How they built “The Great Pyramid Of Giza”
The Discovery Channel has been my all time favorite channel. The other day I watched this great documentary on Discovery HD about how the Egyptians would have built The Great Pyramid Of Giza in an era where there were no modern tools or machineries.
It was a projection of how the Great Pyramid might have been built based on the remains the archeologists have found over time at the pyramid. They show the story of a common man who is taken from his village along with his brother to work as one of the thousands of laborers at the building site of the great pyramid. The whole documentary is actually split into being narrated by the this common man and the documentary narrator.
The man starts out doing the least skillful job on site, that of a water bearer to help wet the ground where the huge 1 ton rocks are transported from the stone quarries to another zone from where they are taken to the site on a huge ramp where the skilled masons work on accurately shaping the edges of the rough blocks of stones. Even at that time, historians think that the Egyptians had developed tools like an “L” shaped wodden frame to try to make the edges of the rocks perpendicular to each other.
The job of removing stones from quarries was also considered skillful. They used small club like hammers and copper chisels, since copper was the hardest known metal at that time. The chisels would blunt out often so they had these other group of men who would sharpen the blunt chisels and always have some back ups ready for the quarry workers.
The workers were well taken care of and well fed. They would work for nine days and rest the tenth. Some of the workers who lived close by were also allowed to return back to their villages to see their family.
The man who narrates this story talks about how he was soon moved to more important jobs like pulling up the hige stones on the ramps and other skilled jobs. He never really bothered to question what the reason was for building such a huge pyramid until one day when he loses his brother, the only person he has always been close to, at the building site to a freak accident. He felt it was his responsibility to take care of his brother and devotes his life to the completion of the pyramid.
In the documentary they also show him as the person being responsible of the team that put up the final small pyramid at the top of the Great Pyramid. Special granite stones, about nine of them, were also brought from other parts of the Egypt to serve as the roof of the king’s burial chamber. Finally an expensive wooden coffin was brought into the king’s burial chamber and the pyramid was now complete. Next to the great pyramid three smaller pyramids were made for the king’s three wives.
All in all this was a very enthralling documentary and I am glad I got to watch it 
.
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Kumar on 13 Jan 2007 at 4:07 am #
This is cool.