Pyramids

Caporegime
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We all know how they were built they even made a documentary and an extended series about them.....

Jaffa Kree!
 
Soldato
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Space isn';t real it's a projection, therefore no safe space can ever exist
Technically space is a concept produced by limited small beings with conceptually 3 dimensional senses and information, scrabbling in the dark like little amoeba searching for minerals deep in the earths crust.

so safe is relative to what we have on hand at any given time, with what we can conceive and or believe to achieve

the galactic consciousness knows all and we are but specs in its life span and liken our self's to simple molecules in its living breathing cells.

i could do a 10:45 appointment if 15:30 doesn't work. or i can do a double booking if you would both like to attended together, i also offer couples therapy - Theres Cookies!
 
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Associate
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Ancient people were capable of amazing things and had both vision and skill. We do them a disservice by assuming they were unable to undertake great works.
This is something that it took me a while to realise. The people that did these things were modern humans with the same faculties as us. They might not have had as many shoulders to stand on but it didn't stop them hoiking bricks about.

Agree that Avebury and Silbury Hill are worth a look, and there's a long barrow nearby too.
 
Soldato
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This is something that it took me a while to realise. The people that did these things were modern humans with the same faculties as us. They might not have had as many shoulders to stand on but it didn't stop them hoiking bricks about.

Agree that Avebury and Silbury Hill are worth a look, and there's a long barrow nearby too.

Yep, most evidence of their lives has been lost, which means there is a lot of guessing.

West Kennet long barrow!

Wayland's Smithy (not named after Waylon Smithers!) near uffington is fabulous, too. Often there is no-one there. I left an old silver florin there, as per legend.
 
Commissario
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Panting like a fiend
This is something that it took me a while to realise. The people that did these things were modern humans with the same faculties as us. They might not have had as many shoulders to stand on but it didn't stop them hoiking bricks about.

Agree that Avebury and Silbury Hill are worth a look, and there's a long barrow nearby too.
Yup

They weren't any dumber than us, they just had a different set of tools and knowledge base.

I have few doubts that a lot of the "ancient" craftspeople would probably take to modern tools very quickly and probably surprise a lot of "modern" people with both how good, and how fast they could work with them. Basically the only difference in the tooling that the Egyptian stone masons had and our stone masons from 100 years ago is that the Egyptian tools would have worn out much faster (softer metals) so they either used more of them, were more careful with their use, or had different ways of doing the "bulk" work that we probably dropped for easier ones.
IIRC most of our modern hand tools for that sort of work have fairly direct equivalents, often with little really changing except maybe they've got easier to use precisely or easier to handle. They even used basically the same method for smoothing surfaces as we do today, the difference being we now use different intermediary steps that are easier/faster (sand paper rather than actual sand/grit as a paste between two surfaces, we still use very fine grit between two surfaces for really fine work).
 
Man of Honour
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This is something that it took me a while to realise. The people that did these things were modern humans with the same faculties as us. They might not have had as many shoulders to stand on but it didn't stop them hoiking bricks about.

Agree that Avebury and Silbury Hill are worth a look, and there's a long barrow nearby too.

Also remember the power of Religion and this a a HUGE factor.
We now know there were no slave builders and most of the builders were farmers who had no work during the dry season.
It was built into their heads that the Nile would only flood and only other good things would happen if they pleased their Pharaoh so they were all willing to work hard.
 
Commissario
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Also remember the power of Religion and this a a HUGE factor.
We now know there were no slave builders and most of the builders were farmers who had no work during the dry season.
It was built into their heads that the Nile would only flood and only other good things would happen if they pleased their Pharaoh so they were all willing to work hard.
Yup

It's the same sort of thing that in Europe led to the cathedrals, the tools were really basic by modern standards and there was a lot of trial and error (high bits becoming low bits unexpectedly), and it might take 100 years to do a something we could do in 5 years now with a fraction of the number of people at any one time, but it was done.

People tend to forget that a lot of what we use heavy equipment for these days was possible, but much more time consuming and required a lot more manpower even just a couple of hundred years ago*, and a lot of the little tricks we use for say shifting stuff when we don't have the modern equipment does scale up (people still shift items that might weigh hundreds of kilos on things like improvised sleds and rollers if they don't have a forklift and it's a one off). Going back about 20 years we were putting the roof on our garage and needed to lift some very heavy wooden beams (iirc 9 by 3 inches by 20 foot), and we put together a basic A frame crane that the Romans would have recognised (and probably showed us how to improve it), and used that to lift them - a proper crane could have done it in an hour, but we were happy to spend a day on it.
Even your average building site in some ways for small builds/houses may not have changed much really in 500 years in terms of the basic tools, sure a mini digger, small crane etc can make things move much faster, but you can do the same job with shovels (and possibly pickaxes), rope and a hod carrier or even by hand.


*Personally the film of old dockworkers still amazes me a bit,when I realise exactly how much of a difference pallets and the early forklifts made to offloading cargo, and how quickly it evolved from that to 40 foot shipping containers.
 
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Man of Honour
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It's the same sort of thing that in Europe led to the cathedrals, the tools were really basic by modern standards and there was a lot of trial and error (high bits becoming low bits unexpectedly), and it might take 100 years to do a something we could do in 5 years now with a fraction of the number of people at any one time, but it was done.

The only comparable thing I've seen done in England in modern times using religion has the drug is helping Jehova's Winesses build two Kingdom Halls very fast.
One of my mates is a JoJo and it was an honour to go and help people who came from all over the UK to build these two Halls in less than two weeks each.
One of my tasks was to get the PA Systems up and running.
I did attend the first meetings but that was it after that being Atheist.

Also about 200 yards from that first Kingdom Hall I used to run past an area and one day I saw loads of Pakistani's starting on a project and in what seemed like a month they had built these two houses. I used to stop every night to watch for 5 minutes while the women gave me a cold drink :) -

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9799493,-2.1114516,3a,75y,165.26h,83.77t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sxwpq6WHr0V3gjHQf7L_-2g!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid=xwpq6WHr0V3gjHQf7L_-2g&cb_client=maps_sv.share&w=900&h=600&yaw=165.26070264086061&pitch=6.231604594101199&thumbfov=90!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0&coh=205410&entry=ttu
 
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Soldato
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Also remember the power of Religion and this a a HUGE factor.
We now know there were no slave builders and most of the builders were farmers who had no work during the dry season.
It was built into their heads that the Nile would only flood and only other good things would happen if they pleased their Pharaoh so they were all willing to work hard.

There's a novel by Ismail Kadare (great writer!) where the pyramids are built through sheer bureaucratic inertia. It's what they've always done, and the civil service/ priests etc need to keep doing it or they're out of a job.

My local castle (Caerphilly, 13th century) is ridiculously big. Like, ridiculously. It took 3 years to build it and dig the (enormous) moat. Standing next to it, I can't understand how you could do that in 3 years with modern technology, lat alone with 13th century technology...
 
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Soldato
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16 Aug 2009
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7,861
Yup

It's the same sort of thing that in Europe led to the cathedrals, the tools were really basic by modern standards and there was a lot of trial and error (high bits becoming low bits unexpectedly), and it might take 100 years to do a something we could do in 5 years now with a fraction of the number of people at any one time, but it was done.

People tend to forget that a lot of what we use heavy equipment for these days was possible, but much more time consuming and required a lot more manpower even just a couple of hundred years ago*, and a lot of the little tricks we use for say shifting stuff when we don't have the modern equipment does scale up (people still shift items that might weigh hundreds of kilos on things like improvised sleds and rollers if they don't have a forklift and it's a one off). Going back about 20 years we were putting the roof on our garage and needed to lift some very heavy wooden beams (iirc 9 by 3 inches by 20 foot), and we put together a basic A frame crane that the Romans would have recognised (and probably showed us how to improve it), and used that to lift them - a proper crane could have done it in an hour, but we were happy to spend a day on it.
Even your average building site in some ways for small builds/houses may not have changed much really in 500 years in terms of the basic tools, sure a mini digger, small crane etc can make things move much faster, but you can do the same job with shovels (and possibly pickaxes), rope and a hod carrier or even by hand.


*Personally the film of old dockworkers still amazes me a bit,when I realise exactly how much of a difference pallets and the early forklifts made to offloading cargo, and how quickly it evolved from that to 40 foot shipping containers.
They were built over a long period of time often a century or more the great west towers of Westminster Abbey which most people think of when they imagine a picture of it were only added as recently as the 1780's

Yep, most evidence of their lives has been lost, which means there is a lot of guessing.

West Kennet long barrow!

Wayland's Smithy (not named after Waylon Smithers!) near uffington is fabulous, too. Often there is no-one there. I left an old silver florin there, as per legend.
Been there too lol. Wayland the Smith was blacksmith to the gods in the old norse/germanic mythology its surprising it kept its name honestly
 
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