Turns out they used sleds:



But theres a trick to it, Wet sand. as you can see in the picture of above, at the foot of the statue there is a guy pouring water onto the sand. as it turns out, wet sand is twice as firm as dry sand, and reduces the pulling load in half compared to the pulling the same load on dry sand. Dry sand would also create burms infront of the sled that would have to be flattened down every so many feet, wet sand does not create these burms. so there you have it, that's how the Egyptians would transfer huge blocks from their quarrys to the pyramids, a sled and some wet sand.

I thought it was quite interesting so I figured id share, heres the original article:

http://gizmodo.com/scientists-discovered-the-egyptian-secret-to-moving-hug-1569802879

This post was edited by Ylem122 on May 1 2014 12:50am

o shit, i saw this article and posted it in GC, where no one cared.

But, srsly, the Pyramids have long stood as one of the great mysteries of ancient civilization... pretty cool that we figured out how they were made (and that it was so obvious!)

Wat?? yeah didn't even see your thread in GC.

wet sand!!!! us and all our technolocal advancements, and a kid making a sand castle at the beach would have had a better chance of getting it right. crazy.

also the picture in the article has these numbers under it where people commented on it, funny stuff.

Wasn't the big mystery in how they actually built the pyramid (ie lifted the blocks) than how they got the stones to the construction site?

Thats pretty neat. I thought for sure it was aliens.

yes you are correct. They still haven't solved the mystery..

they would build mud ramps with a plaster layer on the top to increase the hardness, then pull the stones up them, then they would build another level of ramp onto of the first ramp, then pull the stones up that repeting the process till they got the stone where they wanted it.

grantie used for some of the rooms came as far away as 700 km, carrying a 2.5 ton granite stone 700 KM, really dosnt seem that bad, as most of the trip would be done on the nile, but getting it to the nile, or from the nile to the pyramid was a chalange. this could have been done with the Egyptians using premade paths of similar construction to the ramps I mention above, just for going from the quarry to the nile and then from the nile to the pyramids.


but most the lime stone came from several quarries in the area, which means that many of the 2.5 ton stones needed to be moved some 5-10 km over just sand to get to the pyramid they were building.


moving a 2.5 ton stone 5 kilometers over sand just using a sled, its the kind of thing that would make you think aliens were involved, but nope, it was just some guy pouring water on the sand to make it more firm for the sled.

This post was edited by Ylem122 on May 5 2014 02:21am

using that process seems super improbable, considering the last few levels would take such ridiculous force to get it up at that angle while traveling DOWN the other side of the pyramid.

They used their machines duh

its not that big of a problem when you have 10,000+ people working together.