Nemtinakht Wrote:
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> Sir with all due respect, you failed to address
> the substance of my hypothesis. It can be surmised
> that there were no titles associated with ramps
> found at the workers cemetery because the stone
> draggers, quarrymen, and their overseers were low
> class conscripts who were not entitled to a first
> rate burial next to their sovereign.
I can't really argue against an assumption.
You see no overseers of stone draggers, ramp builders, and quarrymen because they were common serfs. But I see jobs as mundane as "Overseer of the side of the Pyramid", "Overseer of a Boat", or "Overseer of Necklace Stringers". Many of the listed jobs are fairly "inconsequential" but such jobs as "Overseer of all Stone Movements" do not exist!
This is a pattern and it's systemic. There's no one off where you can say that "quarrymen" were so unimportant that despite the thousands necessarily known to have existed should be unrepresented in the cemeteries. We have a "Overseer of the Boats of Neith" right in the workers cemetery. How can this be consistent with building with ramps. Yes, the PT does specifically say they used boats to build bridges in the desert but are we to believe they needed bridges to build or access the pyramids?!? This would make no sense. So you can say the "Overseer of the Boats of Neith" must have commanded an entire fleet and ended up in the workers cemetery by some fluke but this isn't consistent with his other titles.
Nothing fits together when it is assumed they used ramps to build. Get rid of the ramps and go with the fact that the evidence says they mustta pulled stones straight up the side and then EVERYTHING starts making perfect sense. It explains why they had titles like "Weigher/ Reckoner" and Herodotus was told they used "mounds" to build the Great Pyramid.
Even if there were evidence for ramps the fact is that ramps are an exceedingly inefficient means to build. This does matter because they actually completed the work, it was built by a highly primitive economy, and they used what we would call primitive technology. Logic does matter and the assumption they used ramps but left no evidence flies in the face of all the facts and cause the evidence to appear piecemeal and disjointed.
> These men
> were almost certainly buried at that local
> cemeteries up and down the length of the Nile. The
> fact remains that almost no local cemeteries have
> been excavated. Sure cemeteries of provincial
> noblemen have been excavated, but I am referring
> to cemeteries specifically for villagers and other
> commoners
There are, I believe, a couple hundred graves in the workers cemetery of men, women, and children. More common workers likely had little choice in where they were buried but craftsmen often had more elaborate tombs. A few of these appear to have died in accidents but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Logically these simply represent the natural deaths that occurred at Giza over the span that the pyramid was built. perhaps it is over the span of both G1 and G2. It seems a couple hundred deaths over 20 or 40 years among a group of 8,000 shouldn't be too surprising. It would certainly seem low for 100,000 men exposed to the sun and the dangers of dragging stones up mile long ramps even for a couple years.
> Wouldn't my hypothesis conveniently explain the
> lack of titles associated with ramps at Giza?
An hypothesis that can't be tested is almost worthless. It is far less than worthless when taken as an assumption.
This isn't to say that your invention of the hypothesis is worthless but it has no value on its own.
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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.
