Let's build a Pyramid

June 8, 2020 4:46 PM

How Many People Did it Take to Build the Great Pyramid? Let's ask the engineers...

... in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days a year and producing 0.25 cubic meter of stone per capita. The grand total of the construction labor would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that number to account for designers, organizers, and overseers and for labor needed for transport, tool repair, the building and maintenance of on-site housing, and cooking and laundry work, the total would be still less than 7,000 workers.

An article in IEEE Spectrum ("the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences") takes a look at how much human-labor-work would be needed to build a pyramid.

posted by zengargoyle (25 comments total)

Such nonsense. The biggest heavy-lift saucer only needs 18 “men” to operate.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:54 PM on June 8, 2020 [17 favorites]

I find it odd that the author compared the potential energy of the pyramid to how many people are required to provide that energy. It feels like a spherical cow kind of calculation to me but I am just some random person on the internet. It seems like a lot of the commenters to the article are questioning some of the assumptions the author made as well, when they aren't union-bashing.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:04 PM on June 8, 2020 [6 favorites]

First, we assume the pyramid is a sphere*...

Like all engineers**, he's underestimating the magnitude of the paperwork*** and the support personnel. He says, "even" if we double it, as if that's generous. But when I think of all the people that are working so that I can work, I think maybe quintupling it would be more accurate. And this is before things like the loom and sanitation were invented, so every single thing anyone does during the day is absurdly complicated and difficult and expensive compared to modern life.

*ETA: jinx!
**and me
***papyruswork
posted by Horkus at 5:08 PM on June 8, 2020 [7 favorites]

it took three people - two to lift the blocks and one to fold the duct tape over on top so the blocks would stick together
posted by pyramid termite at 6:10 PM on June 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

Bonus: Diary Of A Pyramid Labourer // Oldest Papyrus Discovered 2550 BC "Diary of Merer" // Primary Source.

That's a pretty cool YouTube channel on it's own.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:34 PM on June 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Like all engineers**, he's underestimating the magnitude of the paperwork***

Every civil engineer I know for-sure knows what the paperwork is like.

It's the planners you have to watch out for.
posted by curious nu at 7:14 PM on June 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

How many engineers did it take to pretend to answer every other discipline's questions using the back of an envelope and hand-waving? (To a first approximation, one)
posted by mikelynch at 7:50 PM on June 8, 2020 [12 favorites]

Such nonsense. The biggest heavy-lift saucer only needs 18 “men” to operate.

I thought these jokes were a lot funnier before somebody pointed out that the “ancient aliens” people are basically arguing that visitors from another planet are more believable, in their minds, than brown people capable of math and effort.
posted by mhoye at 8:00 PM on June 8, 2020 [28 favorites]

pretty sure it's the giant rocks part.
posted by sideshow at 8:16 PM on June 8, 2020

The aliens built Stonehenge as well. Every odd thing from the past all around the whole world no matter where is aliens. It's not limited to brown people, it's just not believing people thousands of years ago could do such things when we'd have a hard time pulling it off ourselves.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:36 PM on June 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

Seems like he didn't determine how many it DID take, he bounded it with a minimum. The potential energy thing was pretty clever. But then he blew it when instead of coming at it from another angle to get a maximum, he started extrapolating based on how WE would do a project. He does bound it at the end with a max, but doesn't explain that at all. How do we know no more than 20,000 lived there? Do we know that's the only settlement to find? Loosely based on my own capacity to half-ass back-of-the-envelope something only until I lose interest, I can say with some confidence it took approximately one man about two hours to write this, not dozens of hours experts might have previously believed based on it being professionally published.

I'm joking, I don't think it's pretending to be serious ground-breaking research. Rather, I take it as engineer humor.

Also why is it in the section 'Heroic Failures'?
posted by ctmf at 8:45 PM on June 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

Daniel!
posted by clavdivs at 9:02 PM on June 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

Years back, I saw a documentary about making the pyramids and an interviewer asking an Egyptian historian about the alien theory. He said "This nonsense robs us of one of one of the great achievements in our history."
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:04 PM on June 8, 2020 [13 favorites]

You laugh, but I would spend some serious tourist dollars to go see a spherical pyramid.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:06 PM on June 8, 2020 [9 favorites]

The aliens built Stonehenge as well. Every odd thing from the past all around the whole world no matter where is aliens. It's not limited to brown people, it's just not believing people thousands of years ago could do such things when we'd have a hard time pulling it off ourselves.

Not so fast. The modern "aliens built the pyramids" meme has its origin in the late sixties with Erich von Däniken's "Chariots of the Gods", and his aliens-built-em theory did in fact focus heavily on non-European great structures. And yep, as he cashed in by writing more books, they got more explicitly racist as he blithely waded into theories about aliens designing better humans after the initial black race "failed". Maybe the memes are more benign in their modern more abstract form, but don't whitewash the origins. It's not "people thousands of years ago couldn't have done that," it was explicitly "non-white people couldn't have done that".
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:41 PM on June 8, 2020 [24 favorites]

I'm partial to the idea of the interior spiral ramp theory. They just back-filled as they left so it's not obvious.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:14 PM on June 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is cute, but I'd assume that Egyptologists/archaeologists already have this one in hand? A nice exercise for the engineering student but for actual knowledge I'd turn to an expert in the relevant field. (See also physicists doing linguistics...)
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:14 PM on June 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted. I know ancient aliens jokes are meant in silly fun for some, but once you're aware of some of the history of that "ancient non-European peoples didn't really build their engineering marvels" stuff and therefore how those jokes can strike people -- that's the time to lay off it, since now you know it can land in a sour way.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:21 PM on June 8, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is cute, but I'd assume that Egyptologists/archaeologists already have this one in hand? A nice exercise for the engineering student but for actual knowledge I'd turn to an expert in the relevant field. (See also physicists doing linguistics...)

You're right that most lay interventions are going to be ill-informed and unhelpful, but on the other hand there are some surprising contributions which can be made to by modern non-historian domain experts. One which sticks in my memory is Janet Stephens, a professional hair stylist who uses those skills to research ancient roman hair styles: analysing and recreating them based on surviving sculptures.
posted by vincebowdren at 2:08 AM on June 9, 2020 [6 favorites]

The sexist language really distracted my from the article. It's not that hard to say person-hours and workers.
posted by medusa at 4:49 AM on June 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Looks like these Spectrum folks have never heard of Wally Wallington.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:01 AM on June 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

You beat me to linking to the Wally Wallington video, TPG! Great work by an “amateur.”

There’s no way of getting around the energy requirements, though, and so the calculations of the *minimum* size of the work force make sense. The article does not purport to the elucidate the *techniques* for constructing the Pyramids, which remain speculative.

Wallington “only” moved the stones horizontally, which, in the absence of frictional losses, takes zero net energy. What Wallington showed is that fancy machinery is not needed for transporting and lifting these materials for these monuments. Human power and forces are sufficient with simple but clever techniques.

Please understand I am not minimizing Wallington’s achievement of demonstrating a plausible method eluded generations of scholars. I take my hat off to him.
posted by haiku warrior at 8:47 AM on June 9, 2020

Here's a video about the internal ramp theory, and it also touches on how the Egyptians might have dealt with corners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs
posted by ishmael at 8:53 AM on June 9, 2020

Impressed by Wally Wallington, thanks for that. Can't help but wonder how he's going to lift the cross-pieces on top of the obelisks, though. The wobbly add cribbing one piece at a time technique is going to get pretty dangerous at that height.
posted by ctmf at 12:24 PM on June 9, 2020

I always assumed that they conscripted farm labourers for some of the grunt work between harvests, so the total number of workers involved would vary from summer to winter.

I used to assume that they used exterior ramps, which kinda makes sense (that was the idea in old schoolbooks, along with log-rolling(?)) but the Wikipedia article on Egyptian Pyramid Construction theorizes that it's a complicated question. I don't quite get interior ramps as a much better solution.
posted by ovvl at 5:43 PM on June 9, 2020