Reveal how they lifted giant blocks of alabaster through ramps in the era in which it was built the great pyramid, makes 4,500 years.
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How they managed the ancient egyptians move huge blocks of stone down the mountain? The answer, like so many others, expected under the sand. A team of archaeologists has found the structure that served the workers for transport giant alabaster from their quarries over 4,500 years ago, during the reign of Cheops, one of the pharaohs who signed the immortality lifting up their pyramid on the Giza plateau.
“The mission has discovered a unique system to extract and transfer the blocks of stone from the top of the quarry, after removing the rubble,” says archaeologist galo Yannis Gourdon, co-director of the expedition jointly by the French Institute of Eastern Archaeology, and the british university of Liverpool since 2012, is excavated in the quarries of egyptian alabaster from Hatnub, about 18 km southeast of Tell el Amarna, the city founded by Ajenatón midway between Thebes and Memphis and dedicated to the worship of Aten.
The first examination has determined that the facilities that it got to the land of the pharaohs were exploited during the reign of Khufu (2589-2566 to.C.), the monarch who built the Great Pyramid which dominates the necropolis of Giza, in the arid environs of the current egyptian capital. “The system was composed of a central ramp with two stairways on both sides, with a few holes, which helped to lift and drag blocks of stone from alabaster by a slope with at least a 20 percent slope”, explains the expert.
“The system had not been found until now in any other place. Their existence implies that in times of Cheops, the ancient egyptians knew how to move large blocks of stone using steep slopes. The discovery changes all of the ideas we had so far on the mode in which they were built the pyramids”, argues Gourdon in a statement to THE WORLD.
One of the structures in which the workers used the system of the quarries Ministry of Antiquities of Egypt
their use has also been recorded in the hundreds of inscriptions that tell of the expeditions in pharaonic times up to the quarries in a span of time that begins in the ancient empire and concludes in the new. Hatnub was located in 1891 by Percy Newberry and Howard Carter, who years later would score the milestone of finding the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings and their formidable outfit than 5,000 objects piled up in his little skeleton.
Research epigraphic
The stelae, some of them autobiographical notes, shed light on the labor involved in the work of the quarry. “The team of restorers is working on the conservation of the inscriptions as well as in the investigation of epigraphic of the residential structures around the quarries and built with different stone blocks employed by the workers of the facility”, slide Roland Enmarch, an orientalist trained in Oxford that is co-leading the mission.
at the time, the expedition has unearthed four stone stelae. “One of them shows a picture of a person standing and the other three have inscriptions in hieratic, which are indecipherable due to the poor state of preservation,” added the academic, determined to produce a complete monograph on a site which he worked on the acclaimed egyptologist Ian Shaw between 1985 and 1994.
The treasure that has remained in the wasteland, little studied until now, focused the efforts of the mission, british-French for more than half a decade. “The goal is to produce a full log, epigraphic, photographic and topographical survey of the inscriptions that have come to us”, explains Mustafa the Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
A work that has given one of its first fruits to describe the system of transportation of the blocks. “It is a finding of great importance because this is the first time that it discovers a system to move the stones from the quarries and that shows how the ancient egyptians raised the blocks of several tons via ramps during the time in which was built the great pyramid by modifying our understanding about its construction,” he adds.
More surprises in Ancient Egypt
The time in which the pyramids took shape at Giza plateau he continued to produce areas of shadow and surprises for the scientific community that is studying ancient Egypt. In 2013 the discovery of one of the papyri most ancient of egyptian history, in which an officer called Merer saved with all luxury of details, the carriage of limestone that the gang responsible was daily through the Nile and its canals, provided valuable information on the building.
The newspaper, christened the “Record of Merer”, appeared during the excavation of the first port of history, located in the area of Wadi el-Jarf, 180 kilometres south of the present city of Suez. The fragments rescued reconstruct even the humble diet of bread and beer carriers -about forty – who worked on board of barges in the transfer of the blocks to the Giza necropolis to lift the burial of the second king of the IV dynasty.
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