stones. Don't forget you need a constant dragging of fill to make ramps up as well and if you make it wider to accomodate them then you need more men dragging fill for ramps.
It's not impossible they worked around the clock but remember they would have to do everything in the dark that they did in the light. That means making mortar and cutting stones as well as quarrying and everything else. This would require many hundred of torches and the fuel to keep them running. Torch light is not equivalent to sunlight and craftsmen would have to learn how to do their jobs under these conditions.
It's unlikely they worked at night. There's nothing in the PT suggestive of it nor in the culture. There was no "Overseer of Torch Makers" or anything suggestive. There is a device called the fire-pan which was a light source according to Sethe. There are implications that when this burned the builders reported to work.
Utterance 343.
558a. To say: Bdš.t comes; the fire-pan burns.
558b. Those with (ready) hands stand to give an offering to N.
There's no question this device was of extreme importance and quite fragile. There was a feast at the beginning of the building season when it was taken out of storage and another feast at the end of the season when it was returned to storage. It was said to burn under that which the Gods create. I believe a prototype was found in the Tomb of Sabu. There is significant historical evidence for this contention.
Very few of the graves at Giza are pyramid builders. Even the big shots in the mastabas are generally not associated with building pyramids and there's not a single solitary ramp builder or ramp designer or anything to do with ramps among them. They do have jobs related to counterweights and the like though.
The problem with the great pyramids is that they are just too big to get enough men in there to build them. This suggests we are looking at the problem incorrectly. We need a means to get the manpower to bear or to utilize a motive force. I doubt there's any alternative and ramps are an functional impossibility.
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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.
