Unfortunately the problems of pyramid building and the examinination of the technical and physical problems connected with this is mostly ignored in Egyptologic literature. The most common answer is of the sort "Well, they are there so they must have built them somehow". So it is no wonder that ideas about helping aliens or moulded stones are flourishing. In the last years I examined different angles of the problems, partly with experiments, partly by examining the underlying physics.
Many problems are very complex. If you only take a look at the whole thing it often seems to be impossible to find a solution.
The first thing you learn when studying physics is therefore trying to break down the big problem in smaller, individual solveable parts. At the same time you have to decide how important the individual parts are for the whole problem. Often it is possible to explain the the whole problem even when you have only solved 80, 60, even less than 50% of the isolated parts. With the question of pyramid building you can for example ignore all questions about who when and why someone planned the whole thing, or questions about architecture and religion.
The whole problem of pyramid building can be broken down into 3 main parts, each of which can be seperated into smaller parts. The 3 main groups are:
The next few pages are only dealing with transport problems. Quarry work will later be discussed in a special section on this site.
We can sort the individual transport problems top down from primary problems (no solution found -> the rest of the problem is not solveable) to less important ones:
Is it possible to build and maintain a ramp?
Most of these problems will be discussed on the next pages.
Pyramid building