The Pyramids Were Easy To Build, Actually

[00:00:00][music] >> I'll be brave enough to say it.

[00:00:05]The pyramids are overrated.

[00:00:07]There, I said it. They're overrated.

[00:00:09]They're cool. They're very cool, but in terms of like, you know, amazing feats of humanity, I want to make the case that actually they were pretty easy. The preponderance of theories around how the pyramids were built, honestly, I think we're overthinking it. It's really not that complicated. I mean, people take it all the way to saying that like, you know, it required aliens or some super advanced civilization that only that could have built something so perfect and complex when it's not that perfect and it's not that complex. It's basically just a pile of bricks in the shape of a triangle. I'm sorry. Ancient Egypt is fascinating and it goes so far back. Like, to me, that's the that's the coolest thing about the pyramids.

[00:00:44]They're so much older than all the other wonders of the world. Like, I love the fact that Cleopatra lived closer to today than she did to the building of the pyramids. Like, they were ancient to her.

[00:00:55]They were as ancient to her as the ancient Greece was to us. That is so old!

[00:01:01]That is like the oldest thing. That blows my mind. So, some people look at how old they are and they think that there's no possible way that human beings could have built it all the way back then, but I see it and I just think that, you know, humans are clever and always have been. Seriously, I think that 90% of the viewers on this channel could figure out how to do it if you had enough, you know, time and resources.

[00:01:20]Here's how I think they did it.

[00:01:24]>> [music] >> The pyramid is a special shape. Not because it's sacred or anything, but because it's kind of ubiquitous amongst ancient civilizations. You got the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, the Prasat Kok Ker in Cambodia, the Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee, all shining examples of one of humankind's crowning achievements in architecture.

[00:01:48]Especially that last one. Go Grizzlies.

[00:01:51]Pyramids show up so much that a whole cottage industry has evolved to claim that, you you know, non-humans built them or at least helped humans build them. Which is ridiculous because you know, I'm going to lean forward when I say this.

[00:02:02]A pyramid is literally the easiest thing to build. A pyramid shape makes it very stable, which is important if you use it as a tomb or religious structure, it needs to stand the test of time. So, what stands the test of time more than a pile of blocks arranged in such a way that none of them can fall?

[00:02:19]That's a pyramid.

[00:02:20]So, while, you know, Egypt's pyramids were definitely an impressive work of human achievement, and then man, I really wish I could have seen them back in the day.

[00:02:28]They are beyond understanding, and they don't require any special or advanced technology.

[00:02:33]Just good old human ingenuity and gumption.

[00:02:36]All right, there are several competing theories about how the pyramids were constructed. In 2018, researchers discovered a ramp system dating back 4,500 years. It was at Hatnub, a rock quarry in Egypt, and apparently they used this ramp to get the stones out of the quarry, and then get them on their way, and that led to the giant ramp theory. So, the giant ramp theory is that the Egyptians built a ramp that would increase in size for each layer added to the pyramid. This is perfectly reasonable for maybe the first third of the pyramid, but after a while the angle becomes too steep to get these 2-ton blocks up the ramp without it, you know, sliding back and crushing the workers.

[00:03:09]Yeah, apparently if you're going to build a ramp and you keep it at a reasonable angle that's easy enough for them to move it up, you'd have to build a 1-km long ramp to reach the top of the pyramid, which is basically another pyramid worth of building that's required. Also, there's no evidence of a 1-km long ramp anywhere near the pyramids. Um there are ramps at the quarry, but not at the pyramids. So, some have adjusted this theory to suggest that maybe they ran a ramp around the outside of the pyramid that spiraled from the bottom to the top. You might call this the outside spiral ramp theory. So, the problem with this one is that they need a line of sight to ensure the accuracy of the lines on the outside. Uh so, an outside ramp would actually obscure the view needed to do that. So, this led to the inside spiral ramp theory. This one says that the ramps were built and then the pyramid was kind of built around the ramps. This was put forth by a computer scientist named Vicente Luis Rozell Roig. He claimed that if the ramp was built into the pyramid and then covered with stone blocks from the top down as it was completed, then nothing would be left to remove.

[00:04:08]There wouldn't be any visible traces of it left behind. The problem is this would be extremely difficult to pull off. Another problem is that it might be too tight of a turn when to move these giant blocks inside of the small corridors. Like some have suggested that maybe they actually built landings on the outside in the corners so that they would actually go outside the pyramid in that part and then go back in. None of this IS CONFIRMED THOUGH.

[00:04:36]BOTH OF THESE SPIRAL RAMP ideas would require some extreme engineering to pull off. Another theory that's kind of wild is the water buoyancy theory. This is the idea that they actually pumped in water into the pyramid and then floated the blocks to the top of it on these buoyant ramps. Now, it does make some sense. We know that they floated the stones down the Nile to get to the pyramids in the first place from the quarry.

[00:04:57]And there were some water features as part of the Giza complex. The problem is it's almost impossibly difficult and probably way too slow.

[00:05:04]And there's no evidence of giant canals built around the pyramids or a water system on the inside. It's a neat idea, but probably unlikely. This next theory is pretty wild. Now, I heard about it from Dame Lee's channel. She calls it the cannibalization theory. An independent researcher named Huni Chue came up with this idea. And according to him, the pyramids were basically just overbuilt. They started with a huge trapezoidal mass with a ramp system. And then when it was topped out, it was then carved down and they left the pyramid shape behind. And then all of this leftover stone was used to build the next pyramid. And the math does kind of work out if you consider the entire Giza complex as one big project. So, it's interesting.

[00:05:40]I'm not entirely sure if that follows the chronology of the building of the pyramid complex. Others probably know that better than me. Also again, it kind of seems like a lot of extra work. This next theory, though, this is this is starting to blow my skirt up a little.

[00:05:52]This is called the Grand Gallery Counterweight Theory. So, inside the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khufu, there's a space called the Grand Gallery. It's this massive, steep hallway at a 45° angle. It's 9 m high, 45 m long, but it only has about 2 m wide. The walls are corbeled, with each stone kind of set a few centimeters from the one below. It leads up to the King's Chamber. And the general consensus is that it's sort of designed to create a sense of awe as you approach the final resting place of the pharaoh. But some people believe that the purpose of the Grand Gallery was actually to house a counterweight that helped move the blocks up the side of the pyramid. This would let them go up steeper angles than they'd be able to do with the the giant ramps as I was talking about earlier. I like this theory a lot, and there does seem to be some evidence for it.

[00:06:34]Apparently, there are some marks on the inside of the gallery that suggest that maybe something has scraped against it multiple times, as if a counterweight was going up and down. There are also little ridges along each side of the Grand Gallery that that were always kind of considered to be maybe benches and places for people to sit, but they may have been a surface for the wheels of the logs to roll on. I like this idea.

[00:06:53]It feels like a lot less construction than these other ideas, and it makes a lot more sense for this weird shaft right in the middle of the pyramid.

[00:07:00]>> You said shaft.

[00:07:03]>> You damn right.

[00:07:05]>> The only problem is it might be a little too slow to get all the rocks in the place that they need to be in the in the 20 years that they took to build the pyramid. But it does have an element that ties into a theory that I've looked into a little bit. Counterweights.

[00:07:18]I like me some counterweights. So, there are images from ancient Egypt carved into the walls and whatnot that show people pulling sleds with blocks on them. So, many take that to believe that that's, you know, how they moved them up the pyramids, right? But that may have just been how they got the blocks to the pyramids. I mean, to them, maybe that was the actual feat, just getting them there and cutting them out of the the quarry in the first place. So, So, know, they documented that, and they never even documented how they actually constructed the pyramid because to them it was just that obvious. Another case of it's so common and obvious that at the time that nobody thought to write it down. Counterweights been used about history to make it easy to move heavy things like like drawbridges in medieval castles. And the Grand Gallery counterweight theory uses this idea. But what if they just had like scale-shaped fulcrums with a counterweight on the other end that's maybe just a little bit less than the average weight of the stones. And then once the block is loaded on the fulcrum, they could just add some workers to the other side of the counterweight until the stone lifts off the ground. And then it's just easily guided up to the next level. They could probably have even rigged each lever to move the counterweight in and out giving it more or less torque to adjust its lift. Just line them all the way up each face. One level hands it to the next one above which hands it to the level above that and so [music] on. The math is kind of crazy. They say that in order to move the 2.3 million blocks over 20 years, it would take something like a block every 2 minutes.

[00:08:36]With four going up each side at a time, each lift had maybe 10 minutes or so to load and unload a block. So, I kind of got this idea from a guy named Brad Porter. So, Brad Porter is a former engineer at Amazon. He's now the CEO of Collaborative Robotics. And his idea about the counterweight I thought was pretty interesting. He says that instead of using blocks for weights, uh only workers were used. He points to a story from Herodotus who is a Greek historian who traveled through Egypt in the 4th century BCE.

[00:09:01]He claimed that when he saw the pyramids, the locals told him that the pyramids were made by {quote} machines made of short wooden planks that raised the blocks one level at a time. Of course, that was 2,000 years after they were built. So, the locals probably didn't know any better than he did, but that was the theory that they were going by. Does need to be pointed out that there's no evidence of this in any writings or any wall carvings or anything. But it would help explain these lines that you see running down the center of each of the pyramid's faces. Like that could be where the lifts lined up which they would have been in the center in order to reach all the way to the top. But here's the thing. The pyramids aren't just a huge pile of rocks despite what I said earlier. There is stuff in there. Take the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid for example. It's made entirely of pink granite and its flat roof supports more than 400 tons of masonry. And as long as it's been around, 4,500 years, only one small crack has appeared in the ceiling.

[00:09:50]That's pretty impressive. A red granite sarcophagus that sits inside the chamber and it weighs 4 tons. So, it was probably in there like put in there while they're in the middle of construction. Between the King's Chamber and the lower Queen's Chamber, the Grand Gallery which I talked about before, you enter the Queen's Chamber through a horizontal passageway from the lower end of the Grand Gallery. This chamber is entirely made of finished limestone blocks with a gabled ceiling. The walls are bare with no inscriptions, but there is a niche in the east wall about 4 m up from the floor. It has a corbel ceiling and a statue may have stood there. And there are two air shafts in the Queen's Chamber. They were originally blocked up and they weren't discovered until 1872.

[00:10:25]They're only about 20 cm square and they rise from the chamber's north and south walls climbing up through the masonry above. And they're not straight either.

[00:10:32]For example, the north one kind of bends possibly to curve around the Grand Gallery. Similar shafts are found in the King's Chamber. These air shafts are some of the most mysterious features of the Great Pyramid. Um, one theory was that they were there for air ventilation during construction. Now, that makes sense, but they don't all go all the way out to the outside, so maybe not. Um, also no vents and shafts have been found in any of the other pyramids. They did find small limestone doors at the top of the shafts and that suggests that maybe there were other purposes possibly for astronomical or religious reasons. But another purpose maybe is that it was used for ropes that went down to the Grand Gallery counterweight.

[00:11:10]Huh? See?

[00:11:13]I just pulled that out of my ass. And at the bottom of the Great Pyramid is the subterranean chamber. It's unfinished and located 30 m below the surface of the plateau. Imagine standing in that subterranean chamber cuz like you would have literally 2.3 million stone blocks above your head weighing 6.5 million tons.

[00:11:33]Cool.

[00:11:35]There's a couple of theories around the subterranean chamber. One is that they thought that that's where Khufu was originally going to be buried.

[00:11:41]Uh and the reason it's unfinished is because he changed his mind. He actually wanted his King's Chamber up above.

[00:11:46]That's one theory. There's also the theory that they created that at the beginning of the process just in case Khufu died halfway through the pyramid being finished. But based on all these chambers and like air shafts and stuff, it might make sense that the Great Pyramid was built in sections. Like one thing that kind of blows my mind about the pyramid is just the pyramid shape is that um of course, the higher up you go, the fewer blocks you need. Just to illustrate how much of an effect that is, the lower third of the pyramid holds 80% of the blocks. That also just happens to line up with the bottom of the King's Chamber. So, you know, maybe the foundation was built, the lower third, using a ramp, the way we imagine they would because at that level you could keep the ramp at a a decent angle and whatnot. And then the inside structures were built on top of that.

[00:12:29]And then the remaining 20% of the blocks were moved up on those counter balanced fulcrums and and built around the inside chambers. So, yeah, maybe they used a combination of all these theories. The point is they had a lot of perfectly plausible options and may have used a combination of them. But that's just basic engineering, which they had mastered and had practiced on many previous pyramids for centuries. Nothing crazy or supernatural. It was a wild monumental project and they just figured it out.

[00:12:54]Take that ancient aliens guy.

[00:12:56]So, that's my theory. Um thing is, there's no evidence of any of this.

[00:13:00]>> [laughter] >> There's records of all kinds of stuff.

[00:13:02]There's records of the pay that they paid their workers. They weren't slaves.

[00:13:05]They were well-paid workers. The pay, the logistics of procuring and transporting the stones.

[00:13:11]There's records of all that stuff.

[00:13:12]They're inscribed into the walls and whatnot, but there's no records or images about how they were built.

[00:13:16]Recently though, a group called Scan Pyramids used a few different methods to scan the insides of the pyramids and they actually found a couple of voids that remain unexplained. The group uses this like cosmic ray particle detector to see what's going on inside the pyramid. And in the Great Pyramid, they found this large void deep inside of it in 2017. In fact, it was the first big structure found inside that pyramid since like the Middle Ages. It's basically a large open space above the Grand Gallery. It's about 30 m long and 2 m wide. Another thing to keep in mind, what we see today on the pyramids is not remotely what people saw when the pyramids were built. Like white limestone casing stones once covered the outside flat, making the face smooth and shiny. And they were taken down in the Middle Ages and reused to build mosques and fortresses in Cairo, such as the Alabaster Mosque. The Pyramid of Khafre is the only one that still has some of the original casing stones at the top.

[00:14:06]So, you can kind of get an idea of what they look like. This is like if you remove the brick facade from a McMansion. You know, you're not you're not really seeing it the way the builders wanted you to see it. We're just looking at the stuff underneath when we look at the pyramids today.

[00:14:18]Also, these things are 4,600 years old.

[00:14:21]A lot has happened to them since they were built. Like most of what we see when we look at them has nothing to do with like how or why they were built.

[00:14:28]And they're also the result of 46 centuries of travelers, conquerors, looters, and thieves passing through.

[00:14:33]It's an exercise in human erosion as much as human ingenuity. For example, I remember those lines going down the sides that I talked about. I said maybe that could have been like where they put the the line of fulcrums. Um They're probably just from falling rocks at the summit, actually. That's the prevailing consensus amongst Egyptologists that they've just been worn down over time from rocks that have fallen, probably dozens of them, either by human or just by, you know, time. And those rocks would have fallen in those four directions, traveling straight down from the top. In other words, you know, right down the center.

[00:15:05]Making a line. Ancient Egyptians were just as clever as we are, and there are multiple plausible ways they could have built the pyramids. They were easy to build, and they had plenty of practice on multiple pyramids for centuries. For example, the tombs of early Egyptian kings were housed in bench-shaped mounds called mastabas. Well, actually the first pyramid was built by stacking six mastabas on top of each other to form the step pyramid. That was around 2780 BCE done by King Djoser's architect and it's considered to be the first pyramid in Egypt. It transitioned to smooth-sided pyramids during the fourth dynasty. That's when the Bent Pyramid was built and it's called that because Well, look at it.

[00:15:40]It's angle of incline changes from 51° to around 43°. That gives it that bent look. And this one was built for the pharaoh Sneferu and it clearly was an architectural mistake. Uh his son turned out to be Khufu who built the Great Pyramid.

[00:15:54]Probably just outdo his dad.

[00:15:56]I think we can say he succeeded.

[00:15:58]Actually, the credit should go to the architect Hemiunu. He's considered the genius who designed and executed the Great Pyramid. And I'm sure he was a genius who built off the experience of previous pyramids going back hundreds of years. So, yeah, by the time the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza, they had it dialed in. I should probably wrap up this video by pointing out as many uh Egyptologists will probably do in the comments, I barely know what I'm talking about here.

[00:16:22]There are Egyptologists who have spent their entire lives studying this and I just skim the surface and like a good YouTuber, I'm sitting here telling you I know what's going on. So, I would highly suggest checking out the channel History for Granted. He has tons of videos specifically about the building of the Giza pyramids. I also recommend Dummy Lee's video on the cannibalization theory. I'll put that link down below.

[00:16:41]Now, while watching this video, you might have noticed all the footage of the pyramids and you might have thought, "Hey, did did Joe go all the way to Egypt for this video?"

[00:16:48]Um N- No. No, I I did not.

[00:16:53]I'm going to share a little secret with you that most people won't tell you. Uh we use stock media libraries.

[00:16:59]Specifically, Storyblocks. Storyblocks is the 100% human-made stock footage library that's our go-to for this channel anyway for background footage that kind of helps get across the ideas that I talk about. They've got pretty much anything you can think of with millions of assets, literally millions, including footage, music, sound effects, and even VFX templates. Like, I would love to go out and shoot all this stuff myself, but I'd probably only get like one video out per year.

[00:17:22]>> [music] >> Um, Storyblocks makes it possible for us to keep putting out these videos at the rate that we do. And let's just be honest, this footage is shot by professional photographers that are way better than me anyway. If you're a creator or an editor, they make it super easy to incorporate this into your workflow. They actually have plugins that work inside of Adobe Creative Cloud, meaning you don't even have to leave your editor to find the footage you need. The customizable templates also work seamlessly across Premiere, After Effects, Apple Motion, and DaVinci Resolve. And one of the things that doesn't get talked about nearly enough is that all their assets are pre-licensed.

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[00:18:09]They're offering 15% off any annual plan for a limited time, and that discount's only available through my link. Thanks to Storyblocks for supporting this video and just for supporting artists in general.

[00:18:18]>> [music] >> Link's down below.

[00:18:20]All right, thank you guys for watching.

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