Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

ANCIENT ENGINEERING. 13 THE GREAT PYRAMID. The greatest mass of stone ever raised by man. about 7,000,000 tons. Herodotus tells us Photo, J. P. Sebah. It has a base 764 feet square, is 464 feet high, and weighs its erection occupied 100,000 men for twenty years. about 600 B.C., had 127 columns, each 60 feet high and 1 feet in diameter, shaped from single blocks of marble. The architects, Cher- siphron and his son Metagenes, moved these great masses eight miles from the quarries to the temple site by enclosing them in wooden frames and rolling them across country with the help of oxen. Given sufficient brute force, a mass weighing hundreds of tons could be moved horizontally without much difficulty. But the up-ending of a huge colossus or obelisk or A Sugies- menhir needed the use of more tion. advanced mechanical principles. How did the old Britons raise one of the Stonehenge monoliths ? Perhaps they built an inclined ramp of hard-beaten earth to the site of the stone, hauled it up this over rollers, and tipped it down the end into a hole prepared for it. Or they may have adopted the method employed till compara- tively recent times in India, of gradually pry- ing up the top end of the stone with levers and ramming earth, beneath it until the stone was sufficiently upright to be pulled into its final position with cords. To get a horizontal impost on the top of its two upright supports, the latter were probably surrounded with a mound of earth up which the impost was hauled. Having served its purpose, the earth would then be removed. Herodotus tells us that an inclined road of polished stone was constructed from the banks of the Nile to the site of the Great Pyramid— about three-quarters of a mile—for transport- ing the blocks brought down the Nile from