But now the sole remaining wonder of the ancient world can be viewed in a calmer setting as a new souk regulated by permit holders will be launched at the start of next year. The plan to renovate the ancient site has been in motion for the past 15 years, but the project was put on hold in , after the revolution that ousted long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak.
But lately, the industry has begun to bounce back. Last year, This content is not available in your region. It only develops sound and light techniques and will operate them for 20 years under the supervision of the Egyptian Company of Light and Sound. He further explained that the agreement stipulated that Prisme International will only develop the restaurants of the area and sound and light devices used to operate the night shows around the Sphinx, not the Pyramids.
With the arrival of night, the administration of the pyramids and Sphinx goes to the Egyptian Company of Light and Sound. The agreement is not related to the Pyramids at all as people are prohibited from entering it at night as there are light and sound shows there. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.
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Subscriber Exclusive Content. Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? So I went over, starting from that point of view, but everything I saw told me, day by day, year by year, that they were very human and the marks of humanity are everywhere on them. And you see there's this curious reversal where sometimes New Age theorists say that Egyptologists and archaeologists are denigrating the ancient culture. They sometimes put up a scarecrow argument that we say they were primitive.
And the New Agers sometimes want to say these were very sophisticated, technologically sophisticated people who built these things, they were not primitive. Well, actually there's a certain irony here, because they say they were very sophisticated technological civilizations and societies that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, and yet they weren't the ones that we find. So to me, it's these suggestions that are really denigrating the people whose names, bodies, family relationships, tools, bakeries that we actually find.
Everything that I have found convinces me more and more that indeed it is this society that built the Sphinx and the pyramids. Everytime I go back to Giza my respect increases for those people and that society, that they could do it. You see, to me it's even more fascinating that they did this. And that by doing this they contributed something to the human career and its overall development actually. Rather than just saying, you know copping out and saying, there's no way they could have done this.
I think that denigrates the people whose evidence we actually find. NOVA: Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote that , workers built the pyramids and modern Egyptologists come up with a figure more like 20, workers.
Can you explain that for us? He said, , men working in three shifts, which raises some doubt, I guess if you read it in the original Greek as to whether it's three shifts of , men each or whether you subdivide, you know, the , men.
But my own approach to this stems to some extent from "This Old Pyramid. And certainly we didn't replicate ancient technology percent because there's no way we could replicate the entire ancient society that surrounded this technology. So our stones were delivered by a flatbed truck as opposed to barges. You know, we didn't reconstruct the barges that brought the ton granite blocks from Aswan. So basically what we were doing is, as we say in the film and in the accompanying book, that we're setting up the ability to test particular tools, techniques and operations, without testing the entire building project.
One of the things that most impressed me, though, was the fact that in 21 days, 12 men in bare feet, living out in the eastern desert, opened a new quarry in about the time we needed stone for our NOVA Pyramid, and in 21 days they quarried stones.
Now they did it with an iron winch, you know, an iron cable and a winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry wall, and all their tools were iron.
But other than that they did it by hand. So I said, taking just a raw figure, if 12 men in bare feet—they lived in a lean-to shelter, day and night out there—if they can quarry stones in 21 days, let's do the simple math and see, just in a very raw simplistic calculation, how many men were required to deliver stones a day, which is what you would have to deliver to the Khufu Pyramid to build it in 20 years. And it comes out somewhere between—I've got this all written down—but it comes out in the hundreds of men.
Now I was bothered by the iron tools, like men, 4 to men. I was bothered by the iron tools, especially the iron winch that pulled the stone away from the quarry walls, so I said, let's put in a team of men, of about say 20 men, so that 12 men become And now let's run the equation.
Well, it turns out that even if you give great leeway for the iron tools, all stones could have been quarried in a day by something like 1, men. And that's quarried locally at Giza. You see most of the stone is local stone. So then because of our mapping and because of our approach where we looked at, what is the shape of the ground here, where's the quarry, where is the pyramid, let's see, where would the ramp have run, we could come up with a figure of how many men it would take to schlep the stones up to the pyramid.
Now it's often said that the stones were delivered at a rate of one every two minutes or so. And New Agers sometimes point that out as an impossibility for the Egyptians of Khufu's day. But the stones didn't go in one after another, you see. And you can actually work out the coefficient of friction or glide on a slick surface, how much an average stone weighed, how many men it would take to pull that. And in a NOVA experiment we found that 12 men could pull a 1.
And then you could come up with very conservative estimates as to the number of men it would take to pull an average size block the distance from the quarry, which we know, to the pyramid.
And you could even factor in different configurations of the ramp which would give you a different length. Well, working in such ways, and I challenge anybody to join in the challenge, it comes out that you can actually get the delivery that you need.
You need stones delivered you see, every day, and that's 34 stones every hour in a ten hour day, right. Thirty-four stones can get delivered by x number of gangs of 20 men, and it comes out to something like 2,, somewhere in that area. We can go over the exact figures. So now we've got men in the quarry which is a very generous estimate, 2, men delivering.
And so that's 3, OK, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints, so there's a difference there.
But let's gloss over that for a moment. One of the things the NOVA experiment showed me that no book could, is just what is it like to have a 2 or 3-ton block—how many men can get their hands on it? Well, you can't have 50 men working on one block, you see. And you can only get about four or five, six guys at most working on a block, say two on levers, you know, cutters and so on. And you know, you put pivots under it and as few as two or three guys can pivot it around if you put a hard cobble under it.
There are all these tricks they know. But it's just impossible to get too many men on a block. But you figure out how many stones have to be set to keep up with this rate, to get in with 20 years. And it actually comes up 5, or less men, including the stone setters. Now the stone setting gets a bit complicated because of the casing, and you have one team working from each corner, and another team working in the middle of each face for the casing and then the core.
And I'm going to gloss over that. But the challenge is out there: 5, men to actually do the building and the quarrying and the schlepping from the local quarry.
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