Concrete Blocks used in Great Pyramids Construction

Yeah. Sure. A really credulous explanation. Takes a LOT of fuel to fire a cement kiln to 900 C. Big kiln required. etc. etc. Sounds like the Professor was conned and in turn conned the ACS. He created as many problems as he allegedly solved.

I'll stick with the method shown in/at: <www.theforgottentechnology.com> If this is not the complete solution then it is pretty close! Makes more sense that the Prof's.

Hmmm . . . I have been in each pyramid and sat around on the blocks and they look like cut stone to me (really cool joints . . . tight tight tight), but I'm no PhD Rock Doc either. Could explain those 48,235 tall rubber boots they found in the slaves locker room.

Yet another implausible, over complicated explanation. One of the best lessons I was ever taught was 'KISS - keep it simple, stupid!' My own theory about the Pyramids is – 10,000 lads on double time, no problem. Of course, it being a government job they would have been late on delivery anyway…………

"Yeah. Sure. A really credulous explanation. Takes a LOT of fuel to fire a cement kiln to 900 C. Big kiln required. etc. etc."

You are missing the point, we are not talking about Portland cement here we are talking about geopolymers. I recently read about this geopolymer that is produced from the ash of coal fired power stations. The production of geopolymers dose not necessarily require the sustained high temperatures that Portland cement dose so it may have been possible that the Egyptians had a technology that was based on a geopolymer that they discovered by accident

Many people believe that concrete is only a modern development but in fact it is a rediscovery. The Romans were using a substance not that dissimilar to Portland cement when they built the Pantheon. The Romans were great engineers and builders but they were not great researchers and you can bet you last dollar that any technology they had was nicked from some other poor society that they overran. If the Romans had concrete then its not that much of a stretch to think that Egyptians had it first.

If you wand to apply the KISS rule then I would suggest that construction like the Great Pyramid of Giza would have been a been a whole lot simpler to build by pouring concrete than lumping great lumps of rock. Personally I have suspected for a long time that the Egyptians had a trick or two up their sleeves, that we do not yet understand, when the build the pyramids.

Hi masu, I don't dispute the idea of the Egyptians using concrete, but I don't see any way that method helped build the things. I've been there, and I can assure you, they aren't poured! They are big lumps of carved rock. As a feet of basic engineering it's just too impressive, even though there are quite well established theories as to how it was done, the battering effect as you stand and look up, kicks those theories to death with great big hob nailed boots.

P.S. Be on the lookout for twelve English fugitives suspected of being in you country, they are wanted for impersonating a cricket team.

I have not been fortunate enough to visit the pyramids at Giza but could it be possible that large chunks of the interior are filled with a concrete like substance? For example to construct it they would build a border of ordinary stone then in fill the bulk by pouring the concrete in. Another technique would be once the border is in place the internal blocks are cast in situ with wooden framework.

There are numerous techniques that could have been use to fill in huge sections of the interior that would be hard to detect without either dismantling the whole thing or drilling holes through it.

I don't know, I havn't seen it my self but could you envisage how a liquid that hardened to form a rock like substance could have been used that makes its use unapparent?

"I recently read about this geopolymer that is produced from the ash of coal fired power stations. The production of geopolymers dose not necessarily require the sustained high temperatures that Portland cement dose so it may have been possible that the Egyptians had a technology that was based on a geopolymer that they discovered by accident"

Now all we have to do is figure where the big coal fired power plant was located to supply the required flyash.

Take care as to what you read (and believe), it may lead you astray.

The simplest explanation is usually the best.

What I was trying to show with my links is that there are multiple types of geopolymers and that they can be produced for a variety of readily available materials. Since coal has been used as a fuel since the bronze age there is no reason that the Egyptians would not have had access to the ash left after burning coal.

The second link also describes the technique to produce a geopolymer that only requires a temperature of 90° C, something the Egyptians could also have easily achieved.

If the Egyptians did have a substance that was similar to concrete why wouldn't they use it in the construction of something like the pyramids at Giza? The use of a concrete type building material would certainly speed up the construction process and it's not that much of a stretch to think the Egyptians had something like it.

If you look at the logistics of building the great pyramid at Giza it would require the transporting and positioning of one of those huge blocks ever few minutes for 20 years. Which seems a more plausible solution:

Thousands of men manhandling 1.5 tonne blocks up sandy slopes and positioning one every few minutes for a couple of decades

Or

Thousands of men manhandling 50 Kg bags of concrete and buckets of water with ropes and pulleys every few seconds and mixing them in situ for a couple of decades.

To me it sounds more plausible that the manhandled man sized sacks of concrete than huge stone blocks. It may not be true but it certainly is possible.

And Stan, your observations are right on target. BTW has anyone discovered any nearby coal deposits the Egyptians could have mined?

The article stated that Portland cement based concrete has a life expectancy of 150 years. What is keeping the Pantheon up.

Ah, but they didn't say when the 150 years starts, did they?

Howetwo in post #10 asked

"The article stated that Portland cement based concrete has a life expectancy of 150 years. What is keeping the Pantheon up."

As I said in my post it was not to dissimilar to Portland cement, that doesn't mean it was exactly the same as Portland cement. The concept of a viscous liquid type substance that over time hardened to form a material suitable for construction purposes has been around since water hit dirt and formed mud. The trick was that the Roman engineers had a material that once hardened was no longer soluble in water. There is no getting round the fact that the Pantheon was constructed with a material that consisted of various grades of aggregate mixed with a cementing agent that hardened when water was added.

People have been thinking up fanciful explanations of how the Egyptians, Mayans, Incas and others managed to shape rocks to a degree that we find difficult even with modern technology. It seem to me that we may have overlooked the most obvious answer of all and that is that they had a technique to manufacture geopolymers and cast the stones in situ. If you think about it it's a far more plausible explanation for these ancient structures than many of the far fetched schemes put forward to date.

I must be missing something...is this concrete so like the natural blocks that we couldn't figure this out before? Is the concrete that good?

It seems to me that it should be pretty simple to non-destructively figure out even fine differences in materials. I don't know what frequencies of sound you'd use, or even if stone creates useable non-linear distortion (generating harmonics that can dramatically improve imaging) but it's certainly possible to use sonic imaging to determine where materials change (stone veneer/ concrete or whatever); and from the sonic properties determine just what is what.

According to "Moses" they were manufactured. They stomped and crushed something similar to straw into the mix to bind the material together. Being an organic material, it would eventually dissolve leaving microscopic holes inside the block. Todays concrete only lasts approximately 99 years, according to civil engineering. This is because it never stops curing. Concrete curing involves a continuous shrinking, and hardening which makes the material more brittle until it eventually crumbles. Any material that would stop curing at a specific time would last longer. The minute holes could also play a part in giving room for contraction. (also the dry conditions and lack of frost)

I need the Egyptians to come pour my driveway. It lasted about 4 years.

As 'said' earlier, I have been there (about 30 times) taking each newbie to the area with me on yet another pyramid tour and those blocks look SOLID baby! But, I have been wrong more than right in my life.

Now one thing I thought I did see is one year they were repairing the Sphinx with what looked like man made blocks, not chopped out stone. But that was in my drinking days.

Hey PlbMak, remember the Stella Export 1 liter beers with 'stuff' in the bottom of the bottles?

Hi mate, no sorry, not a clue, probably because I never drink 'lager', being a bit old school when it comes to beverages.

Gee -I'd sure like to believe that this is a possibility - "the pyramids credibly explained at last!" ... but the actual service life of concrete (albeit the portland variety, the only kind that we have broad and recorded experience of for nearly two centurys) does NOT lead us to expect service life of millenia.

Think of all of those crumbling apartment buildings in the sovblok countries. Friends who visited Estonia and Moscow before the Berlin Wall came down said that the night was puntuated with the sound of falling 'high-rise' balconies from failing concrete. Visitors were warned to stay away from the buildings for safetys' own sake.

Or we can look back a little further to the huge amount of concrete produced during WW 2. A number of bunkers and emplacements here in Eastern Canada, at the ripe old age of 50 years, are "failed" structurally. These were not the product of slave labour, the oft-cited reason for the poor quality of concrete constructed by the Todt Organization during the same period - but rather the product of military engineers or commercial low bidders.

Everything else that we have built from concrete is failed or failing in under a century!

The exceptions would be the "bomber" aerodromes and some of the unreinforced concrete highways . They may go unfailing for, perhaps, centuries. Who can yet say?

However, it requires a leap of faith to suggest that concrete even exists in the pyramids.

This is a question to be addressed by geologists. Sorry guys , I don't mean to let the team down - but having a foot planted in each field I feel that 'possibly' there is a natural explanation for the "stone".

The CBC Radio show 'Quirks and Quarks' did an interview with Dr. Michel Barsoum last Saturday. He explains his evidence and how he thinks it may have been done. He roughly estimates that 20% of the pyramid was poured. He admits that his research has yet to be confirmed.

The concrete is said to be practically indistinguishable from limestone. On the microscopic scale, the blocks are amorphous which indicates that the limestone formed rather quickly as opposed to natural limestone.

Dr. Barsoum's geopolymer and pyramids research page. There is a video of replica pyramid blocks being made:

https://www.materials.drexel.edu/Pyramids/

It seems quite entirely possible that this was used in pyramid construction. In time there will be much more research done on this we will have evidence for or against this theory. Regardless, this new concrete may find uses in modern construction or at least for appearance on sidewalks and facades if it proves cheaper than real cut limestone.

I found something a while back, that showed how they could've made concrete blocks.

The title of the video is: How the Egyptians Built the Pyramids.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4

I think that's the one that I saw before. I like the costumes . I thought it was rather insightful, and shows something you may not have seen before. That might explain why they look the way they do, because it actually looks like natural stone from the area, and the thousands of years of being sand blasted would wear away the marks from being mined anyways... wouldn't it? I think that I remember reading that it would.

-Nick

I'm sure I've seen something in the past where the quarry's had been identified and linked to the blocks in the pyramids, would this potentially be redundant?

There's no doubt that they quarried a whole lot of stone, but much of the rock in the area is very similar to other stone, so I bet that it would be hard to prove that "this stone came from here". Or else the stone actually was proven to be from that area miles away, it could be true, I don't remember. If my memory serves me correctly, my old high school history class told me that they took stone for the Great Pyramid of Giza from many miles away down the Nile. Now how improbable does that sound to be able to move 6 million tonnes of rock on a river with ancient boat technology? Travel up and down the Nile is really easy because the current flows in the opposite direction of the wind.

-Nick

My personal opinion, and this is only from a gut instinct, is that they more than likely used a combination of cut stones and some sort of concrete material. Where the it was clearly visible they would use the cut blocks and where non critical they would use the concrete and cast the blocks in situ.

From the quarrying process there would have been a considerable amount of rubble that if used as aggregate would result in cast blocks with a similar chemistry to the cut blocks. Given that concrete was around at least 2,000 years ago then stretching it back to the construction of the pyramids at Giza isn't that much of an unbelievable concept.

If you were building the pyramids today using modern materials you would use concrete wherever possible simply because of its ease of use. So if they indeed had the technology when they built the pyramids why wouldn't they use it whenever and wherever possible?

There is a fair bit of written evidence from the Egyptian era of daily life, I'd like to know if there is the slightest hint of this sort of activity in the records.

Good point and to answer truthfully I havn't got a clue. Dose anybody know how to write concrete in hieroglyph?

I did a bit of searching on the internet and evidently there is a fair amount of evidence that the Egyptians use concrete. The History of Concrete states that they were the first users and at least used a type of mortar to render structures and give them a smooth finish. Scientists Say Concrete Was Used In Pyramids also talks about the use of concrete in the construction of the pyramids so it would appear that the theory is somewhat more wide spread than one might have thought.

Buildings of Artificial Stone talks about how the Romans managed use a concrete that was water proof by adding a particular volcanic ash. Since the Romans nicked just about every piece of technology they had there is a good chance that it was somebody else that worked out how to do it.

This all points to the conclusion that the Egyptians had access to at least a rudimentary form of concrete. It's also not beyond imagination that they knew about the same volcanic ash that the Romans used to make the concrete waterproof.

So in answer to

"There is a fair bit of written evidence from the Egyptian era of daily life, I'd like to know if there is the slightest hint of this sort of activity in the records.

It would appear that there is a considerable amount of evidence of this sort of activity in the records.

This all points to the conclusion that the Egyptians had access to at least a rudimentary form of concrete. It's also not beyond imagination that they knew about the same volcanic ash that the Romans used to make the concrete waterproof.

IIRC the Romans were using the volcanic ash to the north of Vesuvius.

This would indicate the Egyptians were hauling their ash back to Egypt by barges.

"This would indicate the Egyptians were hauling their ash back to Egypt by barges"

Or alternatively, initially the Egyptians sourced ash from a volcano on the African continent. The Romans then realized that the ash from the north of Vesuvius was the same and like they did so often, they just nicked the idea. The initial source, because of increased use by both Romans and Egyptians, may have been mined out precipitating the switch, or the Vesuvius site was just more suitably located.

Whatever the case; whether they were hauling their ashes on barges, or sitting them in carts, there's enough still unknown about this that we must say there are a lot of ash holes in Egypt.

Very droll.