Question: Could You And I Build The Great Pyramid At Giza? If not, how did someone human do it 6 – 10,000 years ago? Just for fun lets think about doing it as archaeologists have said it was done!
I might be willing to help raise the money for the land if someone can help me with the engineering and needed tools (machinery), to do it exactly as they were supposed to have done it centuries ago and assure 
me we can pull it off. It is after all something they did about 6,000 years ago, before the invention of the pulley. The archaeologists said they did it using vine ropes to pull the slabs of stone over well rounded trees used as wheels on the desert sand.
Trees as transportation: Of course thousands of years ago they built it in the current desert and three are no convenient trees so it is likely they imported the trees from far away. Perhaps they floated them in on barges across the Mediterranean sea. It is not that far, maybe a 1,000 miles each way? They probably called the local barge company and arranged to have a few hundred million well rounded tree trunks sent over.
Extra strong vine ropes: As for the vine ropes to pull blocks weighing up to 100 tons (200,000 lbs), I am not immediately aware of any company that made these ropes with this capacity 6,000 yeas ago. Egypt just happens to have developed tools to make rope and did make fine rope centuries later but from reeds, flax, leather and camel hair, not quite what we would need to move 200,000 lb blocks.
However, let’s think positive and if they could do it 6,000 years ago we should be able to do it easily today!
The Great Giza pyramid is estimated to be built from 2,400,000 very heavy blocks of stone. Blocks weigh between 40 tons and 100 tons. A ton is 2,000 lbs so 100 tons is 200,000 lbs. Some of the largest stones are polished granite that are 100 tons each in the pyramid’s central chamber. We do have cranes that can lift up to 100 tons today but barely and they cannot easily move them and they cannot stack them for sure! So, we need vines ropes and a lot of men who want to vacation in Egypt pulling them, up some as of yet fathomed device, perhaps up to 500 feet in the air. My first thought here was to call ‘Joe’s Rent A Scaffold” in nearby Turkey but I think it would still need an elevator and they had not invented the pulley yet. There are lots of “concepts” that are offered on Wiki but none that make a lot of sense and zero that are proven. Some archaeologists estimate that 30,000 people might be needed to do this work. I will bet we can offer to post their pictures on Facebook, doing this remarkable work, and so get them to come and work for free!
The pyramid rises to nearly 500 feet in height so by comparison to our city buildings it is not that terribly tall. The re-built Word Trade Center building is over 3 times that high, but now where near as massive! However, when seen from a satellite, the top most point of the Great Pyramid appears off center from its base by 1/4 of an inch. Now this is after piling up 2,400,000 40 ton blocks of polished stone that they had to cut with supposedly copper tools (very soft). This margin of error, after placing 2,400,000 stones cannot be matched today!
Lets create collect and stack the well cut stones. The stones have been traced to a quarry about 100 miles away, over a mountain range by geologists. To bring these stones to Giza, Archaeologists claim that the Egyptians cut a passage through the mountain range, diverted water to it and created great barges to float the up to 100 ton stones down to Giza. It appears that after they did this, they covered their tracks so we would not be able to see how they did this, after all a big gap in the mountain range would be unsightly. As for floating the up to 100 ton stones on the newly created river, Joe’s brother, Steve had a rent a barge company that they might have called on. Today a jumbo railroad hopper can carry 100 tons, but that is over land on steel rails, which they did not have. A 110 x 30 x 7 foot barge can carry a 100 ton block, however this is as big as some large homes and I am not quite sure how they would get the blocks off and on the barges without cranes as they did not have pulleys. I called Steve and back then he knew of no rent-a-crane (without pulleys) company.
How long would it take to built it, if we had all the stones cut and piled and ready to be placed? If we had a very efficient untiring worker (a slave) who would work 10 hours a day for 360 days a year that is equal to 3,600 hours each year. If we divide 2,400,000 blocks by 3,600 we get 667 blocks to be placed per hour. Now if we have 20 years to do this that is about 33 blocks per hour for one person. However one person cannot do this. So we need help. A small block 40,000 lbs could be moved, if each man carried 50 lbs of weight, by just 800 men. There is the minor challenge of getting some of them up 500 feet in the air but for sure these guys were strong and had really well made vine ropes. Maybe 1,000 men could walk it up a temporary stairway built into the scaffolding (with great vine ropes). Note that Egypt happens to have been one of the first nations to create tools for making rope out of reeds, leather, camel hair and flax; however, I am not aware of any that could move 10o ton blocks or even 40 ton blocks. At this point it becomes, for me, hard to estimate how long it might take to build because it seems impossible; however, others may have a better answer.
An Accuracy of just ¼ inch. The Great Giza pyramid is 13 acres across at the base, which is about 52,609 square meters. I am guessing it cannot be built today with the same accuracy and I don’t think we have the technology or financial resources to do it. So how did they to it centuries ago when they did not have geostationary satellites with lasers to help guide positioning (like our navigational satellites do for cars). Here is one scenario. They build a crane like structure about 1,00o feet high, without pulleys, and they got a “volunteer” to climb it each morning (with food supplies) and he used a as of yet uninvented telescope like device, which surveyors use today to help position each block. It worked something like this: sitting in his comfy rope basket up 1,000 feet, he would observe the movement of the 1,000 guys carrying the blocks on vine ropes. They may have spray painted a 2-d diagram of the stone’s 3-d shadow on the sand that he could line up the moving blocks with. If a block was off place by a hundredth of an inch or so (required to get a ¼ inch max error at the top, he would yell down with a megaphone (no electric needed). “Hey there, Abasi, Adlo, Hanif, Hapi…. guys, move the block 100th of an inch to the left!” That might do it!
My guess is a human being did not build it nor did we build any of the probably thousands of others across the world. There are many in China, many under water near Japan, others in Mexico. Many of these pyramids are at 19.47 latitude as are what appears to be similar structures on other planets in our solar system as found by NASA.
Kilroy. I always thought it was funny to see the WWII caricature of Kilroy, that GIs sketched to indicate they had been there. What better way to get the attention of a planets population than to build thousands of pyramids that are built with technology we cannot duplicate today? Did anybody notice this yet?
Janr
Janr Ssor 