How was the ancient pyramid built?

Answer 1

Shortly after coming to the throne the Pharaoh would command his overseer of public works and architects to prepare a burial place in keeping with his status as a god-king. The chosen site was usually one on the edge of the cultivated land in an already established pyramid field. The royal survey team set to work marking out the site. Great care was taken in orientating the site to the four points of the compass and in levelling the site to provide a foundation for the pyramid. When the slaves had cleared away the sand and rubble highly skilled masons were called in to level the foundations. This was done by cutting a grid of channels and filling them with water. The rock was then cut back to the water level to make it perfectly flat. Finally the water was drained away and the channels filled with rubble.

As the slaves cut the first stones for the pyramid from nearby quarries, thousands more began building the causeway, erecting storehouses and digging a canal to link the foot of the plateau to the Nile. Meanwhile scribes, the Pharaoh's project managers, dispatched orders for more supplies. A town was built for the crafts people and the scribes where they were provided with houses, food, clothing and even medical care. Less comfortable accommodation in the form of barracks was provided for the slaves who did all the heavy labouring jobs.

Through the Pharaoh's reign, the construction site teemed with workers of all kinds hard pressed to complete the monument before the king's death. Day after day, year after year, the quarries rang with the sound of hammer and chisel on stone. Through the dust the bodies of unclothed quarry slaves stand out dark against the yellow stone. After the stone blocks are hacked out of the quarry face they are lowered onto sledges. A note of each load is taken down by a scribe.

From dawn to dusk, gangs of naked slaves dragged sledges loaded with stones each weighing about 2.5 tons each to staging areas at the base of the pyramid. Here the skilled masons chiselled the blocks to prescribed dimensions, smoothed the sides and squared the corners. Slaves then reloaded the sledge and began hauling them slowly up the ramp that spiralled around the emerging structure. The noise here was one of chanting slaves and the rumble of heavy sledges.

When the sledges reached the working level teams of slaves called setters shifted the blocks from the sledges into their designated positions. Toiling below were the tool makers, cooks, porters and guards under the watchful eyes of the scribes. Other slaves were employed in maintaining and extending the ramps as the pyramid grew. These ramps were made of rubble, bound together with tafla (a type of clay) and laid with planks to ease the passage of the ramps.

Barges made from papyrus reeds deliver fine limestone from quarries across the river and granite from Aswan over 400 miles upriver. Some of the granite stones from Aswan weighed up to 70 tons. Copper chisels were using for quarrying limestone but harder stones such as granite required stronger materials. Balls of dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock, were used in the quarries of Aswan to extract hard granite.

These dolerite "pounders" were used to pulverize the stone around the edge of the granite block that needed to be extracted. Teams of slaves would pound out the stone. At the bottom, they rammed wooden pegs into slots they had cut, and filled the slots with water. The pegs would expand, splitting the rock. Slaves would then lower the blocks onto sledges. Long lines of sweating naked slaves drag them along a causeway to the river where they were loaded onto barges and floated down the river.