I think the lever here is a stand-in for mechanical advantage. I don’t believe anyone is seriously proposing they lifted the blocks with a very long stick.
Lol of course you can. They were invented at one point. And before that point… You didn’t have them. I recommend: Let’s Learn Everything episode 49: Goosebumps, (Not) Alien Pyramids, and Nessie & Cryptids.
It’s fair to imagine the challenges a building team would face 2k plus years ago.
Like in this example, building levers that are strong enough to lift the load. I bet they broke a bunch of stuff.
But eventually they figured it out, via trial and error. Levers, ramps, etc. They probably couldn’t describe why those things were inherently the best way, but more approached from the “we tried 9 other ways and they suck. This is the best way.”
Next, the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is relevant here, but in a backwards way.
Since we struggle to imagine what it would take for an ancient society to master the techniques to build these things, we therefore begin to grasp for unrealistic conclusions (magic…read…aliens).
Same goes for Europeans building cathedrals and stuff, the trick is the history, the methods and the results were more documented and understood.
There are some racism concerns that I think go beyond and around what I’ve discussed, which is more abstract. I’m not discounting the other topics, just not covering them here.
The ancient Egyptians utilized neither wheels nor work animals for the majority of the pyramid-building era, so the giant blocks, weighing 2.5 tons on average, had to be moved through human muscle power alone. But until recently, nobody really knew how. The answer, it seems, is simply water. Evidence suggests that the blocks were first levered onto wooden sleds and then hauled up ramps made of sand. However, dry sand piles up in front of a moving sled, increasing friction until the sled is nearly impossible to pull. Wet sand reduces friction dramatically beneath the sled runners, eliminating the sand piles and making it possible for a team of people to move massive objects.
I’ve taken like four or five advanced trigonometry courses and I still can’t really define what trigonometry is. Mathematics is like Andrew Tate’s Hustler University scam. If you take one class, it only exists to prove that you’re a mark and sell you more classes.
I enjoyed the trigonometry unit in my highschool geometry class, but that’s because it was mostly proofs, and those were just philosophy about triangles.
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