While the Apocalypse – Blog

Image by Charles Sharp, via Wikimedia Commons

The compelling but less-than-straightforward question of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids has inspired all manner of theory and speculation, grounded to varying degrees in physical reality. Sheer manpower must have played a large part, and it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that various simple machines were involved. But in certain cases, could the machines have been less simple than we imagine today? Such is the proposal advanced in a paper recently published in PLOS ONE, “On the Possible Use of Hydraulic Force to Assist with Building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.”

“The Step Pyramid was built around 2680 BCE, part of a funerary complex for the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “It’s located in the Saqqara necropolis and was the first pyramid to be built, almost a ‘proto-pyramid’ that originally stood some 205 feet high,” as against the more widely known Great Pyramid of Giza, which reached 481 feet.

According to the paper’s first author Xavier Landreau, head of the French research institute Paleotechnic, his team’s intensive research on “the watersheds to the west of the Saqqara plateau” led to “the discovery of “structures they believe constituted a dam, a water treatment facility, and a possible internal hydraulic lift system within the pyramid,” which could have been used to move heavy limestone.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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