Holy Annunaki, Batman… the giant pyramids weren’t made by aliens?
As fun as it is to pretend some almond-eyed creatures from The Fourth Kind were responsible for descending outta a wormhole in the sky and into the era of King Tut to erect majestic pyramids, we always knew there had to be another way.
(Right, guys? We knew that? Guys?)
Whatever your beliefs, hopefully most of us have been trying our hardest to find a more Spock-like explanache. Rather than the “who”, the real question was the “how”. How’d we sling this heavier-than-giant-truck stuff across the sands? I remember seeing this documentary on the ancient wonders. The shiz they’d rig up to make giant columns was all sans any of that modern day machine awesomery we have – like the orangey-yellow machines at construction sites that say “CAT” on them (yet look nothing like cats to my dismay).
(The meeting of technology and magic and an orangey-yellow cat.)
But even these shows pussyfooted (zing) around the actual answer they couldn’t provide. It’s only been recently that at least one part is an oh-so obvious answer has been staring us right in the face with its Eye o’ Horus: Water. Just as much as it has kept us alive through ingestion, irrigated crops, and allowed us to bob around from one piece of land to the next, good old H20 was also apparently responsible for slinging giant blocks of rock through the sand. What they’d do was lubricate wherever the big stone was traveling with oils or water. and then trudge along, with their giant statues or whatever in tow. Boom. Friction deactivated.
During excavation, massive dolerite “pounders” were used to pulverize the stone around the edge of the granite block that needed to be extracted…. 60 to 70 men would pound out the stone. At the bottom, they rammed wooden pegs into slots they had cut, and filled the slots with water. The pegs would expand, splitting the stone, and the block was then slid down onto a waiting boat.
Teams of oxen or manpower were used to drag the stones on a prepared slipway that was lubricated with oil. Redford notes that a scene from a 19th century B.C. tomb in Middle Egypt depicts “an alabaster statue 20 feet high pulled by 173 men on 4 ropes with a man lubricating the slipway as the pulling went on.
Yeah, okay.
But science still can’t answer the big things.
Like, why durian makes life seem like the trip Beavis and Butthead have as “Rollercoaster of Love” plays?
Or how my dog knows it’s safe to shit on the carpet only when I take a phone call (and can’t yell at her lest I shatter my impeccable pristine image to whoever’s-on-the-other-end-doesn’t-matter-cause-it’s-all-about-me)?
Or why I always wake up at 3 A.M., certain the evil clown’s beneath my bed again?
Answer me that, science channel.
Ah. Well played, sir.
Well played.