How Were the Pyramids Built?
4500 Years Ago, Khufu (Khufu, Greek Cheops, (flourished 25th century BCE) second king of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 BCE) of Egypt and builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza) named Egyptian made the biggest pyramid which is exactly aligned with its sibling pyramid at the same angle the Orion constellation lies. Was it just a coincidence? Let me tell you that it is most probably the only structure present in earth that shows all four directions accurately through its 4 different edges. Even the pyramids of ancient Egypt were made up of heavy stone that approximately weighs about 2 tons.
The great pyramid of Giza that is locally known as Akhet Khufu, was constructed around 2547 BCE using stones cubes (1meter cube volume) where around 2 million stones were used. The inner chamber was made using Granite stones which weighs more than 50 tons. Similarly, the remining structures were made using varieties of lime stones. Now even you can imagine how huge was the Pyramids with the height of 146.6 meters and 51 Degree as an angle of inclination. It sounds more possible for us but at that time it was the greatest achievement made by the Egyptians as it holds the record of being world tallest manmade structures for over 3800 years.
Knowing all these details people have always wondered how were these structures made at that ancient time with probably no existence of any modern equipment. So, today we are decoding the physics behind construction of the pyramids and the difficulties Egyptians were to pass through for construction of these huge structures;
1)LEVELLING THE BASE
To build any kind of structures probably the base needs to be strong enough. But Giza was not situated in a well labelled area. So, it was most important to level the base first. Thus, they went on levelling the base first for bringing smoothness in construction.
2) ALIGNMENT
Pyramids of Giza is so perfectly aligned with all 4 directions through its edges. But at that time existence of anything like compass was not possible. SO, how did the Egyptian made this problem solved. But many researchers claim that Egyptians did alignment using the northern pole star as Egyptian were expert in astronomy. But the revolution of earth makes so huge impacts that sometimes the North Poles star do not seem to be at north. And same happened at around 2457 BCE.
3) RAW MATERIALS
Now, it was time to collect all the necessary raw materials like woods, copper, stone, clays etc. About 23 million stones were expected, for which they needed to do huge mining. But the main problem here was lack of iron which they needed for mining. So, they planned to use the copper for construction purpose. Still, they need to make huge travel for copper mining as it was at Sinai and probably, they needed to cross red sea to get there. They also did wood cutting in big numbers to make necessary items like boats, weapons, etc.
They also needed to mine stones such as granite, yellow limestone and white limestone. Among this yellow limestone could easily be mined but it was tough to mine the remaining stones as they not available locally.
4)CONSTRUCTION PROCESS
Now since we have got the required materials, so let’s discuss on the construction process. So, it was definitely not easy to move the stones weighted 2 tons and how did the ancient Egyptians did so. For that purpose, they used a simple principle of physics which states that “when load distance is increased then the effort required to move the object would decrease”. They used a simple technology popularly known as Ramp (a sloping surface joining two different levels, as at the entrance or between floors of a building) which is just a sloppy surface.
But a single direct ramp could not make the raw materials to the top, so they used internal and external spiral Ramps too.
In this way the construction materials were used properly for building the pyramids.
Building pyramids at that time was a great idea which even inspires the people of todays generation. But at ancient time due to lack of technological development, skilled manpower the project was just unimaginable.
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