Everybody learned in school that ancient Egyptian engineers used thousands of huge limestone blocks to build the pyramids. What we didn’t learn was how the Egyptians got those blocks from the ground to the top of those pyramids.
Archaeologists and engineers have speculated for decades about how they did it. Sloping ramps. Rollers. Gangs of sweating slaves. You’ve seen the movies. But nobody knows for sure.
Now, materials engineers have come up with a new explanation that has the archaeologists in an uproar. Maybe some of those huge limestone blocks weren’t really limestone. And maybe those gangs of slaves didn’t push them up the ramps after all.
The engineers think just maybe the Egyptians invented an early kind of concrete from crushed limestone and binders that work just like the Portland cement in modern concrete. Since the powdered limestone would be just like the limestone in limestone blocks, it would be really hard to tell the difference.
So maybe instead of thousands of slaves pushing huge blocks of stone around, they were carrying bags of wet concrete and pouring it into forms on top of the half-built pyramids. Not as mysterious and romantic as big blocks of stone, but it could have worked.
We haven’t been pushing stone or carrying concrete, but we’re still done. See you next time.
Photo: Bruno Girin/Flickr.com
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Gene Charleton is a science writer at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and Texas A&M
University in College Station, Texas. He’s been watching and writing about science and technology for more than 30 years. Engineering Works! was born in 2003
as a two-minute radio show on Texas
A&M University’s NPR outlet, KAMU-FM.
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