Don’t they have some maintenance company? Fix that!
Should have bought the extended warranty.
pls fix thx
Imagine if Walmart went out of business and each executive was eventually buried at the center of the Walmart and he had his most valuable possessions with his body and a big ass gold cap reflecting the sun onto everyone’s windshield or house windows every day…how long would that building stand after the company no longer did business with it? My guess is bricks down in a good 5 to 10 years. The gold cap would have been gone in an afternoon if someone could pick it up. Otherwise the nearest town would organize daily gold chippings and it would be gone in a month.
Then imagine the building did last 3000 years for whatever reason and someone suggested to build it back for tourism? Just because someone’s graffiti looks better than today’s graffiti.
the top picture looks a lot better, why did they replace it?
It cost too much to maintain a nice one, so they tore it down and replaced it with a cheaper one from IKEA BCE.
They didn’t replace it They removed it. What you’re seeing is underneath.
clearly they didnt remove it, theres still a spike in the bottom picture
So one thing that happens in history is, people stop paying to maintain things or governments don’t care anymore, so people start taking them apart and using it for building materials.
Let’s say you’re a modern day contractor, and need $10,000 worth of brick… or you could go and uh just take some from that old library that no one uses anymore, except some homeless dudes camp in it. You could take down maybe just like one small part of it and not spend ANYTHING on brick. Other contractors are already doing this… No one will care.
Basically what happened to the library of alexandria if I remember correctly. It was less fire and more just hundreds of years of people stopping caring.
but it costs money to demolish the white pyramid and rebuild the shitty one. whyd they do it if money is a concern
They didn’t demolish a limestone pyramid and replace it with what you see now… What you’re seeing now is what was underneath a layer of limestone. They dismantled the limestone slowly to use it for building materials.
the limestone was clearly already used as building material… why would they demolish a nice building for the limestone only to rebuild it but worse
Gotta learn when the joke is spent my man
it’s spent when nobody replies anymore
Man, the aliens were sure good at building these
Imagine being the first person to realize that the Empire is dead and you can just fucking climb up there with your buddies and take that gold cap lol.
I think castles in Europe are similar. They used to have plastered, white washed facades. Over time they wore down, giving way to the raw stone look most of us associate with castles.
Classical statues too
Right! Those white Greek marble busts used to be fully painted. But we only think of them as plain white sculptures.
Remember the Great Pyramid of Giza? This is it today. Feel old yet?
And green/greener lands, as far as I know.
No but shockingly close. The pyramids were built starting around 2630 BCE. But the African Humid Period ended about 5000-6000 years ago, so about 2974 BCE on the near end.
About 350 years is shockingly close. That’s about the length of the Ptolmaic dynasty. That’s Isaac Newton being active to today. Not recent by any means, but that’s “we still know about this” time scales
Bright white casing stones, yes. 50 foot tall gold capstone, no.
Actual capstone in Cairo museum
Note, this is from the ruined Black Pyramid, no the Great Pyramid. But what a remarkable artifact, still amazingly intact.
This is in the right community. It is indeed interesting as fuck.
A bit ironic that they removed their comment that was remarkable and interesting. I guess it was about the capstone from Black Pyramid?
They posted an image of this capstone with the text “actual capstone in the Cairo museum.”
It is a genuine capstone, or pyramidion, from a pyramid, one of very few that survives intact to the present day. It’s black basalt, still beautifully polished and inscribed. It’s just not from the Giza pyramids, it’s from the Black pyramid at Dahshur, tomb of Amenemhat III. This is 12th dynasty, centuries later than the 4th dynasty necropolis at Giza, but it does give us an idea of what the pyramidion of Khufu’s pyramid might have been like. Knowing Khufu, his was probably granite. He had a thing for granite, the entire King’s Chamber of his pyramid is lined with it.
The article I linked doesn’t give any sense of scale, Amenemhat’s pyramidion is 1.85 meters tall and weighs 4.5 metric tons. No problem for the mega masons that built the rest of the actual manmade mountain it would rest upon, but still a far cry from a 100 foot tall chunk of gold.
Humans own 23m³ of gold total
Most of it’s used in tech so how much of it is owned and not licensed? 🤔
Very little gold is used in tech
Humans have mined more than 200000 metric tons of gold, which is about 10000 cubic meters, not 23
Woops. 23³ m³
23 cubed cubic metres? Why not just put a few zeroes in the first place?
I guess, because that way it easier conveys the point of ‘it’s a cube with 23 meters side’, which makes sense as it’s easier to imagine than just an arbitrary amount of cubic meters.
Correct. Cube 23m on each side. I think I meant to write (23m)³ but forgot the parentheses.
From what I understand the polished limestone is accurate for many pyramids, but the gold pyramidion seems to be more of an edge case on some smaller pyramids.
A gold top wouldn’t even be visible from the ground on a large polished white pyramid.
A gold top wouldn’t even be visible from the ground on a large polished white pyramid.
The point of pyramids was of religious nature, it was to be closer to the sky and allow dead pharaohs to go in their version of the after life so it’s likely that the gold wasn’t to be pretty but for a religious something
Also, i wonder if it was a gold alloy and not pure gold
If it was for religious reasons they would definitely use pure gold
Just looked on wikipedia and they say
“… and were sometimes covered with plates of copper, gold or electrum.” (electrum is an alloy of gold and silver IIRC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidion Which makes a lot of sense, gold was and is very expensive“Plates of” especially makes sense. And you do recall correctly, electrum is a natural alloy, which means they wouldn’t have had to create it from scratch.
I remember the signs there and museum did tell that the great pyramids also had golden Pyramidions.
If it was capped in gold, dusk and dawn could have been very pretty.
Was the gold top like a cable connection to the UFO that lands on it?
“Ancient Astronaut theorists say yes.”
China has successfully killed the wither and now has the resources necessary to activate a beacon
I think one of the purposes of the pyramids was to be a sort of ancient beacon. The stone reflected the sun and moonlight, making it pretty tough to get lost. In the days of no GPS or electricity, I’m sure this was of great importance.
Have you ever been playing Minecraft and wandered too far from base before building a bed and just had to abandon that base until you find it by accident later? Imagine that IRL and you can’t just build a new base real quick
I think they just wanted to build a giant titty.
The original original Tomb Raider
Feels quite secondary to the “I have the biggest” contest that we saw later with cathedrals and now skyscrapers.
I think one of the purposes of the pyramids was to be a sort of ancient beacon.
Aliens needed to know where to land.
I think the gold top would have been smaller
The idea of the pyramids as a industrial fertilizer factory is inteteresting, i could understand the “priests” and “rituals” and the pyramid themselves being so sacred and cherrished if it literally ensured strong harvests by supplimenting fertilizer.
The hypothesus is not strong or validated - but its the most compelling one ive heard so far
its the most compelling one ive heard so far
You mean if you ignore all the hieroglyphs that explain everything in great detail?
The red Pyramid, maybe. But the Great Pyramid is gigantic with a relatively tiny tomb (compared to rest of pyramid) that contained a burial chamber that was blocked off with one way giant blocks that sealed off the chamber permanently.
Sorry, I agree with the first guy. Pyramids clearly made poop.
I’m also in favor of the ancient poop factory theory
See, obviously it must be true.
It makes perfect sense, if you don’t think about it.
So…it wasn’t designed for this, but the ruined pyramid of Meidum has been used as a fertilizer factory. A large recess has been quarried into the side and farmers would go up there to collect bat guano.
Commenting again just for fun, I find the pyramids fascinating and hope this is just entertaining to read:
Yeah the pyramid is a massive thing compared to its interior volume, but it’s the second largest interior of any pyramid, after Djoser’s miles of tunnels.
There are actually two systems of “one way giant blocks” to seal the Great pyramid: Three large blocks of granite that still plug the original opening of the ascending passage to this day; the pyramid is accessed through the so-called robber’s tunnel excavated through the masonry long after construction. The second was a system of three vertically closing granite portcullis stones that would have been set in grooves in the walls just outside of the King’s Chamber. It’s not impossible that these were designed to be opened repeatedly, a few fragments of them exist into the present day, and there are rope holes present in them, so it’s possible they were rigged to allow gangs of men in the grand gallery to hoist them open. Problem is, the shape of the antechamber is such that two of the portcullises could be simply climbed over, and then the joint between the wall and the third portcullis could be attacked. So even though they were granite, they were defeated in antiquity.
The King’s chamber is entirely paved with red granite, so it’s possible Khufu trusted this new, extremely durable material a bit too much.
that two of the portcullises could be simply climbed over,
“Once such three portcullises were lowered, it would no longer be possible to bypass the first two. Even climbing over them, there is too little working space to break a section of granite nearly a meter and a half long (equal to the sum of the three horizontal thicknesses)”
https://www.greatpyramidexplanation.com/en/news-6/03-antechambers-portcullis.html
It’s not impossible that these were designed to be opened repeatedly
It’s lazy, but I work from the assumption that the consensus of university historians who have devoted their lives to studying all the data are likely correct. They would have documented wear on the stones from repeated sliding like they documented wear on the bottom of stones from original placement. If their was evidence the portcullis had been opened, it would be the mainstream theory.
It’s like how I assume scientists are right when they say vaccines don’t cause autism. Sure they might be wrong but it’s easier to let specialists specialize.
That said I still really enjoy wild theories about the pyramids!
Not sure I’d call that author mainstream. A couple chapters later he starts blathering about “the device” and talking about gaskets and hydraulic force and water flow. It’s badly formatted, there are no section breaks, he keeps referring to figures and diagrams and photos that aren’t there…This dude’s a crank.
My understanding is the mainstream theory is that the portcullises were resting on wood or stone supports that were set into slots in the floor during construction, fitting and the funeral service, and then when it was time to seal the pyramid the portcullises were hoist off of their supports with ropes suspended from logs across the ceiling, the supports lifted free and removed, and then the ropes eased to lower the portcullis. You wouldn’t want to let them slam shut, granite is very hard but very brittle.
If you can hoist the stone off of its supports to gently lower it, you can hoist it open again. Whether they ever did isn’t knowable.
Compare that to the design of the portcullises in the Bent pyramid, built by Khufu’s father Sneferu. They slide diagonally into place into deep recesses in the wall and floor rendering levering attacks entirely impossible. It’s practically impossible to open once closed, your only way in is to tunnel through. Which is what has happened to the one that was closed. The other was never closed and remains propped open with an ancient log to this day. I’m wondering if it closed by accident. Notably, Sneferu’s later Red pyramid has no portcullis system at all, and Khufu’s portcullises were made of granite but of a much less elegant design.
Not sure I’d call that author mainstream.
I wouldn’t either. It was the first link that had documentation about the physical layout of the portcullis refuting the claim that it could be climbed over.
your only way in is to tunnel through
Which is what was done in the Great Pyramid too!
My understanding is the mainstream theory is that the portcullises were resting on wood or stone supports that were set into slots in the floor during construction,
This is a good overview of the portcullis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL_kX0FJ1cw
Notice that the rope rollers were designed for one time use. Once used, they would roll out of position and become useless.
The imagery in that video shows blocks that don’t exist.
