Building the Great Pyramid

Building the Great Pyramid

From as long ago as the time of the ancient Greeks, people have debated about how the Egyptians created King Khufu's Great Pyramid that was built at Giza. There are many questions about how the stones were moved and placed in their positions. There is some evidence of the use of ramps to move the stones, but historians are not sure how exactly it was done. The Egyptians used levers to move the stones off the ramps and into place. The Egyptian builders are known to have used two surveying tools, a "merkhet" similar to a astrolabe and another tool the "bay" a sighting tool made of a palm leaf. The Egyptians used rock quarrying to get their stone. They made the king's chamber from blocks of Aswan granite. It was estimated that 45,000 cubic meters of stone were removed from those quarries. Some people think that the tools they used to cut the stone were copper and sand was used to help them cut thought the granite.

The most interesting thing about this article was the tools the Egyptians used. They had tools to measure, lift, move, level, and cut the stones. They did all this with man power, not with heavy equipment. Those structures that they built with their hands so long ago have still lasted until today. It's amazing with all the technology we have today that they did that with just the basics. And the pyramid still stands today.

It surprised me how no one knows the way they were created, and that their building methods were lost along the years. It's interesting that people would build something that great for their dead. They used the best they had for the dead.

The difference between the way we build things and the way they did is that we take short cuts. They just used man power, and worked toward perfection. We are still measuring and leveling the ground in similar ways to what they did. However, we use different materials than just stone. In my opinion they were the better builder because the pyramids have withstood the test of time.