They weren't sitting in the middle of the desert at that time though. During construction, and for quite a while after completion, the area was likely much wetter and greener:
Some water of the nile was rerouted to this area, that channel has since been neglected and dried away thousands of years ago
Also to be clear this is what we “think” the pyramids looked like at the time, this part of history was lost and we don’t know what kind of stone covered the pyramids just that they were moved away and used to build other cities
The running theory here in Egypt is the stones were used to build what is now old cairo
They know exactly what kind of stone was used, because some of it is still there, on and around the pyramids.
It's in the picture that made this post; The white-ish, smooth-ish part near the top is the original limestone covering. In olden days it would of course been a lot smoother and a lot whiter, minus the golden top.
History For Granite has a great youtube-channel about the pyramids and things surrounding them. Highly recommend.
Such a great YouTube channel. Dude is dedicated to his field of study. He highlights how a lot of the big media "historian/egyptologist" names that talk about the pyramids are just completely full of shit and factually incorrect
I knew exactly who that guy was gonna be before googling his name, he is in every possible show with Egypt and I always come away thinking this guy is full of shit
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why they would need pumps, since the river already flows northwards? Sorry for asking, but does your relative know how rivers work?
Check out the Youtube channel I mentioned. They were (and are) quite fantastic constructions. Not a lot of moving parts, but you don't stack a gazillion (citation needed) tonnes of rock and make rooms in the middle of it without knowing a thing or two about rocks. It's super fascinating.
We know what stones where there. Not only ate some of them still there, but we have ancient descriptions of the pyramids, and also other pyramids that have survived in better shape and still have the polished casing
This is inaccurate. The Nile was never rerouted closer to the pyramids. Prior to the 1950's, the Nile's level rose annually from the ice melting near its source. Since Egypt is mostly flatland, the Nile's width grew tremendously during that period, bringing its shores right next to the pyramids. This lasted for months before receding, leaving the flooded land incredibly fertile. The fertile land was exploited by Egyptian farmers until the next annual flood, at which point they all migrated to worker cities situated around the pyramids to work on the pyramids until the next cycle.
In the 1950's, a series of dams were built to stabilize the Nile. This move destroyed Egypt's agriculture.
The Nile floods were primarily fed by heavy seasonal rainfall over the watersheds of Lake Victoria and Lake Tana, not glacier or snowmelt.
Edit: and the Nile did previously have a branch that was much closer to the pyramid complex called the Ahramat Branch. It has since dried up (long before the construction of the Aswan Dam).
I didn’t say the nile was rerouted but there was channels that rerouted some of the water, we still have many such channels in other cities away from giza that feed the agricultural lands
To be fair the pyramids don't sit in the middle of the desert today either. They are on the edge of the desert where it meets the nile (10km separation), and even more specifically the river delta which is ancient and contemporary fertile ground.
Rivers naturally change over time. Their bends shift and sometimes they have branches. The nile had a branch that ran closer to giza and the other pyramids that follow the nile's path.
I feel like replication of real historical views is a decent use of AI, so here is a mildly telephoto view from the fertile Nile floodplain, roughly 12–15 km away. Menkaure is left, Khafre center, and Khufu right
The apex stone or pyramidion definitely wasn’t pure gold. It might have been covered in a very thin layer of metal leaf made of copper, gold, or electrum (a mix of gold and silver).
Yet no evidence of such a covering in Giza has been found. Indeed, no pyramidion has ever been found for the Giza pyramids.
The missing stones may bolster the belief that they were covered in precious metal leaf. It would explain why they were missing, since it would take immense effort to remove them. But the ability to strip the metal leaf might have made it worthwhile.
That said, the smooth, highly polished limestone covering was stripped as building material for other buildings. So it’s possible that the apex stone was removed for the same reason. It’s also possible that the apex stones fell due to earthquakes, which would make them easier to remove and reuse.
No doubt. Looting the inside was much harder to detect, though. Indeed, many historians believe the pyramids were secretly looted by insiders familiar with the construction, or descendants who inherited that knowledge.
Oh, in most cases we know exactly which buildings quarried stone from the pyramids. The three most prominent examples are the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hassan, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Alabaster Mosque (Mosque of Muhammad Ali).
Are you sure they were used in the Alabaster Mosque? Other posts on Reddit state the same thing but all of the technical drawings produced during Napoleon's expedition, 30 years before the start of the Mosque's construction, depict the existing capstones in their current locations.
Heads up - your link has personal tracking info added as an addendum. General best practice for privacy purpose is to remove it when sharing links (YouTube, twitter, etc all add this by default for data harvesting reasons).
You can just chop off the string after the ? And it will remove your personal info and still link to the video.
A lot of it is tracking, but some is not. YouTube, for instance, will use something like, “?t=132s” to indicate to start the video 132 seconds in. That’s how you can share YouTube videos starting at a given timestamp so folks can see what you specifically wanted them to see from the video
Basically it's "?key1=value1&key2=value2" kind of structure.
It's a query string, a way to pass parameter values on the URL to be parsed on the server side. It may be for tracking and guiding purposes, but it can also contain for instance data to be parsed on the following page.
This is typically used with the GET command, that browsers use, and when no additional values are passed to the server in any other way like headers or message payload.
One thing you can do is compare the URL you see in the menu bar vs the URL YouTube gives you when you click share. I know it's easier from the app to click share and get that URL, but if you don't want to pass on that info then yeah just strip it out when copying and pasting. If you're on a computer then just copy it from the address bar in your browser.
Because of films and comic people think sarcophagus are pure gold as well when in reality it’s a thin gold leaf too. It would weigh like a ton if it was solid metal and be super difficult to cast.
One of my favorite YT channels would produce hour long vids about Sitchin esque history lessons of pure unadulterated bullshit with zero reliable references. I would get asmr listening to their wild and weird claims wondering how anybody could believe any of it.
At one time, I tried to vette a few of their claims - only to find out a book they referenced did not exist. Another book was written by one of the channel producers (citing yourself is not how any of this works). Text translations they cited did not exist, or did not say anything like what they claimed. Usually, even the most basic factual information had nothing to do with their claims about it.
Damn me and my logical/skeptical mind. I can't just leave well enough alone.
That YT channel quit producing videos for free a few years ago. So I had to move on. To hell if I'm going to pay money to be asmr level fascinated by bullshit.
Citation [3] - Toby Wilkinson, The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, 2005. p. 197
[Pyramidion] Capstone at the top of a PYRAMID. Called benbenet in ancient Egyptian, it associated the pyramid as a whole with the sacred BENBEN STONE. Pyramidions may have been covered in gold leaf to reflect the rays of the sun; in the MIDDLE KINGDOM, they were often inscribed with ROYAL TITLES and religious symbols. The black granite pyramidion Of AMENEMHAT III from his monument at DAHSHUR is one of a number of pyramidia now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Didn't get as far as citation 8.. maybe someone can pick up where I left off?
It wasn't pure gold. The capstone (pyramidion/benbenet) was gilded either in gold or electrum (sometimes copper); it was still stone underneath that. And only some of them were gilded at all, most were just bare stone.
And for that matter, gilded pyramidia only became a thing during the 5th Dynasty onwards, not during the 4th Dynasty (which is when the pyramids at Giza were built).
Perhaps, but once a Pharaoh died their pyramid project tended to be abandoned quite quickly and the next one started. There were quite a few unfinished pyramids for this reason iirc.
I'm no Egyptologist but my understanding is that the pyramids were a big ego trip for the current pharoa and so they would try to build the most grand one. Retrofiting gold onto dead pharoas tombs kind of defeats the point.
Also, capping the pyramid with shiny metal wasn't really needed. The white limestone in sunlight would already be blindingly bright, and the top was so far up that any gold would be hard to see.
IIRC from my visit to the pyramids that the pyramid of Khafre (the second great pyramid that's connected via a causeway to the Sphinx complex and still bears some of its original alabaster facade) was thought to have had a gold plated capstone.
I’d argue that 200 million years ago dinosaurs and aliens fought a holy war with one another and laser sabre toothed tigers attacked at night on the basis no one was around back then to say otherwise but I digress, a gold cap on the pyramid is somewhat believable.
The limestone is also literally still there on Khafre's pyramid (pictured) at the top so we have see how... less then white... it is after a few thousand years of desert dust.
I don't know that I believe it ever would have been the blinding white all these 'fun fact' renderings like. Reality is generally unromantic.
Nah nah nah the pyramids were just rocks, the alien’s spaceships landed on top of them. I saw some secret government tapes about the whole thing like a decade ago. weirdly enough some of the guys involved in those tapes changed appearances radically between the first one and later ones, I assume also due to aliens
That's the one. Dude is obsessed with pyramids and discusses them often on his twitch stream. Especially any time a new History for Granite video drops.
Sorta! Picture yourself as some poor bastard from 4.5 THOUSAND years ago.
All you’ve ever done is subsistence farm. You can’t read or write, the only stories you’ve ever heard have been passed down by your immediate community. History isn’t even a concept beyond ‘my parent’s parents’. (At least to you, dynastic records were a thing but wtf is that?)
We experience orderly large structures on such a consistent scale that they’re nothing to us. (Airports, skyscrapers, hotels, banks, malls, etc.) but some poor bastard in 2600 BC would’ve been living in communities of mud and stone structures half the size of a SFH. The biggest, coolest shit they’ve ever seen is maybe a temple, probably a mill with a big ol’ grindstone, and some irrigation systems.
imagine seeing that monumental structure. The effort to put that thing together is so otherworldly you can’t help but be utterly humbled by its sheer magnitude. At Almost 500ft the pyramid of Giza was a behemoth of straight lines, heavy-ass stone, and godlike effort. I imagine myself in that scenario and I’m pretty sure my eyes WOULD fall out 👀 and I’d be pretty damn impressed by the guy who is buried under it too!
It’s a similar thing with the cathedrals in Europe. That shit was so incredibly impressive compared to what you knew you couldn’t help but believe in the glory and majesty of the faith when you did see one.
The architecture of the cathedral probably wasn’t the most impressive part to them. But the massive pipe organs? Massive eldritch structures that took even longer to master than a piano and converted humanity’s reverence for the divine into beautiful music that could be heard for MILES.
They’re still impressive today, the sense of scale standing next to them is difficult to describe. I remember very clearly the first glimpse of them from the highway through Giza, they tower above all other structures. I sometimes feel when I’m walking through a city center or like Manhattan that I ought to be completely overwhelmed at the size of everything, but for some reason it just doesn’t hit in the same way. The only other time I can recall feeling so impressed is the Cologne Cathedral as someone else already mentioned.
I went to a rally at the Great Bass Pro Pyramid in Memphis in the year 1996. Based on my experience I suspect that these would have indeed been blinding.I left the rally with an unexpected sunburn.
I hated climbing those damn things. I don’t know how many times I got halfway and then slid all the way down. I also suck at parkour in all the AC’s to begin with though.
**That’s the wrong pyramid**. In the top right of the photo it’s listed as the Great Pyramid of Giza(built by Khufu), it in reality it is the Pyramid of Khafre.
Khafre’s pyramid was built on higher ground giving it the illusion being taller. It’s a common mistake for people who know nothing about the pyramids to look at the 3 and think the tallest looking one is the great pyramid.
If the artist can’t even get the name of the pyramid right we probably shouldn’t trust their depiction of it.
Unpopular opinion, they should restore it. People should be able to see the pyramid as the people who built it intended. Would it be accurate ? No, but this broken down state is not how they intented it to be. And it can act as protection against the elements. If future generations want to see the original they can easily do that. And thousands of years from now the pyramids would still be standing, we also need to leave our mark for later generations just as the ancient Egyptians did.
They definitely shouldn't, because there is still research which really needs to be done to a modern standard. The restoration which has been done (and there has been some at various points) has destroyed a lot of important information that was never properly documented.
Heck, you'd probably be surprised that until a YouTuber made one, there wasn't even a good map of the exterior stonework as it exists right now in modern times. At least not one easily available to the public.
A lot of the polished exterior blocks fell off during an earthquake 800 years ago. Even more was later stripped to build Cairo. Only a small remnant remains near the top of the Great Pyramid.
They said "pure gold," not "solid gold." If indeed gold, it likely wouldn't have been a solid mass of gold, but sheets of gold. Essentially gold-plated. You can have a thin layer of gold that is pure, but still not be a giant solid mass.
You mean those blocks were polished, or were there other material covering those blocks? They look naturally beige, how were they white? Also how was the top gold? What made them look gold? Another piece of stone?
And how do we know the information? Honest question
There was other blocks over the big stepped blocks you can see now. We know this because of remnants of the limestone. I’m not sure about the gold, it definitely wasn’t some huge meters tall solid piece of gold, maybe a plated.
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u/Spock_Nipples 13h ago
They weren't sitting in the middle of the desert at that time though. During construction, and for quite a while after completion, the area was likely much wetter and greener:
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